Author: TechBrunch
Larry Ellison's leap into farming with Teacher Farm, a company, offers classic reminders. Being a genius in one arena is not about being successful in another. As the WSJ reports, Oracle's co-founders set out to reform agriculture on Lana Island, Hawaii, which was scooped up at $300 million in 2012. Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robotic harvesters feeding the world sustainably. Instead, the teacher was stumbled by Tech Snarls, including Wi-Fi issues and solar panels that were hit by the winds of Lanai. When the lanai is usually sultry, think of a greenhouse designed for the Israeli desert climate.…
As the district struggles to support students' mental health, a startup called Sonar Mental Health has created a “happy companion” called Sonny. As explained in the Wall Street Journal, Sonny is a chatbot that relies on a combination of human staff and AI. When a student texts a question to Sonny, the AI suggests a response, but it is the human who is ultimately responsible for the message. Sonar said it signed the first school partnership in January 2024, making it available to more than 4,500 middle and high school students in nine districts. The company says the chat is…
Coinbase said Friday that the SEC agreed to stop litigation against the company due to bias. In other words, he said he could not submit it again. The move, subject to approval from the SEC commissioner, is another signal that the Trump administration plans to be more code-friendly than it had been under former leader Gary Gensler. The SEC lawsuit filed in 2023 claimed that the crypto assets were securities and that Coinbase operates as “an unregistered national stock exchange, broker and liquidation agency.” Coinbase fought back to sue them by claiming that the SEC has not established sufficient clear…
Apple released its first developer beta version of iOS 18.4 on Friday. This adds a new “priority notification” feature with Apple Intelligence. This additional purpose is to help users manage notifications by prioritizing important alerts and minimizing distractions from less important ones. These priority notifications will appear in a different section of your phone's lock screen. Apple Intelligence analyzes notifications that you think you need to see in this section, but you can swipe to see all notifications. Currently, the iPhone sorts notifications chronologically, with the latest alerts displayed above. When you use the new feature, you will first see…
The criminal trial against Fintech startup founder Charlie Havis began Friday, with lawyers lifting their opening discussion, Reuters reported. The lawyers repeated their initial claims and defenses from the lawsuit filed by JPMorgan Chase against Javice in December 2022. The financial services giant claims that Javice “fakes millions of customers to buy a company from a bank.” Startup Frank, $175 million. The accusations were also the root of the SEC complaint, with Javice accusing millions of Frank users of “making numerous misrepresentations” of seducing JPMorgan. JP Morgan claims it discovered alleged fraud when more than 70% of its marketing test…
The developers of recipe apps have received a new competition. On Friday, Apple introduced an immediate release feature called Apple News+ Apple News+ Food. This is a new section that allows users to easily search, discover, save and cook recipes from dozens of existing News+ Publishing Partners. It will be rolled out in April as part of iOS 18.4 and iPads 18.4, but only in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Instead of building a standalone recipe app that allows you to import content from the whole web, such as blogs and Tiktok video recipes, Apple News+ Food will focus…
Apple Intelligence is heading towards Vision Pro as part of upcoming operating system updates. Apple confirmed Friday that its generative AI platform will arrive in augmented reality headsets as part of Visionos 2.4. The software beta version is currently available to developers. The public version is set for the April release. Like the iPhone and Mac before that, Vision Pro receives Apple Intelligence updates on Waves. The first set includes several familiar products that focus primarily on text and image generation. The company is seeing the addition of features such as rewrite, calibration and summarization as key components of the…
Welcome to Startups Weekly – Summary every week everything you need to miss from the startup world. Want to put it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Startup Life is a story of birth and death. I checked this this week to make sure the Unicorn Round is not dead. The most interesting startup story of the week Image credit: Natalie Christman / Human It was a week of beginning and ending, as often happens in the startup world. Thinking Machines: Thinking Machines Lab is the new AI startup from former Openai CTO Mira Murati, and has come…
Crypto Exchange Bybit announced on Friday that a “sleek attack” led to the theft of Ethereum (ETH) from one of the company's offline wallets. Bybit CEO and co-founder Ben Zhou said in the live stream that the hackers stole around 401,346 ETH. Both crypto security company Elliptic and crypto security researcher ZachxBT said the total amount of stolen ETH is worth around $1.4 billion, the largest known cipher theft in history. The best previous cryptographic violations were hacking against Ronin and poly networks. The result was a loss of $624 million and $6111 million, respectively, according to data collected by…
Tiny Michigan Biotech startup Circnova has collected $3.3 million seed rounds for technology that uses AI to target “Circular RNA.” This development is promising as a new method for rapidly developing treatments for conditions that currently lack drug therapy. The new funding was also a victory lap for co-founder and CEO Crystal Brown, taking an unconventional path to becoming the founder of biotechnology. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is an important molecule that helps convert genetic information into proteins. Round RNA is a relatively new class of such structures that form circles rather than strands. We hope that these molecule-based therapies…