Author: TechBrunch
US mobile phone company Patriot Mobile experienced a data breach that included subscriber personal information such as names, email addresses, home zip codes, and account PINs, TechCrunch has learned. Patriot Mobile, which reportedly has less than 100,000 subscribers, describes itself as “America's only Christian conservative wireless provider, and our mission is to… and the zealous defense of our God-given constitutional rights and freedoms.” The wireless carrier, whose website features photos of former Fox News host Glenn Beck and former Trump administration officials Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon, recently began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support conservative and pro-Christian…
It's been three years since Spotify acquired live audio startup Betty Labs, but the music streaming service hasn't, at least in our opinion, made the most of the technology. Locker Room, owned by Betty Labs, launched in 2020 as a sports-focused social audio app that allows sports fans to have live conversations, host watch parties, and react to games in real time. . When Spotify acquired the app, it rebranded it as Greenroom, a Clubhouse clone that caters to all types of fans, whether they're interested in sports, fantasy football, music, or other topics. Similar to other social audio apps,…
At the Alchemist Accelerator, AI leading companies are demonstrating their products today. Please take a look if you are interested. The program itself also adds an international twist to Tokyo and Doha. Read on for Bach's picks. Speaking to Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani about the group ahead of Demo Day (10:30 a.m. PT today), it's clear that the AI startup's ambitions are shrinking. Yes, and that's not a bad thing. Right now, there's no chance that an early-stage startup will become the next OpenAI or Anthropic. They currently have too much of a lead in the area of…
Stack AI co-founders Antoni Rosinol and Bernardo Aceituno were MIT PhD students completing their degrees in 2022, just as large language models were becoming mainstream. ChatGPT is scheduled to be released globally at the end of the year, but even before that, we recognized the problem within enterprises of combining data and models without much expertise or knowledge, and we wanted to change that. Ta. After graduating, they moved to San Francisco and joined Y Combinator's Winter 23 group, where they launched Stack and refined their idea. Now, the company has built low-code workflow automation tools designed to help businesses…
Adobe announced Tuesday that it has added Generative Remove functionality to Lightroom. gen AI capabilities built on Firefly allow you to seamlessly edit objects from your photos. This feature will be available in early access on Tuesday. Adobe says this feature works well no matter how complex the object's background. According to the company, “Generative Remove can help you edit even the most complex backgrounds and environments, including removing stains on a patterned shirt, wrinkles on a tablecloth in a food photo, or unwanted reflections in water. ” Photoshop developers announced their foray into generative AI in March 2023. “Firefly…
Pinecone, a vector database startup founded by Ed Liberty, former head of Amazon's AI Lab, has been at the forefront of helping companies extend large-scale language models (LLMs) with their own data. I did. But just recently, the company completely redesigned its product and launched Pinecone Serverless, which frees customers from having to think about managing and scaling their deployments. Today, Pinecone Serverless is released from beta and generally available. Liberty notes that the company's early customers are now moving from experimenting with generative AI to wanting to launch their own AI products. The company observed companies grappling with the…
Young geothermal energy wells are like budding geniuses, each with the potential to surpass the others. However, just like humans, most people decline with age. In California, for example, the production of geothermal power plants decreased by 15% between 2001 and 2018, due in part to the deterioration of existing wells. “The history of geothermal has been the idea of degradation,” says Josh Prueher, CEO of geothermal startup XGS Energy. “This is happening all over the world.” Many geothermal power plants inject water underground, passing through cracks in the rock and absorbing the heat generated deep underground. Once brought to…
All cars are affected by reduced mercury, but electric cars are more sensitive than most because their heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens. affected. Drivers in Chicago learned this the hard way last January after many Tesla cars failed to charge during deep freezes. One startup, South 8 Technologies, says it can make charging more reliable in cold climates by filling batteries with a pressurized liquefied gas electrolyte instead of a liquid electrolyte, and in the process, it hopes to cut the cost of lithium-ion batteries by 30%. For automakers, the…
Scale AI, which provides data labeling services to companies looking to train machine learning models, has raised $1 billion in Series F funding from a number of prominent institutional and corporate investors, including Amazon and Meta. The funding is a combination of primary and secondary funding and is the latest in a series of large venture capital investments in AI. Amazon recently completed a $4 billion investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic, and companies like Mistral AI and Perplexity are also in the process of raising billions more at high valuations. Prior to this round, Scale AI had raised about $600…
Hosting fraud on your platform is bad for your business. So on Tuesday, a group of major technology companies including Match Group, Meta, Coinbase and others joined together to launch a new coalition to combat online fraud across dating apps, social media and cryptocurrencies. . A new coalition, Tech Against Scams, will work together to find ways to counter the tools used by scammers and better educate the public against financial fraud. Romance scams have been costing users millions of dollars even before series like “The Tinder Swindler.” According to the Federal Trade Commission, as of 2019, this type of…