Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Most interesting startup stories from the week Shortly after Google parent Alphabet reportedly abandoned its ambitions to purchase online marketing software company HubSpot, the tech giant decided to pursue another big acquisition. This time, Google is in […]
M&A activity heats up with Wiz, Graphcore, etc. Read More »
Google has joined investors backing Moving Tech, the parent firm of open-source ride-sharing app Namma Yatri in India that is eroding market share from Uber and Ola with its no-commission model. Namma Yatri works atop of Open Network for Digital Commerce, an interoperable e-commerce scheme backed by the Indian government. Namma Yatri’s app connects customers
Google backs Indian open-source Uber rival Read More »
On today’s episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan explored Google’s reported talks to acquire Wiz, a cloud security company, for around $23 billion. Wiz provides an “all-in-one approach to cloud security,” pulling data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and others, then scanning it all for security risk factors — something that Google might
Google’s talks to buy Wiz, and the gap between AI spending and AI revenue Read More »
You know you’ve made it as a startup when the big tech companies start ripping you off. That appears to be the case with Retro, the popular photo-sharing app that’s gained a following among those who appreciate the ability to share photos and videos more privately with friends and family. The company was recently caught
Photo-sharing startup Retro spots Google Photos copying its idea and design Read More »
Generative AI has already shown a lot of promise in robots. Applications include natural language interactions, robot learning, no-code programming and even design. Google’s DeepMind Robotics team this week is showcasing another potential sweet spot between the two disciplines: navigation. In a paper titled “Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphs,”
Watch a robot navigate the Google DeepMind offices using Gemini Read More »
Along with Samsung’s launch of new devices such as the Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6 at Unpacked 2024, and the new Galaxy Watches, Google said on Wednesday that it is bringing its own new features across multiple apps to these devices. The search giant is updating its Gemini for Android app to
Google brings new Gemini features and Wear OS 5 to Samsung devices Read More »
Google Maps has introduced speedometer and speed limits on iOS and CarPlay — more than five years after their debut on Android — to help iPhone users avoid speed ticketing while driving. TechCrunch has exclusively learned that Google has begun rolling out speedometers and speed limits for iPhone users globally. When people start navigation on
Google Maps is rolling out speedometer, speed limits on iPhone and CarPlay globally Read More »
Google has issued its 2024 Environmental Report, a more than 80-page document describing all of the massive company’s efforts to apply tech to environmental issues and to mitigate its own contributions. But it totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI using — perhaps because the answer is “way more than we’d care
Google’s environmental report pointedly avoids AI’s actual energy cost Read More »
Meta is not the only company grappling with the rise in AI-generated content and how it affects its platform. YouTube also quietly rolled out a policy change in June that will allow people to request the takedown of AI-generated or other synthetic content that simulates their face or voice. The change allows people to request
One of the selling points of Google’s flagship generative AI models, Gemini 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash, is the amount of data they can supposedly process and analyze. In press briefings and demos, Google has repeatedly claimed that the models can accomplish previously impossible tasks thanks to their “long context,” like summarizing multiple hundred-page documents
Gemini’s data-analyzing abilities aren’t as good as Google claims Read More »
