StrictlyVC is hosting its first event inside TechCrunch, and if you’re an investor keen to mingle with your peers, you won’t want to miss this opportunity. The StrictlyVC series — which brings the people and stories dominating the headlines straight to an audience of largely VCs, LPs, founders, and operators — is coming to the heart of Disrupt 2024 at Moscone Center in San Francisco on Tuesday, … [Read more...]

Hackers are exploiting yet another vulnerability in one of Ivanti’s widely used enterprise products, the U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA warned in a fresh alert this week. The remote code execution flaw in Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM), a tool that helps organizations manage and secure their fleets of employee devices, was first disclosed by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative in April … [Read more...]

AI-powered video editing app Captions is rolling out a new tool for websites that manages their content publishing schedule for videos and even generates videos for those dates based on relevant topics to the site.  The tool first scans the site to pull content, keywords, service offerings, and key selling points of a site and creates a content plan. At the moment, the social media strategy … [Read more...]

There are many hypotheses about what capabilities will need to come online for the growing space industry to flourish, but two of the biggest concern in-space mobility and in-space refueling. To have a fully independent space economy, proponents argue, we’ll need to be able to move satellites around in space and we’ll need a way to refuel them.  Argo Space Corporation aims to contribute to … [Read more...]

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have been all the rage in recent years, upending traditional online search via the likes of ChatGPT while improving customer support, content generation, translation and more. Now, one fledgling startup is using LLMs to build AI assistants capable specifically of answering complex questions for developers, software end-users, and employees — it’s like … [Read more...]

Black Forest Labs, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup behind the image generation component of xAI’s Grok assistant, has launched an API in beta — and released a new model. The new API provides Black Forest Labs’ family of image generation models, Flux, in a managed package. Using it, developers can choose which Flux model to build into their app or service. Add-ons include a content … [Read more...]

Tesla’s 2024 Cybertrucks have been on the road for less than a year and they’ve already been recalled five times, as of Thursday.  This time, it’s because the rearview camera image may be delayed by two seconds after shifting into reverse, and the display may appear blank for up to eight seconds when the vehicle is in reverse, according to a report Tesla shared with the National Highway … [Read more...]

These days, private investors have a range of options for investing in startups without having to deal with them in real life. This ecosystem more or less started with AngelList, but there are now a plethora of options — such as Carta, Allocations, Vauban and Odin — that startups can use to raise funding and investors can deploy to manage their transactions. A new player in the space, Quoroom, … [Read more...]

Uber is not done snatching up autonomous vehicle partnerships.  The ride-hail and delivery giant on Thursday announced a multi-year deal with Yandex spinout Avride to bring the company’s sidewalk delivery robots and autonomous vehicles to both Uber Eats and Uber.  It’s the latest in a series of deals from Uber over the last two months as the company aims to position itself as the … [Read more...]

AI tends to make things up. That’s unappealing to just about anyone who uses it on a regular basis, but especially to businesses, for which fallacious results could hurt the bottom line. Half of workers responding to a recent survey from Salesforce say they worry answers from their company’s generative AI-powered systems are inaccurate. While no technique can solve these “hallucinations,” some … [Read more...]

After Meta recently reignited controversial plans to use the public posts of U.K. Facebook and Instagram users’ as AI training fodder, the social networking giant has taken the next step and begun to notify local users it will soon start helping itself to their information again. The bad news is the process Meta has devised for opting out of this data-for-AI grab is almost as onerous as it was … [Read more...]

Spotify introduced a new feature today called Offline Backup. This feature for premium users is essentially a list of songs you recently listened to and that you can consume offline. It updates automatically based on your listening history. Paid users can already download songs for offline consumption. But Spotify wants to give them more songs for offline playback by leveraging the local cache on … [Read more...]

We have only touched the surface of what drones can do and how ubiquitous they will become. This is also true in industry, where they have the potential to replace human labor in risky activities such as inspection at height. Swiss startup Voliro operates in this space, with flying robots that can inspect wind turbines, overwater structures, and other infrastructure that’s hazardous for humans to … [Read more...]

Immigrants face an enormous number of challenges and difficulties. In particular, without a local base of family or friends to depend on, new immigrants often find themselves in the dark about reliable information on essential services like housing, healthcare and banking. After being scammed and exploited, one immigrant founder decided to try to help other immigrants address such issues, and … [Read more...]

As online frauds and scams continue to proliferate across India, Google has announced plans for a big change in the country as it tries to mitigate the issue: it plans to block the sideloading of certain apps, specifically those users try to download straight from the internet. The pilot — announced at the annual Google for India event on Thursday — is part of what it described as “enhanced fraud … [Read more...]

Google is adding new AI-powered features on Maps in India including AI-powered summaries, the ability to search for experiences, and weather alerts. The Maps app will analyze reviews and show summaries of places, it said. The company made the announcement at its annual Google for India event on Thursday. Additionally, users will be able to search for items and experiences on Maps — such … [Read more...]

Google is leveraging India’s deep-rooted affinity for gold to expand its reach in the lending market of the world’s most populous nation. The company said on Thursday that Google Pay has partnered with Muthoot Finance, India’s largest gold-backed loans provider, to offer secured loans to users across the country.  Google said the move aims to broaden credit accessibility in a market … [Read more...]

Google is ramping up its artificial intelligence efforts in India to integrate AI across its products for Indians — a move that escalates the growing rivalry among U.S. tech firms in a market where competitors are lagging behind. At its 10th Google for India event on Thursday, the company said it was deploying its AI model, Gemini, to enhance search, visual recognition, and language processing — … [Read more...]

Oura on Thursday unveiled the fourth generation of its popular smart ring. The Oura Ring 4 arrives just under three years after its predecessor’s debut. Despite the gap, the new wearable largely refines — rather than reinvents — the experience. The most notable hardware change is the slimmer profile, an odd thing to say about what was already an extremely compact device. The big difference is … [Read more...]

Google said it is now experimenting with Gemini-powered video search in India at its Google for India event. This feature enables users to shoot a small snippet and ask Gemini questions about it. Users, who would be part of this experiment, will be able to use this feature in Google Lens. The video search features are limited to English language queries on mobile at the moment. The … [Read more...]