wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114K2 Space is betting that the future of the space hardware will be big — really big.
The startup is building massive spacecraft under the assumption that launch costs will continue to drop as SpaceX’s Starship and other heavy-lift vehicles come online. It looks like the Space Force is taking up their side of that bet, with K2 Space announcing Thursday that its first full satellite mission will fly a number of Department of Defence payloads under a $60 million contract.
That mission, called Gravitas, will fly no earlier than February 2026. The satellite will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission, where it will carry multiple national security payloads. The spacecraft will conduct operations in low Earth orbit (LEO) before raising its orbit to medium Earth orbit (MEO). MEO, which is between LEO and geosynchronous orbit, has “historically been an incredibly challenging orbit to operate in,” K2 Space co-founder and CEO Karan Kunjur said in an interview.
To even get there, spacecraft operators typically either need to equip their satellites with powerful propulsion systems or pay a premium for a launch that takes them directly to the target orbit. Once there, the spacecraft must be capable of surviving the high radiation environment for the duration of the mission. But the Space Force has been building out assets in MEO, primarily for missile tracking and warning, but also to enhance the Global Positioning System (GPS) network.
“MEO offers another level of resilience,” Kunjur said. “If you think about a multi-orbit strategy or multi-orbit architecture, what you want, if you want resilience, is to have assets that are in LEO, assets that are in MEO, and assets that are in GEO. We really at K2 believe in that future.”
Kunjur, who founded the company with his brother Neel, called the contract a “step change” for the business. The $60 million in funding includes a 1:1:2 mix of government funds, Small Business Innovation Research matching funds, and private funds — that means $30 million came from private backers, an amount that nearly rivals the startup’s $50 million Series A that closed in February.
Venture investors and the DoD have been pulled in by K2 Space’s proposal for large hardware — the company’s Mega class satellite features a huge 3-meter-by-3-meter payload bay — at a cost of less than $15 million per satellite, with lead times of less than three months. These figures represent a paradigm-shifting change from traditional large satellite procurement.
The Torrance, California-based startup’s novel satellite architecture means that a substantial percentage of the spacecraft components are being built in-house. These include things like reaction wheels, flight computers, solar arrays, and the 20-kilowatt electric propulsion system, which will be among the most powerful to ever fly on orbit. The supply chain for these components at a cost-effective price point simply doesn’t exist, Kunjur said — which is why K2 Space is setting up those manufacturing lines on its own.
“The challenge is not only designing it to hit the performance that this mission requires, but also designing it in a way that we can mass produce it,” he said. “It’s not like we’re going to build one, use it for Gravitas, this mission, and then redesign it for mass production. No, the idea is to build this so that when the first one comes off the line, the second one is right behind it, the third one is behind it, and so on.”
The company will also fly several technology demonstrators on SpaceX’s upcoming Transporter-12 mission in January, for a mission duration that is expected to last no more than a few months.
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The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached $127 billion across the App Store and Google Play, up 15.7% from the prior year. However, those increases were driven by Apple’s App Store, as Google Play spending declined, according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures.
Though spending was up, there was another worrying sign about the overall health of the app ecosystem. This year, global app downloads were down by 2.3%, compared with 2023, reaching nearly 110 billion. This downward trend was seen across both app stores, the data indicates.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen signs that the app ecosystem’s massive growth may be finally starting to level out. As the app economy matures, the more recent focus has been on extracting revenue from the apps consumers are already using via ongoing subscriptions, rather than driving them to download new apps or paid apps.
Of note, only 5% of apps worldwide offered subscriptions last year, but they accounted for 48% of the app revenue across both app stores, Appfigures found. In addition, the top 10 earning apps globally generated 13.7% of all consumer spending, up 1.2% from 12.5% in 2023.
Meanwhile, much of the innovation taking place today is in the field of AI — a trend Apple largely snubbed when picking its overall App of the Year over the past couple of years. The award went to video app Kino and hiking app AllTrails in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
Declining app downloads, meanwhile, was a trend seen across both app marketplaces.
Of the total 110 billion downloads in 2024, iOS downloads accounted for 28.3 billion installs, a decline of 1.1% year-over-year. Android app downloads on Google Play were down 2.6% to 81.4 billion. Last year, app downloads were largely flat, another report had found.
In part, the decline in downloads also has to do with how Apple and Google Play managed their app stores in 2024.
Google, in particular, cracked down on spam and other low-quality apps this past year, leading to a significant 60% reduction in the release of new apps on Google Play. This was likely driven by increased requirements for developers around app testing and app review.
The U.S. also helped push the larger global trend down, as U.S. iOS downloads declined 5.3% to 6.1 billion and U.S. Google Play app downloads dropped 0.7% to 4.4 billion. In total, U.S. app downloads declined by 3.4% in the year, reaching approximately 10.6 billion.
Instagram, not TikTok, was the most downloaded app in 2024 with close to 640 million installs. It was also the most searched-for app in the U.S. Along with Instagram, other top social apps including Snapchat, Facebook, and TikTok were also searched for more than X in 2024.
However, Temu was the most downloaded app in the U.S. with 48 million installs, Appfigures found. Apple recently confirmed it was the U.S.’s most-downloaded app on its App Store, too.
Mexico saw the biggest increase in app downloads in 2024, with 225 million more installs than in 2023.
In terms of revenue, the app economy is still making money for developers and app stores alike — at least on the Apple App Store.
Of the $127 billion in total consumer spending globally in 2024, $91.6 billion came from the App Store, up 24% year-over-year. Google Play consumer spending declined by 1.5% year-over-year to reach $35.7 billion globally.
The U.S. accounted for a large portion of that overall pie, as $47.6 billion in consumer spending came from users in the U.S., up 11% year-over-year. (The Apple App Store accounted for $34.4 billion of that U.S. figure, up 18.4%, while Google Play’s U.S. revenue declined 4.7% to reach $13.2 billion in 2024.)
By consumer spending, the top app globally was TikTok, with an estimated $2.5 billion across iOS and Android, not counting app stores in China. TikTok was also the top app in the U.S., drawing in nearly $1.3 billion.
Brazil was the fastest-growing market for consumer spending, up 73% year-over-year.
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Last week, OpenAI launched Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which feeds real-time video to ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to “see” beyond the confines of its app layer. The premise is that by giving ChatGPT greater contextual awareness, that bot can respond in a more natural and intuitive way.
But the first time I tried it, it lied to me.
“That sofa looks comfortable!” ChatGPT said as I held up my phone and asked the bot to describe our living room. It had mistaken the ottoman for a couch.
“My mistake!” ChatGPT said when I corrected it. “Well, it still looks like a comfy space.”
It’s been nearly a year since OpenAI first demoed Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which the company pitched as a step toward AI as depicted in the Spike Jonze movie “Her.” The way OpenAI sold it, Advanced Voice Mode with Vision would grant ChatGPT superpowers — enabling the bot to solve sketched-out math problems, read emotions, and respond to affectionate letters.
Has it achieved all that? More or less. But Advanced Voice Mode with Vision hasn’t solved ChatGPT’s biggest issue: reliability. If anything, the feature makes the bot’s hallucinations more obvious.
At one point, curious to see if Advanced Voice Mode with Vision could help ChatGPT offer fashion pointers, I enabled it and asked ChatGPT to rate an outfit of mine. It happily did so. But while the bot would give opinions on my jeans and olive-colored-shirt combo, it consistently missed the brown jacket I was wearing.
I’m not the only one who has encountered slipups.
When OpenAI president Greg Brockman showed off Advanced Voice Mode with Vision on “60 Minutes” earlier this month, ChatGPT made a mistake on a geometry problem. When calculating the area of a triangle, it misidentified the triangle’s height.
So my question is, what good is “Her”-like AI if you can’t trust it?
With each ChatGPT misfire, I felt myself becoming less and less inclined to reach into my pocket, unlock my phone, launch ChatGPT, open Advanced Voice Mode, and enable Vision — a cumbersome series of steps in the best of circumstances. With its bright and cheery demeanor, Advanced Voice Mode is clearly designed to engender trust. When it doesn’t deliver on that implicit promise, it’s jarring — and disappointing.
Perhaps OpenAI can solve the hallucinations problem once and for all someday. Until then, we’re stuck with a bot that views the world through criss-crossed wiring. And frankly, I’m not sure who might want that.
OpenAI’s 12 days of “shipmas” continues: OpenAI is releasing new products every day up until December 20. Here’s a roundup of all the announcements, which we’re updating regularly.
YouTube lets creators opt out: YouTube is giving creators more choice over how third parties can use their content to train their AI models. Creators and rights holders will be able to flag for YouTube if they’re permitting specific companies to train models on their clips.
Meta’s smart glasses get upgrades: Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have gotten several new AI-powered updates, including the ability to have an ongoing conversation with Meta’s AI and translate between languages.
DeepMind’s answer to Sora: Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video-generation game. On Monday, DeepMind announced Veo 2, a next-gen video-generating AI that can create two-minute-plus clips in resolutions up to 4k (4,096 x 2,160 pixels).
OpenAI whistleblower found dead: A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times.
Grammarly acquires Coda: Grammarly, best known for its style and spell-check tools, has acquired productivity startup Coda for an undisclosed amount. As part of the deal, Coda’s CEO and co-founder, Shishir Mehrotra, will become the new CEO of Grammarly.
Cohere is working with Palantir: TechCrunch exclusively reported that Cohere, the enterprise-focused AI startup valued at $5.5 billion, has a partnership with data analytics firm Palantir. Palantir is vocal about its close — and at times controversial — work with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Anthropic has pulled back the curtains on Clio (“Claude insights and observations”), a system that the company uses to understand how customers are employing its various AI models. Clio, which Anthropic compares to analytics tools such as Google Trends, is providing “valuable insights” for improving the safety of Anthropic’s AI, claims the company.
Anthropic tapped Clio to compile anonymized usage data, some of which the company made public last week. So what are customers using Anthropic’s AI for? A range of tasks — but web and mobile app development, content creation, and academic research top the list. Predictably, the use cases vary across languages; for example, Japanese speakers are more likely to ask Anthropic’s AI to analyze anime than Spanish speakers.
AI startup Pika released its next-gen video generation model, Pika 2, which can create a clip from a character, object, and location that users supply. Via Pika’s platform, users can upload multiple references (e.g., images of a boardroom and office workers) and Pika 2 will “intuit” the role of each reference before combining them into a single scene.
Now, no model’s perfect, of course. See the “anime” below created by Pika 2, which has impressive consistency but suffers from the aesthetic weirdness present in all generative AI footage.
pic.twitter.com/3jWCy4659o Like I said, Animes will be the first genre thats 100% AI generated. Its amazing to see what’s already possible with Pika 2.0
— Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) December 16, 2024
Still, the tools are very rapidly improving in the video domain — and in equal parts piquing the interest and raising the ire of creatives.
The Future of Life Institute (FLI), the nonprofit organization co-founded by MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, released an “AI Safety Index” designed to evaluate the safety practices of leading AI companies across five key areas: current harms, safety frameworks, existential safety strategy, governance and accountability, and transparency and communication.
Meta was the worst of the bunch evaluated on the Index, with an overall F grade. (The Index uses a numerical and GPA-based scoring system.) Anthropic was the best but failed to manage better than a C — suggesting that there’s room for improvement.
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Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.
GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023.
“My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. “Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free [GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe [conference] as CEO, we announced free Codespaces. And so it felt natural, at some point, to get to the point where we also have a completely free Copilot, not just one that is for students and open source maintainers.”
There are some limitations to the free version, which is geared toward occasional users, not major work on a big project.
Developers on the free plan will get access to 2,000 code completions per month, for example, and as a GitHub spokesperson told me, each Copilot code suggestion will count against this limit — not just accepted suggestions. And while GitHub recently added the ability to switch between different foundation models, users on the free plan are limited to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. (The paid plans also include Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o1-preview and -mini.)
For Copilot Chat, the number of chat messages is limited to 50, but otherwise, there aren’t any major limitations to the free service. Developers still get access to all Copilot Extensions and skills.
As Dohmke told me, the team looked at the Copilot usage data from the last few years to figure out the threshold between occasional users and professional developers.
“You log in and you have Copilot free available, and you can start coding with it, which is ultimately the one thing that people are trying to achieve, right? The outcome here is to build something with software and not to try an AI tool for the sake of AI.”
The free Copilot SKU will work in a number of editors, including VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains, as well as on GitHub.com.
While Copilot has remained somewhat of a de facto standard for AI coding tools since it launched in 2021, the market today is also a bit more competitive, with startups like Tabnine and Qodo (previously known as Codium), as well as the likes of AWS, all offering competing services. These competitors typically offer a free plan as well, so it makes sense now for GitHub to lean into the wide distribution of VS Code and go freemium to expand Copilot’s reach.
“Our mission is to … enable a billion users to become a developer worldwide — and obviously, if you look around the world, whether it’s in Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, in India or Indonesia, in Pakistan, their ten dollars are much more relative to the average income, and as such, we are hoping to also enable a lot more people who have the ambition to become a developer or use a Copilot to become a more productive, efficient, happy developer in those countries, all in the spirit of our one-billion-developer aspiration,” Dohmke said.
Dohmke said that he also expects more students to now use Copilot as well, because even though the company has long offered a free version to them, they always had to jump through a few hoops to certify that they were students.
“With Copilot Free, we are returning to our freemium roots and are laying the groundwork for something far greater: AI represents our best path to enabling a GitHub with one billion developers. There should be no barrier to entry for experiencing the joy of creating software,” Dohmke said. “Now six years after being acquired by Microsoft, it indeed appears GitHub is still GitHub — and we are doing our thing.”
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After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry.
Hoadley’s brother-in-law, and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&A in the waste management space at the time. Sikma discovered how outdated many of the companies changing hands were. When he and Hoadley started looking deeper, they realized waste management might be exactly what Hoadley was looking for.
“All of the existing software in the space, they were clunky, old,” Hoadley told TechCrunch. “Sometimes we’d talk about how this one reminds us of the Oregon Trail, this reminds us of the cell phone Michael Douglas used in ‘Wall Street.’ They’re very clunky and antiquated.”
Hoadley, now CEO, and Sikma, now president, launched Hauler Hero in 2020. The cloud-based software platform works with waste management companies on everything from route planning and management to billing to a customer portal where companies’ underlying customers can request pickups. Hauler Hero’s software also taps AI to help automate some of these tasks like invoicing and route management to find inefficiencies and help companies save money.
Hoadley said the company specifically decided to build multiple product lines right out of the gate as opposed to just building route management or billing software with plans to expand later. He said that he watched ServiceTitan struggle to expand into recurring services (pest control) while he was there. The company ended up having to buy an existing player to get it to work. He didn’t want his company to face the same fate.
“We wanted to make sure that we built this the right way from the beginning,” Hoadley said. “Many people will advise you to build an MVP, which is just a wedge into the market, and on balance, that didn’t seem like the right way to do this. It’s more difficult to raise all the capital and start that way, but now we’ve got a really efficient machine that our customers love.”
The company launched its platform in beta in 2022 and rolled out publicly in Q1 2024. Since then it has amassed more than 120 residential and commercial waste management customers across 40 states. It’s grown its revenue 200% in the past year.
Hauler Hero is announcing that it raised $10 million in seed funding led by I2BF Ventures with participation from K5 Global and Somersault Ventures in addition to executives from companies like Gusto and ServiceTitan and some of Hauler Hero’s customers.
Hoadley said the company plans to use the funds to hire more engineers and sales folks and to continue working on product development.
One area the company is working on, Hoadley said, is building up their products for larger enterprise customers that want better integrations with their other related businesses like transfer stations, or places to sort and store waste. He added that they are also looking to build up its integrated communications offerings like two-way text messaging, which would allow the company to get enough data to eventually build a customer service agent.
Hauler Hero’s tech operates in a relatively crowded industry filled with legacy software companies including Capterra, WasteWorks, and cieTrade, among others.
There are also other startups looking to solve these problems. Copenhagen-based WasteHero is one early-stage startup looking to build software for this industry that’s raised $6.7 million in venture funding. New York-based CurbWaste is another that raised $21.2 million in funding.
The waste management market is massive, though: It generated more than $140 billion in revenue in the U.S. alone in 2023. While the industry does include huge enterprises like Waste Management and G Mello, it also includes thousands of smaller privately run waste collection companies. Hauler Hero wants to grab a meaningful market share.
“It’s extremely rewarding. These are people who really are doing backbreaking work and God’s work,” Hoadley said. “It’s really rewarding to give them an opportunity to get their workflows done more quickly, to be able to generate reports more easily, and ultimately to grow faster and have more cash in their pockets to do the things that matter to them.”
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Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta today, will instead allow users to browse and explore the open social web. This includes services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as other public web content like blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more.
To work, Surf supports open protocols like RSS, which provides feeds for updates from websites and podcasts, Bluesky’s newer AT Protocol, and ActivityPub, which powers decentralized X competitor Mastodon, plus Pixelfed, PeerTube, Friendica, Ghost, and others, and is integrated with Meta’s own X competitor, Instagram Threads.
According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in development for almost two years to solve many of the problems users face when they want to leave larger, centralized social media services in favor of those built with open protocols.
“Under the hood, it’s a browser for the social web,” says McCue. “[Surf] lets you browse any feed on the social web, whether it’s ActivityPub, AT Proto, or RSS,” he continues. “People, of course, have their profiles — those are feeds that you can surf. There are hashtags that are feeds. Searches can be a feed.”
On the app’s home page, Flipboard’s editorial team offers a variety of pre-made feeds to follow, organized into sections like Featured, Trending, Expert Voices, Communities, and others.
But what makes the app powerful is that you can also build your own custom feeds that combine sources of your own choosing.
For instance, if you wanted to follow a specific topic, like AI model development, or a hobby like mountain biking, you could combine feeds that include the people you’d like to follow, real-time searches, keywords, popular hashtags, specific RSS feeds for websites and blogs you like, favorite YouTube channels, podcasts and more.
Plus, Surf gives you a number of features to better configure and control the custom feeds you design.
The app comes with some 30,000 pre-defined topics you can combine and configure. Even if you add people or websites that post about a range of different subjects, you can go into your custom feed’s settings and toggle on an option to “Keep Feed on Topic.”
This automatically filters out any news or posts that aren’t about your subject of interest from appearing in the feed.
You — and optionally, other contributors — can also further configure the feeds to include or exclude replies, reposts, or mature content, and change how the feed will be ordered.
Custom feeds can also support multiple topics, if desired. (Initially, this will be by using “AND” to create a custom feed that combines two topics. But later, you’ll be able to curate feeds by saying this “OR” that, Flipboard says).
As you browse a feed, there are multiple ways to view it, too.
A “Discuss” tab offers a Twitter-like timeline experience where posts from across social networks and sites are featured, which you can also like, reply to, repost, and bookmark, when logged in with your Mastodon credentials. (Support for Bluesky login will arrive in a few weeks).
However, you can also browse the feed by other tabs, “Watch,” “Read,” “Listen,” and “Look,” if you filter the feed to show only videos, news articles, podcasts, and photos, respectively.
In the “Watch” mode video view, browsing the feed feels a lot like scrolling TikTok.
Feed owners can choose which of these is the feed’s default tab.
The app can be particularly useful for those times when a community has become fractured across multiple services, as was the case with those posting to the hashtag NBA Threads on Metas’ Threads app. Some people left Threads for Bluesky and Mastodon after Meta’s moderation issues, which meant users now had to turn to multiple apps to follow the community.
With Surf, the community has been reunited by way of a custom feed that pulls in content from different services.
As Surf was being built, Flipboard was also integrating its magazine app with the open social web, also known as the fediverse, by connecting it with more open services like Mastodon and Bluesky,
“These existing experiences that have been made open — that’s been like the first wave of the social web,” McCue explains, referring to the updates his company made to Flipboard. “Now, I think we’re entering the next wave…which is imagining completely new kinds of user experiences that we’ve never seen before, based on the power of the social web.”
Surf is currently in an invite-only, closed beta, where the first testers will be those who are likely interested in building feeds because they’ve already built things like custom feeds or Starter Packs on Bluesky, or Twitter/X Lists, for example.
The app is initially available on iOS and Android on an invite-only basis while in beta testing, but will later be available on the desktop web.
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