All posts tagged: platform

Root raises $9M to launch its social platform with customizable apps

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Root announced today that it has raised $9 million in seed funding to build a next-gen social platform, which offers customizable apps designed towards building and maintaining large communities. Headline Ventures and Konvoy Ventures led the round, with Day One Ventures, Untamed Ventures, Crunchyroll founder Kun Gao, Clark Valberg and Jack Dunlop among others participating. The company plans to launch the closed beta for the app soon. Root as a platform is notable for its customizability and app framework. Servers can have a number of features and apps specific to the community. For example, at launch Root will have first party apps such as a Raid Planner for MMO communities and a Task Tracker. These apps integrate directly within Root, meaning players don’t have to access third-party software in order to keep track of their community needs, and anyone who uses JavaScript can build their communities own apps. Jesse Dietrichson, founder and CEO of Root, told GamesBeat in an interview that Root began as a way to solve pain points within large communities, such …

Google introduces Firebase Studio, an end-to-end platform that builds custom apps in-browser, in minutes

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Google has heated up the app-building space, today rolling out a generative AI-powered end-to-end app platform that allows users to create custom apps in minutes.  Today at Google Cloud Next, the tech giant introduced the full-stack AI workspace Firebase Studio.   Devs and non-devs can use the cloud-based, Gemini-powered agentic development platform to build, launch, iterate on and monitor mobile and web apps, APIs, backends and frontends directly from their browsers. It is now available in preview to all users (you must have a Google account).  As of this posting, Firebase Studio was experiencing “exceptionally high demand,” so VentureBeat has not yet had the opportunity to test it out. However, early reaction has been largely positive.  “Google Just COOKED AGAIN! Firebase Studio beats Lovable and Bolt?” wrote one YouTube user offering up a tutorial video. “This could be a GAME CHANGER for developers who want to quickly prototype and build production-ready applications with AI assistance.”  “Feels like Cursor …

Operative Games unveils AI-driven interactive storytelling platform

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Operative Games, an AI-based interactive storytelling company, emerged today from stealth with backing from investors 1AM Gaming, Samsung Next, and LongJourney.vc. The company is creating immersive games and experiences where players can converse with genuinely thoughtful, lifelike AI characters that forge lasting emotional connections in the context of solving problems and navigating intricate stories together. Founded by Jon Snoddy, former head of Walt Disney research and development, and Jon Kraft, founding CEO of Pandora Media, along with game industry veteran Pegi Bryant, Operative Games combines decades of entertainment industry innovation with an entirely new application of artificial intelligence to create a unique category of interactive experiences. Daniel in The Operative. “So we’re this collection of storytellers. They’re artists, writers, engineers, scientists, but the thing that kind of holds us all together is this love of story. And so we set about finding the stories we wanted to tell, and the StoryEngine is really our embodiment of that. It’s our technology, the embodiment of the thing we’re trying to do, which is to tell these …

YouTube was born from a failed dating site – 20 years on, the world’s biggest video platform faces new challenges

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[ad_1] When three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, registered the domain www.youtube.com 20 years ago, they wanted to create an online dating site based around videos of users. In 2016, Chen told the SXSW conference: “We thought dating would be the obvious choice.” But despite offering to pay users to upload videos of themselves, nobody came forward. When their concept failed, they hatched a new idea for the same domain: “OK, forget the dating aspect, let’s just open it up to any video,” said Chen. What followed was revolutionary. Having started as a small project, YouTube rapidly grew into one of the most influential platforms in media history, reshaping journalism, media, entertainment and social interactions. Its first-ever video, “Me at the Zoo” – featuring Karim casually describing the elephants at San Diego Zoo – set the tone for democratised content creation, and also the type of content that would become so significant for YouTube: vlogging – where people communicate their own blog-style entries on video, often delivered direct to camera. …

Payroll employee who cheated S$5.7 million from cryptocurrency trading platform jailed

Published by Sam

[ad_1] SINGAPORE: An employee who had sole access to documents for staff payrolls edited the spreadsheets so that cryptocurrencies or fiat payments would be paid into her e-wallet and bank accounts.  In this manner, Ho Kai Xin managed to cheat a company out of more than S$5.5 million (US$4.1 million) worth of United States Dollar Tether (USDT) – the world’s fourth largest cryptocurrency which is pegged to the US dollar – and fiat currency.  The 32-year-old Singaporean then spent the money on upgrading her home, car and the purchase of luxury items, insurance policies and investment plans.  Ho was sentenced to nine years and 11 months’ jail on Thursday (Feb 20) after she pleaded guilty to 14 charges, comprising cheating, concealing or transferring benefits from criminal conduct, and for furnishing false information to the police. Another 30 charges of a similar nature were taken into consideration for her sentencing.  Ho was employed by Wechain Fintech Singapore to process payroll from Oct 20, 2021 to Oct 6, 2022.  Wechain provided payroll services to ByBit Fintech, a …

Saudi’s BRKZ closes $17M Series A for its construction tech platform

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[ad_1] Construction procurement is highly fragmented, manual, and opaque, forcing contractors to juggle multiple suppliers, endure lengthy negotiations, and deal with delayed payments. In Saudi Arabia, where trillion-dollar infrastructure and real estate projects are underway, these inefficiencies are even more pronounced. To address this, BRKZ, a Riyadh-based construction tech startup, offers a tech-enabled managed marketplace that streamlines procurement and provides tailored financing solutions. The company has raised $9 million ($8 million in equity and $1 million in debt), bringing its total Series A funding to $17 million, with investors doubling down. Existing investors, including Aramco’s Waed, BECO Capital, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Class 5 Global, Fluent Ventures, Knollwood Investment Advisory, MISY Ventures, RZM Investment and 9900 Capital re-participated.  This follows the $8 million Series A1 round BRKZ announced last March. Ibrahim Manna, a former executive at Uber subsidiary Careem, founded BRKZ in 2023 after experiencing these challenges firsthand. “After Careem’s exit to Uber, I bought a family house in May 2020 and faced the inefficiencies of the construction supply chain—lack of visibility in material selection, uncertainty around …

What is Project Stargate? Why this $500-billion AI initiative could herald a ‘platform shift’

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[ad_1] Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images This week US President Donald Trump announced a joint venture between OpenAI, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, and Abu Dhabi’s AI-focused sovereign wealth fund MGX, to put as much as $500 billion over multiple years into US data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence.   Trump appeared at the White House with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Oracle is one of the technology partners for the joint initiative — dubbed Stargate — along with Microsoft, ARM Holdings, and Nvidia.  Also: Anthropic warns of AI catastrophe if governments don’t regulate in 18 months The funding, meant to provide “colossal” data centers of 500,000 square feet, comes on top of an enormous amount of capital spending planned by the largest tech firms.  According to one Wall Street analyst, Jackson Ader of the KeyBanc Capital Markets brokerage, “Capital spending for the major hyperscalers” — that is, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, and Alibaba — “will be $286.5 billion in 2025, and $308.8 billion in 2026, after making some …

TikTok leads as the most popular platform among underage users, research reveals

Published by José

[ad_1] A significant portion of children under the age of 13 in the United States are actively using social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, despite clear age restrictions, according to a new study published in Academic Pediatrics. Researchers found that a majority of 11-to-15-year-olds had at least one social media account. Furthermore, the study revealed that 6.3% of young users maintained secret accounts hidden from their parents. Social media platforms set a minimum user age of 13 to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which aims to protect young users from harmful content and data exploitation. However, many children bypass these age restrictions, raising concerns about their exposure to inappropriate material, online harassment, and addictive behaviors. Previous research has linked social media use in adolescents to poor sleep, mental health challenges, and exposure to risky behaviors such as substance use. The researchers sought to provide an updated, platform-specific analysis of underage social media use, especially given the rapid rise of platforms like TikTok, which appeal to younger audiences. They aimed to …

Facebook Planning to Flood Platform with AI-Powered Users

Published by José

[ad_1] “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.” Bot Net Were you hoping that bots on social media would be a thing of the past? Well, don’t hold your breath. Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta’s AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the FT. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going,” he added. Character Development …

Bristol AI platform to help develop toolkit for early stage deep tech investors

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[ad_1] A Bristol-based AI platform has been selected by the world’s largest community of angel investors to be a consultant on a project hoped to stimulate more early stage investment in deep tech starts-ups. South west-based AI Simulator was co-founded by Ali Kazmi and Saj Hasnain and uses artificial intelligence to replicate the private investment market. It is set to join the American Angel Capital Association (ACA) as a consultant to develop a curriculum for the latter’s Deep Tech toolkit, which will help them better understand and assess deep tech opportunities and invest in cutting-edge technologies. It is one of five consulting businesses being used to develop the toolkit in a project funded by Nation Science Foundation and the only business from the UK. Ali Kazmi said: “We’re thrilled to be contributing to the growth of the deep tech ecosystem by providing support and educational resources, which is exactly what AI Simulator is created to do. “Our Simulated approach will enable an impactful curriculum that empowers investors to make informed decisions and drive innovation. “This …