Author: TechBrunch
Death, taxes, and horrifying cybersecurity breaches that happen on a regular basis. These are real facts, as the recent AT&T data breach teaches us once again. A TechCrunch investigation into leaked customer data from the American telecom giant has led AT&T to reset passcodes on certain customer accounts to prevent exposure. The root of the security vulnerability was large-scale, with AT&T's data breach involving the exposure of datasets on more than 70 million former and current AT&T account holders. While only a small portion of these data sets are still up-to-date, the scale of leaked datasets examined by TechCrunch shows…
Police in the United States are increasingly relying on controversial surveillance practices that require technology companies to hand over large amounts of user data in order to identify criminal suspects. So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big technology companies like Google to hand over information from their vast repositories of user data. These orders are not unique to Google, and any company with access to user data could be forced to hand it over, but the search giant is one of the most vulnerable to police requests for access to its database of user information.…
To give female academics and others focused on AI their well-deserved and overdue spotlight time, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. Start. As the AI boom continues, we'll be publishing several articles throughout the year highlighting key research that may go unrecognized. Click here for a detailed profile. Kristin Gloria leads the Aspen Institute's Emergent and Intelligent Technology Initiative. The Aspen Institute is a Washington, DC-based think tank focused on values-based leadership and policy expertise. Gloria received his Ph.D. He has a PhD in cognitive science and a master's…
Meetings take time, and there's no way around that. According to his 2022 poll from Deputy.com, the majority of U.S. employees spend up to about eight hours in meetings each week, depending on industry and region. Reduced productivity explains the growing popularity of AI-powered summarization tools. In a recent survey of marketers conducted by the Conference Board, a nonprofit think tank, nearly half of respondents said they use AI to summarize the content of emails, conference calls, etc. I answered. Many video conferencing suites now have summarization built-in, but David Shim believes there is room for third-party solutions. He is…
Yahoo will acquire Artifact, an AI-powered news app, from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the company announced Tuesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, and its unique AI-powered personalization technology will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app, in the coming months. Yahoo is the parent company of his TechCrunch. Systrom and Krieger will work with Yahoo in an “advisory capacity” during this transition period. The announcement comes several months after Artifact announced it was winding down its operations, saying the market opportunity was not…
A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, former president of Udemy, sat down with Dennis Yang about skill building. Mr. Shimkus believed that building skills in the corporate sector was a difficult but not intractable challenge that could perhaps be solved with the right technology. He took it to Mr. Yang, then the CEO of Udemy. “At Udemy, Jan and I have solved the problem of 'access' to learning. Anyone at any company can find great video content about the skills they want to learn,” Shimkus told TechCrunch. . “But it turns out that solving video access alone is not enough.”…
The average spreadsheet doesn't have a lot of thought put into it. But spreadsheets are becoming an increasingly essential tool for data teams. Entrepreneur David Kirkos knows this all too well. He previously worked at his Techstars, an accelerator program, building financial models for startups. “Building data models is best done in Python, but many of our team members only understood spreadsheets,” Kirkos told TechCrunch. “So I wrote code to generate a spreadsheet. It was a pain. I spent about 10% of my time doing valuable analysis and 90% building the infrastructure and pipeline to create the report. I was…
Odd Ball is a company that makes bouncy, fun electronic balls. You can generate MIDI sounds by tapping or bouncing the ball. The company is adding new gestures to the device, including spins, twists, moves, shakes, and air throws, allowing you to generate sounds in new ways. With the latest app update, the company now lets you become a DJ at your home party with these gestures. This includes a DJ mode with several background tracks and on-screen instructions for gestures for that track. When you combine one or more gestures, the app plays a sound effect on top of…
The funding landscape for AI chip startups, once sunny as a mid-July day, is starting to look shady as Nvidia asserts its dominance. US chip companies raised just $881 million in funding from January 2023 to September 2023, down from $1.79 billion in the first three quarters of 2022, according to a recent report. . Mythic, an AI chip company, ran out of cash in 2022 and was close to being forced to shut down operations. Meanwhile, rival Graphcore, once well-capitalized, is now facing mounting losses. But one startup appears to have found success in the ultra-competitive and increasingly crowded…
Immigrant workers are an important workforce for U.S. farms, but bringing them into the country with the appropriate H-2A visas can be complex, and the compliance surrounding these employees can be burdensome for farms. Masu. Seso was founded five years ago with the aim of streamlining that process and is now aiming to expand into a one-stop HR platform for the agriculture industry. Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked for advice on whether to expand their organic farm. Despite the demand for the crop, Guirgis, whose entire career has been involved in job creation and the labor…