Author: TechBrunch
Google today took aim at the SEO industry, which is gaming search rankings to destroy the value of Google search results. Often when consumers search the web for product recommendations, reviews, sales, discounts, etc., they rank highly but do not provide the promised expert reviews or useful promotions. It returns low quality or spammy websites. The company says that's about to change with its latest search update. Google on Tuesday announced a search quality update specifically focused on improving the search quality rankings of websites and will update its Google Search spam policy. In the latter case, Google's new policy…
The NFT sector has yet to return to its heyday glory in 2022, but that doesn't stop the technology from evolving. For example, OpenSea partnered with music and arts festival conglomerate Coachella to release three NFT collections that offer both virtual and tangible reality VIP experiences and merchandise. The partnership will ultimately create three collections offering different perks and different tiers of exclusivity (and cost). The first one was called “VIP Pass + Oasis Lounge Souvenir” and was released on Tuesday for $1,499 each, with a cap of 1,000 NFTs. This tier includes a 2024 VIP festival pass and access…
Numbers Station, a startup using large-scale language models (LLMs) to power its data analytics platform, today launches its first cloud-based product, the aptly named Numbers Station Cloud. Early access is now open. This service allows virtually anyone in your company to analyze internal data using Numbers Station's chat interface. Several similar tools focus on converting natural language queries into database languages such as SQL. However, the Numbers Station team argues that this approach has its limitations. One reason for this is that a general-purpose LLM does not understand how a specific company operates, how its data is structured, or how…
Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The outage occurred this morning when Meta's Instagram, Facebook, and Threads all went down. YouTube also confirmed this morning that the service was experiencing issues and was working on a fix. The Discord status page says, “This incident has been resolved.” “We are reviewing updated rate limits that caused early session start issues and internal service scaling goals that limited guild loading during initial recovery.” Discord said it is monitoring the recovery of multiple systems. According to third-party monitoring website DownDetector, the issue began around 10:50…
These days, more and more satellites orbit the atmosphere, providing vast amounts of geospatial data, but converting that data into something useful requires significant processing and engineering power. Sina Kashuk and Isaac Brodsky, two former Uber engineers who helped build the mapping system at Uber, decided to apply their knowledge to this problem and came up with a fast, serverless-based solution. It was a product. leverages open source tools built by the company to take data from the source, bring it into apps, and make it work there. Today, the startup has emerged from stealth using the Fused platform and…
Many of Meta's top social apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and the new app Threads, are all reportedly experiencing outages as of Tuesday morning. When loading an app or website, users receive an error message that says “Something went wrong” and must try again later. Or, for Facebook, you'll see a landing page where you're logged out, but you can't sign in either. If you are using the correct password. [Update, 12:11 PM ET: The apps appear to be working again. Meta said at 12:19 PM ET that the issue was ‘technical’ in nature.] The issue appears to have started sometime…
The US government on Tuesday announced sanctions against the founder of the notorious spyware company Intellexa and one of his business partners. This is the first time that the U.S. government has targeted specific individuals in addition to companies with sanctions related to the misuse of commercial spyware. And this means an intensification of efforts by the White House and the US government to rein in the spyware industry. Brian E. Nelson, the U.S. Treasury Department's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said: “Today's action is concrete progress in stopping the misuse of commercial surveillance tools that increase security…
It's been a busy year so far for Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and we're only in March. The digital currency soared above $69,000 on Tuesday morning, rising above $69,000 on Tuesday morning as demand surged in recent weeks following the approval of a Spot Bitcoin ETF in the U.S. and the pending Bitcoin halving in late April. This is the highest value since then. Bitcoin is up more than 60% for the month and about 205% for the year, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization of all tokens increased by 18% to $2.55…
London-based fintech company Monzo has raised $430m (£340m) in a late-stage funding round, confirming a report in the Financial Times a few weeks ago. Following this round, the company's post-money valuation reached $5bn (£4bn). Founded in 2015, Monzo offers UK current accounts, debit cards and several financial products with a digital-first approach. Today's investment is important information because large funding rounds have become rare over the past year or so unless you're working on an AI-based model. As a reminder, Atomico's latest report on the state of technology in Europe estimates that startup funding will grow to $45 billion in…
Waze introduces several new features to help users navigate tricky roundabouts, receive alerts when speed limits are about to change, and receive warnings about speed bumps and sharp turns. Adding. The Google-owned company also makes it easier for users to find parking information, see changes to their favorite routes, and receive alerts when emergency vehicles stop on their route. With the help of Waze community members, drivers now have clarity on when to enter a roundabout, which lane to choose, and where to exit so they don't miss their turn. This feature is especially useful if you are not familiar…