Author: TechBrunch
As a teen model, Katrin Kauloff achieved financial independence at a young age, and Alexandra Medina, who she met at NYU Abu Dhabi, also learned to manage money at an early age. The two bonded over the lack of forums their peers were willing to openly discuss financial wellbeing. So in 2021, they teamed up to found New York City-based Frich, a startup that aims to serve as a social financial community for Gen Z. The company's philosophy is that Gen Z is tired of insincerity: Social media is filled with unrealistic portrayals of financial success, leaving people to question…
Could AI help you tell your story? That's the idea behind a startup called Autobiographer. The startup uses AI technology to engage in meaningful conversations with users about events in their life and their thoughts about them, then converts them into prose, essentially creating their own autobiography. The startup is dabbling in contentious territory: Many balk at the idea of AI replacing art, writing, or other creative endeavors. But in Autobiographer's case, the AI guides users in telling their own story in their own words, then compiles that output into a PDF that can be exported and, one day, bound…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies for more wide-ranging needs. And that growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory, even if CEO and co-founder Sam Altman’s firing and swift return raised concerns about its direction and opened the door for competitors. What does that mean for OpenAI, ChatGPT and its other ambitions? The fallout is still settling,…
AI-powered web page summarization is a feature found in many AI-centric tools these days. The next step for some of these tools is to prepare detailed and nicely formatted web pages for search queries. Arc browser does this to some extent through its Arc Search app. Apple is rumored to be releasing its own smart summarization feature for web pages and articles. A recent addition to this trend is Perplexity AI. With Perplexity Pages, the unicorn aims to enable users to create reports, articles, and guides in a visually appealing format. Both free and paid users can find the option…
Hotelsbycity.com co-founders and former Priceline executives Andrew Loewen and Randy Schartner announced their latest project, Plannin, a global travel booking platform that enables creators to monetize hotel recommendations and share travel-focused content. As the value of the creator economy continues to grow, estimated to generate $250 billion in revenue, Plannin wants to put a new spin on travel booking by using influencers instead of travel agents. Plannin allows creators to tell their audience about their recent trips, their favorite hotels, post travel photos, and earn revenue by sharing their affiliate links on social platforms and encouraging their followers to sign…
Amazon is introducing an AI-powered search feature to Fire TV that will allow Alexa to answer open-ended questions about TV shows and movies and provide more specific recommendations tailored to the user's preferences. Announced at Amazon's annual Devices event last September, the feature is powered by a proprietary large-scale language model (LLM), which allows the AI to understand natural language and phrases and answer specific questions like, “Which movie has the line, 'Life is like a box of chocolates'?” (Forrest Gump, by the way.) It can also surface options based on actors, characters, genres, and topics. Image credit: AmazonImage credit:…
After selling his second company, Bypass, a payments and point-of-sale software company for sports and entertainment, to Fiserv in 2020, Brandon Lloyd dove deeper into the payments industry and noticed something: software companies were being treated unfairly by the payments provider industry. “Companies like Stripe originally built their platform to make it easy for online merchants to accept credit cards,” Lloyd told TechCrunch, “and now it's being distributed to merchants through software companies, who need support. Instead of generating revenue and multiplying their SaaS revenue, they're handing all of their payments revenue over to the payment providers.” It's not uncommon…
Leading tech companies including Intel, Google, Microsoft and Meta are forming a new industry group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group, to guide the development of components that link AI accelerator chips in data centers. Announced on Thursday, the UALink Promoter Group, whose members also include AMD (but not Arm), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Broadcom, and Cisco, is proposing a new industry standard for connecting the AI accelerator chips that are being installed in a growing number of servers. Broadly defined, an AI accelerator is any chip, from GPUs to custom-designed solutions, that speeds up the training, fine-tuning, and execution…
Fresh produce supply chains in Africa and emerging markets face cascading challenges every day. A wide range of issues are intertwined, from environmental and labor issues to logistics issues, food waste and imbalances between supply and demand. These different issues have different impacts on stakeholders. Farmers struggle to sell and retailers struggle to negotiate effectively. Several agritech startups have attempted to solve these problems by managing the fresh produce supply chain and connecting retailers directly with farmers, without the middleman: Frubana in Latin America, Meicai in China, and Waycool in India are examples. YoLa Fresh is one such startup, starting…
Instagram on Thursday announced that it is expanding its “restrict” tool for teenagers to help them limit unwanted interactions in an effort to combat harassment on the platform. When turned on, the feature will allow teenagers to only see comments, messages, story replies, tags, and mentions from their “close friends” group, muting interactions from other accounts. The company originally introduced the Limits feature as a test in 2021 after England players Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho faced online abuse following their loss to Italy in the Euro 2020 final. Now, anyone can use Limits, but you can only…