Traffic is down, newsrooms are undergoing layoffs, and publishers fear that AI technologies will only make matters worse.
Entering the fray, news reader startup Particle is teaming up with publishers to seek out a new business model for the AI era, where AI summaries of news don’t have to mean lost revenues.
Now, the company is bringing its first publishing partners into the mix to help it guide its next steps.
As a start, Particle now subscribes to Reuters newswire to help it deliver information about current events in the news.
What Particle isn’t yet ready to reveal is its business model.
Read MoreParticle secures $10.9M in new funding and expands publishing partners for AI news reader
The early-stage venture capital firm took a unique take on the industry by spearheading public relations for its portfolio companies.
Through Fund I ($20 million) and Fund II ($50 million), the Silicon Valley firm’s portfolio has had 22 exits, including an IPO with Terran Orbital.
It also has backed eight unicorns, including Superhuman, Remote, Worldcoin, Truebill (which exited to Rocket Companies in 2021) and DuckDuckGo.
“When we connected, he was already the founder of three unicorns, which was quite surprising,” Bucher told TechCrunch.
A year later, Bucher exited M&A PR Studio and started Day One Ventures.
Read MoreMasha Bucher, the Portfolio PR Monarch, Secures Massive $150M Fund
Flow is a spinout of VTT, a Finland state-backed research organization that’s a bit like a national lab.
You can’t just magically squeeze extra performance out of CPUs across architectures and code bases.
But Flow has been working on something that has been theoretically possible — it’s just that no one has been able to pull it off.
What Flow claims to have done is remove this limitation, turning the CPU from a one-lane street into a multi-lane highway.
The chef still only has two hands, but now the chef can work ten times as fast.
Read MoreUnlocking the Full Potential of Your CPU: Flow’s Revolutionary Chip and the Magic of Elbow Grease
Apple announced a deal with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot experience, to a range of its devices.
Here’s a roundup of a few of the more noteworthy Apple AI announcements from WWDC 2024.
New SiriSiri got a makeover courtesy of Apple’s overarching generative AI push this year, called Apple Intelligence.
To take advantage of the new Siri, you’ll need an Apple device that supports Apple Intelligence — specifically the iPhone 15 Pro and devices with M1 or newer chips.
Apple Intelligence will have an understanding of who you’re chatting with, Apple says — so if you want to personalize the chat with a custom AI image, you can do so on the fly.
Read More“Unveiling Apple’s Revolutionary AI Advancements at WWDC 2024”
“Big tech companies have ‘mis-set’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch.
According to one survey, over half of businesses have already invested in AI capabilities to support their customer service operations.
Per market research firm Markets and Markets, revenue in the market for call center AI alone is set to climb from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by year-end 2027.
And it’s scalable; Cognigy manages AI agents that can handle up to tens of thousands of customer conversations at once.
Image Credits: Cognigy“Cognigy provides a platform to build, operate and analyze AI agents for customer experiences in the contact center,” Heltewig said.
Read MoreCognigy Secures Funding to Expand Contact Center Automation Enterprise
Who would have thought that Raspberry Pi, the maker of cheap, single-board computers, would become a public company?
It means that Raspberry Pi could end up raising more than $200 million during its IPO process.
If you’re looking to buy Raspberry Pi shares as a retail investor, this isn’t possible just yet.
Raspberry Pi Ltd, the public company, is the commercial subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Arm previously announced that it intended to increase its stake in Raspberry Pi with the public listing.
Read More“Raspberry Pi Goes Public: Shares Surge Following Successful IPO Pricing”
When Urvashi Barooah applied to MBA programs in 2015, she focused her applications around her dream of becoming a venture capitalist.
She got rejected from every school, and was told she was being unrealistic about her prospects in the venture industry, but she didn’t let that deter her.
She landed a spot at Wharton and said she catered all of her classes and extra cirriculars around learning everything she could about the venture industry.
While growing up with entrepreneur parents didn’t introduce Barooah to venture capital, she thinks her upbringing makes her a better VC.
“I started my journey in venture four years ago and knew nothing,” Barooah said.
Read More“Against All Odds: Urvashi Barooah’s Venture Success Story”
Following a keynote presentation at WWDC 2024 that both introduced Apple Intelligence and confirmed a partnership that brings GPT access to Siri through an deal with OpenAI, SVP Craig Federighi confirmed plans to work with additional third-party models.
The first example given by the executive was one the companies with which Apple was exploring a partnership.
“We’re looking forward to doing integrations with other models, including Google Gemini, for instance, in the future,” Federighi said during a post-keynote conversation.
Apple says users will be able to access the system without having to sign up for an account or paying for premium services.
“Now you can do it right through Siri, without going through another tool,” the Apple executive said.
Read MoreApple and Google’s Gemini: A Collaboration in the Works
Elon Musk is threatening to ban iPhones from all his companies over the newly announced OpenAI integrations Apple announced at WWDC 2024 on Monday.
This allows users to get an answer from ChatGPT without having to open the ChatGPT iOS app.
Apple also announced another integration that would allow users have access to ChatGPT system-wide within Writing Tools via a “compose” feature.
That’s great news for OpenAI, which will soon have a massive influx of requests from Apple users.
Apple users may not understand the nuances of the privacy issues here, of course — which is what Musk is counting on by making these complaints.
Read MoreElon Musk Issues Ultimatum: Ban on Apple Devices for Companies in Response to Apple’s ChatGPT Integration
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space.
In the same seven-day period, we watched Boeing’s Starliner launch astronauts to space for the first time, and then we got to watch those two astronauts dock with the International Space Station.
And we also got to see SpaceX launch Starship for the fourth time ever — and then bring it back home.
I think I’m not alone in thinking that some of the most spectacular images in the history of rocketry were generated during that flight.
Of course, the mission isn’t over yet: After around a week aboard the station, the two astronauts will re-board Starliner and use it to get back home.
Read More“The Unforgettable Week in TechCrunch Space”
