Discord is giving its voice channels text-based chat too. The company announced Wednesday that it would roll out text chat for the platform’s voice-based chat rooms, adding a way for anyone hanging out out loud to easily share links and other text without having to channel hop to go find it. The feature will roll
MLOps platform Iterative, which announced a $20 million Series A round almost exactly a year ago, today launched MLEM, an open-source git-based machine learning model management and deployment tool. The idea here, the company says, is to bridge the gap between ML engineers and DevOps teams by using the git-based approach that developers are already
Peer-to-peer car sharing company Turo is expanding to New York State and France in June, the company said on Wednesday. The expansion comes at a time when post/mid-Covid tourism is beginning to heat up, but renting a car will be difficult and expensive due to ongoing semiconductor shortages and supply chain issues. Turo’s launch in
YouTube is improving its app’s experience for those who watch videos via their TVs, the company announced today. After observing that many YouTube users were already using the mobile app and engaging with videos as they watched on the big screen, the company is now introducing a new feature that allows users to connect their
Poparazzi, the anti-Instagram social app that hit the top of the App Store last year, is today, for the first time, detailing the growth stats for its business, its future plans and its previously unconfirmed Benchmark-led Series A round. The L.A.-area startup now reports its iOS-only has seen over 5 million installs in its first
LA-born startup TRIPP doesn’t want the metaverse to be a mere “shopping mall for virtual consumers,” its founder Nanea Reeves told TechCrunch. Instead, Reeves’ company is envisioning a metaverse experience that can “deepen connection to self, facilitate mental well-being and enable personal and collective transformation.” TRIPP’s vision for a mindful metaverse is already a (virtual)
Sheryl Sandberg announced today on Facebook that she is leaving Meta after more than a decade as the company’s chief operating officer. Sandberg joined Meta, then Facebook, as COO in 2008. Over the course of 14 years, Sandberg steered the company through an IPO, an unprecedented period of explosive industry growth and its at-times rocky
For most of the last decade, Americans largely ignored electric vehicles. Some brands sold decent numbers, like the Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf, but they were largely targeted at thrifty commuters or EV diehards. Others, like the Ford Focus Electric, were intended only to comply with laws that mandated a small number of EV sales.
Ethan Batraski Contributor Ethan Batraski is a partner at Venrock and focuses on data infrastructure, open source and developer tools. More posts by this contributor Eight trends accelerating the age of commercial-ready quantum computing 4 enterprise developer trends that will shape 2021 Thanks to the cloud, the amount of data being generated and stored has
Who will be liable for harmful speech generated by large language models? As advanced AIs such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being cheered for impressive breakthroughs in natural language processing and generation — and all sorts of (productive) applications for the tech are envisaged from slicker copywriting to more capable customer service chatbots — the risks
Garmin just brought solar power to its Forerunner line, a cult-favorite among runners. Along with some other devices, the company took the wraps off its new Forerunner 995 Solar today. The $600 running watch packs a new touchscreen display, physical buttons, up to 20 days between charges via its “Power Glass” charging lens, multiband GPS
Not everyone is on board with the idea of remote work. But for those who are, Slack’s new profile features released today should make some workday tasks, particularly onboarding, a bit easier. Slack now supports pronunciation guides for profiles, allowing users to add name pronunciations in the form of phonetic spellings or audio recordings. They’ll
Code Intelligence, an automated application security testing platform based in Bonn, Germany, that focuses on fuzzing, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Tola Capital. Existing investors LBBW, OCCIDENT, Verve Ventures, HTGF and Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub, also participated in this round, which brings the
Large construction projects often take a long time to finish, and subcontractors can get caught up in the flow of money, waiting, in certain circumstances, up to 80 days to be paid by general contractors. This not only causes delays, but also means subcontractors are essentially being asked to finance their portion of the project,
Instagram announced today that it’s launching in-app Amber Alerts to allow users to see and share notices of missing children in their area. With this new feature, if an Amber Alert is activated by law enforcement and you are in the designated search area, the alert will now appear in your Instagram feed. The alert
Novoloop, a plastic upcycling startup, said Wednesday it has raised a $10 million Series A extension round co-led by South Korean chemical firm Hanwha Solutions and Taizo Son’s Mistletoe. This follows a first raise of $11 million in February and brings the Series A to $21 million and its total funding to $24 million. Other
WorkOS, a platform that lets developers add enterprise features like single sign-on (SSO) and directory sync to apps, today announced that it raised $80 million in a Series B funding round led by Greenoaks with participation from Lachy Groom, Lightspeed Ventures, and Abstract Ventures. The closing of the round coincides with the WorkOS’ first acquisition:
We’ve long documented the challenges that DevOps and operations teams in specific areas like security face these days when it comes to data observability: a wide range of services across the landscape of an organization’s network translates into many streams of data that they need to track for performance, security and other reasons. That’s leading
Ahead of Apple’s big developer conference on June 6, WWDC, new information about what’s in store for iOS 16 has come to light. According to leaks reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, iOS users may expect to see new features like an upgraded lockscreen as well as updated first-party apps, including Messages and Health, updates to
Many businesses looking to set up pan-African operations are often met with the challenge of establishing payment services that are appropriate for each country they go to. Most of the payment services merchants working in the continent have solutions that are limited to specific regions, meaning that businesses have to sign deals with multiple providers
Following its $135 million Series D last week, Monte Carlo became the latest unicorn in a fast-rising category: data observability, which the startup defines as “an end-to-end approach to enable teams to deliver more reliable and trustworthy data.” If you are wondering how serious data quality issues are, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses has an
Tech companies got their way in Texas on Tuesday. The Supreme Court just blocked a controversial law that allows Texas residents and the attorney general to sue social media companies over their content-moderation decisions. The law, HB 20, prohibits tech platforms from removing or restricting content based on “the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression”
While going to great lengths to promote itself as an environmentally conscious tech firm, Apple joined several industry associations that are “fighting efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project. As recently as 2020, the company was an active member of several “business groups that seek to
Vendia, a blockchain-based platform that makes it easier for businesses to share their code and data with partners across applications, platforms and clouds, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by NewView Capital. Neotribe Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Aspenwood Ventures and BMW iVentures also participated in this round,
French startup Upway has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Exor Seeds and Sequoia Capital. The company sells second-hand electric bikes that have been refurbished and are ready to roll. In many ways, Upway reminds me of online marketplaces for cars. The startup provides a seamless experience for buyers who want to
Ammar Bandukwala Contributor Improving the efficiency of your software engineering team has many advantages, prime among which is the ability to make up for problems in other areas. Whether you’re facing budget constraints, having problems sourcing and retaining talent, or simply want to boost product iteration, focusing on increasing your engineering efficiencies will yield strong
The appetite for genomic data continues to rise in the field of biotech and pharmaceutical research, but cost is still a factor — even sequencing a full genome now costs as little as $1,000. But with claims of reducing that cost by another order of magnitude to $100, Ultima Genomics may even further accelerate this
TikTok is testing a new feature that would allow for a distraction-free scrolling experience on the app, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The new feature, which is called “clear mode,” is currently in limited testing with select users. Clear mode gets rid of all of the clutter on-screen, such as captions and buttons, when viewing
Erik Bradley Contributor Erik Bradley brings more than two decades of experience in creating research platforms to his role as chief strategist at ETR, a market research firm specializing in enterprise technology data. Over the past three years, the chaos of the pandemic has been felt everywhere. IT managers suddenly found themselves supporting legions of
A federal antitrust lawsuit over the long-shuttered alternative app store called Cydia has now been given the green light to proceed, after its initial complaint was dismissed. The Cydia app store, which once featured apps and other tweaks that weren’t permitted by Apple’s official App Store policies, is suing Apple over its alleged unlawful monopoly