Light, the maker of the minimalist phone with an e-paper screen, is announcing its newest model, the Light Phone III.
Like its earlier counterpart, the Light Phone III offers a simple black-and-white display, without access to social media, the internet or email.
Between the first two models, the Light Phone I and Light Phone II, the company has shipped over 100,000 devices, with the latter accounting for roughly two-thirds of those sales.
The Light Phone III will target the larger demographic that are already using the non-smartphone as their main device.
Image Credits: LightAll the upgrades make the new device more expensive: The Light Phone III is $799 compared with the $299 Light Phone II.
The investor’s latest “Camp” incubator trained up and funded 9 AI agent startups they hope will take on today’s more tedious tasks.
The use cases for many of these companies sound promising, but AI tends to have trouble keeping its promises.
But are AI agents at that stage?
And it’s well within the capabilities of today’s AI agents, which would primarily be tasked with understanding natural language rather than forms.
A framework for web-based AI agents with a pay-as-you-go model so if your company’s experiment craters, you only owe a few bucks.
Meta-owned social network Threads is finally testing a “Recent” filter to sort search results by the latest.
“We’re starting to test this with a small number of people, so it’s easier to find relevant search results in real-time,” he said in a reply to a user.
A user part of the test posted that they could see “Top” and “Recent” filters on the search results screen.
They noted that the “Recent” filter isn’t strictly chronological, but it shows the latest posts better than the “Top” filter.
Earlier this year, the company accidentally rolled out the option to sort search results by the latest.
TikTok is working towards launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent bid to rival Instagram, a service best known for its static-photo sharing feature.
Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and stories itself, taking pieces of other services and incorporating them into its own product.
As is nearly every social service you can imagine.
If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some manner at some point — probably sooner rather than later.
Expanding a feature set can bolster engaged time, and therefore how much revenue a social media service can earn.
Meta has announced it’s testing new features on Instagram intended to help safeguard young people from unwanted nudity or sextortion scams.
This includes a feature called Nudity Protection in DMs, which automatically blurs images detected as containing nudity.
Nudity screensNudity Protection in DMs aims to protect teen Instagram users from cyberflashing by putting nude images behind a safety screen.
But Meta is taking a further step of not showing the “Message” button on a teen’s profile to potential sextortion accounts, i.e.
For example, in July 2021 Meta switched to defaulting young people’s Instagram accounts to private just ahead of the UK compliance deadline.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and take a peek at the week that is to come.
Now that we are finally past Y Combinator’s demo day — though our Friday show is worth listening if you haven’t had a chance yet — we can dive into the latest news.
So, this morning on Equity Monday we got into the chance that the United States might pass a real data privacy law.
There’s movement to report, but we’re still very, very far from anything becoming law.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and take a peek at the week that is to come.
We’ll talk more about Wednesday, but this is Y Combinator Demo Day week, so expect a deluge of startup news.
On the podcast today we dug into the latest news from Discord that indicates it is moving towards opening its gates for advertisements.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Banking-as-a-service startup (BaaS) Synctera has conducted a restructuring that has resulted in a staff reduction, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
While Synctera did not share how many employees were impacted, a report in Fintech Business Weekly pegs the number to be about 17 people, or about 15% of the company.
Synctera built a platform designed to bring together fintech companies and sponsor banks.
Treasury Prime slashed half its 100-person staff in February, a year after it announced a $40 million Series C raise.
Meanwhile, Piermont Bank reportedly cut ties with startup Unit, FinTech Business reported.
Earlier today, Sentry announced its AI Autofix feature for debugging production code and now, a few hours later, GitHub is launching the first beta of its code scanning autofix feature for finding and fixing security vulnerabilities during the coding process.
This new feature combines the real-time capabilities of GitHub’s Copilot with CodeQL, the company’s semantic code analysis engine.
The company also promises that code scanning autofix will cover more than 90% of alert types in the languages it supports, which are currently JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and Python.
“Just as GitHub Copilot relieves developers of tedious and repetitive tasks, code scanning autofix will help development teams reclaim time formerly spent on remediation,” GitHub writes in today’s announcement.
To generate the fixes and their explanations, GitHub uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.
Linktree is now allowing users to highlight links better with featured layout functionLink-in-bio startup Linktree introduced new features today including a featured layout to highlight links better, the ability to fetch the latest posts from Instagram, and support for a more prominent profile picture.
The company said that the new featured layout is great for highlighting certain links.
When you select “Featured layout” for a link it automatically expands with a content preview for links from YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Instagram.
In January, Linktree introduced a feature that automatically fetched the latest posts from YouTube and TikTok.
The company is now extending support for Instagram, with support for up to six of the latest posts and Reels from your account.
