Author: TechBrunch

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said Monday that the FCC should investigate Apple over the company's decision to block the Beeper Mini service, which was working to bring iMessage to Android. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky's Beeper launched a new service in December called Beeper Mini. The service claims to have reverse engineered the iMessage stack to run on Android. The next few days were a cat-and-mouse game as Apple repeatedly blocked Beeper Mini and Beeper Mini tried to find a solution. Later that month, Beeper abandoned his attempt to get iMessage to work on his Android through Beeper Mini, calling it…

Bob W, the premium short-term apartment rental marketplace, has raised €40 million ($43 million) in a Series B round. Founded in Finland in 2018, Bob W rents around 3,000 aparthotels in 17 European cities, including Amsterdam, Athens, London, Berlin, Madrid and Helsinki, and is a technology-enabled hospitality company. We advertise that we are “operators''. From US giants like Airbnb to Europe's Booking.com, there's no getting away from the myriad incumbents that have been operating in Bob W's realm for years. However, there is a somewhat insatiable appetite for conceptual variations in the accommodation market, such as hybrid models that combine…

consumer spyware The operation, called TheTruthSpy, continues to target thousands of people whose Android devices have been unknowingly compromised by the mobile surveillance app, especially due to a simple security flaw that the operator failed to fix. poses significant security and privacy risks. Now, two groups of hackers have independently discovered a flaw that allows mass access to data on victims' stolen mobile devices directly from TheTruthSpy's servers. Switzerland-based hacker Maia Arson Krimiu said in a blog post that the hacker collectives Gigidsec and Bytemeklu identified and exploited the flaw in December 2023. Krimiu said he was provided a cache…

brutal On a December day, we learned that 17% of Spotify's employees were laid off in the company's third round of layoffs last year. Shortly thereafter, music fans around the world discovered that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic treasure trove of music discovery, was no longer working. These two events were not separate. His Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who founded EveryNoise, was one of his 1,500 employees fired that day, but his firing had far-reaching effects. Without access to his Spotify internal data, MacDonald can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which has become a vital…

Bitcoin prices hit $50,000 today, one month after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved 11 applications for Spot Bitcoin ETFs. Issuers of these ETFs have seen demand soar beyond the billions originally predicted. These issuers have a total of approximately $28.35 billion in assets under management and a market capitalization of $39.8 billion, according to Blockworks data. The 24-hour trading volume was $1.38 billion. Topping the Spot Bitcoin ETF pack is Grayscale Bitcoin Trust with $20.27 billion, followed by BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust with $3.31 billion and Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin.・The trust is worth $2.75 billion. Image credits: Blockworks…

Users of Twitter/X alternative service Spoutible claim the company removed their posts after they asked Spoutible CEO Christopher Bouzy to be more honest about the nature of recent security issues. The company denies the claims, but it's the latest bizarre development in a string of security incidents at the startup over the past week. Last week, Bouzy admitted that his startup, which he envisions as a more inclusive and kind Twitter, had a security vulnerability that exposed users' emails and phone numbers. But Troy Hunt, a security researcher and creator of Have I Been Pwned, a website that lets you…

X, formerly Twitter, announced Today, advertisers will soon be able to place ads next to specific content creators. The move will allow advertisers to prevent their ads from appearing next to controversial or offensive content. The launch of the new service comes after a number of brands pulled their ads from X last year after their ads appeared next to pro-Nazi content. “Starting this month, X advertisers will be able to advertise to a curated list of premium content creators through Creator Targeting,” the company said in an article. blog post. “This will allow advertisers to use the self-service Her…

The question of where AI fits into the corporate stack is not as simple as it might seem (i.e., “nowhere”). However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today declared that, like other intellectual property, only individuals can receive rights to it. Official protection. The news came in the form of “guidance,” official policy but not ironclad law, that will soon be federally registered. The guidance document (PDF) clearly states that only “natural human beings” can obtain patents, for clear legal reasons and the basic idea that “patents have the function of encouraging and rewarding human ingenuity.” It has been. It…

Venture capital firm Homebrew is New fund goal is $50 millionaccording to a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing was a bit of a surprise, considering Homebrew announced it was pursuing it about two years ago. more Evergreen model that is not limited by stage It would simply be funded by Satya Patel and hunter walkGeneral Partner of Homebrew. However, many companies raise multiple funds at any given time to target specific opportunities. For example, some early-stage companies raise a second opportunity-focused fund to supplement their primary vehicle. TechCrunch reached out to Walk for comment…

Only 7% of founders Prepare a pitch deck that includes a reasonably good go-to-market (GTM) narrative. Given that many founders are raising money to acquire new customers, let me put into words what this means. This is totally embarrassing. Most of the slide material hardly qualifies as even coherent brainstorming. As an investor, I despair when I see decks like that. Why should I give you his $5 million when I have no clear clue how to utilize that money in a meaningful way? Trust me when I say this. Funding is currently difficult and there are no signs that…