Category: Enterprise
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How filming a capella concerts and dance recitals led Northzone’s newest partner Molly Alter to a career in VC
Molly Alter wears a lot of hats. She’s a mocumentary film maker working on a project about an alternate reality where charades is big business. She’s a caesar salad connoisseur and documents her rankings of different restaurants’ attempts on a blog called JULIUS. She’s also Northzone’s newest partner. Alter’s path to venture capital was not…
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iPad sales help bail out Apple amid a continued iPhone slide
In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple’s most important category by a wide margin. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Apple on Thursday announced that it its third-quarter financials beat Wall Street expectations, as its overall revenue ticked up 5%. iPad, which had languished in recent…
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Google Maps announces new features and somehow none of them are ‘pause navigation’
Look, we’ve all been there. You’re on a road trip and you pull off the highway for some food or fuel. And then Google Maps starts (rudely) yelling at you to get back on the road. The company has all the money and AI chips in the world and yet the app can’t just chill…
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Google releases new ‘open’ AI models with a focus on safety
Google has released a trio of new, “open” generative AI models that it’s calling “safer,” “smaller” and “more transparent” than most — a bold claim, to be sure. They’re additions to Google’s Gemma 2 family of generative models, which debuted back in May. The new models, Gemma 2 2B, ShieldGemma and Gemma Scope, are designed…
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Fintech Execs from Synctera, Unit, and Treasury Prime discuss the future of BaaS at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
The serious, long-term negative impact of the bankruptcy of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) fintech Synapse will be significant “on all of fintech, especially consumer-facing services,” one observer has said. In the wake of that company’s collapse, other startups in the space are working hard to prove that not all BaaS are created equal. As partners to fintechs,…
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Founder behind social media app IRL charged with fraud
While venture capitalists and the rest of the technorati are off on holiday or attending the Paris Olympics, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its staff attorneys are keeping busy this summer. For the second time this week — and at least the fourth time in the past several months — the SEC has…
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Meta says India is the largest market for Meta AI usage
WhatsApp’s massive 500 million users in India have supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. Meta CFO Susan Li said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage, a notable milestone considering the product launched in India just a few months ago. Li said during Meta’s second-quarter earnings call that people have used…
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OpenAI pledges to give U.S. AI Safety Institute early access to its next model
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on an agreement to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing. The announcement, which Altman made in a post on…
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Axle Energy’s sprint to decarbonize the grid lights up with $9M seed led by Accel
Axle Energy is a B2B, back-end infrastructure business focused on connecting flexible assets, such as electric vehicles and home batteries, to energy markets that aren’t otherwise available for consumers to dip into. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. The challenge of integrating renewable energy sources into the grid is a…
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Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3
Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open-source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that to train Llama 4 the company will need 10x more compute than what was needed to train…