India’s national logistics portal exposed sensitive personal data, trade records

India’s state-owned logistics portal has fixed misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that exposed sensitive personal data and various state and private trade records. Called the National Logistics Portal-Marine, the website made the sensitive and private ... more

Google launches Project IDX, a new AI-enabled browser-based development environment

Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. It currently supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, ... more

Threads as a gaming hub? Zynga founder-backed Artie is counting on it

Meta’s Threads has become a household name shortly after its debut earlier this month. Within a week of its launch, it attracted over 100 million users worldwide. The platform also recently achieved one-fifth of Twitter’s weekly active user base globally. ... more

Inngest helps developers build their backend workflows, raises $3M

Inngest, an open-source startup that helps developers build and manage serverless queues, background jobs and workflows, today announced that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by GGV. Co-founded in 2021 by former Buffer CTO Dan Farrelly and Tony ... more

Cyber insurance startup Coalition acquires privacy assistant Jumbo

San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Coalition is acquiring Jumbo, a mobile app that lets you control your privacy on the web. I have covered Jumbo several times over the past few years, so it’s time to close the loop on this one. Terms of the deal ... more

ChatGPT prompts: How to optimize for sales, marketing, writing, and more

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has taken the world by storm. Capable of writing emails, essays and more given a few short prompts, ChatGPT has become one of the fastest-growing apps in history. Beyond that, it’s begun to find a place in the enterprise, ... more

Cloudflare launches Observability, a tool to beef up web monitoring

Organizations increasingly see observability — the ability to measure a system’s current state based on the data it generates — as key. In a recent survey from New Relic, more than three-quarters (78%) of IT decision-makers and practitioners said that ... more

ChatGPT prompts: How to optimize for sales, marketing, writing, and more

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has taken the world by storm. Capable of writing emails, essays and more given a few short prompts, ChatGPT has become one of the fastest-growing apps in history. Beyond that, it’s begun to find a place in the enterprise, ... more

3 things businesses must do to secure applications in the AI era

Reed McGinley-Stempel Contributor Share on Twitter Reed McGinley-Stempel is co-founder and CEO at Stytch. Organizations must quickly adapt their application security strategies to address new threats fueled by AI. They include: More sophisticated bot ... more

Arc browser’s new tool lets you remove some elements from a website

The Browser Company, the company behind the web browser Arc, introduced a fun new tool today called Boosts. It lets you customize a website with new colors and fonts. But the best feature of this tool is that you can “Zap” (read: remove) any element ... more

Microsoft wants to make Windows a better place for developers

While mostly a developer event, Build has long been where Microsoft puts a spotlight on consumer-centric updates to Windows. This year, the company is taking a different approach: It is highlighting the work it is doing to improve the developer experience ... more

Max Q: Space is vast

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! In this issue: Virgin Galactic aims for a triumphant return Vast aims to launch space station in 2025 News from SpaceX, and more Virgin Galactic aims for triumphant return with crewed flight at the end of May Virgin Galactic ... more

Google’s new Labs page lets you sign up for its AI experiments

This year’s Google IO was all about AI. The company announced a number of AI-powered features across its products on Wednesday. The search giant also launched a new page called Google Labs to let people sign up for these experiments and test out AI-powered ... more

With over 1M published apps, Google’s Flutter expands its support for web apps and WebAssembly

Flutter, Google’s open-source multi-platform application framework, has been seeing quite a bit of momentum lately, with both Google’s internal teams betting on it for projects like the new Play Console App, the Google Cloud mobile app and Android’s ... more

Google brings new generative models to Vertex AI, including Imagen

To paraphrase Andreessen Horowitz, generative AI, particularly on the text-to-art side, is eating the world. At least, investors believe so — judging by the billions of dollars they’ve poured into startups developing AI that creates text and images from ... more

Google launches a GitHub Copilot competitor

At its annual I/O developer conference, Google today announced the launch of a number of AI-centric coding tools, including its competitor to GitHub’s Copilot, a chat tool for asking questions about coding and Google Cloud services, as well as AI-assisted ... more

Bipartisan Senate bill would ban social media algorithms for minors

In a bipartisan effort to “protect kids from harm,” an unlikely cohort of senators introduced a bill that would restrict minors’ access to social media, as well as ban companies from using algorithms to recommend content to minors. Senators Brian Schatz ... more

Replit, the web-based IDE developing a GitHub Copilot competitor, raises $100M

Investors continue to pump money into generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, an IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week raised nearly $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation. ... more

Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now generate and debug code

Google’s conversation AI tool Bard can now help software developers with programming, including generating code, debugging and code explanation— a new set of skills that were added in response to user demand. Coding has been one of the top requests Google ... more

Google says it just made Chrome a lot faster on both Mac and Android

Google’s Chrome web browser is getting a speed boost. According to a news announcement out today, Google has made several under-the-hood performance improvements to its popular browser, leading to a significant new performance milestone across Mac and ... more

With Bedrock, Amazon enters the generative AI race

Amazon is throwing its hat into the generative AI ring. But rather than build AI models entirely by itself, it’s recruiting third parties to host models on AWS. AWS today unveiled Amazon Bedrock, which provides a way to build generative AI-powered apps ... more

Dozer exits stealth to help any developer build real-time data apps ‘in minutes’

Data has emerged as one of the world’s greatest resources, underpinning everything from video-recommendation engines and digital banking, to the burgeoning AI revolution. But in a world where data has become increasingly distributed across locations, ... more

Microsoft rebuilt Teams from the ground up, promises 2x faster performance

Teams, Microsoft’s Slack rival, has always had a bit of a reputation for being slow and resource-hungry. Given that it always felt like Microsoft hurried the service’s launch to respond to the success of Slack, that’s maybe no surprise. Now, that’s changing, ... more

Dylibso raises $6.6M to help developers take WebAssembly to production

WebAssembly (Wasm for short) is an open standard that enables browser-based applications to run with near-native performance. It has also expanded to support non-browser environments, which is what is driving a lot of the recent hype around it. But like ... more

Microsoft launches Loop, its Notion competitor, in public preview

Microsoft Loop, a Notion-like hub for managing tasks and projects that sync across Microsoft 365 apps and services, launched in public preview today. Loop is available to users with a Microsoft Account or Azure Active Directory account. A companion app ... more

Google’s Bard lags behind GPT-4 and Claude in head-to-head comparison

Google has taken the wraps off Bard, its conversational AI meant to compete with ChatGPT and other large language models. But after its shaky debut, users may understandably be a bit wary of trusting the system — so we compared it on a few example prompts ... more

Are NFT marketplaces becoming an open sea for creator royalties?

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important crypto stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT, subscribe here . Welcome back to Chain Reaction. PSA: I’ll be at ETH Denver this week, so if you see me, say hi! I’ll have ... more

Chainlink’s new platform lets web3 projects connect to Web 2.0 systems like AWS and Meta

Chainlink, a web3 services platform, is launching a self-service, serverless platform to help developers connect their decentralized applications (dApps) or smart contracts to any Web 2.0 API, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The new platform, ... more

Bitwise Industries lands $80M to expand its sprawling software dev business

In 2013, Irma Olguin Jr. — a third-generation Mexican American and the first in her family to go to college — was working on making coding instruction available to disadvantaged members of her community. During her work, she met Jake Soberal, an intellectual ... more

Linux Foundation Europe launches the OpenWallet Foundation to power interoperable digital wallets

The Linux Foundation‘s European off-shoot has formally launched the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort designed to support interoperability between digital wallets through open source software. The launch comes some five months after ... more