Then mark your calendars for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 happening in San Francisco from October 28–30.
Then choose your preferred presentation format:Breakout session: Take the spotlight with up to four speakers, including a moderator.
Each speaker will lead one breakout session during Disrupt.
Roundtable discussion: Lead an engaging 30-minute interactive discussion with an intimate audience of up to 40 attendees.
We’ll publish the selected topics, descriptions, and speakers online, where TechCrunch readers — and your followers — can vote for their favorite sessions.
Apple has reversed its decision about blocking web apps, also known as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), on iPhones in the EU.
Last month, Apple reduced the functionality of PWAs as mere website shortcuts with the release of the second beta of iOS 17.4, as security researcher Tommy Mysk and Open Web Advocacy had first pointed out.
The company then updated its developer page saying that because of security risks like malicious web apps reading data from other web apps and accessing cameras, it decided to end support for home screen apps.
Apple also said that PWAs had “very low user adoption” so there might not be a lot of impact on users.
Separately, the Open Web Advocacy group published an open letter addressed to Tim Cook to lift the ban on web apps, which was signed by hundreds of organizations and individuals including Mastodon, internet advocate Cory Doctorowand Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.
Newsmast also credits the Mastodon app and Mozilla-backed startup Mammoth for the inspiration around Communities.
In addition, Newsmast offers a system where anyone can build their own Mastodon server with a selection of communities they’ve curated.
Users could then connect to that server in place of the Newsmast server within the Newsmast app.
Later this week, Newsmast will also open up its API to developers, which means your preferred Mastodon app could integrate with Newsmast’s Communities, too, for a more seamless experience.
(In fact, some Mastodon users were confused why Newsmast’s accounts were following them and boosting their content, without understanding the larger purpose.)
Google releases new open LLMs, Rivian lays off staff and Signal rolls out usernamesWelcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry.
This week, Google launched two new open large language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, in its continued bid for generative AI dominance.
The company, which describes the LLMs as “inspired by Gemini,” its flagship family of GenAI models, made each available for commercial and research usage.
Change Healthcare hit: Change Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare tech companies in the U.S., confirmed that a cyberattack on its systems occurred recently.
YouTube triumphant: YouTube dominates TV streaming in the U.S., per Nielsen’s latest report.
Milewski and Schwartz bootstrapped Zūm Rails, building it up to a team of 30 people.
“We reached the point where we realize that bootstrapping is no longer healthy for our business,” Schwartz told TechCrunch.
In addition, Zūm Rails is working on a FedNow offering in the U.S. that will enable businesses to send and receive FDIC-insured payments within seconds.
Zūm Rails’ performance to date “is really impressive,” Jake Olson, vice president at Arthur Ventures, told TechCrunch.
Any organization that views the streamline digital financial interaction coupled with the instant payments capability as a competitive advantage will be a great fit for Zūm Rails.”
Uber has signed a memorandum of understanding with an Indian government-backed program that aims to make mobility and commerce more accessible across the South Asian nation.
The ride-hailing giant said Thursday that it will explore an integration with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to explore integrations with the network and expand range of its mobility offerings on the Uber app.
The ONDC is an ambitious initiative seeking to disrupt the country’s fast-growing e-commerce and mobility sectors.
Though firms like Amazon and Flipkart have expressed intentions to participate in the open network, their engagement remains limited.
“As the Open Network is continuously evolving, MTT (mobility, transport and travel) is certainly a critical sector for us.
Back in 2016, Netflix open-sourced Conductor, its microservices orchestration platform, but last December, it announced that it would discontinue maintaining it.
Thankfully, for the many companies that rely on it, the creators of Conductor had previously left the company to launch Orkes, a startup that provides an enterprise-grade microservices platform based on the open-source project.
As Orkes co-CTO Viren Baraiya told me, the project quickly became popular within Netflix.
Currently, Orkes offers Conductor as a fully managed platform on the customer’s cloud of choice, as well as a Conductor-based AI orchestration platform.
The founders of Orkes wrote a new playbook for building and operating complex, observable and large-scale applications when they helped create the Conductor open-source project at Netflix.
Barely a week after launching the latest iteration of its Gemini models, Google today announced the launch of Gemma, a new family of lightweight open-weight models.
To get started with Gemma, developers can get access to ready-to-use Colab and Kaggle notebooks, as well as integrations with Hugging Face, MaxText and Nvidia’s NeMo.
While Google highlights that these are open models, it’s worth noting that they are not open-source.
Indeed, in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement, Google’s Janine Banks stressed the company’s commitment to open source but also noted that Google is very intentional about how it refers to the Gemma models.
“[Open models] has become pretty pervasive now in the industry,” Banks said.
A spam attack that impacted the open source X rival Mastodon, Misskey, and other apps highlights how the decentralized social web, also known as the Fediverse, is open to abuse.
Over the past several days, attackers have targeted smaller Mastodon servers, taking advantage of open registrations to automate the creation of spam accounts.
While this is not the first spam attack that has impacted the Fediverse, Rochko notes that only larger servers like Mastodon.social had been targeted previously.
The spam attack highlighted one of the weaknesses that comes with how the Fediverse is structured.
It makes me want to walk away and give up,” wrote one Mastodon server admin sam@urbanists.social.
Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital.
The vector database realm is hot.
In recent months we’ve seen the likes of Weaviate raise $50 million for its open source vector database, while Zilliz secured secured $60 million to commercialize the Milvus open source vector database.
We are proud to share that this new X AI feature just announced by @elonmusk is powered by the Qdrant Vector Database.
Right, using a Vector Database, powered by Qdrant.
