Author: TechBrunch
Mahbod Moghaddam, the controversial and never-tiring Genius and Everypedia co-founder and angel investor, died last month at the age of 41 from “complications from a recurrent brain tumor,” his family said. According to a post by and published on Genius. The startup world seems to have caught wind of Moghaddam's death just this weekend, with numerous tributes pouring in on the X Platform, including former TechCrunch writer-turned-investor Josh Constine. He previously interviewed Moghadam and its founders when Genius was being founded. Still in a relatively early stage, he has been called a rap genius. Constine wrote: “Rest in peace, Mr.…
When Hubspot founders Brian Harrigan and Dharmesh Shah conceived their inbound marketing startup in 2004, they were still graduate students at MIT and inbound marketing wasn't fully understood. They developed the idea into a successful company that eventually went public in 2014. Currently, the Boston-based company has a market capitalization of over $30 billion. There were several factors that contributed to the favorable outcome. The founders met at one of the world's leading universities. They had an idea, but they were in a place where it could be nurtured, in an area with experienced venture investors who recognized the company's…
According to the CDC, 1 in 36 children in the United States has autism. Research shows that the earlier a child is diagnosed, the better the developmental outcome. EarliTec Diagnostics has just raised new capital to expand its system that allows clinicians to diagnose children as young as 16 months old. The Atlanta-based startup's FDA-cleared approach involves a child watching a short video or social interaction on a screen for 12 minutes, while the device uses AI to track the child's eye movements. That's what it means. According to EarliTec, children with autism do not concentrate as much on videos…
The tools that allow government hackers to break into iPhones and Android phones, popular software like Chrome and Safari browsers, and chat apps like WhatsApp and iMessage are now worth millions of dollars, and the prices of these products has doubled in the last few years. It will be harder to hack. On Monday, startup Cloudfence published an updated price list for these hacking tools. These hacking tools are commonly known as “zero-days” because they exploit unpatched vulnerabilities that are unknown to the software's manufacturer. Companies such as Cloudfence and one of its competitors, Zerodium, claim that they acquire these…
The AI craze is here to stay, whether you like it or feel it's more hype than substance. That means a lot of companies have a lot of funding, a lot of regulatory concerns, a lot of academic work, a lot of corporate work. For startups, this means a huge opportunity to introduce new technologies into many industries that can be polished a bit. But if you read the news, you might notice that men are the most mentioned and discussed people in the field of AI today. So TechCrunch's Dominic-Madri Davis and Kyle Wiggers sat down with some women…
Apple updated its App Store rules on Friday to allow emulators of retro console games worldwide with the option to download titles. However, the company cautioned that developers have a responsibility to ensure they follow copyright rules. Android users already have access to a ton of emulators to play old classics on their devices. Apple's update will probably encourage some developers to bring their emulators to the App Store. The company says these emulator apps must use an in-app purchase mechanism to offer digital items. Since Apple has to adjust its App Store rules due to regulations, these types of…
Social network X is rolling out access to xAI's Grok chatbot to premium tier subscribers after Elon Musk announced the expansion to more paid users last month. The company said in its announcement: Support page In some regions, only Premium and Premium+ users can interact with chatbots. After Musk's xAI announced Grok last year, the chatbot became available to Premium+ users, those who pay a subscription fee of $16 a month or $168 a year. The latest update gives users who pay $8 per month access to the chatbot. Users can chat with Grok in “normal mode” or “fun mode.”…
When IVP recently announced the closing of its 18th fund, I called Eric Liau, the growth-stage firm's longtime general partner, and asked him a few questions. First, squeezing out $1.6 billion in capital commitments from investors at this point will seem much more difficult than attracting commitments during the frothy 2021 period, when IVP announced a $1.8 billion business plan. I also wondered about IVP's successor. IVP includes his Figma and Robinhood, whose founders and early investors still cast a large shadow over the company, both figuratively and literally. Fortune magazine recently noted that photos of the company's founder Reid…
Less than a week after the Wall St. Journal reported that Snapchat's feature called “Solar System” was increasing anxiety among teens, the company is making adjustments to how the feature works. I responded with The current ranking system for paid subscribers shows how close you are to your Snapchat friends by showing them their location in the solar system. For example, a friend with a Mercury position is someone you communicate with often, while a friend with a Uranus position is someone you don't get very close to. Of course, online chats don't necessarily correlate with real-world relationships, and such…
Despite the similarities, Instagram threads are not X. At least it's not X yet. The text-centric social network, and meta answer to Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter), missed its moment to shine on Friday when users turned to X again to discuss the New York/New Jersey area earthquake. The surge in traffic propelled #earthquake to the top of X's trending section, followed by other affected regions such as “East Coast,” “Long Island,” “Philadelphia,” “Manhattan,” and “Brooklyn.” I did. Meanwhile, even though the quake occurred shortly before 10:30 a.m. Friday morning, earthquake-related terms didn't appear in the trending section of the…