KSN Election Guide: 2024 Candidate Profiles

TechCrunch Apple users can soon upgrade to ChatGPT Plus within the Settings app Apple products are getting an integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT in December when iOS 18.2 rolls out, which should supercharge Siri and a few other features with smarter AI. On Monday, iOS 18.2 beta testers got a taste of how OpenAI could profit off of its Apple partnership. Apple is including an option to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus inside its Settings app, according to an update to the iOS 18.2 beta spotted by 9to5Mac.

Bluesky gears up for Election Day as X goes pro-Trump As Election Day in the U.S. nears, social networking startup Bluesky, now flush with new capital, hopes to demonstrate that its platform can serve as a more trusted, fact-checked alternative to Elon Musk's X. While the latter is dominated by Musk's support for the Trump campaign, Bluesky tends to lean left, thanks to its influx of disgruntled former Twitter users who don't like the platform's new direction. Now, with the U.S. elections upon us, Bluesky is setting up for its biggest test yet: its ability to handle the potential misinformation that can mislead users during these critical national events, including any posts meant to disrupt the voting process or those using new technologies, like AI, to confuse the voting public. While X's other competitor, Meta's Threads app, has distanced itself from politics — even going so far as to no longer recommend users political content — Bluesky has capitalized on the demand for a real-time social network that prioritizes such discussions.

X updates block feature, letting blocked users see your public posts X is rolling out its controversial update to the block feature, allowing people to view your public posts even if you have blocked them. The social network said its logic behind this change was that the block feature can be used to share and hide harmful or private information about someone, and its new iteration would result in more transparency. X's take on the block feature goes against how it's been implemented conventionally, and when the company announced its intention to revamp it, many argued that the change would encourage stalking and make it easy for people to harass users.

Instagram upgrades DMs with focus on creators Instagram on Friday announced an update to DMs, its direct messages inbox, which will improve the experience for those who receive a lot of inbound messages, like creators and influencers. Now, the app is introducing tools that will allow users to sort and filter their "message requests" - meaning those messages that don't arrive in their main inbox, based on controls the user sets. The new tools will give users the ability to sort and filter these message requests by follower count, verified accounts, brands, creators, and other factors.

Apple is buying photo-editing app Pixelmator Pixelmator announced on Friday that it is being acquired by Apple. The image-editing platform didn't discuss what life might look like under the corporate umbrella but did note there would be "no material changes" to its Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps — at least for now. If Apple's acquisition history is any indication, that level of autonomy could change soon as Pixelmator's features are integrated directly into the Photos app.

Former Caribou founder launches Further, a fintech that's focused on helping people buy homes Kevin Bennett launched Further to try to help make the financial process easier to navigate — especially for first-time buyers. The company's first product, which goes live Friday, is a calculator that shows what people can afford and what their monthly mortgage payments and closing costs could look like, among other metrics based on real-time interest rates. Unlike other mortgage calculators that you can find on Zillow and LendingTree, Further looks to give users more than the numbers.

College social app Fizz's 'serial failed retiree' CEO steps down as founder takes helm It's full circle for Fizz, the anonymous platform that Solomon started with his Stanford classmate Ashton Cofer before they dropped out to work on the app full-time. Mathur has been working with the young founders since late 2021, when his daughter — also a Stanford student — met Solomon at a party and proclaimed to her father that she had met "the next Mark Zuckerberg." Fizz isn't Facebook, and thankfully, Solomon has not yet had to testify for his company's shortcomings on Capitol Hill.

Betaworks focuses on AI applications in its latest Camp For its most recent Camp, VC and accelerator Betaworks was on the lookout for startups building native applications made possible by AI. To explain this focus, managing partner John Borthwick wrote at the time that while things like AI chatbots and writing assistants exist, "we aren't yet living in the future we imagine." In other words, despite advances in AI technology, Borthwick said that "when end users like ourselves are faced with a task or project we are certain could be done faster, better, smarter, by harnessing the power of AI, the ready-made tools we have available to us in that moment are surprisingly limited."

Luna wants to help young girls navigate their health and well-being Meet Luna, a health and well-being app for teen girls that is designed to help them navigate teenhood. The app lets teens ask questions about their health and wellness and get responses from experts. The London-based startup presented today at on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to detail its mission to educate and support teen girls.

LinkedIn launches its first AI agent to take on the role of job recruiters LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions to sourcing candidates and engaging with them. LinkedIn is describing Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: It is, per the Microsoft-owned company, its first "AI agent" and one that happens to be targeting one of LinkedIn's most lucrative categories of users — recruiters.

GitHub Spark lets you build web apps in plain English When GitHub Copilot launched and started autocompleting lines of code - and, later, entire code snippets - the question many people were asking was: How long until we can just describe an app in natural language and Copilot will build it for us? Spark, which is officially an experiment the company is launching out of its GitHub Next labs, allows you to quickly build a small web app using nothing but natural language.