Square and Cash App return online after extended unexplained outage

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Friday, September 08, 2023

Today's top story is about the outage over at Square that started on Thursday. The fintech giant said services are coming back Friday after the daylong outage left small business owners unable to process payments. Here’s what happened. Meanwhile, India's Reliance Industries' Jio Platforms partners with Nvidia to build a large language model that is trained on the country's diverse languages. There's supercomputers involved. And find out what the Federal Aviation Administration had to say about SpaceX in the Starship Heavy incident. Image Credits: btmedia / Shutterstock

More top reads Know when to fold 'em: Rario's founders reportedly plan to exit the company. This comes a year after the NFT startup raised $120 million in funding. Read more. You can play in this sandbox without getting sand everywhere: Google flips the switch on interest-based ads with "Privacy Sandbox" rollout. Get the scoop. X gon' give you new terms: X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, updates its terms to ban crawling and scraping. Dive into the changes. Also, X got caught running unlabeled ads in feeds. Into the Brine-y deep: Brine Fi is here to challenge Coinbase and Binance with its decentralized exchange as it nets a Pantera-led $16.5 million round. Read more. Your doctor will see you now: Glass Health is building an AI for suggesting medical diagnoses. What are your symptoms? Built on the fediverse: With Postmarks, social bookmarking is back. Only this time it's built on the fediverse. What will you save? That's illegal: This is what the Polish government said about the use of government spyware in the country. Here’s why. Vital signs: Deal volume might be down, but there are still signs of life in the technology M&A market. See who's still kicking. (TC+) "He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own": Reddit users on mobile can now translate posts into other languages. Read more.

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TC Opinion: How badly will AI-generated images impact elections? An image of Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket may not be high stakes, but consider the damage one bad actor could inflict by using deepfakes to manipulate voters during an election. According to Kyle Walter, head of research at Logically, “the question we really need to be asking now is not, ‘When will AI have an impact?’ but ‘How influential could the technology be, and how likely will it be used in coordinated disinformation campaigns?'” If you’d like to submit an opinion column to TechCrunch, please read our new editorial guidelines. Read More Image Credits: wildpixel / Getty Images

Pitch Deck Teardown: Tomorrow University's $10M Series A deck Condensing a pitch deck into 16 slides or less is a genuine narrative challenge, but edtech startup Tomorrow University recently raised a $10 million Series A with just 10 slides: Cover Historical context Goal Mission Solution Product Traction Market Team Closing TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code "DC" for a 15% discount on an annual subscription. Read More Image Credits: Tomorrow University

On the pods The Equity crew is looking into Mentra’s plan to help neurodivergent jobseekers, as well as how SimpleClosure might be betting on the downturn, what’s next for the Argo AI founders, Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 Demo Day, and how the EU is cracking down on major tech companies. Read More Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

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IBM says its new Granite series LLM was trained on 'curated, enterprise-quality data'

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Thursday, September 07, 2023

In today's top story, AI continues to be at the forefront of new products and services. IBM is rolling out new generative AI features and models. The company even says it will reveal the data being used to train the models. Next, Anthropic, a startup founded by former OpenAI executives, launched a paid plan for its AI-powered chatbot that promises 5x more usage. And more messages. Meanwhile, Instagram is testing a feature to let you share feed posts with just "Close Friends" if you have them. Bond with someone. Note: We want to correct the headline from yesterday's Daily Crunch to: "Under new rules, EU says 6 tech 'gatekeepers' fall under Digital Market Acts." It was actually five from the U.S., not six. Image Credits: picture alliance / Getty Images

More top reads Are you ready for some football? The National Football League is kicking off its 2023 season today, and we tell all you cord-cutters how to stream each action-packed game. Google is ready for its close-up: Google Chrome gets a visual makeover and some new search features for its 15th anniversary. Check it out. One Moment in time: A new app called Moments helps you maintain your personal and professional relationships. Reach out and touch someone . . . through the phone. So I creep: ActiveFence snaps up Spectrum Labs, which was last valued at $137 million, to help fight the harmful content creep. Read more. All charged up: Honda confirms it will use Tesla's EV charging port from 2025. Plug in. Kind of like Robocop, but without the costume: Imbue raises $200 million to build AI models that can "robustly reason" like humans. We're here for it. Vacation, all I ever wanted: Mindtrip wants to become your AI travel agent that will do the booking and planning all in one place. Treat yo' self. In every shape and size: Pinterest unveiled new computer vision-powered body type technology to make search more inclusive. What will you search for? Coming back: Base Ecosystem Fund and Hashed Emergent invest $1.9 million in Nestcoin to scale its Onboard product. Find out how it started and how it's going. Know that third party: Compliance and risk management startup Certa raises $35 million to monitor your relationship with third parties. Read more. Building blocks: Low-code platform Retool launched a bunch of new tools that make it easier to bring AI smarts to business apps. Ready, set, low-code. More for your Thursday: SAP nabs German startup LeanIX to help companies modernize faster Show me the revenue growth (TC+) Apple Event 2023: What we expect from the 'Wonderlust' iPhone 15 reveal The perils of the platforms of paranoia (TC+) Gaming browser Opera GX integrates ChatGPT-powered AI feature Image Credits: The NFL

Our favorite startups from YC's Summer 2023 Demo Day, Day 2 YC’s Summer 2023 cohort is slightly smaller than it has been in recent years, which means there’s less chaff for the TC+ team to sort through. Today, Alex Wilhelm, Christine Hall and Anna Heim identified their eight favorite startups: Envelope Flint Dili Silicate Parea AI Magic Loops Flex Pure TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code "DC" for a 15% discount on an annual subscription. Read More Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

On the pods On today’s episode of Chain Reaction, Jacquelyn interviewed Charlie Shrem, founder of the Bitcoin Foundation, general partner at Druid Ventures and host of the Charlie Shrem Show. Before all that, he was the co-founder and CEO of BitInstant, which was a bitcoin payment processor that started in 2011. Shortly after founding the company, he was charged with operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and with allegedly attempting to launder over $1 million through the now-defunct dark web marketplace Silk Road. He spent a little over a year in a low-security prison as a result. Now Charlie is a vocal advocate for clearer crypto regulation, and he's a crypto investor, podcaster, and even a movie producer. Read More Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

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Under new rules, EU says 6 US tech 'gatekeepers' fall under Digital Markets Act

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Wednesday, September 06, 2023

Today's top story has the European Union naming names — is it safe to call them "The Big 6"? The EU wants to put six tech giants under the Digital Markets Act due to how they gatekeep their core platform services. Find out who didn’t make the list. Next, images shouldn't have all the fun. That's why X added Community Notes for videos, with the company saying, "Notes written on videos will automatically show on other posts containing matching videos. A highly-scalable way of adding context to edited clips, AI-generated videos, and more." Read more. And meet Intuit Assist, the company's generative AI–powered digital assistant for small businesses and consumers. It offers personalized recommendations across Intuit's line of products, from TurboTax to Mailchimp. Or is it MailKeemp? Image Credits: Andrew Jalali / Getty Images

More top reads Today was the first day of Y Combinator's Summer 2023 Demo Day. While some of the VC comments got YC president and CEO Garry Tan hot (see more below), the team was busy looking through the list of startups and listening to pitches: Our favorite startups from YC's Summer 2023 Demo Day, Day 1 (TC+) 5 neat AI startups from Y Combinator's summer 2023 batch Y Combinator-backed Automat turns videos into workflow automations It doesn't look like Y Combinator's summer Demo Day batch will surprise us much (TC+) Let's all go to the lobby to buy ourselves a snack: Amy Schumer and Mark Wahlberg were among a star-studded group that sank some capital into snack brand SkinnyDipped. Take a bite. When it's time to wind down: SimpleClosure grabbed $1.5 million in less than 24 hours to help companies shut down faster and cheaper. Learn more about what they do. AI, it's everywhere you want to be: HubSpot introduced a new strategy that, you guessed it, integrates AI across its platform. Meet HubSpot AI. Change in pace: Arduino, known for creating microcontrollers for hobbyists, nabs $22 million in fresh funding to support expansion into enterprise. Read more. Don't you love it when dreams become reality?: In this case, LocalGlobe and Pronomos Capital back Itana to pave the way for Africa's first digital free zone. Find out what it will do. Departed: Two senior executives quit SoftBank-backed Oyo amid public listing deliberation. Get the scoop. More layoffs: Roku made another round of job cuts, this time impacting over 300 people. Read more. That's music to our ears: Duolingo adds both math and music lessons to its upcoming app lineup. It's time to dust off that guitar. No iPhone for you: Government officials in China reportedly can't use iPhones. Find out why. More for your Wednesday: Apple says iPhone and iPad apps will show up on the visionOS App Store from the get-go Blockchain tech needs a 'ChatGPT moment' to scale enterprise adoption (TC+) API security startup Pynt raises $6M GoPro Hero 12 Black: battery life's the thing Tech companies are finding their profitability groove (TC+) Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

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TC Opinion: How can startups help close the EV charging gap? If the U.S. is going to reach its goal of making one car out of every seven a zero-emissions vehicle by 2030, we’ll need to multiply the existing number of charging stations by 20. “Given the wide gap in supply and demand of EV chargers, there are massive opportunities for startups focused on the space,” according to Margret Dupslaff, an investment associate at BMW iVentures. If you’d like to submit an opinion column to TechCrunch, please read our new editorial guidelines Read More Image Credits: ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty Images

Here's why some investors are sitting out of YC Demo Day Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 cohort is taking part in Demo Days today and tomorrow, but seven investors Rebecca Szkutak interviewed said they’re taking a pass. “Demo Day is not really all that useful for pre-seed, seed investors at this point, as most of the companies are already funded," said Amit Shah, general partner at Golden Ventures. “It's useful for the larger funds that want to track companies/founders. Most of the work pre-seed/seed firms have to do [is] before demo day.” TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code "DC" for a 15% discount on an annual subscription. Read More Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

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