Earlier this fall, Spotify was found to be developing a new feature that would allow its streaming app users to create playlists using AI technology and prompts.
Now, that “AI playlists” feature has been spotted in the wild, as part of a test that to see how users will respond to AI-driven playlist creation.
Here, a pop-up menu appears and the AI playlist feature is a new option underneath the existing “Playlist” and “Blend” options.
The feature’s description reads “Turn your ideas into playlists using AI” and notes that it’s currently only available in English.
It remains to be seen if and when the new AI feature goes live to the public.
Two days after our short look into the rivalry, Temu filed suit against Shein.
Now, Temu is back with a fresh lawsuit that alleges a battery of illegal acts by Shein.
It’d be useful to recall at this point that Temu’s parent company PDD recently overtook Alibaba in market cap, and Shein wants to go public in the United States.
A Shein spokesperson told TechCrunch+ that the company “believe[s] this lawsuit is without merit and will vigorously defend” itself.
Some deal with Temu’s view that Shein is filing myriad “dubious copyright infringement lawsuits” against it, and alleges that the latter is issuing “voluminous, bad-faith DMCA takedown notices” against its rival.
An email, penned by newly minted president and CTO Mo Elshenawy, was sent this morning to the entire 3,800-person workforce.
Cruise is targeting non-engineering jobs in the layoffs, particularly those people who worked in the field, commercial operations and corporate staffing, according to the email.
Engineering, a category that makes up the bulk of the Cruise workforce, is largely being preserved, according to the content of the email and discussions with internal sources.
The layoffs have been largely expected at Cruise for weeks now.
GM and the Cruise board have been scrambling ever since the October 2 incident put the company in the crosshairs of state, local and federal agencies.
When Apex Space emerged from stealth last October, the company had a provocative goal: remove the “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry by manufacturing satellite buses at scale.
To get there, Apex announced today that it has opened a new headquarters and production facility in California that will eventually scale up to manufacture 50 satellite platforms annually.
Apex wants to disrupt one of the more entrenched parts of the space industry.
In general, satellite buses have been built to order at a very high cost and with very long lead times.
Apex is planning on flying its first Aries on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 ride-share mission scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
Beeper Cloud users were also impacted, the company’s post said, referring to its original messaging app aggregator, but said those users could contact Beeper Help for a fix as well.
Apple appears to be deliberately blocking iMessages from being delivered to ~5% of Beeper Mini users.
Uninstalling and reinstalling Beeper Mini fixes the issue.
But although Beeper believed Apple would not be able to shut its service down, as Beeper Mini users communicated directly with Apple’s servers, just as iPhones do, Apple quickly reacted on Friday to put an end to Beeper Mini’s operation.
As a result of Apple’s meddling, leading to Beeper Mini’s instability, the startup made its new app free for Android users for the time being.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper successfully validated key technology that will increase throughput and reduce latency for customers using its satellite internet service, the company said Thursday.
That technology is called “optical inter-satellite links” (OISL), a type of optical communication that uses infrared lasers to send data between spacecraft on orbit.
OISL has been around for a while to enable inter-satellite communications, but earlier generations were limited to linking just two satellites at a time.
Kuiper’s satellites will be able to connect with many other spacecraft simultaneously, which will form a mesh network in space.
“With optical inter-satellite links across our satellite constellation, Project Kuiper will effectively operate as a mesh network in space,” Kuiper VP of technology Rajeev Badyal said in a statement.
Australia-based link-in-bio platform Linktree announced today that it has acquired competitor Koji from its parent company GoMeta for an undisclosed amount.
The company is offering Koji users three months of Linktree Pro plan as a trial.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Koji users to the Linktree community and are excited to continue to innovate on the category we created.
The company launched Koji as a link-in-bio platform in March 2021 and raised $16 million through its parent entity.
In a previous avatar, Koji let non-technical developers make “mini apps on the web,” which were later turned into templates on the link-in-bio platform.
OhmConnect is currently active in California, Texas, and New York, and the new company, Renew Home, plans to expand into new markets once launched, the spokesperson added.
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners itself was once a part of Sidewalk Labs.
Sidewalk Labs got its start originally as a Google moonshot in 2015 with the lofty goal of using tech to improve urban life.
SIP was eventually spun out of Sidewalk Labs in 2020 fuelled with a $400 million investment from Google.
Nest Renew has been one of OhmConnect’s customers, alongside Sensi, ecobee, Carrier and others.
Proton Mail finally has a native desktop app, rolling out now in beta for some users on Windows and MacOS.
The encrypted email service has, of course, been available to desktop users since its inception nearly a decade ago — first through the web, and latterly via a “bridge” that opened access to Proton Mail accounts through desktop clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail.
The desktop app provides offline access and is available directly from the Windows Start menu or MacOS dock, while it also bundles access to Proton Calendar, the encrypted calendar app Proton launched back in 2019.
Alongside the new app, Proton also unveiled a handful of new features that will be available to Proton Mail users on both the web and desktop.
Privacy pushFounded in 2014, Proton initially only offered encrypted email, but the Swiss company has expanded into VPNs, a password manager, calendar and a cloud storage service called Proton Drive which also has its own desktop app.
Qogita – a two-sided ecommerce wholesale marketplace aimed at retailers largely in the health and beauty sectors – has raised €80 million ($86 million) in a Series B round led by London’s Dawn Capital and Accel.
Targeting SME e-commerce retailers businesses that want to deal with a more ‘all-in-one’ wholesale platform, Qogita is not dissimilar to Faire.com in the US (which has raised $1.7 billion to date) and Ankorstore out of France (which has raised €365 million).
In a statement, Norman Fiore, General Partner at Dawn Capital, said: “It is remarkable how complex and completely opaque product procurement still is for small and medium-sized businesses targeting the $6 trillion e-commerce market.
Qogita has built an all-in-one platform to address the entire wholesale procurement process.”Luca Bocchio, Partner at Accel, also added: “The B2B wholesale market in Europe is huge, but also fragmented and complex.
And in April, Ankorstore launched a new membership programme for independent retailers in Europe, removing minimum checkout amounts and waiving heavy/fragile shipping fees, plus a 90 day BNPL offer.
