Sidney Scott decided to take himself out of the venture capital rat race and is now jokingly auctioning off his vests — starting at $500,000. The Driving Forces solo general partner announced on LinkedIn this week that he was shutting down his $5 million fintech and deep tech VC fund that he started in 2020, … Read more
Amazon has decided to discontinue its Astro for Business device, a security robot for small—and medium-sized businesses, just seven months after launch. In an email sent to customers and employees on Wednesday, provided to TechCrunch, the reason for putting Astro for Business on the shelf is a simple one: Amazon wants to focus on its … Read more
Aiming to bring the “social” back to “social media,” a new app called noplace has surged to the top of the App Store as it launches out of invite-only mode Wednesday. Designed to appeal to a younger crowd — or anyone who wants to connect with friends or around shared interests — noplace is like … Read more
Cloudflare, the publicly-traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models. Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s … Read more
Last week, a hacker claimed to have stolen 33 million phone numbers from U.S. messaging giant Twilio. On Tuesday, Twilio confirmed to TechCrunch that “threat actors” were able to identify the phone number of people who use Authy, a popular two-factor authentication app owned by Twilio. In a post on a well-known hacking forum, the … Read more
Ashwin Nandakumar and Ashwin Jainarayanan were working on their doctorates at adjacent departments in Oxford, but they didn’t know each other. Nandakumar, who was studying oncology, one day stumbled across a curious dataset for prostate cancer, with which he needed sequencing help. “I reached out to a few friends asking to help me analyze this … Read more
Telegram launched a digital currency called Stars for in-app use last month. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app is also allowing channels to covert the stars they have to Toncoin — the cryptocurrency Telegram uses over The Open Network (TON) blockchain. Alternatively, they can use them to … Read more
The Indian social media platform Koo, which sought to compete with Elon Musk’s X, is shutting down after acquisition talks with Dailyhunt fell through. Despite securing over $60 million in funding from prominent investors including Tiger Global and Accel, Koo faced significant challenges in expanding its user base and generating revenue over the past year. … Read more
Sophisticated spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computing systems: consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750, the processor famous for running on iMacs in the late 1990s. San Francisco-based Aethero is aiming to bring more powerful computing systems to orbit, and their first payload launches this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission. … Read more
“Fediverse” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? The word comes from “federation” and “universe” being smooshed together, and it refers to a group of social networks — a federation, if you will — that can communicate with each other. This approach is pretty appealing when … Read more