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There has to be a “best” franchise and a “hottest” industry, right? Well, sorry, there is not. Franchise expert Tim Parmeter explains why.

Long ago Mobile World Congress, which we’ve been covering all week, absorbed a side event for startups, the idiosyncratically named “Four Years From Now”. The event is now well and truly inside the Borg Starship that is MWC, and every year runs a startup competition aimed at finding the ‘best startups’ around the globe. Thus, […]

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It’s not everyday you come across kombucha playing a starring role in potential industrial disruption. But here at 4YFN in MWC we got chatting to Laura Freixas about her PhD research project that’s using a base of the fermented hipster tea to “upcycle” organic waste into filaments. Once processed these biodegradable threads can be knitted […]

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Developers are adopting AI-powered code generators — services like GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, along with open access models such as Meta’s CodeLlama — at an astonishing rate. But the tools are far from ideal. Many aren’t free. Others are, but only under licenses that preclude them from being used in common commercial contexts. Perceiving […]

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SambaNova, an AI chip startup that’s raised over $1.1 billion in VC money to date, is gunning for OpenAI — and rivals — with a new generative AI product geared toward enterprise customers. SambaNova today announced Samba-1, an AI-powered system designed for tasks like text rewriting, coding, language translation and more. The company’s calling the […]

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OpenAI’s Sora, which can generate videos and interactive 3D environments on the fly, is a remarkable demonstration of the cutting edge in GenAI — a bonafide milestone. But curiously, one of the innovations that led to it, an AI model architecture colloquially known as the diffusion transformer, arrived on the AI research scene years ago. […]

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Reliance, its media asset Viacom18 and Disney are merging their media businesses in India, creating the largest media conglomerate in the South Asian market. Reliance, which is India’s most valuable firm, said it sees an opportunity to expand and streamline its presence in the Indian fast-growing market by acquiring the majority stake in Disney India. Reliance, […]

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Boasting a hefty cash reserve and a stellar fiscal year performance, Warren Buffett’s iconic investment powerhouse, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), nearly touched a $1 trillion market cap recently. However, considering the…

Black Tech Nation Ventures launched in 2021 to address the funding gap for Black founders amid a wave of venture diversity initiatives after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Three years later, amongst growing backlash against DEI and diversity-focused investments, the firm’s mission may be more important now than when it started. The Pittsburgh-based […]

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Pitches are critical in the quest for funding and first customers. It’s rare, however, for innovators to get truly candid insight on their pitches before stepping in front of VCs. Here’s your chance for something different: We’re excited bring back “So You Think You Can Pitch” at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024, our annual founder summit […]

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