Author: TechBrunch

Threads, Instagram's Twitter-like app, is rolling out features that allow users to save drafts and take photos within the app. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the feature today, saying it was designed to “make it easy to share ideas on the fly.” The official rollout comes a few weeks after Threads begins testing the feature with a select number of users. At the time, Mosseri said these were his two “most requested” features on the platform. These new features transform Threads into a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), which has had drafts and camera shortcuts for as long as we…

Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easy for business users to build custom AI agents. Currently, the company is focused on support teams and security analysts (areas where both use cases and training sets are clearly defined), but plans to expand into other areas over time. The company came out of stealth today and announced a $9 million seed funding round. Brevian, BREV/ΛN, was founded by Vinay Wagh (CEO) and Ram Swaminathan (CTO). The two came into this startup journey from very different directions. Mr. Wagh previously served as Product Director at Databricks and Head of Product at Bracket Computing.…

Uber Eats is adding live location sharing to help delivery drivers find customers in hard-to-find locations, including public spaces like campus courtyards, parks, and playgrounds. Starting today, this new feature is rolling out to all markets except Quebec. Uber Eats is available in over 11,000 cities on six continents. When a user places a “Meet Outside” or “Meet at the Door” order on Uber Eats, they are notified that their location is being shared with the delivery person, and if the delivery person is within 3 minutes and 100 customers have arrived. Notifications turn on when you are within meters.…

PayPal today announced that it is launching “Tap to Pay” in the U.S. for merchants with iPhones through the Venmo and Zettle apps. PayPal, which owns both Venmo and Zettle, said the feature allows businesses to accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on the iPhone without any additional cost or hardware. This release comes eight months after PayPal introduced this feature for merchants using his Android smartphone. With Tap to Pay, you can not only accept payments from cards and digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, but also add taxes, take tips, and write receipts without…

People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but company CEOs rarely admit publicly that AI can help reduce headcount. His plagiarism detection company Turnitin, which CEO Chris Caren warned last year that his AI would allow the company to reduce its headcount by 20% within 18 months, announced today that Confirmed large-scale personnel reductions. TechCrunch has learned that Turnitin laid off about 15 people earlier this year as part of a broader organizational shakeup. While this is far from the 20% reduction that Caren expected (Turnitin has more than 900 employees, according to LinkedIn and Pitchbook…

This week, Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google, Amazon and a who’s who of VCs and angel investors, released a family of models — Claude 3 — that it claims bests OpenAI’s GPT-4 on a range of benchmarks. There’s no reason to doubt Anthropic’s claims. But we at TechCrunch would argue that the results Anthropic cites — results from highly technical and academic benchmarks — are a poor corollary to the average user’s experience. That’s why we designed our own test — a list of questions on subjects that the average person might ask about, ranging from politics to…

Anonymous social apps are being evaluated. Yes, again. This week, University of North Carolina (UNC) System Chancellor Peter Hance announced plans to block popular anonymous social apps such as Yik Yak, Fizz, Whisper and Sidechat from being used on campus. The ban would affect 16 universities, including UNC-Chapel Hill, NCSU and UNC Charlotte, as well as one public boarding high school that makes up the UNC system. In a letter to the UNC Board of Governors, Hans explained the reason for the ban, saying that these small, hyperlocal platforms “show a reckless disregard for the well-being of young people and…

Cybersecurity budgets are under strain due to economic uncertainty. More than a third of chief information security officers (CISOs) have either kept their security spending the same or slightly reduced it in 2023, according to a 2023 survey conducted by IANS and recruitment firm Artico Search. Another report from PwC found that one in five organizations will see their cybersecurity budgets stagnate or even shrink this year. So what's a CISO to do? Well, ask Garrett Hamilton to give Reach Security a thought. Reach is the brainchild of Hamilton, a startup he co-founded with Colt Blackmore in 2021. Although it…

Instagram has quietly added a secret emoji game that you can access in your DMs. The goal of the game is simple. Use your finger to move the paddle at the bottom of the screen to keep the emoji floating and bouncing continuously. If you delete the emoji, the game is over. This game reminds me of classic games like Breakout and Pong that came pre-installed on cell phones back in the day. To access a hidden game, simply open a DM chat, send an emoji, and click on it. You will then be taken to a yellow screen with…

The Digital Markets Act (DMA), an ex ante European Union reform of digital competition rules, will be in force today, by midnight Brussels’ time, on six tech giants — applying a new set of legal requirements on more than 20 of their “core platform services” (CPS). Online empires that scaled in an era of minimal interventions from regulators, shaping the commercial web as we know it, are now facing a prescriptive set of rules on how they can operate and do business in the EU, including hard limits on their use of data; interoperability mandates; and bans on self-preferencing. The…