Author: TechBrunch
Spotify's annual Wrapped feature, which provides listeners with a fun, personalized overview of their listening habits, has gained immense popularity over the years. As a result, many companies are seizing the opportunity to create similar year-in-review experiences that provide users with a summary of their habits, preferences, and interactions over the past year. Here are some platforms and websites that mimic the Spotify Wrapped concept. amazon music Amazon Music has a new Spotify Wrapped knockoff this year called “2024 Delivered,” which provides users with an overview of their listening statistics, including top artists, songs, and even podcasts. Notably, the platform…
Security firm iVerify said leaders of large companies were among several people whose iPhones were recently targeted by Pegasus spyware. Journalists, human rights defenders, lawmakers, and political officials are frequently subject to state surveillance, and reports of spyware infiltrating business leaders' phones are rare but not unheard of. The findings are another warning that spyware, typically used by governments under the guise of preventing serious crime and terrorism, could also be used for commercial espionage. In a call with TechCrunch this week, iVerify CEO Rocky Cole declined to say who was targeted, but said the spyware targeted companies that he…
When Nicolás Camhi, Matias Pérez Pefaur, and Diego Chahuán (pictured above, left to right) launched Vambe last year, they were building a CRM for debt collection. But despite gaining momentum, Vambe quickly realized that customers weren't as interested in its debt collection product as the WhatsApp AI agent it built to facilitate it. “Our customers are already asking, 'When I go out with debt, can I ask AI to provide this person with 'x' product or 'x' service?” '' Camhi told TechCrunch. “It was a really cool experience to do that. It made us realize that we're not building a…
Cyber attacks are on the rise. In the first quarter of 2024, organizations experienced an average of approximately 1,300 attacks per week. The cost of attacks is also increasing. According to Statista, cybercrime-related losses could soar to more than $13 billion by 2028. Software is one way to combat these attacks. Hardware is different. Startup Axiado is a proponent of both, building a business out of designing “security” chips and apps that leverage them. Founded in 2017, Axiado makes chips to protect devices from data centers to 5G base stations. “Our solution gives enterprises the power to fully secure their…
There are many metrics to track the adoption of open source components, such as GitHub stars and downloads, but they don't give a complete picture of how they're used in production codebases. . Census of Free and Open Source Software III: Application Library leverages over 12 million data points from software composition analysis (SCA) and application security tools such as Black Duck, FOSSA, Snyk, and Sonatype deployed in over 10,000 deployments. Based on. companies. This wide-ranging report highlights the shift toward memory-safe programming that has seen rapid adoption of Rust. It also points out the continued reliance on Python 2…
Cyberattacks are on the rise and victims are getting more attention. According to research by KPMG, nearly half of companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more have recently experienced a security breach. Surprisingly, an overabundance of security tools may be contributing to the problem. In another poll, 43% of companies said their teams were overwhelmed by alerts. Piyush Sharma is no stranger to cybersecurity tool overload. As Director of Engineering at Symantec, Sharma was responsible for leading the development of several app control, endpoint security, and unified management products and ensuring that these tools worked well together. “Organizations…
Spotify Wrapped, the streamer's long-awaited annual listening roundup, has arrived. In addition to the usual personalized overviews that detail your favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more, the company is introducing two new features this year. The most notable of these is 2024 Wrapped's AI-powered podcast, created with NotebookLM, Google's AI summarization tool. . Spotify is also rolling out a new data story called “Your Music Evolution,” which shows how interest in music has changed over the past year. Spotify previously built its Wrapped features in-house, but the addition of podcasts powered by Notebook LM means Spotify will be working with…
Today, a new company is emerging from stealth to help companies build open-source AI infrastructure and reduce engineering overhead, backed by Google's AI-focused venture fund. Cake provides over 100 products for enterprises, including data source adapters (such as Apache Hadoop), data ingestion (such as Apache Kafka), data labeling (such as Label Studio), vector and graph databases (such as Milvus or Neo4j), and generative AI. Integrate and secure your components. APIs and related tools (such as Anthropic) and many other categories. This suggests why Cake is called so. Cake takes the various “layers” that make up an AI stack and integrates…
A new connected fitness device is in town. Its name is Growl. Inspired by hardware companies like Peloton and Tonal, Growl creates boxing bags that attach to the walls of your home. Users can start an immersive, gamified boxing class from the comfort of their own home. The team also seems to be taking inspiration from boxing classes like Brooklyn Fitboxing. We're just looking at the opportunity to offer users a similarly intense fitness experience without having to go to a studio and sweat it out in groups. “The real purpose of this product is to transform the traditional punching…
Veeam, which helps users protect and recover their data, has seen its valuation soar in a recent secondary sale aimed at bolstering the company's cap table ahead of its eventual IPO. The Insight Partners-backed company said Tuesday it raised $2 billion in a secondary sale of stock worth $15 billion. TPG led the investment, with participation from Temasek, Neuberger Berman Capital Solutions and others. The sale is expected to close in the first quarter of 2025. The sale triples Veeam's price since it was acquired by Insight Partners for $5 billion in January 2020. According to its financial results at…