Tofino Capital, a venture capital firm targeting early-stage startups in emerging markets, has launched its $10 million fund. It is announcing the first close of this fund at $5 million and hopes to achieve a final close nine months from now.   The firm, founded by Eliot Pence and Aubrey Hruby, wants to back startups in Africa, […]

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Africa-focused payments startup PalmPay raised a $100 million Series A round last year. TechCrunch spotted this news in Partech Africa’s latest end-of-year report on venture capital investments in Africa. Further checks in Crunchbase and Tracxn — platforms that track funding rounds in startups and private companies globally — reveal that the company closed the round […]

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Founded back in 2012, the LoopMe adtech/martech startup focused on brand-based mobile advertising, using AI to deliver measurable outcomes for its users. At its height, it had raised $25 million equity and $10 million of venture debt (which was fully paid off before signing). But there’s a reason for using the past tense — Mayfair […]

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The pandemic hasn’t been easy for anyone, but the food service industry has been hit particularly hard. More than 90,000 restaurants and bars have closed, leaving workers unemployed in an already precarious industry. And those who kept their jobs faced the stressful demands of customer-facing work in a pandemic. In response to the changed industry […]

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Storing great pools of data is an increasingly figured-out challenge. Between public clouds, and data lakes more specifically, you can stick oceans of corporate data in any number of places. But leveraging that data into something useful is another challenge altogether. The analogy that data is this era’s oil is at best half-baked. Oil takes […]

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Private equity firm Apollo Global Management this morning announced that it has completed its acquisition of Yahoo (formerly known as Verizon Media Group, itself formerly known as Oath) from Verizon. The deal is worth $5 billion, with $4.25 billion in cash, plus preferred interests of $750 million. Verizon will be retaining 10% of the newly […]

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AOL founder Steve Case was there in Dulles, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., when in 1996 the Communications Decency Act was passed as part of a major overhaul of U.S. telecommunications laws that President Bill Clinton signed into law. Soon after, in its first test, a provision of that act which states that, “[n]o […]

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Steve Case and Clara Sieg of Revolution recently spoke on TechCrunch’s new series, Extra Crunch Live. Throughout the hour-long chat, we touched on numerous subjects, including how diverse founders can take advantage during this downturn and how remote work may lead to growth outside Silicon Valley. The two have a unique vantage point, with Steve […]

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This afternoon, we’re chatting with Steve Case and Clara Sieg of Revolution as part of our new interview series, Extra Crunch Live. Topping our agenda, we will talk about jobs — in Silicon Valley, on the coasts and in the heartland. The technology sector is suffering through a contraction caused by the COVID-19 global health […]

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Couchbase, the Santa Clara-based company behind the eponymous NoSQL cloud database service, today announced that it has raised a $105 million all-equity Series G round “to expand product development and global go-to-market capabilities.” The oversubscribed round was led by GPI Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel, Sorenson Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, […]

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Boasting a technology that can dramatically increase the capacity of existing polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing used to identify people infected with COVID-19 and other illnesses, ChromaCode has attracted new funding from Bill Gates-backed Adjuvant Capital.  “We want a good solution for a resource-limited environment,” says ChromaCode founder and executive chairman Alex Dickinson, a serial entrepreneur […]

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X, formerly Twitter, is no longer the “digital town square” it once promised to be. Following the results of the U.S. presidential election, floods of users unhappy with the app’s latest direction are moving over to a competing app, Bluesky. Bluesky’s decentralized social media platform has steadily grown from 9+ million users as of September […]

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The media industry today may not have a very favorable view of AI — a technology that’s already been used to replace reporters with AI-written copy, while other AI companies have scooped up journalists’ work to feed their chatbots’ data demands, but without returning traffic to the publisher as search engines once did. However, one […]

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An effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is now in the hands of the social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, a service that created mirrored accounts of top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even yours truly), has transferred its collection […]

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TikTok on Thursday debuted a new feature that will more closely connect its app, which already influences which songs top the charts, to the streaming services where users discover and play their favorite music. With the launch of a new “Share to TikTok” feature, music fans will be able to directly share tracks from both […]

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Apple has released the AI-powered version of its latest mobile operating system, iOS 18.2, to its public beta users. The update includes new features like an AI emoji generator app called Genmoji, an Image Playground AI image app, ChatGPT integration with Siri, and visual search using the iPhone 16 cameras, among other things. Previously, these […]

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Tuesday that it will be taking action against the online cash app and neobank Dave, which it says used “misleading marketing to deceive consumers.” At issue is how Dave marketed $500 cash advances to consumers that it rarely offered, and the “Express Fee” it charged if customers wanted […]

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“For You” algorithms that promote the most interesting content across a social network, personalized to the individual user, offered a disjointed, outdated, and nearly unusable experience on election night in the U.S. as they highlighted hours-old posts that no longer reflected the current state of the race. Frustrations were particularly high on Threads, Meta’s X […]

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Google says it has addressed an issue with its search engine that saw it displaying a “where to vote” panel, which includes a map of polling places, for some specific voting-related searches but not for others. The tech giant even used the word “fixed” to respond to the matter, despite the fact that Google Search […]

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Publishing platform Substack is now pushing users to install its mobile app by offering gifted subscriptions. While Substack itself is available across platforms, including the web, those who want to take advantage of the free subscription offer can only do so after downloading the mobile app to their device. The free subscription offer is being […]

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It’s Election Day in the U.S., which means you’re likely glued to the latest news about which presidential candidate is currently in the lead. To help with this, Apple has released a Live Activities widget within its Apple News app that will offer real-time election updates directly on your iPhone or iPad’s Home Screen and […]

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As Election Day in the U.S. nears, social networking startup Bluesky, now flush with new capital, hopes to demonstrate that its platform can serve as a more trusted, fact-checked alternative to Elon Musk’s X. While the latter is dominated by Musk’s support for the Trump campaign, Bluesky tends to lean left, thanks to its influx […]

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At TechCrunch Disrupt, our team sits front and center, furiously typing away at our laptops to publish real-time news from impressive speakers like NFL quarterback-turned-founder Colin Kaepernick, Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas, and Ashton Kutcher. We are a well-oiled machine. Some writers have been covering Disrupt since the old days, before Meta was Meta and […]

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The decline of X (formerly Twitter) under Elon Musk has boosted engagement with alternative social networks like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon, but it has also challenged early adopters who now have too many places to post. Naturally, some entrepreneurs are working to solve this problem with apps that let you cross-post to multiple platforms at […]

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Instagram on Friday announced an update to DMs, its direct messages inbox, which will improve the experience for those who receive a lot of inbound messages, like creators and influencers. Now, the app is introducing tools that will allow users to sort and filter their “message requests” — meaning those messages that don’t arrive in […]

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WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday, said he’s not worried that the recent legal drama between his company, Automattic, and WordPress host WP Engine may lead to a fork of the open source WordPress software. In fact, he said, he’d welcome it. “There might be […]

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Creator of the iPod, Nest Labs founder, and investor Tony Fadell took a shot at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday during a spirited interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco. Speaking about his understanding of the longer history of AI development before the large language model (LLM) craze and the serious issues with […]

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Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm, Sound Ventures, co-led by general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, is betting on AI — including with an investment in Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, the investors confirmed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday. The startup, founded by Li, the Stanford professor dubbed the “Godmother of AI,” has already raised […]

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Storied investor Vinod Khosla, founder and partner at Khosla Ventures, and more recently one of the first checks into OpenAI, veered off topic during a Monday interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 focused on the future of AI. After talking about AI’s future and risks, he took a moment to deliver a stringent warning about the […]

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Even cybersecurity companies aren’t safe from deepfake attacks. Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Wiz’s CEO and co-founder Assaf Rappaport, who recently turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google, noted that his employees had been targeted by a deepfake attack just two weeks ago. “Dozens of my employees got a voice […]

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Similar to how Mastodon offers an open source, distributed version of X, the fediverse is getting its own TikTok competitor. This week, an app called Loops began accepting signups on its new platform for sharing short, looping videos. Still in the early stages, Loops is not yet open sourced, nor has it completed its integration […]

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Social network X has so far limited its AI chatbot Grok (built by Elon Musk’s other company xAI) to its premium, paying users. However, the platform is seemingly preparing to open up the chatbot to free users. Over the weekend, several app researchers and users posted about a free version of Grok being made available […]

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TechCrunch found that X's AI chatbot produced incorrect results about the U.S. presidential election, even as votes were still being cast.

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In the final days leading up to the U.S. presidential election, Elon Musk’s X suspended the official account of a progressive-donor-backed ballot initiative called SwapYourVote. The volunteer-run website tries to get third-party voters in swing states to cast their ballots for Kamala Harris, matching them with Democrats in solidly blue states who agree to vote […]

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X is rolling out its controversial update to the block feature, allowing people to view your public posts even if you have blocked them.

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Elon Musk-owned social network X made changes to its API pricing and limits today and also announced annual plans with a discounted rate. The company raised the prices of the basic API tier from $100 to $200 and said it would introduce higher limits and new endpoints for this subscription plan. In a post on […]

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Elon Musk-owned xAI has added image-understanding capabilities to its Grok AI model. This means that paid users on his social platform X, who have access to the AI chatbot, can upload an image and ask the AI questions about it. An xAI employee and the official @grok handle posted to X about the update on […]

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Decentralized social app Bluesky announced on Thursday that it has raised a $15 million Series A round, following its $8 million seed raise last year. This funding comes as Bluesky sees increased growth, in part from X users who are troubled by recent changes to the block feature, as well as the move to allow […]

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X’s revenue in India plummeted 89.8% to $2.51 million in the financial year ending March, according to regulatory filings from the Elon Musk-owned social network. The company, which had posted revenue of $24.7 million in the previous fiscal year, also significantly reduced its expenses in India to $2.2 million from $20 million year-over-year, the filing […]

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As competition from newcomers like Bluesky and Threads increases, X launched a “Radar” trend analysis tool that aims to offer subscribers real-time insights into emerging trends and conversations on the platform. The tool, previously known as Insights, was initially targeted at Verified Organizations (businesses), allowing marketers to track topics and trends on the app. If […]

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Elon Musk’s X is planning to make a change to how the block function works, breaking from the established standards of other social media apps. When the policies around blocking change, people who have been blocked by someone will still be able to see that person’s posts, so long as they’re public. They just won’t […]

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On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party “collaborators” to train their AI models on X data, unless users opt out. While X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU’s lead privacy regulator, […]

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Eric Council Jr. and unnamed co-conspirators were allegedly behind the hack of the official @SECGov account on X.

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Abel creates AI that uses body cam footage and other data to fill out consuming police reports. For research, founder Daniel Francis shadowed the police.

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As X continues to alienate advertisers, even recently suing a group over their boycott of the platform, the company is shifting its creator payments policy to be less dependent on ads. Before, creators would be paid a percentage of the ad revenue from ads shown in their replies. Now, X says it will instead pay […]

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Meta’s take on a Twitter/X rival, Instagram Threads, may be inching further into its competitor’s territory with the development of a communities feature that would presumably allow users to better organize their discussions on the platform by topics. At least that’s what references in the app’s code seem to imply. The code mentions a new […]

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Mastodon, the open source, decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), is rolling out a handful of new features, including refreshed notifications, new discovery tools, and an updated look. Although some of these changes were available in nightly releases, they are now officially rolling out in a stable release. Notifications on Mastodon will now look somewhat similar to […]

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Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price, according to a new estimate from investor Fidelity.  The asset manager’s Blue Chip Growth Fund now values its stake in X, formerly known as Twitter, at approximately $4.19 million, based on newly released disclosures from Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth […]

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We’ll be straight with you. There’s no 1:1 Twitter replacement, but there are plenty of social apps that might be worth substituting into your obsessive timeline-checking routines if you’re done with Twitter for whatever reason (we can think of plenty). Twitter’s current situation — advertisers leaving, Nazis logging back on — presents an opportunity to […]

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It seems that Elon Musk-owned social network X (formerly Twitter) is backing down from a confrontation with Brazil’s Supreme Court. The New York Times reported on a new court filing in which the company’s lawyers said X had complied with the court’s orders — blocking designated accounts, paying fines, and naming a new formal representative […]

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