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DOJ asks court to reject TikTok’s bid to temporarily block sell-or-ban law
The Department of Justice has asked a U.S. appeals court to reject ByteDance and TikTok’s emergency motion that aims to temporarily block the law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless the social network divests from Chinese ownership by January 19. The Justice Department said the court should not delay the matter, arguing that…
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Realize Music’s ‘Sing’ wants you to sing out loud by yourself in VR because it just feels good
Aimed at maintaining well-being, Sing is a VR app that you can sing out loud with when you’re home alone. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
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Evinced’s $55M C round will help bring its accessibility dev tools (and AI) to Europe
Making sure your software is accessible is fast becoming a must rather than a nice-to-have, and Evinced is one of a wave of startups helping make that happen. The company is about to expand to Europe, where new accessibility regulations are about to take effect, and has raised $55 million to fuel the expansion. Evinced…
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The founders of SlideShare are making sharing docs more social with their new platform, Jaunt
When SlideShare, the presentation-sharing service acquired by Scribd, launched in 2006, generative AI technology was significantly less advanced than it is today, and social networking platforms were just beginning to take off. Recognizing the evolution of AI and the increasing desire for innovative ways to share documents, the founders of SlideShare—Amit Ranjan (COO), Jonathan Boutelle…
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Amid lawsuits and criticism, Character AI unveils new safety tools for teens
Character AI is facing at least two lawsuits, with plaintiffs accusing the company of contributing to a teen’s suicide and exposing a 9-year-old to “hypersexualized content”, as well as promoting self-harm to a 17-year-old user. Amid these ongoing lawsuits and widespread user criticism, the Google-backed company announced new teen safety tools today: a separate model for…
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Archer teams up with Anduril and raises $430 million to build defense aircraft
Funding to defense tech companies has boomed in 2024 as geopolitical tensions rise, advancements in AI abound, and investors seek out a new growth area amid a broader tech sector slowdown. Archer Aviation wants in on the action. The aviation startup, which is building vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, said Thursday that it has…
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Twelve Labs is building AI that can analyze and search through videos
AI models that understand videos as well as text can unlock powerful new applications. At least, that’s what Jae Lee, the co-founder of Twelve Labs, believes. Granted, Lee’s a little biased. Twelve Labs trains video-analyzing models for a range of use cases. But there may just be something to his assertion. Using Twelve Labs’ models,…
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Harvard and Google to release 1 million public-domain books as AI training dataset
AI training data has a big price tag, one best-suited for deep-pocketed tech firms. This is why Harvard University plans to release a dataset that includes in the region of 1 million public-domain books, spanning genres, languages, and authors including Dickens, Dante, and Shakespeare, which are no longer copyright-protected due to their age. The new…
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Gigs, an ‘MVNO in a box,’ gets $73M to power mobile network services for any company
Gigs, a platform that makes it easier for any company to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), has raised $73 million in a Series B round of funding. The announcement comes as countless companies have added mobile networking services to their product lineup this past year, including neobanks such as Nubank (a Gigs customer)…
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Microsoft quietly axes Skype credit and phone number sales to push subscriptions
Bad news for anyone out there who still uses Skype: the Microsoft-owned phone and messaging platform has quietly stopped letting users top-up accounts with credit and buy Skype phone numbers. Instead, Skype is locking into SaaS mode: it’s pushing users to take monthly subscriptions for regional and global Skype-to-phone plans, for a set monthly fee,…