Author: TechBrunch
Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov announced today that the company will launch an advertising platform next month that will allow channel owners to receive financial rewards. The company uses TON coins on the TON blockchain to pay out rewards. The channel owner will start receiving his 50% of all revenue that the company earns from displaying ads on the channel. Telegram channels allow users to broadcast public messages to large audiences. According to Durov, Telegram's broadcast channel generates 1 trillion views every month, but only 10% of that promotion is monetized with his tool, his Telegram Ads. . In…
Wearables have become increasingly diverse in shape, form factor, and appearance as health and fitness tracking has proliferated recently. At his 4YFN at the MWC trade show, we discovered something new. It's a stick-on patch that helps athletes track sweat to monitor salt loss and adjust hydration strategies. The Spanish startup developing these (for now) disposable wearables is called Swanty (yes, that's not a typo). “We create personalized hydration plans for athletes, and these plans are based on sweat analysis,” said co-CEO and founder Laura Ortorega Tanya. He explained that the system is designed to ensure athletes are hydrated with…
Major payment infrastructure stripe today announced that it has entered into an agreement with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer valued at $65 billion. Notably, this valuation represents a 30% increase compared to the valuation at which Stripe was valued last March. Raise $6.5 billion in Series I funding The valuation is $50 billion. But it's still below. Valuation of $95 billion Achieved in March 2021. Stripe declined further comment, but written statementStripe and some investors have agreed to buy more than $1 billion in stock from current and former Stripe employees, a…
WhatsApp today announced that it is rolling out a 'Search by Date' feature for individual and group chats on Android devices. This feature is also available on other platforms such as iOS, Mac desktop, and WhatsApp Web. Mark Zuckerberg shared the announcement on his WhatsApp channel, along with a video searching for old chats about karaoke. Users can only search for chats from a specific date instead of specifying a date range. To use this feature, users must tap on a contact or group name to go to the 1:1 or group chat details. To search by date, you need…
Dating app maker Bumble is rethinking its vision for the future after disappointing results and announcing major layoffs that will cut about 350 people, or a third of its workforce. In addition to plans to revamp the app for Gen Z, the company's new CEO, former Slack CEO Lydiaan Jones, will focus on building a social network for the Bumble BFF friend-finding business. Currently, Bumble's BFF side of the app uses the same swipe-to-like mechanism used on the dating side, giving users a profile that they can choose to match or pass. will be displayed. Jones doesn't think the format…
When Coverdash, which provides commercial insurance products to startups, tripled the number of embedded distribution partners to more than 100 in the past year, CEO Ralph Betesh made a decision. He could either continue on his way to profitability or raise a venture capital round that the private insurance company didn't really need so he could bring in bigger partners faster. “We encouraged more large partners to continue partnering with us and getting on board with our roadmap,” Betes told TechCrunch. “We talked about adding these partners over time, but we thought we might lose a partner. On the other…
Back in the day, Mobile World Congress, which we've been covering all week, hosted a side event for startups with the quirky name “Four Years From Now.” The event is now housed within his very own MWC, Borg Starship, which holds an annual startup competition aimed at finding the “best startups” around the world. Therefore, from among the hundreds of startups that applied and proposed, five finalists were selected by a panel of industry experts and investors after pitching their projects on stage. Here is a brief introduction to the five finalists from the competition. (Some of them are newer…
Developers are adopting AI-powered code generators (services like GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, and open access models like Meta's CodeLlama) at an astonishing rate. However, the tool is far from ideal. Many are not free. Others are available, but only under licenses that prohibit their use in general commercial contexts. Recognizing the demand for alternatives, several years ago AI startup Hugging Face partnered with workflow automation platform ServiceNow to create StarCoder, an open source code generator with a less restrictive license than others. Did. The original was released online early last year, and a sequel, StarCoder 2, has been in…
SambaNova, an AI chip startup that has raised more than $1.1 billion in VC funding to date, is aiming to rival OpenAI with new generative AI products for enterprise customers. SambaNova today announced Samba-1, an AI-powered system designed for tasks such as text rewriting, coding, and language translation. The company calls this architecture “expert configuration.” This is the technical term for a bundle of 56 generative open source AI models in total. Samba-1 allows enterprises to fine-tune and address multiple AI use cases while avoiding the challenges of implementing AI systems ad hoc, said Rodrigo Liang, co-founder and CEO of…
With so much fresh competition in social apps right now — plus the usual set of social media platforms and messaging giants sucking up attention — it might feel like there’s precious little room to innovate in this slice of the consumer market. But the creators of a new iOS app called Yolk are joining the fray, spying an opportunity to hook into recent developments in on-device AI and attract a younger demographic. In this playful arena, no text can be typed. Users have to message each other visually, sending custom live stickers the AI tools enable them to make. The…