Author: TechBrunch

The internet's giant platforms are slowly merging into larger clumps of sameness, and even the world's most high-profile companies can't escape this trend. TikTok's winning strategy of focusing on short-form, vertical videos has won it fans among other internet platforms, and now TikTok is taking a page out of its competitors' books and borrowing its popularity factors. It is reported that they are doing so. TikTok is working to launch a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images, aiming to take on Instagram, a service best known for its still photo-sharing feature. Of course, Instagram…

If you ask investors to name the biggest challenge for venture capital today, you'll likely get a near-unanimous answer: lack of liquidity. Due to the lack of IPOs, even though investments in startups and VC funds have risen in value, those bets have not generated much, if any, cash for backers. That's the drawback of private investment and public markets. Shares in private companies, such as startups, cannot be sold freely. Companies must authorize existing investors to sell their shares to authorized others, known as secondary sales. Cash-hungry venture investors, whether VCs themselves or limited partners, are increasingly looking to…

thread. Mastodon. blue sky. Substack notes. post. Nostra. I can spit it out. In the months since Elon Musk acquired the text-based social network formerly known as Twitter, there has been no shortage of competitors for X. Now you can add one more startup to that lineup. Lyrak is a new competitor to X that, like X, aims to differentiate itself by focusing on real-time news and monetization options for creators, but with Fediverse integration similar to Instagram's Threads. Masu. fediverse refers to an open source social network consisting of interconnected servers utilizing the social networking protocol ActivityPub. The most…

Flipboard, the social magazine app for the Web 2.0 era, is reinventing itself to take advantage of new commitments to the open social web, creating a social We are deepening our relationship with the network fediverse. , and eventually Instagram threads and the like appeared. The company announced Thursday that it is expanding fediverse integration to an additional 400 Flipboard creators and introducing fediverse notifications in the Flipboard app itself. The latter will allow Flipboard users to see new followers and other activity on the content they share on Fediverse directly in the Flipboard app. This follows last year's introduction…

Substack announced Thursday that it is introducing several new features for podcasters to its platform. Most notably, the company is rolling out an integration with Spotify that will allow Substack podcasters to sync and distribute all their free and paid episodes to Spotify's streaming service. Additionally, Substack introduces new custom audio transcripts and captions, along with improvements to clip sharing and mobile video. The release of this new feature comes as Substack announced that its podcasters collectively earn more than $100 million annually, a figure that has more than doubled in the past year. Ta. The number of active podcasters…

Humane today announced the launch of its first product, the Ai Pin. The Bay Area-based hardware startup has been around since 2017, a year after co-founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhry left Apple. Since then, the company has focused on building standalone AI devices with his $230 million deep pocket. Ai Pin is the first in what Humane hopes will be a series of devices aimed at leveraging the power and popularity of generative AI platforms such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. This system relies on a variety of LLM-based systems, utilizing what we believe to be the best…

Lerato Motolounge is a mother of two who works in a supermarket in Johannesburg, South Africa. After her cell phone was stolen, Ms. Mottlounge could not afford her new cell phone, so she had to go without one for nine months. Then in February 2024, she saw her billboard about PayJoy, a startup that provides loans to underserved populations in emerging markets. She was able to buy her first smartphone right away. Motloung is one of the millions of customers that San Francisco-based PayJoy has helped since its founding in 2015. (She was the company's 10 millionth customer.) The company's…

Fresh off raising $50 million in March at a valuation of $550 million, the browser company is building on its Arc browser to provide a true alternative to Chrome and other dominant players in the internet browser market. We continue to introduce more features. Today we're introducing a new feature called Live Folders. It automatically creates and updates tabs in a folder based on events such as someone adding a file to a shared folder. Live Folders comes as the company builds out more AI-powered capabilities to create more dynamic and automated user experiences. One of the plans is to…

DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused consumer technology company, on Thursday launched a new Privacy Pro subscription that bundles VPN services, personal information deletion, and identity theft recovery. This plan costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year and is currently only available to people in the United States. This is the company's first move toward a subscription service built into the DuckDuckGo browser. DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014, but previously relied on advertising revenue. Subscription services open up new revenue avenues for businesses. Image credit: DuckDuckGo A VPN uses the open source WireGuard protocol to protect your personal information as you…

Sanctuary AI announced that it will deliver its humanoid robots to Magna's manufacturing facility. Austria-based Magna manufactures and assembles cars for Europe's top automakers, including Mercedes, Jaguar and BMW. As is typical with the nature of such deals, the parties have not disclosed how many Sanctuary AI robots will be installed. The news follows similar deals announced by Figure and Apptronik, which are piloting their own humanoid systems with BMW and Mercedes, respectively. Agility also announced a deal with Ford at CES in January 2020, which revealed the American automaker is considering using Digit units for last-mile deliveries. Since then,…