<p>Telegram founder Pavel Durov said today that the service now has more than 1 billion active users. This number is up from last year&#8217;s reported 950 million monthly active users. Durov also noted that the company registered $547 million in profits last year. He had announced the company&#8217;s profitability in December but hadn&#8217;t provided any [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Social media site X’s valuation has bounced back to $44 billion, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Elon Musk purchased the platform, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion back in 2022. However, a report from Bloomberg states that X has raised close to $1 billion from investors in a deal that [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google Search and its Play Store app marketplace are suspected of breaching the European Union&#8217;s Digital Markets Act (DMA), per preliminary findings announced Wednesday by EU Commission enforcers of the bloc&#8217;s flagship market contestability law, who have been investigating the company for months. The DMA applies to a handful of tech giants, Alphabet (Google&#8217;s parent) [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The European Union has sent Apple preliminary instructions on how it expects the iPhone maker to comply with interoperability provisions in the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), its flagship market contestability reform. According to the Commission, device manufacturers and app developers should be able to access nine iOS connectivity features that were restricted to Apple&#8217;s [&hellip;]</p>

<p>AI startup Hugging Face has released a new app for iOS that only does one thing: uses offline, local AI to describe what&#8217;s in view of your iPhone&#8217;s camera. The app, called HuggingSnap, taps Hugging Face&#8217;s in-house vision model, smolvlm2, to analyze what your phone sees in real time without sending data off to the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Mobile networks continue to be a major target for cybersecurity breaches, and Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon&#8217;s persistent attacks on multiple carriers are only the latest known examples.&nbsp; The mobile carrier startup Cape is taking a novel approach to addressing the problem: It has built a service it says can provide a more secure, private [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google announced on Wednesday that kids with Android phones can now tap to pay at stores using Google Wallet in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and Poland. Parents and guardians in these countries can now allow their children to access digital payments on their Android devices with supervision. Kids can also use Google [&hellip;]</p>

<p>They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Google seems to agree. On Tuesday, the company added a feature to its AI-powered Gemini chatbot that the company is calling Canvas. Similar in concept to OpenAI&#8217;s identically named Canvas tool for ChatGPT and Anthropic&#8217;s Artifacts, Canvas provides Gemini users with an interactive space where [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A new iOS social wellness app called Exist wants to help middle-aged consumers connect and build meaningful communities with one another as they navigate their lives and the stresses that come with it. The app describes itself as the edgier cousin of Calm or Headspace, and its main feature is social journaling. The idea behind [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Chat platform WhatsApp said today that it will limit the number of broadcast messages individual users and businesses can send to curb spam on the app. In the coming weeks, the company will start testing limits on individual broadcast messages. Under these limits, WhatsApp will put a monthly limit on the number of broadcasts. While [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google on Tuesday announced new products and features aimed at healthcare use cases, including improved overviews in Google Search for health queries, medical records APIs, and new health-focused &#8220;open&#8221; AI models. In Search, Google says it&#8217;s using AI and ranking systems to expand &#8220;knowledge panel&#8221; answers on thousands of health-related topics, and adding support for [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Being a staggeringly successful big tech company does have some downsides: Apple has lost an appeal against a special abuse control regime that Germany&#8217;s competition watchdog applied to it last year. The iPhone maker can expect to continue to face bespoke competition controls in a major European market, in addition to other similar laws (such [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The world is bad sometimes, but it feels even worse if you can&#8217;t stop staring into the all-consuming abyss that is the 6-inch screen of a smartphone, following you through space and time. It taunts you with its compact, light build that&#8217;s small enough to slip into your pocket and take anywhere, and its siren [&hellip;]</p>

<p>If you&#8217;ve ever spent way too long scrolling through endless feeds about nothing, you may have been advised to touch grass. It&#8217;s a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, basically telling you to log off and go outside. But one developer took the concept to the next level. Rhys Kentish launched an iOS app last week called Touch Grass, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI will soon begin testing a way for business customers to connect apps like Slack and Google Drive to ChatGPT. OpenAI plans to start beta testing a new feature called ChatGPT Connectors, according to a document viewed by TechCrunch. ChatGPT Connectors will allow ChatGPT Team subscribers to link workspace Google Drive and Slack accounts to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is introducing a new &#8220;Security Checkup&#8221; tool that allows users to quickly review and update their account&#8217;s security settings from a single screen, the company announced on Monday. The feature is similar to Security Checkup tools offered by TikTok rival Instagram and tech giant Google. Users can access the new tool from their profile [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Bumble is finally catching up with competitor Tinder with a new ID verification feature as dating app users urge for more safety measures.  In addition to ID verification, the company also released three more features, including a feature that flags inappropriate messages in chat before users hit send and the ability to share date details [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Last week, at the Abundance Summit in Los Angeles, billionaire entrepreneur Travis Kalanick gave attendees a rare glimpse into his vision for the future of his newest company, CloudKitchens. While today the eight-year-old L.A.-based outfit is known for a growing real estate portfolio that it uses to it host – and set up – restaurants [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Discord on Monday announced the launch of its Discord Social SDK, a free toolkit that allows developers to leverage the platform&#8217;s social infrastructure to enhance their games&#8217; social and multiplayer experiences. The toolkit allows developers to improve their in-game experiences, whether players have a Discord account or not. Social integrations include a unified friends list [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Most of the focus in generative AI has been on text-based interfaces used to generate text, images, and more. The next wave appears to be voice, and it’s rolling in fast. In the latest development, Google today announced that it would be adding Chirp 3 — its speech-to-text and HD text-to-speech models — to its [&hellip;]</p>