Author: TechBrunch
The European Union’s rebooted ecommerce rules start to apply in full from tomorrow — setting new legal obligations on the likely thousands of platforms and digital businesses that fall in scope. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a massive endeavour by the EU to set an online governance framework for platforms and use transparency obligations as a tool to squeeze illegal content and products off the regional internet. If something is illegal to say or sell in a particular Member State it should not be possible to workaround the law by taking to the Internet is the basic idea. So…
It's a rare startup that destroys companies. Own Pitch deck, but that's exactly what Equals did after raising $16 million in a Series A round. Equals' mission is not to replace spreadsheets, but to ensure that whatever you throw at them, it runs. As an avid spreadsheet user, this is an approach I can support. I built an entire software solution using a very complex spreadsheet as the backend. Additionally, as a pitch deck enthusiast, I can also appreciate the bright and bold design of Equals' decks. What I particularly liked was that it split the deck into two different…
The former founder of a to-do list app that sold for as much as $200 million is back nine years later with another app that does the same thing. Really? It's a hard story to make up, but it's a reality. I don't think you can hold back talented founders. After selling his first startup, his Wunderlist of To Do List apps, to Microsoft in 2015, Christian Reber (pictured above) could have fought back with angel investment (for example, he is an investor in his Notion). Instead, he started a new company called Pitch, where he had to find a…
After Apple confirmed yesterday that it was suspending web apps for customers in the EU due to compliance with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said: states. Suggest in X post There's another reason behind Apple's decision. iPhone web apps don't make any money for Apple. Sweeney's company is suing Apple over antitrust concerns related to App Store fees, an obviously biased source on the subject, but it raises questions on everyone's minds. are doing. Was Apple breaking his iPhone web app to protect customers from security risks posed by third-party browser engines, as Apple…
Karen Serfati and Giannina Rossi, engineers from Argentina, have been working for US-based companies for the past 10 years and are faced with the same problem of how to manage their taxes while working as contractors in another country. It was always surfacing. Working with San Francisco-based Josefina Van Seenen, who was building strategic partnerships with AI-focused technology companies at Microsoft, they looked more deeply into this question and realized how companies around the world I discovered that taxes are not the only issue if you want to get hired in . “If you're working from Europe, Asia or Latin…
Clubhouse, the once popular live audio app, announced today that users can now send text messages to friends and hear those texts in the sender's custom voice. To stay relevant amid user churn, Clubhouse debuted group audio chats. Group audio chat allows members to send asynchronous audio messages to each other, and the messages appear in a format similar to Instagram Stories. With today's announcement, the company acknowledges that users may not be able to send voice messages to each other. So, when you train your custom voice and send a text, your friends will be able to hear your…
Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, Anthropic, a well-funded AI startup, detects when users of its GenAI chatbot ask questions about political topics and turns them into a “trusted” source of voting information. We are testing technology to redirect. The technology, called “Prompt Shield,” relies on a combination of AI detection models and rules to display a pop-up when U.S.-based users of Anthropic's chatbot, Claude, request voting information. The pop-up offers to redirect users to TurboVote, a resource from the nonpartisan organization Democracy Works, where they can find up-to-date, accurate voting information. According to Antropic, Prompt Shield was necessitated…
Berlin-based Pacifico Biolab believes it has a unique approach that uses fermentation to create whole muscle structures, aiming to replace traditional seafood with alternatives. Fermentation, the process of growing cells in bioreactors, is already used to make many alternative proteins such as cultured meat, but co-founder and CEO Zach Austin We call the process a “complete transformation.” Prior to joining Pacifico Biolab, Austin worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey in London. After he finished his job at the UK government's coronavirus task force, he met co-founder Washington Nelson Logroño Vintimilla, who had moved to Europe from Ecuador for graduate…
Over the past few decades, extreme weather events have not only become more severe but also more frequent. Neara is focused on enabling utilities and energy providers to model their power networks and the things that could impact them, such as wildfires and floods. The Redfern, New South Wales, Australia-based startup recently launched an AI and machine learning product that creates large-scale models of networks and assesses risk without manual inspection. Since launching commercially in 2019, Neara has raised a total of AUD 45 million (approximately USD 29.3 million) from investors including Square Peg Capital, Skip Capital and Press Ventures.…
New features and firsts for OpenAI. — Sora, a video generation model, can perform some truly impressive cinematic feats.But the model is uniform. more OpenAI has more capabilities than originally assumed, at least judging from a technical paper published this evening. Co-authored by a number of OpenAI researchers, the paper, entitled “Video Generation Models as World Simulators,” peels back the curtain on key aspects of Sora's architecture, including how Sora can handle arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. It reveals that it can generate videos (up to 1080p). According to the paper, Sora can perform a variety of image and video…