Like many immigrants, the New York City skyline was one of the first sights young brothers Edi and Etrit Demaj took in when they arrived in the U.S. over 20 years ago.
“The first building that we saw was the Empire State Building,” Etrit recalls.
The Demaj family soon settled in Detroit, where the brothers completed their education and started various companies, including their latest, Kode Labs, which integrates and automates various systems in commercial buildings — including the Empire State Building.
When the Demaj brothers founded Kode in 2017, they sought to bring building management into the cloud era.
The brothers liken it to an OS that integrates building systems like a computer OS integrates various circuit boards.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, just got a big upgrade.
OpenAI announced today that premium ChatGPT users — customers paying for ChatGPT Plus, Team or Enterprise — can now leveraged an updated and enhanced version of GPT-4 Turbo, one of the models that powers the conversational ChatGPT experience.
It was trained on publicly available data up to December 2023, in contrast to the previous edition of GPT-4 Turbo available in ChatGPT, which had an April 2023 cut-off.
“When writing with ChatGPT [with the new GPT-4 Turbo], responses will be more direct, less verbose and use more conversational language,” OpenAI writes in a post on X.
Our new GPT-4 Turbo is now available to paid ChatGPT users.
Social network X is rolling out access to xAI’s Grok chatbot to Premium tier subscribers after Elon Musk announced the expansion to more paid users last month.
The company said on its support page that only Premium and Premium+ users can interact with the chatbot in select regions.
Last year, after Musk’s xAI announced Grok, it made the chatbot available to Premium+ users — people who are paying $16 per month or a $168 per year subscription fee.
Earlier this week, X rolled out a new explore view inside Grok where the chatbot summarizes trending news stories.
Last month, xAI open-sourced Grok but without any training data details.
In its early days, OctoAI focused almost exclusively on optimizing models to run more effectively.
With the rise of generative AI, the team then launched the fully managed OctoAI platform to help its users serve and fine-tune existing models.
OctoStack, at its core, is that OctoAI platform, but for private deployments.
Deploying OctoStack should be straightforward for most enterprises, as OctoAI delivers the platform with read-to-go containers and their associated Helm charts for deployments.
For developers, the API remains the same, no matter whether they are targeting the SaaS product or OctoAI in their private cloud.
Adobe today announced Firefly Services, a set of over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools and services.
Firefly Services makes some of the company’s AI-powered features from its Creative Cloud tools like Photoshop available to enterprise developers to speed up content creation in their custom workflows — or create entirely new solutions.
In addition, the company also today launched Custom Models, which allows businesses to fine tune Firefly models based on their assets.
Custom Models is already built into Adobe’s new GenStudio.
In addition to these AI features, Firefly Services also exposes tools for editing text layers, tagging content and applying presets from Lightroom, for example.
SpaceX is continuing to make progress on the development of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the third test flight Thursday accomplishing considerably more than the previous two tests.
The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southeastern Texas at 8:25 a.m. local time.
Although SpaceX has been developing Starship for years, this is only the third time the company has attempted an orbital mission.
The hot-staging technique was performed for the first time, ever, during the second Starship test flight last November.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulated the team on X, saying, “Starship reached orbital velocity!”Starship reached orbital velocity!
The company has crafted an interesting distribution strategy for travel eSIM cards and simplified the experience as eSIM remains a confusing technology for most people.
Thanks to eSIM, the experience is much better — or at least on paper because the eSIM industry is a bit confusing.
For instance, if you’re traveling to Argentina, you might search for the best option for a travel eSIM before heading to the airport.
Kolet’s first travel partners are professional travel agency Resaneo and air ticket booking platform Ulysse.
It has also asked some travel industry experts to become advisors for the startup.
Thus, SaaS startups are not category-specific, instead sharing a business model approach more than any particular industry focus.
Among myriad SaaS startups, those focused on selling to business clients — a group often called enterprise SaaS — are a magnet for venture capital.
Since then, investment into enterprise SaaS startups has slowed.
Enterprise SaaS startups raised $21.9 billion, $45.0 billion, $55.1 billion and $58.3 billion in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Perhaps a rate cut or two and a strong enterprise IPO are the tonic required to really reignite venture investment into enterprise SaaS.
In enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS), usage-based pricing, a pricing model in which customers are charged only when they use a product or service, is gaining ground.
According to a report from VC firm OpenView, ~60% of SaaS businesses offer some form of usage-based pricing today.
But while usage-based pricing has its advantages, it can be tougher to keep tabs on from a billing perspective.
There, he ran into blockers collecting usage-based pricing data from different providers and infrastructure and aggregating and analyzing this usage together.
“Competitors in the usage-based space only cater to the revenue teams with a closed-source, billing-first approach,” he said.
In 2022, Walmart acquired earned wage access provider Even to offer early pay access to its employees.
Other big U.S. companies, including Amazon, McDonald’s and Uber, also offer employees early wage access programs.
Like other earned wage access providers, Wagely charges a nominal flat membership fee to employees withdrawing their salaries early.
“This is something that no other competitor is even close to because other earned wage access companies are focusing on different things,” he said.
One of the areas where global earned wage access providers have shifted their focus nowadays is lending — in some cases, to lend money to employers.
