Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth.
The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol.
Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage, and more.
The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol.
Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships.
Spain’s data protection authority has ordered Worldcoin to temporarily stop collecting and processing personal data from the market.
Data protection authorities can also demand unlawful processing to stop, including temporarily if they are concerned people’s rights are at serious risk, as is happening here.
An investigation was opened by France’s data protection authority last year.
It also said then that it would be seeking to ascertain whether Worldcoin had carried out a data protection impact assessment.
In another set-back last year, Kenya’s data protection authority issued a ban on Worldcoin’s local processing.
Credit bureaus relying on outdated third-party data are only getting a small piece of the puzzle, Georgina Merhom says.
User-permissioned data sources, that consumers provide with their permission, come from a variety of places.
In addition, user-permissioned data sources replace the self-reporting process, brokers trust between the institution and consumer and identifies opportunities that the bank would have otherwise overlooked, Merhom said.
Building a better credit bureau or finding new ways to verify data from people without a lot of credit is not a new concept.
“It costs banks $29 billion a year to process applications, and that’s not even including the money they pay credit bureaus,” Merhom said.
Today, Groq announced that it’s forming a new division — Groq Systems — focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem.
In forming the new unit, Groq has acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based firm offering a range of business-oriented AI solutions including chatbots, data analytics tools and documentation builders.
Prior to launching Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Sherry co-launched Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems, that Ford acquired in 2018.
Prior to the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had raised $25.5 million in venture capital.
Definitive Intelligence is Groq’s second acquisition after Maxeler Technologies, a high-performance compute and AI infrastructure solutions firm, in 2022.
Google said on Friday it will start removing apps from its Play Store in India if developers fail to comply with its payment policy, taking a definitive stand weeks after the top Indian court granted the Android-maker with relief.
Without naming them, Google said 10 companies in India, including “many well-established ones,” have not paid Google Play’s fee despite being provided with three years to prepare.
“After giving these developers more than three years to prepare, including three weeks after the Supreme Court’s order, we are taking necessary steps to ensure our policies are applied consistently across the ecosystem, as we do for any form of policy violation globally,” the company wrote in a blog post.
“Enforcement of our policy, when necessary, can include removal of non-compliant apps from Google Play.”This is a developing story.
More to come.
The TechCrunch team is in Barcelona this week to bring you all the action going on at Mobile World Congress 2024.
So far, we’ve seen some big announcements from companies, including new Android features from Google, Lenovo’s new laptop concept and rollable phone concept and Xiaomi’s robotic dog.
Motorola’s rollable concept phoneWhat’s the maximum size of a device that you will wear on your wrist?
The company has designed what it’s calling a “rollable concept phone” for Motorola that folds around your wrist.
In addition to design, Xiaomi has developed the five core EV technologies: E-Motor, CTB Integrated Battery, Xiaomi Die Casting, Xiaomi Pilot Autonomous Driving, and Smart Cabin.
Today, the company announced a new capability for its Palmyra model that generates text from images, including graphs and charts, they call Palmyra-Vision.
May Habib, company co-founder and CEO, says that they made a strategic decision to concentrate on multimodal content, and being able to generate text from images is part of that strategy.
“We are going to be focused on multimodal input, but text output, so text generation and insight that is delivered via text,” Habib told TechCrunch.
She reserves the right to create charts and graphs at some point from data, but that’s not something they are doing at the moment.
This particular release is focused on generating text from those kinds of images.
The TechCrunch team is in Barcelona this week to bring you all the action going on at Mobile World Congress 2024.
So far, we’ve seen some big announcements from companies, including new Android features from Google, Lenovo’s new laptop concept and Xiaomi’s robotic dog.
As MWC progresses, here’s how you can follow along with our team’s coverage.
Last week, Brian reported that “Battery is precisely the sort of thing OnePlus needs to lean into,” given that its first generation product only had about 25 hours of battery life.
Xiaomi’s CyberDogAfter years of reporting on Xiaomi’s CyberDog, Brian Heater was finally able to see the robotic dog up-close at MWC.
However, awareness of the monetary and environmental benefits associated with carbon credits is low.
It was early, as no methodologies were available at the time to create carbon credits from agriculture.
However, the 34-year-old entrepreneur decided to start his venture once the methodologies started appearing in developed markets, including the U.S. and Europe.
Unlike nature-based credits, carbon credits from renewable energy projects are easy to measure and record and do not involve co-benefits to nature.
That said, the rigorous oversight helps bring high-quality carbon credits that can be sold globally.
Uber has quietly started testing a feature that lets gig workers pick up prepaid items from local stores and deliver them to customers in India.
It suggests that Uber sees a business opportunity in delivering items from local stores in India — just like in the U.S.
For instance, the item set for pickup at the local store needs to be five kilograms (11 lbs) or less.
In addition to Store Pickup, Uber offers its regular Connect feature to let customers deliver packages through its app.
However, the Store Pickup feature is specifically for arranging deliveries from local stores.
