Author: TechBrunch

OpenAI has begun testing a feature that allows new users of ChatGPT to sign up with just a phone number, without requiring an email. The feature, discovered by software engineer Tibor Blaho, is in beta in the US and India and allows users to sign up for an account on ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot platform, by entering their number. can be created. There are some limitations. Users who create an account using their own number cannot upgrade to OpenAI's paid plans, such as ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Pro, unless they verify their account via email. Multi-factor authentication is also not…

The U.S. school district that fell victim to the recent cyberattack on education technology giant Power Schools told TechCrunch that the hackers accessed “all” historical student and teacher data stored in its student information systems. PowerSchool, which uses school records software to support more than 50 million students across the United States, suffered a breach in December when its customer support portal was compromised with stolen credentials, leaving students and We now have access to a large amount of personal data belonging to teachers. in K-12 schools. It has not yet been publicly identified that this attack was the work…

For years, Vyas Sekhar has been calling his old friend from undergrad, Mackay Girish, to discuss potential startup ideas and seeking Girish's opinion. The two usually discussed the idea and ended the conversation there. When Sekhar called Girish in early 2022 about his idea for synthetic data, the conversation didn't end when he hung up. Sekar and his colleague Julia Fanti at Carnegie Mellon University were working on building synthetic data to solve the reproducibility crisis in academia: the inability to reproduce data. While Sekhar recognized the need for a solution in academia, Girish knew his customers at the time…

Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for business customers that bundles some (but not all) of the company's existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365. The new plan, Copilot Chat (not to be confused with Microsoft's Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat), is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o AI model and allows users to ask business-related questions and automate workflows. You can build and generate images. All of these features were part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft's expansive enterprise AI add-on for Microsoft 365. However, Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing is more stringent. License fees are $30 per user per month.…

Change Healthcare, the health tech company owned by United Health that lost sensitive health data of more than 100 million people in a ransomware attack last year, said Tuesday that it has not provided “substantive notice” to affected individuals about the massive data breach. announced that it had been completed. A February 2024 ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, one of the largest patient claims processing companies in the United States, caused a months-long outage and disrupted healthcare across the U.S. healthcare system. The data breach is known as the largest theft of medical data in U.S. history. Change Healthcare paid…

Hinge today launched a new AI-powered feature called “Prompted Feedback.” This feature aims to improve your dating profile by analyzing how you answer prompts and assessing whether you need more specificity or authenticity. Prompted feedback, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o mini, evaluates each response and provides tailored advice to help you share interesting details about yourself. This can lead to more engaging conversations. However, rather than telling you exactly what to write, the AI ​​provides three levels of guidance: “Look into this a little more,” “Try a small change,” and “That's a great answer.” Masu. A “great answer” rating will tell…

In the summer of 2020, as pandemic-induced volatility gripped the market, SoftBank Group shocked Wall Street with a series of huge options bets on U.S. technology stocks. Akshay Naheta was behind these trades that gave SoftBank the nickname “The Whale of Nasdaq.” Akshay Naheta is an executive whose career has been marked by bold bets on disruption. Now, after closing multibillion-dollar deals including the merger of Nvidia and ARM, Naheta is making perhaps his most ambitious bet yet. That means the global payments infrastructure is ripe for reinvention. His Zug, Switzerland-based startup, Distributed Technologies Research (DTR), seeks to bridge the…

Nikita Via, creator of popular apps like anonymous voting app tbh (acquired by Facebook) and anonymous flattery app Gas (acquired by Discord), has created a new app called Explode that focuses on deleting messages in iMessage. I did. Explode acts as a mini-app for Apple's Messages app. It will help you send the disappeared message to others. Users see text or images once and it explodes. The app also blocks users from taking screenshots. Beer said in a post on X that only the sender needs to have the Explode app. The app is free to download, but users can…

As the world continues to grapple with how to deal with the proliferation of deepfake content online, it appears that not all AI-generated videos are controversial. Synthesia, a London startup building products around hyper-realistic AI avatar technology, says the technology has been a big hit with businesses, with around 60,000 people (1 million users) using it. He says he creates avatar-based videos from text documents and uses them for sales and marketing purposes. For training etc. Now, VCs also want to get involved. Synthesia today announced that it has closed a $180 million Series D funding round, boosting the company's…

Nelly wants to become the largest fintech startup in the healthcare industry. The Berlin-based startup already partners with more than 1,200 medical sites in several European countries. But there are thousands more businesses that could benefit from an administrative workflow upgrade. That's why Nelly recently raised €50 million (approximately $51 million at current exchange rates) in a Series B round led by Cathay Innovation and Notion Capital. Existing investors b2venture, Lakestar, Motive Ventures and Arc Investors also rejoined. As many industries fully transition to digital workflows, Nelly's founding team realized that many medical practices were falling behind. “I had to…