Meta’s researchers have made a significant leap in the AI art generation field with Make-A-Video, the creatively named new technique for — you guessed it — making a video out of nothing but a text prompt. The results are impressive and varied, and all, with no exceptions, slightly creepy. We’ve seen text-to-video models before —
admin
In sub-Saharan Africa, only 33% of the urban population has access to public transportation, compared to 75% in Europe and North America, according to UN statistics. That means that most of the continent faces challenges chasing new job opportunities, going to school, accessing healthcare and just having a night on the town. This lack of
When it comes to the decentralized world of crypto, few single entities loom larger or carry more weight in the industry than exchange behemoth Binance. The blockchain giant processed $34 trillion in trading volume in 2021, it says, and the exchange shows few signs of resting on its laurels as it pursues bold new bets
Anyone who has followed global news events of late will have noticed the devastating floods that have engulfed pretty much every corner of the world, from the U.S. and Europe, to Africa, Australia, and Asia, where India and Pakistan have been hit by some of their worst floods in recent memory. By pretty much all
Financial institutions have struggled to develop their own technologies, hence the rise of neo-banks which used Open Banking regulations to build their own Fintech stacks. That has led to a wave of innovation, and startups have hungrily devoured the opportunities to ‘platformise’ the financial work. The latest is fintech SaaS provider Toqio which has now
A new letter penned by Senate and House Democrats accuses Amazon of “anticompetitive” practices in its bid to purchase Roomba-maker, iRobot, for $1.7 billion. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge to convince the Federal Trade Commission to reject the deal, according to a report from Axios. “Rather than compete in a fair marketplace
Today, Nielsen announced that Roku plans to enable four-screen measurement across desktop, mobile, connected TV, and traditional TV. This is the first time Roku will use the digital methodology, Nielsen One, the data measurement firm’s cross-media measurement tool, which launches in December. In the age of streaming, it’s becoming more challenging for companies to measure
On the same day that Lionsgate renamed Starzplay to Lionsgate+, MGM’s Epix announced it would also get a “+” in its brand title. Epix, the ad-free streaming service, announced today that it will relaunch as MGM+ in early 2023. While the new name is hardly original, mainly the plus sign, the rebranding comes as streaming
Una Brands, an e-commerce aggregator focused on brands in the Asia-Pacific region, announced the first close of its Series B round at $30 million today. The funding was led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC Ventures. Headquartered in Singapore, Una Brands has a presence in Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, China and the United
French startup Pigment has raised a new round of funding less than a year after raising a $73 million Series B round. If you’re not familiar with Pigment, the company develops a business planning and forecasting platform. For small companies that are growing up, it can replace Microsoft Excel as it’s more secure and more
Google is adding several new sustainability features for Search, the company announced today at its Search On event. The search giant will start showing the annual fuel cost for cars in search results to help people who are in the market for a new car. Google will also show emissions estimates for cars, so you
Meet Solvo, a new mobile app that wants to make it easier to invest in cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency-related financial products. The two founders Ayelen Denovitzer and Shailendra Sason met while they were working for Revolut, in the crypto team more specifically. Earlier this year, Solvo raised a $3.5 million seed round from Index Ventures with
Weighing in at $100, Amazon’s new Blink Floodlight camera brings more brightness and smarts to its camera line. The company also launched a brand-new $30 Blink Mini Pan Tilt mount, giving security-conscious customers the ability to look around a bit more than before. The two new additions to the Blink family were launched at Amazon’s
Sep.21 — Revolution Chairman and CEO Steve Case joins Emily Chang ahead of his keynote at this week’s Greenwich Economic Forum to discuss the future of tech investing.
Regie.ai, a startup using OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating system to create sales and marketing content for brands, today announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Foundation Capital, South Park Commons, Day One Ventures and prominent angel investors. The fresh investment comes as VCs see a
Digital mortgage lender Better.com continues to lay off staff, and seemingly in as callous a way as possible. Indeed, whereas most companies try to avoid repeated layoffs, the outfit — which gained notoriety by laying off about 900 employees over Zoom on December 1, 2021 — has since been laying off smaller groups very systematically,
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. With almost a hundred new stories on the site since the last Daily Crunch, we’re having a hard time picking the cream of the crop, but that’s what we dooooo. It’s been
Eviation’s Alice electric aircraft took off for the first time yesterday, teasing a future in which regional flights of hundreds of miles will be done with zero emissions and a lot less noise. It’s still a ways off, but today’s demonstration shows it’s at least just a matter of time and money. The Alice is
More signs that the economy is slowing down in Europe, and that costs are going up, are driving merchants and consumers to look for less expensive ways to carry out their everyday business. Today, a startup out of Italy called Satispay — which operates an independent payment network that bypasses big banks and credit companies
Amazon Alexa will be the foundation of BMW’s next-generation voice assistant, the companies announced Wednesday at Amazon’s annual Devices and Services launch event. The German automaker and Amazon are have had a relationship for years now. BMW started offering the Alexa assistant in select cars starting in 2018 and the partnership has grown from there.
Making its television premiere tonight, “Ring Nation” is debuting amid calls from advocacy groups to cancel the show. MGM (now owned by Amazon) is leveraging footage from Ring security cameras (also owned by Amazon) to create a show along the lines of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” with Wanda Sykes as host. The show is a
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Is there a way
For many non-technical sales teams at product-led growth companies, it’s difficult to sift through reams of data to find out the best way to engage with potential paying customers. That’s a problem that HeadsUp, a conversion engine for product-led sales, wants to solve. The San Francisco-based startup announced today it has raised $8.5 million in
E-commerce roll-up startup Flora emerged from stealth mode with $9 million in seed funding from an investor group that included Lux Capital, Correlation Ventures, Climate Capital and Gokul Rajaram. Also known as an aggregator, the company acquires and grows brands — in Flora’s case, focused on offering sustainable products and reducing carbon emissions. Co-founders and
The European Union is to update product liability laws to tackle the risk of damage caused by artificial intelligence systems and address other liability issues arising from digital devices — such as drones and smart devices. Presenting a proposal for revisions to long-standing EU products rules — which includes a dedicated AI Liability Directive —
Apple’s new iPhone 14 lineup isn’t proving to be as popular as the company would have hoped for. So it is readjusting its production targets by cutting down additional orders for the device. A report from Bloomberg notes that the Cupertino-based tech company produced around 90 million units in the second half of the last
Cloudflare, the security, performance and reliability company that went public three years ago, said this morning that it will help connect startups that use its serverless computing platform to dozens of venture firms that have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion in the companies out of their existing funds. It’s a smart, splashy
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. At TechCrunch, we love being a conduit for everything that happens in the startup ecosystem. This year, there’s been a lot of layoffs, and we got to thinking, how can we help
Now that the U.S. has finally committed to electrifying cars and trucks, there’s been a lot of handwringing over where they’ll charge. The Biden administration just approved all 50 states’ plans for where to install DC fast chargers, and while those plans will help fill massive infrastructure gaps, those chargers won’t be nearly enough to
French startup Stockly is raising a $12 million Series A round (€12 million) from Eurazeo, Daphni and several business angels. The company pools together the inventory of several e-commerce websites. When a retailer is out-of-stock on a popular item, they can still accept the order and process the order through a different retailer’s inventory. This