Author: TechBrunch
it's fair to say The NFT space has lost a lot of its luster in recent years, but that hasn't stopped some founders, investors, and projects from trucking ahead in hopes of another surge. Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea, one of the first NFT marketplaces to gain serious traction and market share, is still betting big on the space. On January 1, 2022, global NFT sales peaked at $23.73 billion. Two years later, by the first day of 2024, it had fallen 94% to just $1.4 billion. While this volume decline is clearly impacting the bottom line of OpenSea's business,…
The European Union has launched a consultation on draft election security mitigations aimed at larger online platforms, such as Facebook, Google, TikTok and X (Twitter), that includes a set of recommendations it hopes will shrink democratic risks from generative AI and deepfakes — in addition to covering off more well-trodden ground such as content moderation resourcing and service integrity; political ads transparency; and media literacy. The overall goal for the guidance is to ensure tech giants take due care and attention to a full sweep of election-related risks that might bubble up on their platforms, including as a result of…
Don't enter anything criminal or anything you don't want others to see into Gemini, Google's GenAI family of apps. That's the PSA (of sorts) released by Google today, outlining in a new support document how the company collects data from users of its Gemini chatbot app for the web, Android, and iOS. Google says human annotators routinely read, label, and process your conversations with Gemini to improve its services (even though the conversations are “disconnected” from your Google account). ). (It's not clear whether these annotators are in-house or outsourced, but that could be important when it comes to data…
appears to be emerging The pricing of AI-powered software products will boost the total addressable market (TAM) for technology products and help re-accelerate the growth of technology companies large and small. Battery Ventures noted that in the second half of 2023, the rebound in revenue growth for software startups reached a nadir, with growth levels beginning to stabilize in the fourth quarter. Around the same time, Scale Venture Partners reported that after several years of slowdown, early-stage software companies are expected to regain momentum in his 2024. All told, tech companies appeared to be mostly out of the woods. We…
PayPal is working on a new consumer app for mobile customers and says it's “ready” to take advantage of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a new EU regulation that comes into effect next month for technology “gatekeepers.” ” like Apple. For PayPal, one of the key changes with DMA is that third-party apps will be able to access the NFC technology that currently powers Apple Pay in its own mobile wallet application. Based on the new guidelines, iPhone users can also switch to another mobile wallet as their default. PayPal didn't say much during its fourth quarter earnings call about…
Upstash announced a $1.9 million seed round almost exactly two years ago with the idea of building a serverless data platform for data-intensive applications built on Redis and Kafka. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but the data landscape has changed a lot since then. Fast forward to today, and the company boasts $1 million in ARR and a $10 million Series A centered around the a16z and a shiny new vector database. What has changed in the short two years since he started the company is the growth of generative AI. As you may have noticed, this is…
Podcast creators can now send RSS feeds to YouTube and YouTube Music, the company revealed in a video uploaded to its Creator Insider channel. It was previously announced in August that support for RSS feeds would begin. This feature was available as an invite-only beta test last year. The move to embrace RSS feeds will help YouTube solidify its position as a top podcast destination, especially since rival Spotify doesn't support this feature. While other platforms just make her RSS feed available to listeners, YouTube takes the episodes from her RSS feed and converts them into YouTube videos. This is…
Cell phone cameras are both hardware and software, and Glass wants to improve both. But while wild anamorphic lenses are creeping onto the market, the company (which is running on $9.3 million in new funding) is using AI to significantly improve image quality without introducing strange AI upscaling artifacts. Released camera upgrade. GlassAI is a pure software approach to image enhancement called a Neural Image Signal Processor (ISP). ISP essentially takes the raw sensor output (which is often flat, noisy, and distorted) and turns it into the crisp, colorful images we see. Like phone makers like Apple and Google, ISPs…
Plaid has named Jennifer (Jen) Taylor, who most recently served as Cloudflare's chief product officer, as its first president. The move is notable in that it comes just months after the fintech startup hired employees.Former Expedia CFO Eric Hart joins the board first chief financial officer. Hiring a CFO is This is typically a step only taken by companies planning to go public. In announcing Taylor's appointment, San Francisco-based Plaid noted that her nearly seven-year tenure spanned before, during, and after Cloudflare's IPO; Perhaps it's a sign that Plaid itself is inching closer to an initial public offering (IPO). update:A…
The maker of popular smart ski and bike helmets has fixed a security flaw that made it easier to track the real-time location of people wearing their helmets. Livall makes internet-connected helmets that allow groups of skiers and bike riders to talk to each other using the helmet's built-in speakers and microphones, or to a group of friends using Livall's smartphone app. You can share your real-time location information. Ken Munro, founder of British cybersecurity testing firm Pen Test Partners, said Rival's smartphone app had a simple flaw that made it easy to access group voice chats and location data.…