One way to know for sure that you’re at a developer conference: The crowd gets really excited when you announce a new Calculator app.
The addition of the app got (by far) the biggest applause pop at WWDC 2024 so far.
The biggest arrival here is the addition of Math Notes.
The addition feature effect does the math for you.
At once, the feature makes iPad an even more interesting option is the academic segment, though plenty of teachers will no doubt balk at an app that does all of the work for users.
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.
Some call it the “commercial valley of death,” and it’s the point at which many climate tech startups struggle.
Climate nonprofit Prime Coalition is hoping to bridge the valley with a new program, Trellis Climate.
Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce.
“There are more and more philanthropists that are really interested in solving the climate problem,” Lara Pierpoint, director of Trellis Climate, told TechCrunch.
“It is the most flexible and potentially risk-forward set of dollars that are out there.”For founders in climate tech, that sort of funding is likely welcome news.
The global demand for wood could grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the World Resources Institute.
While some building materials like steel get consistently recycled back into the supply chain, wood does not.
Cambium looks to build the supply chain that keeps wood from being wasted by connecting those with already-been-used wood to the businesses and folks that need it.
“We’re building a better value chain where you can use local material, you can use salvaged material, and all of that is connected through our technology,” Christensen said.
And we do that in a really efficient and cost competitive way.”Demand for more sustainable wood has been growing in recent years, Christensen said, but before Cambium there wasn’t a good system to find the recycled wood.
Is it just me, or was that an earthquake?
“DID WE JUST HAVE AN EARTHQUAKE IN NEW YORK”“was that an earthquake?????
People on microblogging sites (it wasn’t just X — I see you, Bluesky) had already determined the scope of the earthquake, confirmed it was, in fact, an earthquake, and began posting jokes about the situation before the less chronically online people even realized what happened.
Dom says she used to live in LA, and this was definitely an earthquake.
On Facebook, I am delighted to learn there is a new grocery store coming to my neighborhood, but no one is talking about the earthquake.
Founder Daudi Barnes started the company in 2019 to augment the work of his previous company, Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test.
The Colorado-based startup already operates one test stand, called Sunshine, which AMPT stood up in 2010.
“The market is just really, really expanding really fast right now,” Animas project manager Graham Dudley explained.
So they’ve had four plus years of design and development that they have to reboot on, and that’s really, really expensive and hard for your schedule prediction.
Its a competitive edge in the space propulsion market, which has become increasingly crowded as the cost to launch spacecraft to orbit has dropped.
Autism Impact Fund (AIF) was a pioneer when it emerged in 2021, three years after the son of its co-founder and managing partner, Chris Male, was diagnosed with ASD.
A joint effort of Male and others, its ambition was to become “the investment and innovation arm of the autism community,” Male told TechCrunch.
Since then, startups in the neurodiversity space gathered momentum, and so did AIF, which recently closed its first fund at $60 million.
AIF’s decision to broaden its scope has to do with autism itself, Male said.
It’s also global, with healthtech Genial Care raising $10 million to help kids with autism and their families in Brazil.
Bumble’s new CEO talks about her critical mission: to spice things up at the company Tis the season for turnaround CEOsSince Bumble’s blockbuster IPO at the height of the pandemic, investors’ ardor with the dating service has cooled.
Part of it ties to AI, which Bumble’s rivals are also leaning into more heavily.
But as we approach our 10-year anniversary, it’s a great moment to think about how we best serve our mission.
Historically, what we’ve seen is that a lot of men will come to Bumble who believe in women being empowered.
Bumble has always been great at community-based marketing: hosting events and finding ambassadors who really want to represent the brand.
Why is AI so bad at spelling?
But put an AI up against some middle schoolers at the spelling bee, and it’ll get knocked out faster than you can say diffusion.
The underlying technology behind image and text generators are different, yet both kinds of models have similar struggles with details like spelling.
But, Guzdial says, if we look close enough, it’s not just fingers and spelling that AI gets wrong.
Though these AI models are improving at an alarming rate, these tools are still bound to encounter issues like this, which limits the capacity of the technology.
But that’s how things are at Microsoft now: everything needs to have a Copilot angle — even its most straightforward hardware events.
“Windows 11 and Windows 365 promise a new era of AI productivity,” Melissa Grant, Microsoft’s senior director for Windows Enterprise said.
Microsoft is also betting on cloud PCs delivered through Windows 365 as a surface for the Copilot.
Microsoft says that Windows App usage has now reached over 3 million active hours since it entered preview at the Microsoft Ignite 2023 in November.
And those Windows 365 cloud PCs?
