Wastewater from these plants emerges laden with sodium sulfate, a byproduct of sulfuric acid and caustic soda, two chemicals used in battery manufacturing, copper refining and other industries.
“We can totally create a circular economy around these reagent chemicals,” Bilen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of Aepnus Technology, told TechCrunch.
The two founded Aepnus to modernize the century-old chloralkali process, which splits salts like sodium sulfate back into the acids and bases that created them.
“We don’t use any expensive catalysts in our electrolyzers,” Akuzum said.
For customers, fully recycling sodium sulfate waste should reduce disposal and material costs.
An “Apple Intelligence” (AI)-powered feature coming in iOS 18 will allow iPhone users to create AI images of people they’re messaging with — a feature that works something like an AI-upgraded Bitmoji.
Image Credits: AppleFor example, Apple showed off making an AI Bitmoji of a friend celebrating their birthday with an image that included cake, balloons and flowers.
The Genmoji can be used as a sticker for reacting to messages with a Tapback or inline with your messages, Apple said.
Apple Intelligence will also suggest concepts related to your messages conversation, but all this takes place on the device, according to Apple.
Also at WWDC 2024, Apple announced updates to Siri and introduced macOS Sequoia.
Meta is quietly rolling out a new “Communities” feature on Messenger, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The rollout comes as Meta introduced Communities on WhatsApp back in 2022.
They could create dedicated group chats for topics like upcoming events, security alerts, trash pickup schedules, and more.
Although the feature works similarly to Communities on WhatsApp, Meta says there is one key differentiator, which is the fact that Messenger Communities are connected to Facebook’s social graph.
On a help page, Meta says Communities on Messenger are designed for more public conversations when compared to Facebook groups.
Clay Canning had an idea while in high school: smartphone screen protectors that featured logos, right on the screen.
“In December 2022, I resigned from my job to pursue building Screen Skinz with Clay full time.”Now, Screen Skinz can officially announce the closing of a $1.5 million seed round led by South Loop Ventures and Abo Ventures.
The company produces custom, patent-pending phone screen protectors that feature personalized logos or slogans that are visible when the phone screen is black and then disappear when the phone is in use.
The latest fundraise allowed Screen Skinz to move manufacturing from Asia to the U.S., allowing it to more easily control its supply chain.
Screen Skinz next has some partnerships lined up and is focused on customer acquisition and deepening licensing relationships.
A new social media app called Indaband lets musicians and vocalists collaborate with others and make music with people all over the world.
You can record and mix unlimited video tracks in different sessions using the app’s multi-track video studio and share them with your community.
The app is the brainchild of CEO Daniel Murta, CTO Andrews Medina, Head of Engineering Helielson Santos and Design Leader Emerson Farias.
They all used to get together to play music during happy hours after work, and once the pandemic hit, they came up with the idea for Indaband so they could still play music together while in quarantine.
Circles will allow users to build their own communities on the app and possibly even hold live events.
Spotify is working on mixing tools that would allow users to remix songs on the streaming service, according to screenshots captured by tech veteran and app researcher Chris Messina.
The screenshots indicate that the mixing tools would be available under a new “Music Pro” premium subscription tier.
While Spotify’s mixing tools can’t get rid of this issue altogether, they could help remedy it to a certain extent.
It’s not surprising that Spotify is developing mixing tools, especially as sped-up songs and mashups are having a moment thanks to TikTok.
According to TikTok’s 2023 year-end report, the most popular songs on the app were sped-up remixes of songs.
Meta announced on Tuesday it’s rolling out the ability for Messenger users to create shared albums in chats, send photos in high-definition, and share larger files up to 100MB in size.
With these new features, Messenger is targeting people who tend to create shared albums or share HD images via services like Google Drive.
Now, users can create albums of photos and videos in group chats, whether it’s to organize photos of a recent spring break or grandma’s 80th birthday celebration.
The launch of the new feature follows Meta’s rollout of support for HD photos on WhatsApp back in September 2023.
The new features are rolling out on mobile to all Messenger users.
On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids.
At Google Cloud Next, we’re unveiling Google Vids, a brand new, AI-powered video creation app for work,” Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said, introducing the tool.
Examples of the kinds of videos people are creating with Google Vids include product pitches, training content or celebratory team videos.
Like most generative AI tooling, Google Vids starts with a prompt.
Along the way colleagues can comment or make changes, just as with any Google Workspace tool.
Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand.
At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands create content and measure its performance, with generative AI — and the promise of brand safety — at its center.
Adobe wants GenStudio, which it first previewed last September, to be an end-to-end solution to help marketers tailor their content to different channels and audience segments.
That, of course, is where generative AI comes in, since it can speed up content creation dramatically.
The tools also continuously checks that anything a user creates in GenStudio is within a brand’s guidelines.
TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband and CTO Ralph Gootee helped build their previous startup, PlanGrid, into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $850 million in 2018.
Yet in spite of that success, they always felt they left business on the table because of an inability to forecast business changes accurately.
“TigerEye is a business simulation engine that helps companies predict their future,” Young told TechCrunch.
The couple was advising other startups at Y Combinator in 2021 when they decided it was time to build TigerEye.
The following year, they brought a bunch of the core members of the PlanGrid team back together and started working on the problem.
