Author: TechBrunch
Y Combinator President Garry Tan I used social platform X On Tuesday, he again expressed his displeasure with elected officials representing San Francisco, home of the storied accelerator. This time, he slammed California Congressman Matt Haney over his late-night email bill. Mr. Haney serves in San Francisco's equivalent of the state House of Representatives. legalize hard labor Haney is spreading nonsense again, from the man who killed Algebra and started the fentanyl crisis in the Tenderloin https://t.co/SGJ9eGwW4f — Garry Tan 💥♻️ e/acc (@garrytan) April 2, 2024 The tweet read, “Legalize hard labor. Haney is spreading yet another nonsense from the…
Spotify announced Tuesday that it will also offer free audiobook benefits in Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. Users in these markets can listen to 15 hours of audiobooks for free each month. Spotify also announced that it will expand its audiobook catalog from 200,000 to 250,000 titles. This benefit is already available in the US, UK and Australia. The expansion comes two months after Spotify announced its audiobook service was the second-largest audiobook provider behind Amazon-owned Audible. Spotify says users have listened to more than 150,000 titles since the free service launched last November. Audiobooks can be found in the…
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…