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.”
After its IPO, the platform is planning a slew of product features for the year ahead, and — spoiler alert — most of them are powered by AI.
“I think the IPO was an important milestone, but we’re just focused on building for our users,” Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Baht told TechCrunch.
Reddit’s product roadmap includes faster loading times, more tools for moderators and developers, and an AI-powered language translation feature to bring Reddit to a more global audience.
According to Reddit’s IPO filing, in December 2023, 50% of Reddit’s daily active unique users were from non-U.S. countries.
The company will build on those updates with other new tools, like an LLM that’s trained on moderators’ past decisions and actions.
I was happy — excited, even — to check out Shure’s latest USB microphone.
Its predecessor, the MV7, has been my default podcasting mic since it was launched toward to end of 2022.
If you’ve asked me at some point over the past year and a half to recommend a USB mic, I likely suggested its predecessor.
As for sound, I’ve been quite pleased with the MV7+.
It’s pricey compared to other USB mics, but it’s hard to beat out of the box.
Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion.
Based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.
To be fair, though, Microsoft only announced its Cobalt Arm chips late last year, too, and those chips aren’t yet available to customers, either.
In a press briefing ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, Google stressed that since Axion is built on an open foundation, Google Cloud customers will be able to bring their existing Arm workloads to Google Cloud without any modifications.
“Through this collaboration, we’re accessing a broad ecosystem of cloud customers who have already deployed ARM-based workloads across hundreds of ISVs and open-source projects.”More later this year.
The vulnerability is a new one, resulting from the increased “context window” of the latest generation of LLMs.
But in an unexpected extension of this “in-context learning,” as it’s called, the models also get “better” at replying to inappropriate questions.
So if you ask it to build a bomb right away, it will refuse.
But if you ask it to answer 99 other questions of lesser harmfulness and then ask it to build a bomb… it’s a lot more likely to comply.
If the user wants trivia, it seems to gradually activate more latent trivia power as you ask dozens of questions.
Google will let you swipe right or swipe left on clothes to get better fashion recommendationsGoogle is rolling out a new update that makes it easier for users to find personalized shopping results, the company announced on Wednesday.
The new feature lets users rate different products in order to get style recommendations when shopping for apparel, shoes and accessories.
After you have rated a selection of products, Google will display personalized results for you to parse through.
Google will remember your preferences, so if you ever search for men’s polo shirts again, you will see style recommendations based on what you liked in the past.
The company says people shop on Google more than a billion times a day and see more than 45 billion products in their results.
In the summer after his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school in Worcester, Massachusetts, Cyvl.ai co-founder and CEO Daniel Pelaez needed a job.
And during my time there, I quickly saw firsthand they had no data on anything,” Pelaez told TechCrunch.
He saw an opportunity that would eventually become Cyvl.ai, a firm that helps municipalities and civil engineering firms bring a digital layer to tracking the conditions of transportation infrastructure.
“Our core vision and why we started the company in the first place is to help the entire world build and maintain better transportation infrastructure,” he said.
The $6 million investment was led by Companyon Ventures with participation from Argon Ventures, AeroX Ventures and Alumni Ventures.
Canva has typically targeted the beginner for their products, but company co-Founder Cliff Obrecht sees the acquisition opening the door to more advanced users.
“Canva needed products with more complex capabilities to go up against Adobe,” Wang told TechCrunch.
In a blog post on the Affinity website, CEO Ashley Hewson tried to allay customer fears about the change.
“In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels.
With Affinity, Canva gains 3 million users worldwide along with 90 employees who will be joining the company.
In an alkaline electrolyzer, two electrodes are submerged in a solution of alkaline water (usually consisting of a high concentration of potassium or sodium hydroxide).
Alkaline electrolysis differs from the other main approach, proton-exchange membrane electrolysis, in a few ways.
One of the most important, though, is that alkaline electrolysis doesn’t require expensive exotic metals like platinum.
That gives alkaline electrolyzers a cost advantage from the start, one that Evoloh says it builds on with its lower-cost manufacturing.
To further trim manufacturing costs, Evoloh uses roll-to-roll printing, a technique pioneered centuries ago by printing presses and more recently used in battery manufacturing.
Globally, a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, and in Kenya, that figure stands at between 20% to 40%.
Farm to Feed, an agri-tech based in Kenya, is one of the fast-risers in the space.
Farm to Feed teams then sort, grade and dispatch the products to clients from its warehouse in Kenya’s Capital, Nairobi.
Data collectionOn top of the e-commerce platform, Van Enk said they are building a data platform by collecting granular data including on climate and drivers of food loss, for better farming outcome and to create a more circular food system.
I do think that food loss is such a huge impact opportunity and also a very good commercial opportunity,” she said.
