Author: GT

Kesha may have taken the dollar sign out of her name, but now, the singer is thinking about money again — not for herself, but to fund the seed round of her new startup, Smash. According to Kesha’s Instagram post, Smash will be a “community-based platform to connect and protect music creators,” which aligns with the mission of her new eponymous record label, which she announced last year. The 38-year-old chart-topper has always been more than a glitter-clad party girl singing about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel’s. Beneath her infectious 2010s pop music is a darker story — one…

Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to make changes to or veto a newly passed law in the state that would require the company to verify the ages of device owners, according to The Wall Street Journal. Abbott has yet to sign the bill. But Apple, alongside Google, has been working with interest groups to fight the legislation. Apple in particular argues that the implementation of the Texas bill could pose a threat to user privacy.  The bill would mandate that if a minor uses a device, their App Store account be tied to their parents’,…

Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low.  However, the recent launch of its chat assistant on mobile app stores was met with some hype, particularly in its home country. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a…

The idea of becoming a real estate investor for as little as $5 may seem too good to be true. And for many users of Landa, a proptech company that promised just that — it has been. Landa emerged from stealth in August 2022, announcing a total of $33 million in funding and a pledge to help everyday Americans access residential real estate investment through fractional shares. CEO Yishai Cohen and former CTO Amit Assaraf founded Landa in 2019 in an effort to make real estate investment more inclusive. The app’s only requirements were that users be over age 18…

Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company Zoox has issued its second voluntary software recall in a month, following a collision between one of its robotaxis and an e-scooter rider in San Francisco on May 8. The latest incident involved an unoccupied Zoox vehicle operating at low speed, which the company says was struck by the e-scooter after braking to yield at an intersection.  Just weeks earlier, the company recalled about 270 vehicles after a Las Vegas crash between a Zoox robotaxi and a passenger car that raised concerns over the self-driving software’s ability to predict the movement of other road users.  That…

Solar power CEOs believed the billions of dollars that they invested in Republican congressional districts would ultimately shield their industry from President Donald Trump’s threats to end federal support for renewable energy.But they may have been disastrously wrong. The tax bill that House Republicans passed this week is a “worse than feared scenario” for solar, analysts at the investment bank Jefferies told clients in a note.The legislation would terminate key tax credits that have supported the industry’s growth, triggering a broad sell-off of solar stocks on Thursday. The bill does still have to pass the Senate, where Jefferies expects the…

Venture capitalists have always focused on investing in companies that leverage technology to either disrupt established industries or create entirely new business categories. But some VCs are starting to flip the script on their investing styles. Rather than funding startups, they are acquiring mature businesses — such as call centers, accounting firms, and other professional service firms —and optimizing them with artificial intelligence to serve more customers through automation. This strategy, often likened to private equity roll-ups, is being employed by firms such as General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, and solo VC Elad Gil. General Catalyst, touting this as a new…

Naukri.com, a popular Indian employment website, has fixed a bug that exposed the email addresses of recruiters using its platform to search and hire talent online. The issue, discovered by security researcher Lohith Gowda, affected the API that Naukri used on its Android and iOS apps. The API exposed the email addresses of recruiters visiting profiles of potential candidates on Naukri’s platform. The issue did not appear to affect the company’s website. “The exposed recruiter email IDs can be used for targeted phishing attacks, and recruiters may receive excessive unsolicited emails and spam,” Gowda told TechCrunch. He added that exposed…

Anthropic’s new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, is a strong programmer and writer, the company claims. When talking to itself, it’s also a prolific emoji user. That’s according to a technical report Anthropic released on Thursday, a part of which investigates how Opus 4 behaves in “open-ended self-interaction” — i.e. essentially having a chat with itself. In one test that tasked a pair of Opus 4 models with talking to each other over 200, 30-turn interactions, the models used thousands of emojis. Opus 4 sure does like emojisImage Credits:Anthropic Which emojis? Well, per the report, Opus 4 used the…

Bluesky on Thursday quietly opened the doors to those who want to become verified on its social networking service. In a post published by the Bluesky Safety account, the company announced that “notable and authentic” accounts can now apply for verification through a new online form. Plus, organizations can request to become a Trusted Verifier to receive access to the tools that allow them to verify others. Bluesky began testing this feature last month with a small handful of organizations, including The New York Times, Wired, and The Athletic. For some on Bluesky, the blue verification badge is not a…