Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it’s powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it’s designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more … Read more
PalmPay, an African digital bank fintech, is in talks to raise between $50 million and $100 million in a Series B round, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. It’s unclear what valuation it hopes to get, but its last round, in 2021, ranked it among the continent’s most valuable startups, estimated just shy … Read more
In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday night in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back against concerns that AI could eventually make half the company’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. Instead, Pichai stressed the company’s commitment to growth through at least next year. “I expect we will grow from our current engineering phase even into next … Read more
As Apple prepares to unveil iOS 19 at WWDC 2025 on Monday, several rumors have surfaced, including a potential new name for the operating system, an entirely new design inspired by the Vision Pro, and more. Here’s a roundup of the most notable features rumored to be coming to iOS 19. New name Sources … Read more
Steve Collins, the CTO of the game engine developer Unity, is stepping down, a company representative confirmed to TechCrunch. He joined Unity just six months ago after serving as CTO of King, the mobile gaming company behind Candy Crush. According to Unity, Collins made the decision to leave the company of his own accord. “We … Read more
Days before its Worldwide Developer Conference 2025 (WWDC), Apple has named the winners and finalists of its 2025 Design Awards for apps. This year’s winners and finalists mostly include indie apps and startups, and contrary to the trend everywhere else, generative AI apps are noticeably missing from the list. This is the second year in … Read more
In 2023, co-founders Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani sold their expense management startup Expensya to Swedish procurement software firm Medius in what is widely considered to be one of the largest acquisitions of an African startup. Some sources say the sum was just over $120 million, although deal terms were not disclosed. Success achieved, both … Read more
Anthropic has given its AI a blog. A week ago, Anthropic quietly launched Claude Explains, a new page on its website that’s generated mostly by the company’s AI model family, Claude. Populated by posts on technical topics related to various Claude use cases (e.g. “Simplify complex codebases with Claude”), the blog is intended to be … Read more
Dating apps have developed a bad reputation lately. People ghost others, which means they simply stop responding to someone they once shared frequent correspondence with. There appear to be slim pickings, despite living in big cities like New York, and did we mention a lot of these apps now cost money? At the inaugural SXSW … Read more
Joby Aviation has reached a tentative deal with investor and Saudi Arabian conglomerate Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ) to distribute up to 200 electric aircraft valued at about $1 billion over the coming years. If finalized, the partnership could provide Joby with a fast path to monetizing its electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles in Saudi … Read more
