Author: TechBrunch

This story has been updated throughout with updated details as the story unfolds. We will continue to do so as litigation and disputes are ongoing. There is a lot of controversy going on in the world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites. The central issue is a dispute between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. WordPress technology is open source, free, and powers a huge portion of the internet (approximately 40% of websites). Websites can host their own WordPress instance or use a…

Paris-based startup Filigran is quickly emerging as the next cybersecurity rocket. The company just raised a $35 million Series B round, just months after raising $16 million in a Series A round. Filigran's main product is OpenCTI. OpenCTI is an open-source threat intelligence platform that allows enterprises and public sector organizations to import threat data from multiple sources and enrich that data set with intelligence from providers such as CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Sekoia. The open source version of OpenCTI has attracted contributions from 4,300 cybersecurity professionals and has been downloaded millions of times. The European Commission, FBI, and New York…

The popularity of an Instagram video can affect the actual video quality. According to Adam Mosseri (a meta executive who leads Instagram and Threads), more popular videos will be shown in higher quality, and less popular videos will be shown in lower quality. In the video (via The Verge), Mosseri says that Instagram tries to show “the highest quality videos possible,” but that “if something isn't viewed for a long time, a large percentage of the views are “Because I'm here,” he said. At first you will move to lower quality videos. ” This is not entirely new information. Meta…

The phrase “Europe needs to take drastic action to remain competitive” has become a common refrain in political debates. Among a long list of potential reforms, one that has received particular attention is a new EU-wide legal personality for innovative companies. The innovation, known (somewhat vaguely) as the “28th Regime”, is being touted as Europe's answer to Delaware's C-Corp and would further strengthen the regime already in place in the 27 EU member states. Probably. Now supported by a grassroots movement backed by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, it also brings with it the more familiar name of “EU Inc” and…

On this episode of StrictlyVC Download, hosts Connie Loizos and Alex Gove speak with Pranav Singhvi and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst, one of the largest venture companies on the planet. Is it one of the central themes? It's a product that General Catalyst created about five years ago and is reminiscent of GE Lease. Essentially, the company funds private and public companies that invest heavily in customer acquisition and marketing, in exchange for a cut of the revenue generated from those new customers. They package these deals by predicting how much the company will grow over a few years.…

Meta has released an “open” implementation of its viral podcast generation feature in Google's NotebookLM. The project, called NotebookLlama, unsurprisingly uses Meta's own Llama model for much of its processing. Similar to NotebookLM, it can generate podcast-style digests of uploaded text files before and after. NotebookLlama first creates a transcript from a file (such as a PDF of a news article or blog post). It then adds “further dramatization” and interruptions before feeding the transcript into an open text-to-speech model. Image credit: Meta The results don't seem to be as good as NotebookLM. In the NotebookLlama sample I listened to,…

Mariam Naficy, founder of cosmetics retailer Eve and design marketplace Minted, has a long history of supporting independent artists and helping them sell their products. Her latest venture, Arcade AI, is a new type of marketplace that puts creative control directly in the hands of users. The Generate AI platform, which launched in beta in September, allows customers called “dreamers” to input their ideas into a generator that generates a variety of jewelry design options. You can also upload images. Once a “dream” is selected, it will be assigned to one of Arcade’s artisans who will bring the digital concept…

One of the most anticipated technology events of the year is ending in just 24 hours. Excitement is building as we prepare to welcome the global tech community to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Get ready for a week full of vibrant energy that lights up San Francisco. Disrupt 2024 will take place from October 28th to 30th, and the excitement will reverberate throughout the week with inspiration, great networking opportunities, and innovative ideas. Haven't secured your Disrupt Pass yet? There's still time to save up to $400 on individual tickets. You can also bring friends, colleagues, family, and more for half…

Many venture investors, and perhaps their LPs, were hoping for a return to IPOs in 2024, but that hasn't happened and is unlikely to happen in the next two months. Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman is not surprised. On paper, public markets are experiencing a great year, with the S&P 500 up about 22%, but there's more to this story than just the headline numbers, Friedman said at Axios' BFD event on Tuesday. He said it was meaningful. Friedman said S&P understandably puts too much emphasis on large-cap stocks. And thanks to the strength of companies like Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft,…

The Associated Press reports that software engineers, developers, and academic researchers have serious concerns about OpenAI's transcriptions from Whisper. There's a lot of discussion about generative AI's tendency to hallucinate (and thus make things up), so it's a little surprising that this is a problem with transcription. Transcription is expected to closely follow the audio being transcribed. Instead, researchers told the AP, Whisper introduces everything from racial commentary to imagined medical practices into the records. And this could be particularly disastrous if Whisper is employed in hospitals or other medical settings. Researchers at the University of Michigan studying public meetings…