KTM City Posts

via https://ift.tt/7a59oxf Shared electric scooters came onto the scene five years ago with a promising vision of getting people out of cars and onto greener modes of transportation. Yet despite billions in VC money and plenty of hype , the future that micromobility companies promised still hasn’t quite arrived. In cities like Paris, most people aren’t replacing car trips with shared e-scooter jaunts in a meaningful way; the cost of riding scooters makes them an expensive option for last-mile transit connections and equitable access; and the public disclosures of Bird and Helbiz have shown us that achieving profitability is incredibly difficult. Plus, cities that allowed shared e-scooter companies in their midsts are increasingly making it difficult for scooter companies to operate sustainably. For the sake of traffic flow and carbon emissions , there need to be alternatives to cars. Are shared e-scooters the answer to that, or are they just another shitty option? What have we ...

via https://ift.tt/sWzQhjZ The gigantic technological leap that machine learning models have shown in the last few months is getting everyone excited about the future of AI — but also nervous about its uncomfortable consequences. After text-to-image tools from Stability AI and OpenAI became the talk of the town, ChatGPT’s ability to hold intelligent conversations is the new obsession in sectors across the board. In China, where the tech community has always watched progress in the West closely, entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors are looking for ways to make their dent in the generative AI space. Tech firms are devising tools built on open source models to attract consumer and enterprise customers. Individuals are cashing in on AI-generated content. Regulators have responded quickly to define how text, image, and video synthesis should be used. Meanwhile, U.S. tech sanctions are raising concerns about China’s ability to keep up with AI advancement. As generative AI takes the ...

via https://ift.tt/hJNekHP Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid , combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 , and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans. “By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce quality content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content output, reducing the risk of burnout,” Habib told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to keep up with the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI.” But depending on how they’re used, ...

via https://ift.tt/0IGDH64 To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . We’re almost there, folks. It’s the last Thursday of 2022, and today we have some news for you out of Alibaba and Spotify, as well as some crypto news out of India. And as always, we give you some goodness from TC+, our premium membership program. Read on, dear readers, and we’ll be back again tomorrow to bring you the final moments of 2022 in tech. — HP The TechCrunch Top 3 Alibaba’s cloud move : Alibaba Cloud has a new president, Rita reports. The third-largest public cloud infrastructure provider in the world only after AWS and Microsoft has appointed Daniel Zhang, the company’s CEO, as acting president. Ring it in with Spotify : Aisha writes that the platform wants to help you welcome 2023 in style with what it thinks you might enjoy. Such playlists as “Party Hits,” “Floor Fillers,” “Pop Party” and “Rock Party” wil...

via https://ift.tt/zgnYulA Taking a deep breath as I write these words: Next week, TechCrunch will return to our first in-person CES in three years. Phew. It felt good to finally get that off my chest. The last time our team flew to Las Vegas for the event was January 2020 . An auspicious date. It wouldn’t be long before the entire world went pear-shaped. It was a big show, with 117,000 in attendance, per the CTA’s (Consumer Technology Association) figures. The event, which its governing body would rather you not call the Consumer Electronics Show , has become a sprawling affair in recent decades. Attempting to see the entire show is a fool’s errand. Back in my younger, more hopeful days, I made a point of seeing as much of it as I could, making a pretty good run at walking every official hall. That’s become increasingly impossible over the years, as the show has spilled out well beyond the confines of the Las Vegas Convention Center. There’s the Venetian Convention and Expo Cente...

via https://ift.tt/TzplUrk To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Hey, folks, welcome back! Below we’ve got some 2022 roundups and even some news. I suspect it’ll get even leaner as the week wears on, but no matter! There will always be stories to share. Now, here is your Wednesday edition of the Daily Crunch. — Hank The TechCrunch Top 3 Sports on Amazon : The tech giant wants to continue its march into broadcasting live sports, adding to its current lineup of Thursday Night Football, Premier League soccer and the like, Aisha reports. Pro tip, Amazon: Add cricket to your plans. Ring true : Movano beat the CES rush and launched Evie, a smart ring focused on women’s health, Brian reports. In the water : Earlier this month, Boundary Layer pivoted to producing personal watercraft that will run interested parties upward of $60,000 once they’re ready. Haje reports that the company has mo...

via https://ift.tt/rmt6Pwu 2022 was the kind of year that made us think, “What a time to be alive and reporting on transportation.” This year was absolutely dominated by conversations around the realities of bringing self-driving cars to market, the potential upheaval of the gig worker economy, micromobility dramas and, of course, all things Tesla. We took a look back at our top-performing transportation stories to determine what stood out as important to you, our dear readers. Ford, VW-backed Argo AI is shutting down Image Credits: Argo AI Autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI came onto the scene in 2017 with a $1 billion investment. Today, the company is no more after Ford and Volkswagen pulled out their investments. This one shocked the AV world, in particular because Argo had been in the middle of running a robotaxi pilot with Lyft in Austin and testing fully driverless technology in Miami . The shutdown of the company signaled two things: (1) Another round of consolidation ...