It’s the end of an era for one of the App Store’s earliest success stories. Foursquare is shutting down its signature city guide app in order to “focus our efforts on building an even better experience in Swarm,” the company said in . The app will shut down December 15, while the web version will stay online until “early 2025.”

The shutdown is a notable reversal of a strategy the company announced a decade ago when it, controversially, opted its famed “check-in” service into a separate app. That app became known as Swarm while the Foursquare-branded app became a “” full of user-generated reviews and local recommendations.

Now, Foursquare says its future is, once again, the check-in. “We’re also introducing exciting new features and capabilities into Swarm throughout the year (👀 some of which may look familiar to you) in order to unlock new use cases that may better support your needs,” the company said, adding that additional updates are expected “early next year.”

It’s not clear why the company is changing its strategy to elevate Swarm over its namesake app. The company more than 100 employees earlier this year in an effort to “streamline” operations. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, who is currently co-chair of the company’s board of directors, said in a post that the company is “doing fine,” though he expressed disappointment with the news. “I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I have been in a real funk these last few days over this news,” he wrote.

T-minus 7 days until TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 officially kicks off! One of the year’s biggest tech events is ready to dominate the Bay Area’s thriving tech landscape for almost the entire week.

Get ready for one of the biggest tech gatherings, taking place October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Tech experts from every corner of the globe will come together to engage with the latest innovations, learn trends, and connect through unparalleled networking.

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10,000+ startup and VC leaders

Forge powerful connections with the 10,000 tech, startup, and VC leaders who gather at Disrupt 2024. 

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Discover groundbreaking innovations from the 350+ startups from all over the world that will be showcased in the Expo Hall.

250+ industry experts

Gain invaluable insights from some of the top industry heavyweights across six of the industry stages and sessions.

200+ hands-on sessions 

Engage in Q&A Breakouts and Roundtable Sessions with industry experts, focused on solving today’s key challenges.

Startup Battlefield 200

Witness the high-stakes startup showdown that is a highlight of Disrupt. Twenty handpicked startups, chosen from thousands, will pitch to a panel of leading VC judges, competing for a $100,000 equity-free prize and the iconic Disrupt Cup.

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Though it remains very unclear whether any of the self-driving vehicles demoed at Tesla’s We, Robot presentation will ever actually make it to market, one of the production companies behind Blade Runner 2049 thinks Elon Musk ripped off their copyright for the event, and are taking him to court.

Today, Alcon Entertainment — an LA-based production company behind Blade Runner 2049 — filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Elon Musk, and Warner Bros. Discovery alleging that an AI image generator was used to create promotional art for the We, Robot event that was meant to resemble stills from the 2017 sci-fi film. According to Alcon, which also owns the copyright to Blade Runner 2049, WBD and Tesla sent a request to use imagery from the film on the afternoon of October 10th just hours before the We, Robot demo took place on the Warner Bros. lot in California.

Though WBD owns some licensing rights for Blade Runner 2049, because the event would be live-streamed internationally, clearance for the images had to come from Alcon directly. And when Alcon’s legal and licensing departments were made aware of the situation, they sent back a firm refusal to the interested parties “so that there would be no mistakes in the conduct of the event.”

“Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account,” Alcon’s suit explains. “Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”

Despite Alcon’s refusal, however, Tesla allegedly decided to feed shots from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to create “a lightly stylized fake screen still screen” which was displayed prominently during the We, Robot presentation. During the event, Musk mentioned the Blade Runner franchise by name while describing sci-fi depictions of the future, and the livestream cut to an image depicting a man wearing a duster jacket and standing in front of a ruinous, apocalyptic cityscape.

Along with the larger copyright infringement, Alcon also says it was never made privy to any of the agreements between Tesla and WBD that would have been necessary before the We, Robot event. Along with giving Tesla the ability to use Warner Bros.’ lot and equipment, Alcon believes that agreement also included a promotional element that “allowed or possibly even required Tesla expressly to affiliate the Cybercab with one or more motion pictures” from the studio’s catalog.

Alcon’s suit doesn’t specify exactly how much money the company is seeking in damages, but it states clearly that it believes Musk, Tesla, and WBD all “understood the unauthorized nature of the image and the improper purpose behind it and encouraged or otherwise lent their support to the improper endeavor.”

Midjourney’s AI image creator is adding major new editing options to its platform, as announced by CEO David Holz on Discord. You’ll be able to edit an uploaded image using generative AI, as you could only do with images that AI has created until now. Notably, this will be a web-based tool, expanding Midjourney’s Discord-centered and exclusive features.

While AI editing tools for images have been around for a bit, they are almost always restricted to images created with the same AI model doing the editing. Midjourney is taking the leap into allowing you to edit an image you want to edit rather than having the model make the initial creation.

Meta has said it’s going to utilize facial recognition technology in a bid to crack down on celebrity scam ads that plague its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

The move comes three years after Meta removed facial recognition smarts from Facebook following a backlash against the technology. Meta will be hoping that the implementation of the system, and the reason for bringing it in, will be better received by its online communities this time around.

“Scammers often try to use images of public figures, such as content creators or celebrities, to bait people into engaging with ads that lead to scam websites, where they are asked to share personal information or send money,” Meta explained in a post announcing the move to reintroduce facial recognition technology.

Meta already has a system in place for detecting scam ads involving celebrities, but it’s now aiming to make it more robust. Moving forward, if it suspects an ad to be a potential scam and it contains the image of a public figure at risk of celeb-bait, it will deploy facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures. If it confirms a match and concludes that the ad is a scam, Meta will block it.

In a bid to steer clear of the same kind of criticisms that prompted Meta to ditch a form of facial recognition technology three years ago that involved automatic photo-tagging of Facebook users, the company said it will delete any facial data generated from ads for the one-time comparison, regardless of whether its system finds a match, adding that it won’t use the data for any other purpose.

The company said that early testing with a small group of celebrities and public figures shows promising results. Next, it will enroll a wider pool of celebrities that have been used in celeb-bait scams. Those selected will be notified, and they can opt out of the system at any time.

Regaining access to accounts

Google continues to work on making Gemini the ultimate AI-powered assistant for mobile devices. Lately, the service has been gaining features that were previously only available on the classic Google Assistant. New findings suggest that Gemini may soon receive the ability to manage calls and messages on locked devices.

Both Gemini and Google Assistant are capable of making calls and sending text messages via voice commands. However, currently, only Google Assistant can do so on phones with the screen locked. A new Gemini option that enables such actions from the lock screen could soon change that.

You could then make calls and send messages with Gemini from locked devices

Gemini is already capable of offering responses to requests via voice commands with the screen locked, but the call and message management function is still missing. That is one of the features that keeps Google Assistant “alive.” However, Android Authority has enabled a switch to trigger calls and messages from Gemini on locked devices in the latest Google app beta (v15.42.30.28.arm64).

You can access the switch from the same section where you grant Gemini permission to perform other actions while the screen is locked. Still, the feature will require you to unlock the device under certain conditions. “Gemini will still ask you to unlock when a response contains personal content, such as your Gmail messages, from apps you use,” the option says.

New minimalist floating overlay and extension categories

The source has identified a few additional potential changes for Gemini. First, it seems that Google wants to make the assistant’s floating overlay much more minimalistic. To achieve this, they are significantly reducing the size of the floating overlay, a move that makes sense as it allows for a larger percentage of the background UI to remain visible. The floating overlay will expand according to the number of words your prompt contains.

Additionally, Google is rearranging the Gemini extensions into different categories. Initially, the few Gemini extensions available made it possible to have them all in one list, in no apparent order. However, as the service is receiving more and more extensions, it is more convenient to include an organizational system. This will help you find current and future extensions more easily. There are categories like “communication,” “device control,” “travel,” “media,” and “productivity.”

There are no details on when Google might push these new features to Gemini. It’s even possible that we will never see some of the spotted changes implemented.