Google on Thursday is issuing new guidance for developers building AI apps distributed through Google Play, in hopes of cutting down on inappropriate and otherwise prohibited content.
Schools across the U.S. are reporting problems with students passing around AI deepfake nudes of other students (and sometimes teachers) for bullying and harassment, alongside other sorts of inappropriate AI content.
Google says that its policies will help to keep out apps from Google Play that feature AI-generated content that can be inappropriate or harmful to users.
It points to its existing AI-Generated Content Policy as a place to check its requirements for app approval on Google Play.
The company is also publishing other resources and best practices, like its People + AI Guidebook, which aims to support developers building AI apps.
Twitch has come up with a solution for the ongoing copyright issues that DJs encounter on the platform.
Participating DJs in the program must contribute a percentage of their earnings from streams to cover some of the music rights costs.
Twitch partnered with all major labels to bring a majority of popular music to the offering, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music, as well as several independent labels represented by music licensing partner Merlin.
Additionally, a one-year subsidy is being offered to existing Twitch DJs, providing financial support and a transition period to adapt to the new program.
Twitch will soon require DJs to share part of their revenue with the music industry.
But look beyond the hype and high-profile deals like the one between OpenAI and PwC last week, and you’ll see that the world is already years into using customer-facing, no-code AI tools for extracting information and working faster.
The deal underscores not just the opportunity around increasing demand for AI in the B2B market, but also a wider trend in enterprise IT.
Eigen and Sirion are not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but below is relevant context that tells some of the story.
London-based Eigen is led and co-founded by Dr Lewis Liu, an Oxford PhD who studied both art and physics.
It says that it works with over 250 large enterprises manages more than 7 million contracts worth $800 billion.
Only a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was ‘robotic process automation’ (RPA).
The rise of generative AI, however, may just be the missing key to building these kinds of systems.
“Last year, generative AI happened and I realized that it unlocks some software scenarios that were impossible before,” Surpatanu said.
You have to combine it with more traditional software if you want to squeeze the best out of it,” he said.
Generative AI, Surpatanu argues, can bring a degree of adaptability to context and an understanding of the user’s intent to these systems that wasn’t really possible before and something that RPA often struggles with.
This partly explains why Belgium-based startup Qargo has now raised £11 million ($14 million) in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital.
With the logistics industry facing rising operating costs, decarbonization pressures, hikes in fuel prices and cyber attacks, companies in the space are in tricky times.
There is clear pressure to digitize the industry to introduce cost savings.
While the transport industry does use legacy software platforms like Mcleod Software, Rose Rocket and Dash Doc, many of these platforms are from an earlier era.
In a statement, Rob Moffat, partner at Balderton Capital, said, “Logistics is a $5T market globally but is often overlooked by software companies.
It’s been 20 years since Shira Yevin, the lead singer of punk band Shiragirl drove a pink RV into the Vans Warped Tour grounds, the now-defunct punk rock festival notorious for being male-dominated.
After Shiragirl Stage, Yevin went on a “lifelong crusade for carving out a space for women in music and other male-dominated industries,” she told TechCrunch.
This began with the launch of Gritty in Pink in 2020, a Live Nation-backed platform designed to empower women in the music industry.
Like freelance platforms Fiverr and Upwork, users can publish listings to highlight their services on InPink’s marketplace and connect with major brands.
Yevin said InPink is already working with one sports client, Angel City Football Club (the LA-based women’s soccer league), to help them hire talent for pre-shows.
Torpago, a commercial credit card and spend management provider, is no different, but with one caveat — banks are who it builds technology for, particularly community banks.
“We started as a competitor with Brex and Ramp, as well as American Express and Capital One,” Jackson told TechCrunch.
The Torpago Powered By tools and infrastructure enable means that those banks’ to customers don’t have to leave the bank’s brand domain to get sophisticated fintech features.
Banks have all the customers, and they have all the card volume, but “they have the absolute worst credit card tools and technology,” he said.
Since making the shift to banks as customers, that was whittled down to 300 companies while it goes after bank customers.
Stock-trading platform Robinhood is diving deeper into the cryptocurrency realm with the acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp.
With Bitstamp under its wing, Robinhood says that it will be better positioned to target retail and institutional crypto investors across Europe, Asia, and the U.S., with Bitstamp currently holding more than 50 licenses and registrations to operate in these markets.
“The acquisition of Bitstamp is a major step in growing our crypto business,” Robinhood’s crypto general manager Johann Kerbrat said in a statement.
“The Bitstamp team has established one of the strongest reputations across retail and institutional crypto investors.
Through this strategic combination, we are better positioned to expand our footprint outside of the U.S. and welcome institutional customers to Robinhood.”
But as the data analytics and AI boom drives organizations to expect more of data models, many of the old paradigms are proving difficult to manage — and exceptionally brittle.
Now, five years later, Keydunov and Tiunov have a veritable business on their hands, having launched a subscription-based service built on Cube — Cube Cloud — that adds automated workflows and enterprise-focused governance and deployment tooling.
An illustration of Cube’s semantic data layer.
Image Credits: Cube“Cube Cloud is a universal semantic layer that is an independent, yet interoperable, part of the modern data stack that sits between your data sources and data consumers,” Keydunov said.
Keydunov says that the open source Cube project has surpassed 10 million downloads, while Cube Cloud is now installed on around 90,000 servers.
The company first started working with Mr. Bricolage, a popular DIY retailer in France.
Dealt operates a white-label platform for Mr. Bricolage so that it can upsell its own clients with services.
After that, retailers like Mr. Bricolage can provide services and generate new revenue lines as they take a cut on each transaction.
Other Dealt clients include Fnac-Darty, Orange, E.Leclerc, Conforama, Boulanger, 3Suisses and Rue du Commerce.
Some of these retailers work with Dealt to provide services that aren’t necessarily related to a new purchase.
