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.
A startup called Empathy has built a platform to help navigate this tricky space, and now with some 40 million people using the platform it’s raised $47 million more in funding to grow.
Further services will likely see more AI tools incorporated to guide people through the question of “what next” in the process of organizing things, Gura said.
This round brings the total raised by Empathy to $90 million.
Empathy is not disclosing its valuation, but we understand from sources close to the company that it’s now approaching $400 million.
The rise of more sophisticated AI tooling, has played a role in how Empathy has evolved over the last couple of years.
Lucid Motors is stuck in a fight over the name of its Gravity SUVLucid Motors is at risk of losing the trademark for the name of its Gravity SUV, just months before the company is supposed to start production.
Google Ventures-backed EV charging company Gravity Inc. filed a “petition for cancellation” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) in December asking for Lucid’s Gravity trademark to be revoked.
“We feel very, very confident about it,” Moshe Cohen, Gravity Inc.’s CEO, said of the petition in an interview with TechCrunch.
Lucid, in its answer to the petition filed last week, says that Gravity does not currently operate an EV fleet and argues that consumers would not be confused by the two different uses of the Gravity name.
“[Lucid] believes that it is being and will continue to be damaged by [Gravity Inc.’s] registration,” the company writes.
Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank bills itself as an API-driven ‘Banking as a Service’ platform.
But Griffin isn’t likely to offer banking accounts directly to consumers, but to other businesses needing to offer embedded financial solutions such as savings accounts, safeguarding accounts and accounts for holding client money.
Last year in North America, Treasury Prime secured a $40 million Series C, Synctera $15 million and Omnio raised $9.8 million.
So they’re leveraging an existing financial relationship to bundle additional financial services in an embedded way.
All of that needs to sit in specially marked bank accounts.” Griffin’s aim, he says is to pick up as much of that business as possible.
How DMA gatekeepers are responding to the EU’s new competition rules — in their own wordsThe compliance deadline for the six tech giants regulated under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) expired yesterday.
The first batch of gatekeeper compliance reports — aka the non-confidential versions — have been published on the Commission’s DMA website.
The length is at least justified: Reflecting the fact a full eight of its products are designated as core platform services.
For handy reference, we’ve rounded up links to the gatekeepers’ first batch of public-facing DMA compliance reports below.
If you’re looking for an analytic overview of the DMA, its aims and early impacts, check out our earlier explainer.
Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff.
Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening, and onboarding, has cut just under 40% of its staff, which equates to dozens of employees.
San Francisco-based Inscribe.ai confirmed the headcount reduction to TechCrunch, noting that the AI advances in the financial services industry necessitated a pivot to a new product and direction for the company.
“2023 was a year of change for our customers and Inscribe,” explained Inscribe CEO and co-founder, Ronan Burke.
At the time, the company forecast it would double its then 50-person workforce over the coming 12 to 18 months.
This new program allows Play Store developers to lead their users in the EEA outside their app, including to promote offers.
Google says this fee represents the value that Play provided in facilitating the initial user acquisition through the Play Store.
Google says this fee represents the value that Play provided in facilitating the initial user acquisition through the Play Store.
Developers, however, will still be responsible for reporting transactions involving those users who are continuing to receive Play Store services.
Separately from the External Offers program, Google also this week launched two other programs to allow alternative billing systems for in-app purchases.
Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: the company required them to consent to an arbitration agreement in order to access their device.
Users (at least, this user) received an email the day before saying that “we have made changes to our Dispute Resolution Terms, which describe how you can resolve disputes with Roku.
We encourage you to read the updated Dispute Resolution Terms.
But there really is something rather despicable about totally disabling a user’s device until they agree, and having basically anything the user does count as agreement.
Don’t delay or, when people sue them over how they held devices hostage in order to coerce them into consumer-hostile dispute resolution terms, you won’t be able to join in on the fun.
Google has trailed another bundle of product tweaks ahead of Thursday’s deadline for compliance with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Google’s blog post further notes that users “may” see “new consent banners asking them whether they would like to link their Google services“.
The adtech giant is the DMA gatekeeper with by far the largest number of regulated platforms — eight in total; namely: Google Maps, Google Play, Google Shopping, Google Ads, Chrome, Android, Google Search and YouTube.
Elsewhere on data for ads, Google appear to be relying on its advertisers to keep a pipeline of targetable user data flowing through its ad engines.
Some of what Google is trailing in today’s blog post also appears to be re-announcing changes previously announced and/or launched in recent weeks.
