Maybe it’s no surprise that IO River was launched by two industry veterans.
Co-founders Edward Tsinovoi (CEO) and Michael Hakimi (CTO) worked together for over a decade, including at Akamai’s Tel Aviv office, before founding IO River in late 2022 and participating in the Intel Ignite accelerator program.
All of this is relatively straightforward and for the basic functionality all CDNs have in common (think redirecting URLs, for example), IO River can tap into their native APIs.
CDN services aren’t exactly meant to work together, after all, so there is not a lot of common ground.
What IO River does is provide its own application services like a web application firewall, rate limiting and origin load balancing.
The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires.
For example, someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network.
Bluesky says installing filters from independent moderation services will be as easy as following another account.
People running moderation services will be able to set custom labels and determine what they do.
Moderation services aren’t tied to individual accounts, so multiple people can manage them together.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out the ability for users to save a draft and take photos within the app.
The new features shape Threads into more of a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), which has had drafts and a camera shortcut for as long as we can remember.
However, Threads only lets you save one draft at a time, whereas X lets you save multiple.
Threads users can now start writing out a post that they may want to share later, and then swipe down to save it as a draft.
The launch of the camera shortcut comes as app researcher Nima Owji indicated that X might be looking to adopt Threads’ carousel format for displaying images.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a monthly fee.
Some of the other features for business accounts involve organizing chats with color labels, using automatic greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for quick replies.
On his channel, Durov said that Telegram plans to launch more business features this month including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats.
Telegram is trying to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features.
Notably, the experience is free for Sling TV and Sling Freestream customers, and they can play games while simultaneously watching live TV content — providing entertainment during commercial breaks.
Sling TV also allows users to expand the Arcade row on the home screen to have a more immersive playing experience.
Sling TV says that 10 games will be available at launch, with new titles to be added regularly.
Sling didn’t say if it would partner with other gaming companies to expand its gaming library, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
Dish, which recently merged with EchoStar, reported a loss of 65,000 Sling TV subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2023, bringing the total to 2.06 million.
Numbers Station, a startup that is using large language models (LLMs) to power its data analytics platform, is launching its first cloud-based product today: the aptly named Numbers Station Cloud, which is now in early access.
With this service, virtually any user in an enterprise can analyze their internal data using Numbers Station’s chat interface.
As Numbers Station co-founder and CEO Chris Aberger told me, he’s somewhat tired of talking about how the service allows users to “chat with their data,” because there is so much noise around that.
Numbers Stations’ research shows that its approach results in significantly improved precision compared to more traditional text-to-SQL pipelines.
“Numbers Station is at the cutting edge of enterprise AI for structured data,” said Sharad Rastogi, the CEO of Work Dynamics Technology from Jones Lang LaSalle.
Instagram announced today that it’s rolling out the ability for users to edit their direct messages for up to 15 minutes after sending them.
The ability to edit your DMs lets you fix a typo or change things around if your message doesn’t quite sound right.
To edit a message, you need to press and hold it, and then then choose “edit” from the dropdown menu.
The feature works similar to Apple’s edit feature for iMessage, which launched nearly two years ago.
Instagram also recently started allowing all users to turn read receipts off, for all of their chats or specific ones.
Swayy is an iPhone app startup that allows you to share not your current location, but your next intended location.
I also liked the way the Swayy app allows me to create custom groups.
As Westropp pointed out, as a female founder, she’s acutely aware that being able to control precisely who can see her future location is something she hard-wired into the app.
Of course, Swayy is likely to struggle against the tech giants already toying with location as feature.
It will also be an opportunity for Instagram to appeal to people who were fans of Zenly, a social map app that Snap acquired and then shut down in 2022.
Want to weave various Stability AI-generated video clips into a movie?
Morph Studio, which has its own text-to-video model, just introduced an AI filmmaking platform.
Undergirding the creation process is Morph’s partnership with Stability AI, though eventually, Morph plans to introduce an array of generative video models for users to choose from.
AI has introduced a new workflow to film production,” Morph’s co-founder Xu Huaizhe said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Meme generatingXu’s commitment to creating a community around videos was evident in Morph’s inaugural product endeavor: a place for sharing AI-generated memes.
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out a “search by date” function for individual and group chats on Android devices.
Users can only search for a chat on a particular date instead of specifying a date range.
To use the feature, users have to go a one-on-one or group chat details by tapping on the contact or the group name.
To search by date, they have to tap on the search button and then tap the calendar icon.
Users can already search through conversations by media type such as links, media, and docs through the conversation detail page.
