With its list of Apple Design Awards winners, Apple is celebrating indie apps and startups over bigger tech firms — including those offering AI chatbots.
There’s no ChatGPT to be found on Apple’s list of Design Awards finalists, for example.
Instead, Apple’s list of finalists for its Design Awards favored small to midsize app makers like Copilot Money, SmartGym, recipe app Crouton, creative app Procreate Dreams, Gentler Streak, and others, as well as those from venture-backed startups like the creativity app Rooms and the reimagined web browser Arc Search.
We're overjoyed– and, frankly, in disbelief– that Rooms is a finalist for Apple's 2024 Design Awards.
An “Inclusivity” section also boosts Apple’s global app community, including members in the EU where regulation is underway via the Digital Markets Act.
Hoop, a productivity startup founded by a group of early Trello employees, wants to use AI to help you automatically generate and track your to-do list.
Image Credits: HoopThe core idea behind Hoop is that it will use AI to automatically capture potential tasks from Google Meet and Slack meetings and Slack messages (with other platforms coming later, starting with email) and pull those into the Hoop to-do list.
Currently, Hoop is a bit of a single-player experience, but Garber tells me that the company plans to add more team features in the future.
“We are really, really focused on making [Hoop] as useful for the individual as possible before we expand to teams, but it’s a very natural thing for us to do,” Garber said.
And while Hoop right now mostly looks like a standard to-do list, the company plans to add different views over time as well.
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best.
But what if companies were to open up those referral bonuses to people outside the organization?
Draftboard lets employers post referral bonuses and have referrers compete to earn them by scouring their networks for talent.
Free for companies, Draftboard notifies its roughly 1,000 referrers — in Draftboard’s parlance, “scouts” — as referrals move through the different stages of companies’ recruiting processes.
Referrers are graded on the quality of their referrals, and Draftboard takes a 20% cut of each referral bonus.
Guesty — which has built a platform for accommodation managers to manage all aspects of their business on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and directly to travellers — has raised $130 million.
Guesty’s close competitor Hostaway raised $175 million in May last year (its first ever big funding round).
And Mews, which like Guesty builds SaaS but for hoteliers, raised $110 million at a $1.2 billion valuation last month (March 2024).
First of all, Guesty wants to continue expanding its existing platform for current customers.
Third of all, Soto said that Guesty wants to consider more acquisitions.
1991 Ventures is the brainchild of Ukrainian brothers Denis and Viktor Gursky, who are better known for running incubation and accelerator programs inside Ukraine.
The Gursky brothers previously backed over 200 startups between 2016 and 2024, via their incubator Social Boost and their 1991 Accelerator.
Startups backed to date include LegalTech startup AXDRAFT; European toll payment app eTolls; and cybersecurity company Osavul.
Finally, TA Ventures is perhaps the best known and most active Ukrainian VC internationally, headed up by the almost-ubiquitous Viktoriya Tigipko.
Of course, many of the tech companies Ukraine will produce in the forthcoming years are likely to be either ‘dual-use’ or related to defence.
Sharing URLs privatelyNow, if all of this sounds a bit familiar, then that’s likely because you are already familiar with the Safe Browsing Enhanced Mode.
The privacy server removes potential user identifiers and forwards the encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing server via a TLS connection that mixes requests with many other Chrome users.
The Safe Browsing server decrypts the hash prefixes and matches them against the server-side database, returning full hashes of all unsafe URLs that match one of the hash prefixes sent by Chrome.
This server sits between Chrome and Safe Browsing and strips out any identifying information from the browser request.
Thanks to all of this, Google’s Safe Browsing service should never see your IP address.
WhatsApp said today it is rolling out a number of new formatting options on the app, including bulleted lists, numbered lists, block quotes, and inline code.
Numbered lists: You can create a numbered list by typing a digit followed by a period and a space.
“ Block quotes: To insert block quotes to highlight certain text by typing “>” and then a space.
WhatsApp already has basic text formatting options such as Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, and Monospace.
It is possible that these formatting options would also help the AI-powered bots to show responses neatly.
More than 100 companies are getting ready to list on Nasdaq after filing confidentially with the SEC, Nasdaq’s CEO Adena Friedman told investing publication Barron’s.
If that does come to happen, the IPO drought that the tech industry has suffered for months will draw to a close sooner than later.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Still we at least know about one company filing confidentially for an IPO: Circle.
We still have a few questions about the company’s finances, but this filing makes us more optimistic about its chances this time around.
Vietnamese EV startup VinFast is trying to get into the electric pickup truck game, as it revealed a new concept called the VF Wild at CES 2024 in Las Vegas.
The company announced it also plans to start selling its smallest EV, the VF3, outside of Vietnam as previously hinted.
The VF3 is a plucky little EV that VinFast announced in Vietnam earlier this year.
Developing a truck and globally launching a compact EV aren’t even the biggest things on VinFast’s plate.
Globally, the overwhelming majority of VinFast’s EV sales have been to a taxi company owned by Vuong.
Clear offers a specific vision for how to-do lists should work and, as an indie app, it doesn’t have to deliver increasing returns on investment or answer to investors.
“It feels a little punk compared with the average app on the App Store,” notes Ryu about Clear’s lack of subscriptions.
But for most of that time, the app was just being updated on TestFlight, not on the public App Store.
The original team had kind of “burned out” on Clear, Ryu explains, after being overloaded with projects like porting Clear to Mac or adding iCloud Sync.
You can also drag and drop items between lists, swipe to schedule reminders, screenshot to share lists, and swipe to archive lists.
