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Tech bosses who willingly flout UK online child safety rules to face criminal liability
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 17 |
The U.K. government has confirmed it will expand criminal liability powers contained in draft online safety legislation which is currently making its way through parliament with the aim of preventing platforms from intentionally flouting child-safety rules. The current version of the (already ) Online Safety Bill, which is set to return to parliament today for the report stage ahead of its third reading, does include criminal liability for execs who fail to comply with duties to provide the regulator, Ofcom, with information it requests from them. However the government has now bowed to pressure from some its own backbenches — as well as — to include expanded criminal liability provisions by making senior management at in-scope platforms criminally liable for repeat breaches of child safety duties. This means that Ofcom will get additional powers that could — at least on paper — result in jail time for social media bosses who deliberately flout child safety rules. broke the news of the looming government reversal late yesterday, reporting that Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state in charge of digital issues, had accepted changes to the bill which will make senior managers at tech firms criminally liable for persistent breaches of their duty of care to children. A spokesman for the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) confirmed the development, telling TechCrunch that DCMS minister Paul Scully will set out details in a speech to parliament this afternoon. The development follows meetings between Donelan and backbench Conservative Party MPs who, in recent weeks, had been pushing a more wide-ranging amendment to expand criminal liability for senior execs. The DCMS spokesman said backbench MPs have agreed to withdraw their amendment in exchange for the government introducing its amendment to expand criminal liability provisions. The opposition Labour Party had signalled support for the backbenchers’ amendment, meaning the government could have faced an embarrassing defeat on the bill — hence it’s backing down to avoid a rebellion. Backbench Conservative MPs have argued the legislation needs more teeth if it’s to rein in powerful tech giants and ensure children are protected from exposure to harmful content, with MPs pointing to other sectors — such financial services or construction — that already have criminal liability for senior execs and questioning why the execs in the tech sector should get a free pass. In other , the government revised the bill to remove a clause related to legal but harmful content — in response to concerns the legislation could have a chilling effect on freedom of expression. However that move was decried by child safety campaigners and appears to have fuelled the backbench dissent on criminal liability. The wording of the government amendment has not yet been published but DCMS’ spokesman emphasized that the expanded criminal liability will only apply for repeated breaches of child safety duties in the legislation — describing the target as execs who “go rogue” and “willingly ignore” Ofcom’s investigations and enforcement of child safety rules. So a sort of , if you will. The backbenchers’ proposed amendment would have gone further than that — extending criminal liability for breaches of child safety duties. So the government appears to have won a concession by squeezing liability to deliberate breaches only. And DCMS’ spokesman suggested the amendment is “more targeted and proportionate to the risks” than the one proposed by rebel MPs. The liability will kick in for senior management “if they repeatedly and knowingly and willingly ignore Ofcom’s enforcement notices in relation to their safety tech duties”, the DCMS spokesman also told us, adding: “It will be commensurate to other senior manager liability provisions that are currently in law elsewhere… Senior manager liability was currently already in the bill if they failed to give Ofcom information when it was asking for it.” “We’re confident that it won’t affect the UK’s attractiveness as a place to invest. Because it won’t penalize responsible and reactive tech bosses who are focused on making sure their platforms are safe. This is about people who are deliberately and willingly going against what Ofcom are telling them to do to make their sites safer for kids,” the spokesman also claimed. “So it gives tech bosses a lot more certainty about when this could be used. And… as ever, with the fines that are in the bill — with Ofcom’s powers to fine them, with Ofcom’s powers to block access to sites [that break the law], these are a suite of powers that Ofcom has that it’s been very clear it will only use these in the worst case scenarios. In the extreme cases where it has to use these powers it will but it’s got a load of other options to use before that point.” Since the deadline for introducing amendments in the House of Commons has passed, the government’s amendment to the bill will be introduced when scrutiny moves to the House of Lords next month — so full details remain to be seen. We asked DCMS whether the expanded criminal liability provision for senior management will apply only to larger platforms (so called “category 1” services) — or whether all in-scope services (so, potentially, tens of thousands of companies and/or entities that provide user-to-user services) will face this risk — but the spokesman was unable to confirm how broadly the change will apply at this time. While child safety campaigners are likely to welcome the government’s change of heart on beefing up criminal liability on tech bosses, digital rights groups are likely to be more cautious over risks to freedom of expression, with groups like also warning about the impact of laws that push compulsory age-gating on websites on users’ ability to access online content and on people’s privacy. In a to parliament today about the extension of criminal liability, Donelan said: We are committed to ensuring that children are safe online, so will work with the Honourable Members for Penistone and Stockbridge, Stone and others to table an effective amendment in the Lords. This amendment will deliver our shared aims of holding people accountable for their actions in a way which is effective and targeted towards child safety, whilst ensuring the UK remains an attractive place for technology companies to invest and grow. We need to take the time to get this right. We intend to base our amendment on the Irish Online Safety and Media Regulation Act (2022) which introduces individual criminal liability for failure to comply with a notice to end contravention. In line with that approach, the final government amendment at the end of ping pong [aka the process of a bill being passed back and forth] between the Lords and the Commons will be carefully designed to capture instances where senior managers, or those purporting to act in that capacity, have consented or connived in ignoring enforceable requirements, risking serious harm to children. The criminal penalties, including imprisonment and fines, will be commensurate with similar offences. While this amendment will not affect those who have acted in good faith to comply in a proportionate way, it gives the Act additional teeth to deliver change and ensure that people are held to account if they fail to properly protect children.
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Amplifica Capital ‘wants to be the fund that LatAm’s female tech founders reach out to first’
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 17 |
Anna Raptis, founder and CEO at Mexico-based venture capital firm , was always someone who’s been “interested in facilitating economic development.” Born in Australia, she followed that lead, holding positions with the United Nations and the World Bank, spending two decades working in the energy sector. That’s what ultimately brought her to Mexico: a focus on providing access to clean, safe and reliable energy as a way to help the country develop and improve people’s lives. Her background in investing in building and developing investment opportunities, along with a notion to change the narrative around the lack of female tech entrepreneurs in Mexico, was what pushed her into venture capital. She started out investing as an angel and in a couple of funds to learn more, with a focus on companies looking to solve important problems in Latin America. “There are so many challenges, which means there are so many opportunities,” Raptis told TechCrunch. “Through investing in tech in Latin America, we can really make a difference in people’s lives.” Raptis started Amplifica in 2020, the name inspired by the thesis of “celebrating, magnifying and amplifying the success of female founders in the region.” In fact, her focus is on what she called “gender lens investing,” a concept driven by the notion that you can get better returns through investing in diversity. Amplifica invests mainly in teams where there are female founders or co-founders or goods and services focused on women. If a founder is not a woman, she does look deeper at the leadership team and to see what policies and practices they have in place supporting women. “I was very inspired by a lot of women in the U.S. building similar funds because I haven’t seen anything like this,” she added. “These women showed me what was possible, and we know that when women see others have success it motivates them to think they can have a try.” Raptis is a solo general partner working with a staff of five and began raising capital for her first fund, which recently closed with $11 million in capital commitments, exceeding its $10 million target. This fund has nearly 100 investors, including Mexico Ventures (a joint venture between Fondo de Fondos and Sun Mountain Capital); Grupo Herdez; Maria Ariza, CEO of BIVA; Melanie Devlyn, CEO of Devlyn Holdings; Daniel Undurraga and Oskar Hjertonsson, founders of Cornershop; and Loreanne Garcia co-founder of Kavak. She explained that there are a lot of new funds in Mexico, but believes Amplifica’s success in raising money was because its focus on female founders is unique. However, that aspect was also what made it a challenge, she recalls. “People were skeptical because this is something that people had not seen in Mexico before,” Raptis said. There were a lot of questions around that, like, ‘Is Mexico really ready for a fund like this?’ and what would it mean to be investing in women in tech.” Amplifica has invested in 10 companies so far, including inter-city mobility services startup Kolors, Verqor, focused on agricultural financing for inputs, and Mujer Financiera, an Argentine company providing tools for financial inclusion for women. In addition, Raptis wants to invest in 10 to 15 more companies in the next two years. “We’ve had a lot of support from the VC ecosystem in Latin America, and we want to be the fund that the best female entrepreneurs in tech, in Latin America, reach out to first,” she added.
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Nucleus aims to simplify the process of managing microservices
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 16 |
An increasing number of organizations are adopting microservices, the loosely coupled, independently deployable services that together make up an app. According to a 2020 O’Reilly , 77% of organizations had adopted microservices, with 29% reporting that they were migrating or implementing a majority of their systems using microservices. The widespread microservices adoption has spawned new problems in app development, however. According to the same O’Reilly survey, company culture and integrating with holdover systems have become major challenges in the microservices arena. Startups have rushed in to fill the void of solutions. There’s , a microservices management platform that helps developers understand how their code interacts with the rest of their apps. Vendors like and compete with Helios for business, offering platforms that organize microservices in a centralized portal. A newer entrant in the space is , which aims to let devs spin up microservices architectures using a range of infrastructure, security and observability tools. Backed by Y Combinator, Nucleus has raised $2.1 million in VC money to date. Nucleus was co-founded by Evis Drenova and Nick Zelei in 2021, after the two spent roughly seven years building infrastructure platforms both at large enterprise companies (e.g., IBM, Garmin) and startups (Skyflow, Newfront). The inspiration for Nucleus came after Drenova and Zelei realized they often had to rebuild the same platform to help developers create, test and deploy their microservices. “We noticed that more companies were trying to move to [microservices] and break apart their monoliths but really struggled to do this well,” Drenova said via email. “Some companies that have tried to move to microservices have gotten their fingers burned because they didn’t have the right tooling, and, more importantly, the right people … We want to make it easy and reliable for companies to move to not just microservices but service-oriented architectures without having to be security, infrastructure and observability experts.” With Nucleus, developers define microservices and deploy them on the Nucleus platform, which automatically configures aspects of their security, observability and more. Nucleus is delivered through a command-line interface designed to fit into existing developer workflows and comes with prebuilt integrations, including tools such as HashiCorp, Cloudflare and Okta. Nucleus “Nucleus is an infrastructure platform that allows you complete freedom over your code,” Drenova said. “As a developer, you can write your code in any language that you want and we support it out of the box. We don’t interfere with your business logic — one way to think about it is that we’ve built a cage you can put your code into and that cage is integrated with your infrastructure and your third-party tools and is extremely secure.” Drenova acknowledges the many rivals in the microservices orchestration space. But he sees the “do-it-yourself” crowd as Nucleus’ primary competition. “Before we wrote any code, we interviewed 55 chief technology officers and 90% said that they’ve built something like this in the past and it took on average 8–12 months, cost over $1 million and took three full-time senior engineers,” Drenova said. “We believe that we can deliver a better product in 10% of the time it would take to DIY and at 10% of cost. That’s pretty compelling.” Those are lofty promises. But to Drenova’s credit, Nucleus — whose platform is still in beta — already has “a few” early customers and eight design partners. Investors, too, were won over, with backers including Soma Capital, Y Combinator, LombardStreet Ventures and “dozens” of angels throwing capital in Nucleus’ direction. “Nucleus is a critical piece of software. We run and manage all of your services,” Drenova added. “It’s bigger than any one developer, meaning that chief technology officers are always our buyers … Our target market is companies with 20-plus developers who are moving to a service-oriented architecture. But any company that uses services can use us.” Nucleus is focused on organic growth at the moment, sticking with a small team of four employees, including the co-founders. Drenova is considering hiring one to two engineers next year, but he’s leaning conservative, waiting for stronger signs of product-market fit. “In a downturn, the playing field is more level towards early-stage companies, and while larger competitors are focused on reducing cash burn and staying alive, we’re putting the pedal to the metal and going after the opportunity,” Drenova said. “We have plenty of cash in the bank and have runway for the next few years.”
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Indian edtech giant Byju’s changes sales strategy in key revamp
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Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
Byju’s has made a key change in its sales strategy, moving away from a business practice that attracted the edtech giant criticism over the years. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, India’s , said on Monday its sales people no longer visit students’ homes to pitch to their parents. Instead, the entire sales workforce now works from inside the office and reaches out virtually to only those whose children have shown a clear interest in subscribing to the platform. The so-called 4-tier approach introduces multiple checks to verify customers’ intent and consent to purchase a subscription, the startup said. Byju’s said it has also introduced an affordability test for all potential customers, ensuring the child’s family income is at least 25,000 Indian rupees ($306) before they can move forward with the purchase. The refund is also done over a Zoom call, the startup said. The firm, which employed its early practice in 2017, made the change in October last year and said that the transition is bringing more accountability and transparency to its workforce and it’s better for both sides of the equation. The new sales tactic is also allowing Byju’s to expand its reach in the country and is already returning a higher conversion rate, said Mrinal Mohit, the chief executive of Byju’s India business, in an interview with TechCrunch. “The Covid helped increase the category awareness of online education learning and brand awareness of Byju’s. Plus we now have multiple products. That’s why we are moving to ‘inside sales,’” he said. “The sales journey now begins only after you have downloaded my app and used it multiple times and for long periods of time. If you don’t download the app, or like our product, we are not going to reach out.” The Indian edtech has been criticized over the years for its aggressive sales tactic with allegations that some of its personnels made misleading pitches to the parents and persuaded them into buying a subscription when they couldn’t afford it. Byju’s offers a range of learning platforms to students from free content and classes to hybrid lessons at its centres across the South Asian market. It also connects parents who need to take a loan with banks and non-banking financial companies. Mohit, who has been at Byju’s since the beginning and took over the India chief position last year, said the revamp is bringing more transparency with the parents and what its sales people are telling them. “I had 120 offices, my download comes from everywhere but I was able to reach only 50% of these users. With inside sales, location is not a barrier. All these calls are recorded, so we know what is being pitched to the parents. We have more transparency with parents,” he said. If an individual doesn’t know how to precisely answer a parent’s questions, the startup is able to pull more experience and relevant personnels in real-time, he said. Sales is a key part of Byju’s success. The startup’s classes operate on a two-teacher model, where the lessons are taught through a pre-recorded video while an on-site or live teacher tackles students’ questions. The startup’s philosophy from the beginning has been to bring the best education to students and this means relying on lessons from certain teachers as the base of its offerings. Sales people are tasked with explaining the benefits of this model.
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Google-backed ShareChat cuts 20% workforce to ‘sustain through headwinds’
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Jagmeet Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
ShareChat, the Indian social media startup backed by Twitter, Google, Tiger Global and Temasek, has laid off 20% of its workforce — or over 400 employees — just a month . The startup informed its employees about the decision on Monday morning. It deactivated access to accounts and wiped out all data of impacted employees, a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch. In December, ShareChat laid off nearly 5% of its workforce of 2300 employees as a result of shutting down its fantasy sports platform Jeet11. Informing the new decision to its employees, ShareChat CEO Ankush Sachdeva said in an internal note that the move was to “ensure the financial health and longevity” of the startup. The executive also noted that the startup “overestimated the market growth in the highs of 2021 and underestimated the duration and intensity of the global liquidity squeeze.” The note and layoff was first by Indian newspaper Economic Times. In a statement shared with TechCrunch, a ShareChat spokesperson confirmed the layoff and said that the decision was taken “after much deliberation and in light of the growing market consensus that investment sentiments will remain very cautious throughout this year.” “Since our launch eight years ago, ShareChat and our short video app Moj have seen incredible growth. However, even as we continue to keep growing, there have been several external macro factors that impact the cost and availability of capital,” the spokesperson said. “Keeping these factors in mind, we need to prepare the company to sustain through these headwinds. Therefore, we’ve had to take some of the most difficult and painful decisions in our history as a company and had to let go of around 20% of our incredibly talented employees who have been with us in this start-up journey.” The spokesperson also claimed that the startup had “aggressively optimised costs across the board, including in marketing and infrastructure, among other cost heads and ramped up our monetisation efforts.” Exact details on what roles are impacted were not disclosed. The affected employees will receive the total salary for their notice period and two weeks pay as ex gratia for every year they served the startup. The employees will also get 100% of the variable pay until December 2022 and their health insurance policy cover will remain until the end of June, the startup confirmed. The startup will also let ESOPs of its affected employees continue to vest per their schedule up until April 30. “We are doubling down on our efforts behind advertising and live-streaming revenues. With these changes, we aim to sail through the uncertain global economic conditions over 2023 and 2024 and come out stronger,” the spokesperson said. Crunchbase, ShareChat has raised over $1 billion in over 15 funding rounds, including its last fundraising of $300 million in a Series H round in May last year.
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Jakarta-based Mindtera helps companies keep an eye on employee morale
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Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
During the pandemic, Tita Ardiati and Bayu Puspito Bhaskoro began developing life coaching content to support employees who were increasingly burned out by working from home. They got a good enough reception that they decided to develop their product into an employee assistance program called , which now serves more than 10,000 employees in Indonesia. Today, the startup announced total seed funding of $850,000 led by East Ventures, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures and angel investors. Bhaskoro told TechCrunch that the startup is focused on B2B markets, including mid- to large enterprises. It also provides a self-service platform for small- to medium enterprises. Its main sectors are finance, consulting and retail, and its typical client has more than 200 employees. Mindtera aims to support employees with challenges related to their work, and also in their personal lives like finances, family and relationships. Companies, on the other hand, get insights about what employees want and how to create a more engaged and productive workforce. Mindtera includes two platforms. The first, called Mindtera Pro, is an analytics dashboard and app with assessment tools to collect employee feedback, which is then used for insights about the well-being and engagement of a company’s workforce. This includes surveys that let employees participate anonymously or use their names. They can provide suggestions, criticism and other opinions about their work and employer. The second, Mindtera Plus, connects companies to coaching and development consultants for help with management and workplace culture issues. Employers have the option of either subscribing to Mindtera Plus for a continuous action plan, or working with consultants on demand. Mindtera Plus uses internal consultants, external certified consultants and curated partners, who provide strategic program plans and monthly or quarterly progress reports for clients. Bhaskoro said Mindtera’s main competitors are EAPs based outside of Indonesia, and traditional workforce consulting agencies. The main way that Mindtera differentiates is by giving employers real-time monitoring on how engaged employees are, instead of making them wait for reports. Mindtera Pro also gives them more visibility into spending on activities, vendors or platforms that they use as interventions to improve productivity and performance. The newunding will be used to expand Mindtera’s B2B platform, with the goal of becoming Indonesia’s top employee assistance program platform. In a statement about the funding, Seedstars International Ventures general partner Patricia Sosrodjojo, said, “The world has seen a major shift in the understanding of how integral mental health and well-being are for businesses, but there is still much work to be done in order to effectively address this. Mindtera is at the forefront of foundational changes in the workplace and has been able to rapidly expand its reach in Indonesia’s HR space.”
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Wristcheck wants to make used luxury watches more affordable
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Rita Liao
| 2,023 | 1 | 16 |
In an age when almost everything can be bought online, watch resale is done in a surprisingly archaic way, namely, face-to-face with little price transparency. , a startup based out of Hong Kong, is taking a shot at digitizing the industry. Traditional secondhand watch dealing is a “buy low, sell high” business that often puts the buyer and seller in a “predatory” position, says Austen Chu, co-founder and CEO at Wristcheck, in an interview. An auction house, for example, typically charges the buyer up to 26% and up to 12% for sellers in transaction fees, he says. “There’s no standardized way for buying and selling in the luxury watch space. Part of the reason is the high barrier to entry because it’s a super knowledge-based hobby,” the founder observes. In comparison, Wristcheck takes 8% from the seller and 4% from the buyer. Rather than buying watches from sellers upfront, Wristcheck acts as a consignment platform and does away with inventory costs. The platform allows users to put in a bidding price for a watch they want — buyers know what sellers net, and sellers know what buyers pay. The startup had been bootstrapping for the last three years or so until closing its first outside investment recently. It raised $8 million in a funding round led by Gobi Partners, a prominent Chinese venture capital firm that has in recent years focused more on the Greater Bay Area, which encompasses megacities like Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Singapore-based K3 Ventures also participated in the round. Ever since he was given his first watch — a Flik Flak — at the age of five, Chu has been obsessed with watches. But collecting fine watches, like artwork, is too expensive for most young people, so the hobby is normally associated with an older crowd. Wristcheck is attracting a different demographic. Forty-three percent of its customers are under 30 years old, according to Chu. While he’s not able to disclose the firm’s revenue size, he says the platform has sold “multiple watches that transacted over a million USD.” All told, Wristcheck has gathered a “community” of 80,000 members, meaning people it has interacted with online and at offline events. “We see [Wristcheck] as the future for watch enthusiasts who can’t really get anything from retail,” Chu says. More young consumers are getting into watches, he adds, partly thanks to Apple. Contrary to the popular belief that Apple Watch spelled the end for the luxury watch industry, Chu argues that it actually helps raise “wrist awareness” among Gen Z who grew up with smartwatches. “Apple Watch is the greatest thing that has happened to the watch industry,” the founder asserts. The company is strategically based in Hong Kong, known as thanks to its friendly tax policy. During COVID, the bulk of Wristcheck’s customers have been local, but as Hong Kong reopens its border, the city is gradually welcoming back international travelers. Growing in tandem is the Wristcheck’s overseas consignors and buyers, which are seeing a big uptick. As of today, more than 15% of Wristcheck’s consigned pieces are from overseas customers. Many of its customers prefer to pick up their purchases in Hong Kong, taking advantage of the city’s tax-free scheme. The city’s vicinity to the tech hub Shenzhen, which is just across the border in mainland China, will also make it easier for Wristwatch to hire engineers, a common strategy for Hong Kong-headquartered tech firms. As of today, the startup is actively looking for a CTO to build out its AI infrastructure. With the fresh capital boost, Wristcheck aims to develop its proprietary image recognition tool that can authenticate watches in photos uploaded by sellers. Secondhand watches, says Chu, are one of the most counterfeited categories across the board. “The more zoomed in [a photo] is, the more obvious whether the watch is genuine. So we just need to train a collection of real and fake watches,” he explains. In addition, the platform cross-checks for stolen watches registered with police stations around the world. Applying image recognition to e-commerce is nothing new. Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace has long let people look up products by uploading photos. But timing is key for digitizing luxury watch trading. During COVID, much of the luxury watch research and shopping moved online. At the same time, have made consumers, especially Gen Z, more comfortable about spending large amounts of money online, Chu suggests. Eventually, the startup aims to be the “benchmark for watch prices.” To that end, it plans to spend portions of its new funding on building an engine that gleans real-time as well as historical price data, which is supposed to bring more transparency to the used watch industry.
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Environmental health and safety software is now a hot commodity
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
and safety software hasn’t been a massive market — at least compared to others in the software-as-a-service segment — and it’s admittedly not the most enthralling startup category. But that’s changing, according to a new survey released by research firm Verdantix. EHS software acts as a data management system for capturing and analyzing information related to occupational health and safety, waste management and sustainability. Companies use EHS software to track emissions and investigate workplace incidents, for example, as well as conduct health and safety training and grant entry to restricted spaces. Verdantix’s Green Quadrant: EHS Software 2023 shows that the EHS software market had more than 50 transactions in the past two years and predicts that it’ll grow from $1.6 billion in 2022 to around $2.7 billion by 2027. Verdantix predicts it’ll buck the global economic downturn, furthermore, due to differentiators like the use of AI and automation. “Over the past two years, the market landscape for EHS software has undergone a paradigm shift, as EHS providers have expanded their product offerings to meet the ravenous appetite for robust environmental management solutions brought on by the ESG megatrend,” Verdantix industry analyst Chris Sayers said in a statement. “As EHS functions seek to interlink with other business operations, providers are turning to emerging technologies as a point of differentiation and redefining the functional possibilities of EHS software.” Per the Verdantix report, since ETF Partners around €10 million (roughly $11 million) in EHS vendor Enablon in 2011, private equity firms and strategic investors like Wolters Kluwer and Fortive have spent more than $4 billion to buy into the EHS software market. The absence of the world’s largest enterprise software vendors — including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP — has left a lot of oxygen in the market for midsize businesses to grow.
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CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ secrets
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Zack Whittaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 14 |
CircleCi, a software company whose products are popular with developers and software engineers, confirmed that some customers’ data was stolen in a last month. The company on Friday that it identified the intruder’s initial point of access as an employee’s laptop that was compromised with malware, allowing the theft of session tokens used to keep the employee logged in to certain applications, even though their access was protected with two-factor authentication. The company took the blame for the compromise, calling it a “systems failure,” adding that its antivirus software failed to detect the token-stealing malware on the employee’s laptop. Session tokens allow a user to stay logged in without having to keep re-entering their password or re-authorizing using two-factor authentication each time. But a stolen session token allows an intruder to gain the same access as the account holder without needing their password or two-factor code. As such, it can be difficult to differentiate between a session token of the account owner, or a hacker who stole the token. CircleCi said the theft of the session token allowed the cybercriminals to impersonate the employee and gain access to some of the company’s production systems, which store customer data. “Because the targeted employee had privileges to generate production access tokens as part of the employee’s regular duties, the unauthorized third party was able to access and exfiltrate data from a subset of databases and stores, including customer environment variables, tokens, and keys,” said Rob Zuber, the company’s chief technology officer. Zuber said the intruders had access from December 16 through January 4. Zuber said that while customer data was encrypted, the cybercriminals also obtained the encryption keys able to decrypt customer data. “We encourage customers who have yet to take action to do so in order to prevent unauthorized access to third-party systems and stores,” Zuber added. Several customers have already informed CircleCi of unauthorized access to their systems, Zuber said. The post-mortem comes days after the company stored in its platform, fearing that hackers had stolen its customers’ code and other sensitive secrets used for access to other applications and services. Zuber said that CircleCi employees who retain access to production systems “have added additional step-up authentication steps and controls,” which should prevent a repeat-incident, likely by way of . The initial point of access — the token-stealing on an employee’s laptop — bears some resemblance to how the password manager giant LastPass was hacked, which also involved an intruder targeting an employee’s device, though it’s not known if the two incidents are linked. LastPass confirmed in December that its were stolen in an earlier breach. LastPass said the intruders had initially compromised , allowing them to break into LastPass’ internal developer environment.
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ChatGPT goes pro, layoffs at Alphabet, and Dungeons & Dragons flirts with restrictive new licensing
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 14 |
Welcome, welcome, folks, to Week in Review, TechCrunch’s regular column that recaps the last week in news. If you’d like it in your inbox every Saturday, sign up . Hope you’re sitting comfortably with a warm beverage on this wintery Saturday afternoon. Expecting Greg’s byline? Not to worry — he’s still enjoying parental leave, as I mentioned in the January 7 edition. All’s well. Before we get into it, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note, once again, that in Boston is on the horizon. With tickets starting at $99, it’ll be a worthwhile stop along the Eastern conference circuit, packed with expert-led workshops, case studies and deep dives with technical founders. Some members of the TechCrunch editorial staff will be in attendance — don’t be a stranger if you spot us on the show floor. OpenAI this week signaled it’ll soon begin charging for , its viral AI-powered chatbot that can write essays, emails, poems and even computer code. A “pro” version of the tool called ChatGPT Professional will throw in no unavailability windows, no throttling and an unlimited number of messages with ChatGPT — “at least 2x the regular daily limit.” Pricing remains up in the air. Microsoft will introduce a lower-cost tier of Microsoft 365, its family of productivity software and cloud-based document editing services, starting on January 30, the company announced Wednesday. Called Microsoft 365 Basic and priced at $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year, the plan will initially include 100 GB of storage, Outlook email and access to support experts for help with Microsoft 365 and Windows 11. SmartNews, the Tokyo-based news aggregation website and app, let go of 40% of its U.S. and China workforce, or around 120 people, my colleagues and report. The company was impacted by the same macroeconomic factors that have led to a number of tech industry layoffs in recent months, in addition to complications that arose from Apple’s implementation of , or ATT. reports that this week, Alphabet joined the growing list of tech giants making staff cuts amid ongoing economic struggles. The company’s robot software firm, Intrinsic, laid off 40 employees, a move that comes less than a year after Intrinsic acquired both Vicarious and Open Robotics — the latter having been announced less than a month ago. Dungeons & Dragons content creators are fighting to protect their livelihoods, writes in a sobering deep dive. Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the Hasbro-owned publisher of the game, plans to update the game’s license for the first time in over 22 years, releasing a new licensing system that would require any D&D content creator who makes over $750,000 in revenue to pay a 25% royalty to the company on every dollar above that threshold. In , WotC has delayed the rollout of the licensing scheme, following a widespread backlash. One of the cooler gizmos to emerge from the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show is E Ink’s color displays, writes. They can spit out 50,000 colors at 300 DPI — way, way up from the last-gen model’s max of 4,000 colors. E Ink says it aims to use them to build a magazine reading experience that’s good enough to win over even the most demanding publishers. My colleague (and boss!) reviewed the Keychron Q10 this week, a keyboard akin to . He approved of the gasket mount and silicon gaskets, which provide a bit of flex while reducing ping and other noise. As for the Alice layout (the keys aren’t in a straight line, but the left and right half are slightly angled), it was easy to get used to, he said — and he appreciated that the five macro buttons under the knob could be mapped to anything you’d like. Read the for more. In a profile, peels back the curtains on Welcome Homes, a proptech startup launched by the co-founders of cloud service provider DigitalOcean. The New York City–based firm — which recently raised $29 million — offers people a way to design and build new homes online, similar to other venture-backed companies (e.g., Atmos, Homebound) attempting to address the housing shortage. Microsoft’s new VALL-E AI model can replicate a voice using just three seconds of audio from the target speaker. But as my colleague Devin writes, it’s not necessarily cause for alarm — or rather, cause for more alarm than was already warranted by voice-duplicating tech. Voice replication has been a subject of intense research for years, and the results have been good enough to power plenty of startups, like WellSaid, Papercup and Respeecher. VALL-E is simply the latest illustration of its potential — and dangers. Online publishing startup Medium, originally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, is embracing the open source social platform Mastodon. reports that Medium has created its own instance — — to support authors and their publications with reliable infrastructure, moderation and a short domain name to make it easier for authors to share their usernames, among other things. As always, TechCrunch had a winning lineup of audio content this week for your listening pleasure — although I be a little biased. On startup-focused , TechCrunch startup battlefield editor Neesha Tambe spoke with Sheeba Dawood, the co-founder of clean energy tech provider Minerva Lithium, about the struggles she’s faced as a woman of color trying to innovate in the mineral manufacturing industry and what’s next for the company. TC’s dedicated crypto show, , featured an interview with Polygon Labs, one of the biggest market shakers and layer-2 blockchains in the crypto space that’s building on top of the Ethereum ecosystem. Meanwhile, over at , Natasha, Mary Ann, and Becca chatted about incoming deals from Inflow, Deel and Fidelity; layoffs and lawsuits at Carta; Microsoft’s much-rumored investment in ChatGPT and OpenAI; and SBF’s Substack debut. Here’s your regular reminder to subscribe to TC+ if you haven’t yet. It’s where TC takes exhaustive, exclusive looks at trends, industries and emerging technologies. Here’s some of the most popular content on TC+ this week: While some crypto-focused venture capitalists are bullish for 2023, others see it as a hazardous time, reports. Internal sentiment among VCs is a “wait and see” game, according to one source quoted in the piece; competition in the market is likely to heat up as investors write fewer checks and become more selective. Some investors are (cautiously) incorporating ChatGPT into their workflows, as it turns out. ChatGPT being a specifically text-based support tool, automation could be making its way to rejection letters, market maps or even bits of due diligence, TC found — all in order to stay afloat in a changing venture landscape. , , and have more. Pivots aren’t necessarily bad news. Brian Casey writes about how he pivoted his deep tech startup to become a software-as-a-service company — albeit not without major challenges. In his words: “Pivoting from hardware to SaaS was the right move for our electric motor design startup, but the process wasn’t precisely linear.”
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This Week in Apps: ChatGPT app scammers, Instagram revamp and a consumer spending slowdown
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 14 |
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time using mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more. Data.ai’s anticipated review of the app ecosystem, “ ,” , finding that consumer spending on apps has been hit by the same macroeconomic forces impacting the broader economy. That led to a first-time drop in consumer spending after years of record growth. However, there are some bright spots in the report’s findings. For starters, it seems that non-game apps are more resilient than games in a down economy. Though consumer spend on mobile games dropped 5% to $110 billion, spending on non-game apps increased 6% to $58 billion — driven by streaming subscriptions, dating apps and short-form video apps. data.ai The data also indicated that despite the tightening of wallets, consumer engagement on mobile continues to grow. Across top mobile markets, consumers were spending 5 hours, 2 minutes per day in 2022 using their apps, up 9% from 2020. That’s remarkable, given that 2020 was the onset of the COVID pandemic, which tied everyone to their phone and rapidly changed consumer behavior. However, there is a caveat to this news: Much of mobile users’ time is monopolized by three app categories, which accounted for half the time spent on mobile: Social Media/Communication (19.5% of total time); Entertainment/Short Video (17% of total time); and Entertainment/Video Sharing (12.7% of total time). data.ai In addition, while mobile ad spend growth will also slow alongside the economy, it will not decline. Data.ai is forecasting that mobile ad spend in 2023 will hit $262 billion, up from $336 billion this year as short video apps drive growth. TikTok, for example, became the second-ever non-game app to top $6 billion in all-time consumer spending, the report noted. The first category — Social Media/Communication — includes WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Telegram, LINE and Discord, while the Entertainment and Short Video category is where you’ll find TikTok as well as Kwai, Vido Video, Baidu Haokan and Snack Video. The last category of Entertainment and Video Sharing includes long-form video like YouTube, YouTube Kids and bilibili. data.ai One finding that jumped out at me is that TikTok this year lost its No. 1 position on the Top Charts by Downloads to Instagram, the Meta-owned social app that has been desperately trying to clone TikTok’s feature set with Reels. Data.ai’s report indicated that Meta had a bit of a comeback this year, with Instagram bumping TikTok on downloads, though TikTok remained No. 1 by consumer spending. However, in terms of real-world use, TikTok is much further down the charts. In 2022, the top four non-game apps by monthly active users were all owned by Facebook. In order, they were Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, Instagram, then Facebook Messenger. TikTok was No. 5. Amazon, which was No. 5 last year, slipped to No. 7 while Telegram moved up to No. 6 from No. 7 in 2021. Twitter, Spotify and Netflix rounded out the charts. data.ai The report delves into other interesting trends related to specific categories of apps (some of which we may get into later), but one particular area of interest to us involved the detailed habits of Gen Z consumers. Unlike the top apps used by older generations, which tend to be more utilitarian and practical (think Amazon, eBay, Walmart, The Weather Channel, Waze, Ring, PayPal and others), Gen Z is still devoted to video apps, user-generated content and mindfulness apps, data.ai said. ( They also have a preference for Meta’s Instagram over Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify. Another trend driven by younger users was the rise of BeReal, a more authentic photo-sharing app that prompts users once a day to take candid photos of themselves and what they’re doing. Data.ai found that added more new users in the U.S. over the past five years than the 5.3 million users BeReal gained in August 2022. But the firm suggested BeReal may struggle to grow engagement since the app only asks people to use it for brief periods. However, in speaking with those close to the company, we understand BeReal is purposefully trying to build a non-addictive social app — it just doesn’t know how to monetize that sort of creation. Another app category driven by Gen Z trends is friend-finding, which includes apps like Yubo, Hoop, Bumble (for its BFF feature), Live Talk and others. data.ai Meanwhile, in terms of gaming, the Gen Z demographic showed a preference for party, simulation and shooters, and counted Roblox as their No. 1 app. If there’s any wonder why Meta is spending billions trying to develop a virtual gaming landscape with Horizon Worlds, just look at Roblox’s growth and traction among the younger demographic. “Creative Sandbox” games like Roblox as well as Minecraft saw a global increase in time spent last year, up 25% from 2021 to 2022. data.ai data.ai What, no I mean, is going on with App Review? For years, Apple has been caught off guard at times, allowing violative apps to slip through its review process to be published on the App Store until users or the media called out the mistake. But in the case of the over the past couple of weeks, one has to wonder if Apple is even paying attention at all. ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI doesn’t offer a public API, so that should have been a red flag to reviewers about any app claiming a ChatGPT or OpenAI connection in its name or description, then charging money for access. One app, called “ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3,” even managed to reach the Top Charts in the productivity category in multiple countries as a result of consumer demand for ChatGPT and Apple’s inattention. (The app was removed shortly after reporters, including ourselves, reached out to Apple for comment. Apple never answered our emails.) The iOS App Store is full of folks putting ChatGPT into a paid wrapper with ambiguous language that would let you believe you’re paying for ChatGPT — Austen Allred (@Austen) Google Play had the same problem, but frankly, consumers expect more from Apple’s App Store. In fact, Apple’s argument against antitrust concerns, like its ban on sideloading and third-party app stores, has to do with the safety and security of its users. Apple says only it should be trusted to keep consumers safe. But surely that means Apple should also be protecting consumers from scam apps and subscription scams. But it is not. And while no system is perfect, it seems like the apps that are at the top of the App Store’s charts — or those that quickly moved up the charts for unknown reasons — should go under an additional review by Apple, just to make sure they’re playing by the rules. Developers have long argued that Apple should be cracking down on apps with high-priced subscriptions or those that are charging users for basic utilities or otherwise free features — in other words, the apps that are profiting from scamming users. If it did so, a subscription-based app that appeared to be charging for access to a free service with a non-public API wouldn’t have made the cut. These things aren’t hard to spot either — third-party app intelligence services can parse customer reviews for negative sentiments and keywords, so surely Apple could implement a system of its own, if it wanted to. In the case of the scammy ChatGPT apps, customer reviews called the apps fake and non-functional, warning others not to get scammed. Where was Apple on this issue? Until the media coverage, it was quietly collecting its cut of the scammers’ subscription revenues. In other App Store news, activist investors have pressured Apple for more insight into app removals, the FT reported, but their interest lies in wanting a better understanding of when Apple acquiesces to foreign governments’ requests. The company will begin including additional information in its Transparency Report about whether removals are related to local laws and how many apps were pulled in each country. Instagram Instagram this week it will simplify its in-app navigation after years of confusing changes designed to push various products like Instagram Shop and Reels. The company said, , it will return the Compose button (the plus sign “+”) to the front and center of the navigation bar at the bottom of the app and it will remove the Shop tab entirely. As a result, the Reels button will now move over to the right of Compose, losing its prime spot. The that had pushed Reels over Compose had been fairly controversial as Instagram users felt as if the company was forcing them to use the app’s new products at the expense of the overall user experience. Instagram defended the changes in prior years as a way to introduce users to its new products. But in more recent months, there’s been increased backlash over how far Instagram has deviated from its original mission. Even the Kardashians criticized the app for “trying to be TikTok.” Instagram said shopping on Instagram will continue to be supported despite the removal of the tab. Apple Stardew Valley The Easy Company
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YouTube plans to modify profanity rules that prompted creator backlash
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 14 |
YouTube’s gaming community against the company this week after some creators saw their old videos demonetized out of the blue. The culprit is a new policy that the company in order to make certain kinds of content more advertiser friendly. That change, made to YouTubes’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines, overhauled the platform’s approach to profanity and violence. The good news is that while we don’t quite know what the company will do yet, YouTube is apparently listening to creators’ concerns. “In recent weeks we’ve heard from many creators regarding this update,” YouTube spokesperson Michael Aciman told TechCrunch. “That feedback is important to us and we are in the process of making some adjustments to this policy to address their concerns. We will follow up shortly with our creator community as soon as we have more to share.” In November, YouTube expanded its definition of violence beyond real-world depictions, including in-game violent content “directed at a real named person or acts that are manufactured to create shocking experiences (such as brutal mass killing).” The company said that gore in “standard game play” was fine, but only after the first 8 seconds of a video. The whole section left plenty of room for interpretation, for better or worse. The changes to its profanity policy were more drastic. YouTube announced that it would no longer count “hell” and “damn” as profane words, but all other profanity would be lumped together instead of differentiated based on severity (e.g. words like “shit” and “fuck” would now be treated the same way). Further, “profanity used in the title, thumbnails, or in the video’s first 7 seconds or used consistently throughout the video may not receive ad revenue,” according to the new policy. If the swearing kicks in after the first 8 seconds of a video, it’s still eligible, but some of the changes stood to affect a massive swath of videos —many of which were made well before the changes were announced. Creators started noticing the new policies in effect around the end of December, watching some videos be slapped with new restrictions that limit their reach and ad eligibility. YouTube creator Daniel Condren, who runs RTGame, on his own channel in a video that racked up more than a million views this week. Condren has been grappling with the enforcement changes in recent weeks after seeing roughly a dozen videos demonetized and his request for appeals rejected. I am so sorry to have to keep tweeting this – but overnight, 6 more of my videos have now become limited suddenly, including my Best of 2020. No notification from YouTube at all on any of these. This is genuinely awful — RTGame Daniel (@RTGameCrowd) “I genuinely feel like my entire livelihood is at risk if this continues,” Condren wrote on Twitter. “I’m so upset this is even happening and that there seems to be nothing I can do to resolve it.” YouTube didn’t respond to our follow-up questions about how it plans to tweak the policy, but we’re certainly curious if the platform will roll back enforcement for old, previously published videos that creators might rely on for income. In the face of emerging regulation targeting social media’s relationship with underage users, the company is clearly trying to make its massive trove of videos more age-appropriate (and advertiser friendly). But retrofitting age restrictions and new monetization rules onto a platform like YouTube is a delicate balance — and in this case the changes had a swift, sweeping impact that gave creators little time to adapt.
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Tesla rolls into a pressure cooker, Paris mulls its scooter future, and the double SPAC arrives
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 16 |
Welcome back to , your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Let’s get right to it, shall we? Top of mind for me this week is . I know, weird. But really, it seems that pressure is coming from all sides these days. The company’s decision to has angered recent buyers (one only need to turn to Twitter to view the ire), shareholders are becoming more vocal about the lagging stock price (it fell in the past year) and it’s facing mounting regulatory pressure over Autopilot and its so-called FSD software beta product that promises full self-driving. To be clear, Tesla vehicles are not self-driving. The system is an advanced driver-assistance product. At any rate, these problems keep piling up. How much can the company take? In the past, Tesla and its CEO have managed to wriggle free of criticism or concerns it was stagnating, often by showcasing a potential future product or hitting ambitious production and delivery goals. But Tesla narrowly missed its own for the year, and Wall Street’s Q4 expectations. And shareholders, consumers and regulators seem to be tiring of this cycle. To me, this is just another indication that Tesla is starting to be viewed (and treated) more as a legacy automaker and not a whiz-bang upstart that can do no wrong. Rebecca Bellan was out this past week, but I still wanted to share a couple of interesting micromobbin’ stories reported by yours truly and Romain Dillet, who hails from France. First up is Romain’s article that takes a look at and its that could upend the micromobility industry there. I recommend you read the entire article. Here’s a small taste. On March 23, the fate of the 15,000 colorful electric scooters that currently spill across the streets of Paris could drastically change as the French capital weighs up whether to renew licenses for the three scooter companies currently operating in the city. Romain gets right to the implications, which stretch far beyond Paris: And this isn’t just going to impact Dott, Tier and Uber-affiliated Lime — the three companies that have since 2020. The decision will set a precedent for the many cities around the world that have also let scooters onto their streets. If things don’t go their way, a negative decision in Paris could have a chilling effect on micromobility startups globally. Bugatti/Bytech Next up is a more luxurious, high-performance scooter story. I’m talking about , yes Bugatti, and its new electric scooter. Bugatti, through a partnership with tech accessory company Bytech, launched a $1,200 electric scooter in 2022. The two companies paired up again for a that is beefier, equipped with new features and colors, and has larger “self-repairing” tires. The 2023 scooter is 10% larger than its predecessor and is equipped with a 36-volt/15.6Ah battery and an electric motor with a maximum output of 1,000 watts, according to the companies. That battery and motor combo allows the scooter to handle up to an 18-degree incline, have a max speed of 22 miles per hour and cover 35 miles on a single charge, according to the company. (That’s up from the 22-mile range in the previous model.) No word yet on the pricing for this bigger second-generation model. Perhaps this is one of those “if you have to ask” moments. ;D We’ve seen lots of SPACs the past two years, but what about a double SPAC? Yes, it has happened. I’m talking about , the British automotive data exchange platform that went public in November 2021 after merging with special purpose acquisition company via at an implied $800 million valuation. But what’s this? The company announced January 10 it has now with a SPAC created by private equity firm , in a deal that could raise up to $100 million. And that’s money Wejo needs. It seems that this latest SPAC is the buoy Wejo is using to keep it afloat. It’s not just that Wejo’s share price fell below $1 a share; the company is also burning through cash. Wejo warned in November it had a $15 million cash balance, which would sustain the company for a “very short period of time.” Wejo is about two years away from generating life-sustaining-nope-we’re-not-going-to-file-for-bankruptcy revenue. To add a little extra financial drama to the scenario, Wejo also owes millions of dollars, per by Chris Bryant in Bloomberg. This double SPAC is an odd one. I have this nagging feeling that some other failing SPACs will try this same tactic. agreed to buy Chinese electric vehicle maker . The acquisition must still meet regulatory approvals. , a green hydrogen startup based in Norway, in a Series B round co-led by AP Ventures and Mitsubishi Corp. Other investors included Nippon Steel Trading, Belgium-based investment company Finindus, Hillhouse Investment, Trustbridge Partners, SINTEF Ventures and Firda. , an Israeli teleoperations company focused on the agriculture, construction, last-mile delivery, logistics and mobility industries, raised $14.5 million in its Series A funding round that attracted public transport giant as an investor. Other participants included AI Alliance Fund, MizMaa Ventures, IN Venture and Next Gear Ventures. T , a startup out of England that develops software to power autonomous vehicles, in a Series C round that included investment from Japan’s Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Co. and corporate VC ENEOS Innovation Partners. Existing investors BGF, safety equipment group Halma, hospitality and recreation investor Hostplus, Kiko Ventures, the online shopping company Ocado Group, Tencent, Venture Science and automotive component maker ZF also participated. Australian lithium explorer Essential Metals Ltd in a A$136 million ($94 million) deal that is estimated to provide enough supply for around 10 million electric vehicles. gives a to FreightWaves. What next for Pittsburgh’s ? The is apparently on the Tesla Autopilot investigation it opened in August 2021. Speaking of pressure on Tesla, there may be even more coming after of an eight-car pile-up on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge caused by a Tesla Model S. The driver claimed “Full Self-Driving” was active at the time of the crash. produced 7,180 of its in 2022, exceeding its previously lowered guidance for the year. Lucid adjusted its guidance last fall, stating it would produce 6,000 to 7,000 vehicles in 2022. is officially moving its battery manufacturing from Cypress, California, to its Coolidge, Arizona, manufacturing facility. The move is expected to be completed early in the third quarter. Manufacturing will continue in Cypress through the second quarter. produced its first commercial EV battery at its in Greer, South Carolina. The company is calling the factory “Powered 1” and believes it will be the largest battery manufacturing facility in the United States dedicated to electric commercial vehicles. plans to into an expansion of its factory near Austin that includes a die shop, a facility for battery cell testing and another to manufacture cathode and drive units. Tesla indicated it wants to build the new facilities this year. , the premium brand under , started serial production of its second model, an electric van called Zeekr 009. , the online used car dealer, continues to struggle and it’s as sales slow and it attempts to manage its $7 billion debt load. has as its new chief human resources officer. Thomas, who most recently served in a similar position at Lyft, succeeds Arden Hoffman at Cruise. Thomas also spent 13 years at Google leading efforts focused on recruitment, D&I, employee engagement, HR governance and employee relations. , the heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicle supplier, appointed as president of international operations. , the San Francisco–based company that uses software and people to label image, text, voice and video data for companies building machine learning algorithms, laid off . The company did not say how many people work at Scale AI. However, back in February 2022, the company told TechCrunch it employed about 450 people.
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Stratospheric balloon company World View to go public in $350M SPAC deal
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
, a company developing stratospheric balloons for Earth observation and tourism, is heading to the public markets. The company announced Friday that it would merge with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Leo Holdings Corp. II in a deal worth $350 million, as it seeks to build out what it calls “the stratospheric economy.” The deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter of this year, will provide the combined company with up to $121 million in gross proceeds, plus an option to enter into additional equity financing agreements for up to $75 million. The $121 million figure is assuming no shareholder redemptions, however, and as we’ve seen with some space SPACs in the past — notably Virgin Orbit, which — an unexpected number of redemptions can sometimes drastically eat into that figure. Tucson, Arizona-based World View says its stratospheric remote sensing balloons offer specific benefits over traditional satellites. The company’s remote sensing balloon systems — which it calls Stratollites — can fly at altitudes up to 29 kilometes (95,000 feet), and World View says they could eventually serve verticals from defense to agriculture. That isn’t the only use case for the balloons, as World View sees it. In 2021, the company also announced its intention to launch a tourism business using the balloons. World View says more than 1,200 people have reserved their place in line for a stratospheric balloon flight; the $500 deposit forms just a fraction of the $50,000 ticket price. Each trip will last between 6-8 hours. World View has raised $48.9 million to date, according to , with its most recent funding round closing in 2018. Last November, the company announced a partnership with Sierra Nevada Corp. to jointly operate balloons for defense intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The same month, World View announced a separate agreement with atmospheric monitoring company Scepter Inc. to measure methane levels in Texas’ Permian Basin. SPACs have become a popular vehicle for private companies looking to enter public markets outside the traditional IPO process, and get a large injection of cash in the process. Major space players including Rocket Lab and Planet Labs have all completed SPAC transactions over the past two years. While some companies — like the two I just mentioned — have been faring pretty well on the public markets, space SPACs in general have badly underperformed, particularly relative to legacy aerospace companies, with a handful of companies seeing a dire drop in stock price.
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CircleCI warns customers to rotate ‘any and all secrets’ after hack
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Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
CircleCI, a company whose development products are popular with software engineers, has urged users to rotate their secrets following a breach of the company’s systems. The San Francisco–headquartered DevOps company said in an published late Wednesday that it is currently investigating the security incident — its most recent in recent years. We wanted to make you aware that we are currently investigating a security incident, and that our investigation is ongoing,” CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber said. “At this point, we are confident that there are no unauthorized actors active in our systems; however, out of an abundance of caution, we want to ensure that all customers take certain preventative measures to protect your data as well.” CircleCI, which claims its technology is used by more than a million software engineers, is advising users to rotate “any and all secrets” stored in CircleCI, including those stored in project environment variables or in contexts. Secrets are passwords or private keys that are used to connect and authenticate servers together. For projects using API tokens, CircleCI said it has invalidated these tokens and users will be required to replace them. CircleCI, , hasn’t shared any more information about the nature of the incident and has yet to respond to TechCrunch’s questions. However, the company is also advising users to audit their internal logs for unauthorized access occurring between December 21, 2022, and January 4, 2023, which suggests the company’s breach began some two weeks earlier. On December 21, the company also announced that it had released to the service to resolve underlying “systemic issues. In 2019, CircleCI was hit by a data breach after a third-party vendor was compromised. This saw hackers compromise user data, including usernames and email addresses, usernames and email addresses associated with GitHub and Bitbucket, along with user IP addresses. In November, CircleCI that it had also witnessed an increasing number of attempts whereby unauthorized actors were impersonating CircleCI to gain access to users’ code repositories on GitHub.
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Microsoft 365 Basic launches with 100 GB of storage, Outlook and more for $1.99 per month
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Microsoft will introduce a new, lower-cost tier of Microsoft 365, its product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services, starting on January 30. Called Microsoft 365 Basic and priced at $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year, the plan will initially include 100 GB of storage, Outlook email and access to support experts for help with Microsoft 365 and Windows 11. Existing OneDrive 100 GB subscribers will be transitioned to Microsoft 365 Basic beginning January 30 as well, Microsoft says. And in the coming months, Microsoft 365 Basic plan members will get “advanced security features” like ransomware recovery and password-protected sharing links in OneDrive. Importantly, Microsoft 365 Basic is replacing the free Microsoft 365 tier. That’s here to stay, along with the same benefits it offers today, including access to the web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, OneDrive, Clipchamp and more, and 5 GB of cloud storage. Microsoft 365 Personal, meanwhile, will remain $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. Microsoft 365 plans. Microsoft Microsoft 365 Basic compares favorably in terms of pricing to rival Google Workspace, whose Individual plan starts at $9.99 per month for 1 TB of storage, professional support and Google’s standard productivity software (e.g. Google Drive, Calendar, Meet and Gmail). It’s also cheaper than Zoho’s Standard Workplace plan, which costs $3 per user per month billed annually and tops out at 10 GB of storage. To coincide with the introduction of the new tier, Microsoft today announced the general availability of the Microsoft 365 app, which replaces the Microsoft Office app with a new design and new features. As previewed earlier this year during Microsoft’s Ignite conference, the Microsoft 365 app — now on the web — provides quick access to apps including Word, Excel and PowerPoint in addition to file templates, “smart” recommendations, to-do list functionality and syncing across different devices. The Microsoft 365 app will launch on Windows, Android and iOS later this month, Microsoft says. Rounding out the raft of new apps and services, Microsoft 365 users will soon be able to view, manage and upgrade cloud storage across devices via a new “simplified view,” says the company. Starting February 1 from a Microsoft account, Windows settings or app settings, subscribers can mange and upgrade their cloud file and photo storage. The investment in Microsoft 365 makes sense. It is a growing revenue item for Microsoft, which has bet much of its future on the cloud and, by extension, cloud-driven subscriptions. In its Q4 2022 earnings call, Microsoft reported that Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers grew 15% to 59.7 million, driving revenue in the company’s Office Consumer products and cloud services segment to $136 million — a 9% year-over-year increase. In a potential niggle, legal trouble may be brewing over Microsoft 365 in the European Union, my colleague Natasha Lomas , where a recent assessment by a working group of German data protection regulators found that Microsoft still hasn’t able to resolve any of the compliance problems they’ve raised with it. The working group’s update could crank up the pressure on Microsoft 365 customers in Germany and elsewhere in the European Union to reassess usage of Microsoft’s software and/or seek out less compliance-challenged alternatives.
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Locad lands Series A to expand its “logistics engine” across Southeast Asia and Australia
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Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
When Constantin Robertz was working at Zalora, he was involved in moving warehouses six times as the e-commerce company outgrew its logistics infrastructure. This inspired him to co-found , a logistics provider for omnichannel e-commerce companies that connects its network of third-party warehouses and shipping carriers with a cloud-based platform referred to its “logistics engine.” Founded in Singapore and Manila by Robertz, fellow Zalora alumni Jannis Dargel and former Grab lead product manager of maps Shrey Jain, Locad announced today it has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by , a joint venture between Temasek and logistics company Kuehne + Nagel. Returning investors Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, Febe Ventures and Antler also participated, along with new backers Access Ventures, JG Summit and WTI. TechCrunch last covered . Locad can handle almost every part of the delivery process, from inventory storage and packing to shipping and tracking. So far, Locad has provided order fulfillment for 200 brands, including Havaians, Levi’s Reckitt Benckisder and Emma Sleep. Its customers are spread across Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong and Australia, and typically ship about 25 to 5,000 orders a day. Last year, Locad was used to ship more than two million orders and it claims a 99% same-day order fulfillment rate. Its new funding will be used to add more warehouses and transport operators to Locad’s network and on hiring in Southeast Asia and Australia, with the goal of building the region’s largest network of warehouses over the next five years. Robertz said helping Zalora scale up its logistics infrastructure “planted the seed of how a cloud approach to supply chain, with a scalable logistics infrastructure as a service, would be a better way.” During their time at Zalora, Robertz and Dargel also worked with brands that had to set up their own e-commerce fulfillment capabilities and tech stack in order to support multiple sales channels. Legacy logistics infrastructure, originally created for B2B wholesale distribution, couldn’t keep up with direct-to-consumer brands as their sales channels multiplied. It also meant they could no longer rely on “walled garden” fulfillment networks run by e-commerce platforms, like Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), as they scaled up. At the same time, consumers want faster and cheaper delivery, and offering multiple options like same day, next day or economy shipment is important for conversions at checkout. Robertz said that to deliver more quickly without paying more, retailers need to store products closer to customers to enable shorter and faster last-mile deliveries. This requires a network of warehouses and integration between sales channels, warehouses and shipping carriers. That is what Locad’s tech enables. Locad’s logistics engine syncs inventory from multiple sales channels, including Shopify, Lazada, Shopee and TikTok Shops, and manages storage and delivery through its network of warehouses and shipping carriers. Many of Locad’s customers first approach the startup while phasing out their inhouse logistics operations. Brands often start with one warehouse to consolidate their inventory and order fulfillment across sales channels, before putting inventory into additional warehouses based where its customers are located. As it expands across Southeast Asia and Australia, Locad also plans to increase the number of warehouses in Tier 1 to Tier 3 cities in the region, with the goal of enabling same-day delivery in all of them. In a statement about the funding, Reefknot Investments vice president Ervin Lim said, “Locad’s unique operating model of localizing warehouses into the cities ensures that inventory is kept close to the customers thereby enabling significant cost and time savings for both brand and consumer. We believe that Locad’s logistics engine will spur greater participation in the digital economy as consumers outside of Tier-1 cities can now receive their orders 2-3x faster at a fraction of the usual cost.”
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E Ink’s latest color displays have me dreaming of electronic paper magazines
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Harri Weber
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
There’s still nothing quite like thumbing the pages of a real-life print magazine, but the latest evolution of E Ink’s color tech is creeping tantalizingly close — at least as far as my eyes are concerned. You’ve : A lifetime of staring at screens has worn out my eyes, leading me down a rabbit hole of . Some of the tricks I picked up over the years have helped — especially the one where I simply take breaks and go for walks — but one thing hasn’t changed: I still spend more time than I’d like gazing at glossy displays. I don’t want anything less for videos or gaming, but for reading I typically ignore the latest tech and instead turn to a 2016 Kindle Oasis or old-fashioned books. My hands can obviously tell the difference between the two, but when I’m lost in a story, I don’t think my eyes can. With paper and e-paper alike, a sense of ease washes over me as I read. Is it how the light bounces off the page? Or, is it because I know ads and notifications won’t bombard me at every turn? I’m not sure, and I don’t really care why; I just prefer it, and E Ink reminded me of that when I stepped into its little conference room last week in Las Vegas. E Ink posted up at the Venetian for , and inside its makeshift showroom, the MIT spinoff crammed its latest tech, including pieces of its and its latest Gallery 3 color displays. The latter tech is now , starting with devices like the PocketBook Viva. And let me tell you, these displays look outright vivid next to the in E Ink’s Kaleido color displays, which debuted . Gallery 3’s displays can spit out — way, way up from Kaleido’s 4,000 colors, the company said. A prototype with E Ink’s Gallery 3 display tech. Harri Weber for TechCrunch “We aren’t ever going to be the best movie-showing screen,” U.S. business lead Timothy O’Malley stated the obvious in an interview with TechCrunch. But E Ink’s goals are still stretching well into iPad territory. Eventually, E Ink aims to build a magazine reading experience that’s good enough to win over even the most demanding publishers, O’Malley told TechCrunch. “Fashion magazines in particular really have strict standards on color [and] that’s a great goal for us,” the 22-year company veteran said. “I do believe we will get there and the tech fundamentally supports it.” O’Malley added, “We’ll work on the material response and the controls, and we will get the saturation up to that.” Reaching that bar could win over comics fans and picturebook readers, too. The same prototype with E Ink’s Gallery 3 display. Harri Weber for TechCrunch E Ink’s in-house Gallery 3 stats illustrate the current trade-off. The company said in December that its black-and-white update time is now at 350 milliseconds, while its color speeds range from 500 ms (which E Ink calls “fast color mode”) to 1500 ms (for “best color”). E Ink lets manufacturers decide how they’ll balance speed and clarity, so your proverbial mileage may vary. Brands like PocketBook, Bigme and BOOX already seem to be embracing Gallery 3, yet there’s still no word if Amazon is willing to throw its considerable weight behind color e-readers. Amazon could help legitimize the tech, but crucially, the retail giant for its black-and-white Kindles, amid . When I asked O’Malley what the holdup might be for a full-color Kindle, the executive speedily deflected. “It’s a two step dance — we have our part, and each customer has their own part,” he said. A Kindle rep quickly declined to comment when I asked a similar question over email, but hey, a girl can dream.
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Medium embraces Twitter alternative Mastodon with launch of its own community
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Online publishing platform , originally created by Twitter co-founder , today that it’s embracing the open source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications. The company said it’s launching , a Mastodon community that will offer reliable infrastructure, moderation and a short domain name to make it easier for authors to share their usernames, among other things. Though launched six years ago, Mastodon has more recently gained traction as users flee Elon Musk’s Twitter. Since acquiring the social network, Musk has made a series of controversial decisions, like the accounts of white supremacists and former president Donald as well as journalists, amid a reduction in Twitter’s moderation teams. He’s also been mucking around with Twitter’s product, who don’t pay for the service, , putting Twitter’s future at risk. That’s left a subset of Twitter users seeking new places to serve as a place to post their thoughts and engage in public conversations. Mastodon is among those platforms that directly benefitted. The social microblogging platform has grown to in recent days, up from just The service isn’t exactly a Twitter clone, however, because Instead of joining “Mastodon” itself, members join communities, or instances, which have their own sets of rules, moderation guidelines and home timelines. While this doesn’t prevent a user from following another user on a different community, it’s expected that many will choose to join a community that reflects their specific interests — like tech, music, security, gaming or one of many other topics. That seems to be the case here with Medium’s Mastodon entry. The company will open up Mastodon to Medium writers and readers as an additional perk of Medium membership, creating a place for discussions around Medium’s content. This will result in an “interesting local feed,” the company explained in its announcement. Medium also says it will make it easier to find people and topics that match their interests when joining Mastodon, as a part of its onboarding workflow. As a part of this effort, Medium will create a “sign up with Medium” interface for joining Mastodon, which could help to address some users’ complaints about the difficulties in getting started on Mastodon, which can be confusing because of the initial instance selection process. Though it may seem odd for a longer-form blogging platform to embrace a platform designed for much shorter posts, Medium believes it’s worth operating in both spaces. “We think the mission of Medium — to deepen people’s understanding of the world by helping to share the best ideas and best information — transcends mediums,” company CEO Tony Stubblebine wrote in a blog post. ( last year.) “To date, we’ve focused on article-length writing. It’s how our company got its name: as a home for medium-length writing on the internet. By contrast, Mastodon is primarily for short-form writing of 500 characters or less … Today we are extending what we do into the short-form medium (lowercase m) with an instance on Mastodon, ,” he said. Medium’s move to embrace Mastodon isn’t only because it sees the platform as “an emerging force for good in social media,” as Stubblebine wrote, when explaining the company’s interest in the space. In reality, businesses like Medium could suffer if Twitter were to experience a decline in the Musk era. To date, Twitter has served as a way for publishers to promote their work, engage in discussions with their readership and grow their followings. If more writers and readers exit Twitter, platforms like Medium could lose traction, as well — especially if the writer didn’t have a strong following elsewhere on social media. A Mastodon community could help to address that problem by providing a place for those discussions to continue outside of Twitter. Medium isn’t alone in realizing the need to find a Twitter alternative. Newsletter publisher Substack recently launched that enables short chats between writers and readers within its own app. Flipboard also last month a Notes feature for a similar purpose. And Tumblr owner that Tumblr would adopt , the decentralized social networking protocol that powers Mastodon. For Mastodon, the launch of a Medium instance could help further boost its numbers as Medium today Even if only a tiny percentage of those joined Medium’s Mastodon, it could represent a decently sized influx of new “fediverse” users, as the networked Mastodon servers are called. Medium says it will begin inviting select authors and publications tomorrow to be in before inviting all writers and readers in the near future.
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Instagram is removing the Shop tab, moving Reels from the center spot in design overhaul next month
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Instagram announced today it will simplify its in-app navigation after years of confusing changes designed to push various products like Instagram Shop and Reels. The company says, , it will return the Compose button (the plus sign “+”) to the front and center of the navigation bar at the bottom of the app and it will remove the Shop tab entirely. As a result, the Reels button will now move over to the right of Compose, losing its prime spot. The earlier changes that had pushed Reels over Compose had been fairly controversial as Instagram users felt as if the company was forcing them to use the app’s new products at the expense of the overall user experience. The company had first relocated the Reels tab to the middle of the navigation bar instead. The Compose button and Activity were also then to the top right of the home screen, making them harder to find. At the time, Instagram explained these changes would make it easier for users to access Instagram’s “expanded suite of products.” But in more recent months, there’s been increased backlash over how far Instagram has deviated from its original mission. Last year, for example, high-profile Instagram users Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner , as Jenner posted an image to her Instagram begging the company to “make Instagram Instagram again,” and to “stop trying to be tiktok.” Kim then echoed those sentiments in a post to her Stories. In addition to the aggressive Reels push, the celebs were upset over changes to the Instagram feed that more often pushed video content and recommended posts, rather than the polished photos that had helped make them famous. But the stunt caught Instagram’s attention, leading Instagram head to assure users that photos were still a priority. He also addressed frustration with the increasing number of Recommended (algorithmically suggested posts) on users’ feeds, which seemed to be Instagram’s attempt to build out its own version of TikTok’s For You page. The upcoming redesign won’t address all users’ complaints, of course — moving buttons around doesn’t mean the feed itself will change — but it will at least offer a simpler experience for users who just want to post their photos, as before. And by reprioritizing the Compose button, users may feel subtly encouraged to return to posting photos. There were hints that Instagram was considering this direction when from the some users’ home screens, hiding it under Settings instead. Instagram said then it was only an experiment with a small number of users. However, had reported the reason for the change was due to a shift in the “company priorities,” according to an internal memo. The company today says the removal of the Shop tab doesn’t necessarily mean the end of shopping on Instagram, however. “You will still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram as we continue to invest in shopping experiences that provide the most value for people and businesses across Feed, Stories, Reels, ads, and more,” a spokesperson said. Instagram says the to its navigation will reach its users in February.
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Google’s Extension SDK aims to bring latest features to older Android versions
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Fragmentation has been a longstanding complaint about the Android ecosystem. Often users miss out on features of the latest Android version because they are using older devices that are no longer updated. To reduce the gap, Google has released the first public version of , which aims to bring features of the latest Android version to older iterations. As a part of this announcement, Google is opening up Photo Picker API support to Android 11 and Android 12. Photo Picker lets users give access to select photos from their library to an app — right now, only Android 13 users can use the latest photo-picker interface. Notably, as this is an SDK, app developers will have to include this functionality in their apps. But users won’t need a system update to use the photo picker. Google Photo Picker. Google The Extension SDK also brings support to implement AdServices APIs to prepare for the launch of the Android Privacy Sandbox. The to replace cookies in Chrome. Currently, Google is testing Privacy Sandbox on , with a wider beta launch expected this year. With components like the Extension SDK, Google will aim to roll out Privacy Sandbox support to devices running older versions of Android. Google has tried to compress feature rollout times through programs like , which was introduced with Android 10 to make the operating system more modular and push features through Google Play. So users don’t have to wait for phone makers to issue a software update. The Extension SDK is another step in that direction.
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Apple’s iOS 17 may have fewer major changes than initially planned
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Apple may skip some major changes with the release of iOS 17, according to a new from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The report says Apple is going to spend most of 2023 focusing on its , which has been a work in progress for several years and may arrive this year. As Apple’s main focus is said to be on the operating system for the mixed-reality headset, the tech giant is reportedly cutting back on some new features in iOS 17. The upcoming software update, currently code-named Dawn, may have fewer major changes than originally planned. The report says this will also be the case for iPadOS 17 and macOS 14. iOS 16 many significant features, but the software update also saw some . As a result, it’s possible that Apple may want to focus on improving the stability of its software, as opposed to introducing additional major changes while also prioritizing the operating system for its upcoming mixed-reality headset. Although we may not see major changes with iOS 17, the report says the new iPhone’s hardware could still be impressive. The sizes for the upcoming devices are said to be same as the iPhone 14 lineup, but the Dynamic Island will likely be available on all four models. In addition, the phone is said to switch to USB-C and faster processors. As for the mixed-reality headset, Apple is reportedly planning to announce the new device at its Worldwide Developers Conference this year in June. The report says the device may be called Reality Pro, and the operating system could be called xrOS. Some developers have already started working on apps for the new Apple platform. In terms of the rest of Apple’s roadmap for 2023, Gurman writes that you shouldn’t expect a lot of surprises beyond the company’s mixed-reality headset.
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Keychron gets it right with its Q10 Alice-style keyboard
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Are you thinking about getting a mechanical keyboard and asked a friend which one to get? Chances are, they said: get a . It’s basically a meme at this point. After making its name with affordable mechanical keyboards (with a bit of a focus for Mac users) — the company now has something on offer for every budget and in virtually every layout, ranging from the 40% Q9 to the 100% Q6 — and everything in-between. And while the Q-line gets a lot of press, the more affordable pre-built K and V lines go after the non-enthusiast market. At this point, Keychron has so much of the potential market covered, it’s now starting to offer some more exotic layouts. The latest of these is the Q10, a 75% Alice board with a few twists. It’s probably no surprise that it, too, is an easy recommendation for anybody who is looking for this kind of board. TechCrunch As a 75% board, the hefty Q10 (it comes in at just under five pounds), with its full aluminum body, offers function keys, number row and dedicated insert, delete, page up/down and home keys. As you would expect from a modern keyboard, there are hot-swap sockets so you can easily try new switches and there is a knob on the left side. And because there’s a bit of extra room here, Keychron added five macro buttons under the knob as well that you can map to anything you’d like, using what has now become the industry-standard . Like most modern keyboards, it’ll happily work with your Mac or Windows machine, but there’s no wireless option here (that’s coming to Keychron’s Q line soon, though, starting with the upcoming ). Oh, and there’s per-key RGB, too, if that’s your thing. This is, of course, a board with an Alice layout — that is, the keys are not in a straight line but the left and right half are slightly angled, which some would claim makes for a more ergonomic typing experience. I don’t know about the ergonomics, especially since the keyboard doesn’t tent like something like an would, but at its core, it’s not all that different from some of the more popular ergonomic keyboards from the likes of . It’s quite easy to get used to, even for touch-typists, and quite comfortable to type on. Otherwise, Keychron is going with its standard setup here: gasket mount for a bit of flex and silicon gaskets between the top and bottom cases to reduce ping and other noise. I never quite find that I notice the gasket mounting in daily use, because you really have to hammer on your keys to get any of that bounce you may have seen in YouTube videos, but then I switch to an older keyboard with a and notice how hard that feels. Your mileage may vary here, of course. At this point, gasket mounts are the industry standard, it seems, but I do look forward to some innovation here. TechCrunch If all of this sounds familiar, then… yeah… basically everything I said in , the Q8, still applies here, too. Keychron had some early missteps with its Q1 but to the company’s credit, the team quickly learned from that and the community’s feedback. You can modify this keyboard to your heart’s content, but you don’t have to. Sure, you can improve the stabilizers by lubing them yourself (time to break out that dielectric grease), but the pre-lubed ones are good enough, especially because there’s no large rattling space bar to contend with here anyway. One nice thing Keychron is doing now with its latest board is pre-modding it. One popular trick among enthusiasts is the tape mod, for example, which involves sticking some painters’ tape at the bottom of the PCB to absorb some of the higher-pitched frequencies as you type. On its new boards, Keychron already applies tape to the bottom of the PCB itself. I think the board could still benefit from some thicker foam at the bottom of the case (but there isn’t a lot of room there, so I haven’t tried yet). Keychron also uses Gateron G Pro switches, which come pre-lubed (as you can see, there’s a lot of lubing going on in the mechanical keyboard world). And while I continue to hope that Keychron will offer more options than just the linear Red, tactile Brown and clicky Blue switches (yellow would be nice, Keychron…), those are competent options. Keychron My review unit came with brown switches, which some people like, but I find to fall into the uncanny valley between tactile and linear. They just aren’t all that tactile, yet also not quite linear. I prefer linear switches, but if I use a tactile switch, I want to feel that tactile bump as I press down. I had a set of pre-lubed three-pin Gateron CAP lying around here (as one does), which are a bit more tactile and made me enjoy the keyboard quite a bit more. They also have a slightly lower pitch than the standard Geteron brown switches. Keychron’s default keycaps, which come with the pre-built board, are fine. They are double-shot PBT keycaps in the . That profile is higher and rounder than you may be used to from Cherry keycaps, but that’s easy enough to get used to. Keychron does make a nice set of , though, which I prefer, both in terms of profile and sound. Maybe one day, Keychron will offer that as an option. As usual, the company offers its keyboard as a bare-bones kit. That will set you back $195 plus shipping. That’s also the only way to get the dark purple colorway. Fully assembled, with switches and keycaps (stabilizers are included in both versions), you pay $215 plus shipping. Personally, I’d pay the extra $20 and get a set of switches and keycaps to try, but if you already know your preferences and have boxes full of keycaps just waiting to be used, then the bare-bones is probably the way to go (just make sure your own set supports Alice layouts, with their unusual double spacebars). Keychron doesn’t really have a lot of competition in this space right now; 75% Alice-style boards are a bit of a rarity, though there is the from the , with similar specs, but a $329 price tag (which includes keycaps but not switches). One advantage here is that it includes Bluetooth support. There aren’t a lot of other in-stock options available, though you may find some 75% Alice group buys every now and then and maybe KBDfans will bring back its at some point (but that was well over $450 for the bare-bones kit). If you want a smaller board, there are a few more options, including Keychron’s aluminum Q8 (which is my daily driver) and the cheaper, non-gasket-mount V8. And like with all Keychron models, a $100 is on its way, too.
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FCC moves to form Space Bureau as its role in regulating orbit intensifies
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
The regulates lots of industries and practices relating to telecommunications and the internet, but it is now cementing its role as a space regulator specializing in the topic. Bureaus are the divisions of the agency that handle different areas of industry: media, wireless, consumer, and so on, as well as enforcement and the like. They’re full of specialists who research and produce the rules and advisories promulgated by the FCC. The newly minted Space Bureau will handle all business relating to satellite approval, orbital communications, and space debris, among other things. These are things the agency was already doing, but now they’ll have a new, more effective organization to do them in. “The satellite industry is growing at a record pace, but here on the ground our regulatory frameworks for licensing have not kept up. We’re working to change that,” said Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement. The current International Bureau is being cannibalized to form it, but it sounds like more of an upgrade than a dissolution. Although the FCC voted unanimously today to form the new bureau, it will need additional approvals from Congress and some other formalities before it is final, but you can bet that they’re already shifting the desks around and powering up new chat channels. Here’s how the FCC put it in their order: Under this reorganization, the Space Bureau will promote a competitive and innovative global telecommunications marketplace via space services. The Space Bureau will do so by undertaking policy analysis and rulemakings as well as authorizing satellite systems for the purpose of facilitating the deployment of satellite services, streamlining regulatory processes and maximizing flexibility for operators to meet customer needs, and fostering the efficient use of spectrum and orbital resources. The Space Bureau will also serve as a focal point for coordination with other U.S. government agencies on matters of space policy and governance, and will support the Office of International Affairs for meetings with other countries, international organizations and foreign government officials that involve space policy matters. It may seem a little strange that the FCC regulates space, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The agency is in charge of regulating transmissions, especially interstate ones (which makes it the natural regulator for internet stuff), and satellites transmit a lot of data. In fact, with hundreds or thousands more going up every year, they’re probably one of the fastest-growing sources of data transmissions. While the likes of the FAA, NASA, and the Pentagon have their fingers in this pie as well, when it comes to making sure orbital platforms don’t interfere with each other or surface communications, the FCC is the right tool for the job. ( .) But until recently, space was a pretty small niche in their work. Now they’re fielding satellite approval applications from hundreds of companies and research centers, administrating spectrum for networks of Comsats thousands strong, and trying to make sure all this wireless traffic doesn’t drown out anything important. Then there’s the whole space debris thing, which is another story. But also important. At any rate, it makes perfect sense for the FCC to build out a space-focused bureau that, as part of its work, negotiates and cooperates with other countries — the old International Bureau’s job. We’ll hear more about .
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Indian giant Jio makes cloud gaming push
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Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Mukesh Ambani, one of Asia’s richest men, has made a splash in many industries over the past three decades. It now appears he has set his eyes on a new sector: Gaming. JioGames, part of Reliance Industries’ telecom platform Jio, said on Thursday it has inked a 10-year strategic partnership with French firm Gamestream. The French firm, which offers clients white-labeling cloud gaming solutions, will work with the Indian giant to make an “ambitious” play on bringing cloud gaming to “1.4 billion” Indians, Jio said. Jio said the partnership will help it scale its cloud gaming platform JioGamesCloud, which is currently in beta and available to users across a range of devices. The firm quietly launched JioGamesCloud in beta late last year, offering dozens of games (though very few AAA titles). JioGamesCloud is currently free during its beta test period. Home page of JioGamesCloud. (Screenshot by TechCrunch) Gamestream, whose partners include Ubisoft, has deployed its tech in many markets in Europe, the Middle East and Asia in tie ups with Etisalat, Telkom, Sunrise and Telekom Slovenije. “India will soon be the new hub of the video game industry, with the potential of over 1 billion gamers thanks to the rapid deployment in India of Jio True 5G network, with high speed and low latency. Video games could become one of the digital services that contribute significantly to economic growth,” said Kiran Thomas, chief executive of Jio Platforms, in a statement. “This partnership between Gamestream and Jio will enable every Indian to access a high-quality Cloud Gaming experience.” India, the world’s second largest internet market, is not necessarily a very attractive gaming market. (India is usually not among the first wave of nations that receives the new PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Google never bothered to launch its abandoned Stadia platform in the South Asian market. Nintendo has no presence in the country.) But mobile gaming has taken off in India in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of cut-rate mobile data prices and affordable Android handsets. Krafton’s PUBG Mobile was the most popular game in the country, with as many as 50 million monthly active users before New Delhi amid national security concerns. Amazon last month , its subscription service that offers access to a number of titles, to its members in India. The gaming service, complementary to Amazon Prime and Video subscribers, offers users access to a range of mobile, PC and Mac games as well as in-game loot at no additional cost.
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How we pivoted our deep tech startup to become a SaaS company
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Brian Casey
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
future, global markets will require billions of highly specialized electric machines that perform much better than the inefficient relics of the past. Initially, we approached this as a hardware challenge until we determined that the key to meeting next-generation electric motor demand actually lies in software. That’s why we’ve pivoted to a SaaS model. Like any major startup redirect, there were several “a-ha!” realizations, accompanied by trials to make it all work. Fortunately, the SaaS direction has delivered upsides: We’ve achieved relatively strong product-market fit and cash flow-positive status without big VC raises or burn rates. The process wasn’t precisely linear, but (looking back) we did four core things to conclude SaaS was our model: ECM PCB Stator Technology was founded on the innovation of MIT-trained electrical and software engineer Dr. Steven Shaw, our chief scientist. After launch, we began developing proprietary printed circuit board stators that replace bulky copper windings — the central component in electric motors — and using in-house software to make them lighter, faster and more efficient machines. Two years later, I joined as a growth-stage CEO after leading two energy technology companies to scale and acquisition. At that point, we were still at a relatively early stage in funding and product-market fit. The startup had raised a venture round and was flirting with becoming an axial flux electric motor manufacturing company. The initial impetus for a SaaS shift came when I began to assess the company with fresh eyes and engage Steve and the board on our inherent advantages and path to profitability. At that point, we also pulled in some new investors. On a macro level, we conferred to determine our competitive advantages and addressable market. An early observation was that there were already several large, established players making off-the-shelf electric motors. An assessment of global trends (e.g., mass electrification, automation, reducing carbon emissions) also revealed that the need and requirements for next-generation electric machines were rapidly shifting. After plenty of analysis and a number of board meetings, this appraisal emerged: The global marketplace will require more efficient, better performing and custom-designed electric motors that can be produced in the hundreds of millions in a more sustainable way. With that in mind, I turned to Steve and our board to evaluate the best business model. We concluded that the most competitive aspect was the ability to leverage printed circuit boards via “motor CAD” software to create bespoke electric motor designs that require less raw material and outperform legacy offerings. Then we addressed a critical question: How can we take this technology to market rapidly with a favorable capex profile?
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Roblox may arrive on Meta Quest later this year
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Lauren Forristal
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
It appears that Roblox, a major player in the metaverse space, could be getting its moment to shine on Meta’s virtual reality headset. According to The Verge’s , sources say that might be planning to come to in late 2023. Roblox declined to comment to TechCrunch. Meta was not immediately available to comment. This isn’t the first time someone has mentioned Roblox coming to Quest. During an investor call in 2021, CEO and co-founder of Roblox, Dave Baszucki, that Quest makes “perfect sense for Roblox,” which was a hint that the company had VR plans for the future. While Roblox is already compatible with , including Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, gamers currently need to connect their PC to a VR headset to play. The virtual world gaming platform isn’t available as a Quest game. If Roblox were to get support for Meta Quest, it would be a significant move for both companies. If the rumor turns out to be true, it will likely satisfy investors as well. Roblox and Meta both reported disappointing earnings results, with Roblox experiencing a loss of and Meta’s virtual reality division losing . Meta anticipates more losses in 2023. However, Meta also in its earnings call that a consumer-grade follow-up to Quest 2 is coming in 2023. So, with Meta’s new VR headset arriving sometime this year, it’s possible Roblox could be the launch title. The company announced at , so it’s likely we’ll learn more about the new VR headset at Meta’s next Connect conference in fall 2023. The price of the upcoming headset is expected to be around the same as Quest 2, which increased by $100 to in August 2022.
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Stardew Valley’s big update is now available for iOS and Android
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
If there’s anything fans want, it’s more Stardew — and that’s now the case for anyone playing the cozy life sim on iOS or Android. The game is available on out there (personally I play it on the Nintendo Switch, which is perfect), but Stardew’s mobile fans were left waiting for a major content update that . Over the weekend, Stardew Valley patch 1.5 rolled out for the game’s Android and iOS ports, bringing a ton of new stuff to do with it. The mobile 1.5 update has been submitted for iOS and Android, and will start rolling out to users over the next few days. The update should already be available to some on Android. — ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) The update is no small thing. If you haven’t played yet, fair warning that there are probably a few spoilers in here if you like to discover the quaint game world’s secrets organically. Patch 1.5 adds a lot, but some of the most notable additions are a new beach farm layout, a slew of new NPCs and enemies, ostriches (because ostriches) and a whole new location — Ginger Island. The full list of new 1.5 content can be found , but why spoil it for yourself? This last content push is likely it for the game, which has sold more than 20 million copies since launching in 2016. Stardew Valley’s creator Eric Barone is already at work on Haunted Chocolatier, his next hit indie game-to-be. There’s no expected release date yet, but Barone started working on the game back in 2020, so a launch in late 2023 or some time in 2024 might not be off the table. Something interesting that sets Stardew’s success apart from a lot of other hit games is that its hype has only snowballed over the years: In 2022, years after its launch, the game was selling . That’s likely due to the massive amount of word-of-mouth love out there for Stardew’s charming world and the impressive depth it offers for a game that’s ostensibly a farming sim.
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Google is finally rolling out emoji reactions for Meet video calls
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Google is finally rolling out emoji reactions to people using Google Meet for video calls. Starting today, the company said this feature will be first available on iOS and the web with Android support coming soon. The search giant , but it is reaching users just now. Users can click or tap on the smile icon on the bottom pane to post a reaction emoji — with support for different skin tones — on the video call. When users react with an emoji, you will see a small badge on the top-left corner of their tile on the web. If there are many people reacting at one time, you will see a stream of reactions on the left-hand side — just like comments on a live video. While the reaction feature is turned on by default, the meeting host can choose to . Google said that the feature rollout will begin starting today and will be available to everyone in the next few weeks. Google Along with emoji reactions for Meet calls, Google is also rolling out a Workspace update for chats that easily lets people start an individual or a group conversation. The earlier version of Chat prompted people to “Start group conversation” when they started typing names. Now, Google is removing that option completely. Rather, users can simply type and select multiple names to start a group chat. And by typing in one name, they can start an individual chat. Google “With this update, users can create Chat conversations in one consistent and intuitive way, whether with one person or a group,” the company said in . The new group chat creation feature is rolling out to end-users starting today, spanning across the next few weeks.
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Apple TV and Apple Music apps for Windows quietly appear on the Microsoft Store
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Apple is finally bringing its Apple Music and Apple TV apps to Windows, as preview versions of the two apps have quietly appeared on the Microsoft Store. The roll out comes a few months after the apps would be coming to Windows 11 this year. The launch was first spotted by . The apps look similar to the versions that are available on macOS but are slightly modified for Windows. The Apple TV app functions similarly to the app on Smart TVs, giving users access to Apple TV+ and Apple TV Channels, in addition to movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store. The Apple Music app is almost the same as the macOS version but doesn’t have the lyrics feature. There’s also a preview app called “Apple Devices” that lets users manage Apple devices from their Window PC. The app replaces iTunes for sync and backup and also allows users to restore firmware without the need for iTunes. All three of the new Apple apps require Windows 11 version 22621.0 or higher. Apple notes that installing any of these apps will prevent iTunes for Windows from opening. Users will have to uninstall the apps to continue using iTunes. In October, that was integrating Apple’s iCloud storage service with the Photos app in Windows 11. After installing the iCloud for Windows app from the Microsoft Store and choosing to sync iCloud, iPhone users with Windows devices will be able to see their iPhone photos and videos within Photos.
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Supreme Court declines to block WhatsApp lawsuit over NSO phone hacking
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Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to block a lawsuit brought by WhatsApp challenging the alleged mass phone hacking by Israeli spyware maker NSO Group. Meta-owned WhatsApp first against NSO Group in 2019 claiming the spyware maker exploited to stealthily deliver its Pegasus phone spyware onto users’ devices. Pegasus gives its government customers to a target’s device, including their personal data, photos, messages and granular location data. More than 1,400 devices belonging to journalists, activists and government officials were compromised by Pegasus, according to the lawsuit. NSO Group filed a petition to dismiss the lawsuit in April last year, that it could not be sued, as it was acting on behalf of a foreign government. This claim of so-called sovereign immunity was by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, after it was previously dismissed by a California district court and later by the U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit. The case will bounce back to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In a statement, NSO Group spokesperson Liron Bruck said the company is “confident” that the court will determine the use of Pegasus by its customers was legal. WhatsApp spokesperson Carl Woog told TechCrunch that the company was “grateful to see the Supreme Court rejected NSO’s baseless petition” and that NSO “must be held to account for their unlawful operations.” The WhatsApp case is among a series of legal battles plaguing NSO Group of late. Apple also against the spyware maker, seeking a permanent injunction to block the spyware maker from using any Apple product or service — a move designed to make it more difficult for the company to operate. In November, journalists from an investigative news outlet in El Salvador also sued NSO in a U.S. court after Pegasus spyware was detected on their iPhones. These journalists are being represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which on Monday welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision. “We’re pleased that the Supreme Court rejected NSO Group’s petition. Today’s decision clears the path for lawsuits brought by the tech companies, as well as for suits brought by journalists and human rights advocates who have been victims of spyware attacks,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “The use of spyware to surveil and intimidate journalists poses one of the most urgent threats to press freedom and democracy today.”
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Europe quizzes TikTok on data safety, disinformation and DSA compliance
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
A meeting between TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, and senior European Union lawmakers that took place today saw the video sharing platform’s chief executive quizzed on a range of topics — including its preparations to comply with incoming pan-EU rules focused on content governance and safety (aka the Digital Services Act; or ), and its approach to existing rules on privacy and data protection (including the General Data Protection Regulation). Other topics the EU said its commissioners brought up in the meetings with Chew included child safety, Russian disinformation and the . TikTok has faced a range of regulatory scrutiny across the bloc in recent years, including and a — as well as having two open GDPR inquiries in Ireland (one into TikTok’s processing of children’s data and ), which began . In recent years it has also sought to respond to regional concerns about data security by opening one of its so-called to host visitors from the bloc and field their questions. Plus it’s undertaking a data localization project — that will see EU users’ information stored in a Dublin-based data center — as another response to data protection and security concerns (although and can’t entirely fix the data transfer issue since TikTok has admitted some non-EU-based staffers can access EU user data). More regulatory scrutiny is coming as this year TikTok could also face direct oversight by the European Commission itself — if it’s deemed to meet “gatekeeper” criteria under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA, which came into force at the start of November and is set to start to apply from early May, is intended to supplement traditional “after the fact of abuse” antitrust regulation by applying a proactive set of operational “dos and don’ts” to the most powerful, intermediating platforms and will put some hard limits on anticompetitive practices like self-preferencing (as well as introducing some firm requirements in areas like interoperability and data portability). So EU compliance requirements for platforms that fall under the DMA regime will step up considerably. While it’s not yet confirmed whether TikTok will be designated a core platform service subject to the DMA, there’s no doubt that fostering a solid working relationship with the bloc’s executive is in its strategic interests — as the Commission will be making designations and overseeing compliance for both the DMA and for a layer of additional obligations that will apply to a subset of larger platforms (so called VLOPs) under the DSA — a category TikTok is almost certain to fall into (even if it avoids being designated a DMA gatekeeper). The but the bulk of provisions won’t apply before February 2024. However VLOPs have a shorter implementation period — with compliance expected to be up and running later this year; platforms are given four months for implementation after a VLOP designation is made (so by midyear the DSA is likely to be in force for a first wave of VLOPs). Talking of strategic interests, the also arguably creates an opportunity for TikTok to present a more cooperative face to the Commission — and seek to win friends (or at least avoid making enemies) among commissioners who are gaining powerful new oversight capabilities (and enforcement powers) atop digital platforms this year. It’s clear the Commission is dining out on the of a Big Tech CEO coming in person to Brussels to press commissioner flesh. In a statement following a meeting between TikTok’s CEO and the EU’s EVP and head of digital strategy, Margrethe Vestager, the Commission said: The objective of the meeting with TikTok was to review how the company is preparing for complying with its obligations under the European Commission’s regulation, namely the Digital Services Act (DSA) and possibly under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). At the meeting the parties also discussed GDPR and matters of privacy and data transfer obligations with a reference to the recent press reporting on aggressive data harvesting and surveillance in the US. The EU’s VP for values and transparency, Věra Jourová, also had a face-to-face meeting with Chew — and the EU said she asked about several concerns, including the protection of personal data of Europeans and steps TikTok is taking to address disinformation on its platform, as well as raising to try to identify the source of internal leaks. In a readout of the meeting, the EU said Jourová “appreciated” the fact that TikTok joined the bloc’s Code of Practice on Disinformation ( ) and how it “swiftly implemented EU sanctions against Russian propaganda outlets,” as it put it. (One wonders if this flavor of public praise by the EU is also a subtle sideswipe at Musk and Twitter — given some blatant snubs the latter has doled out to Brussels in recent months, such as the .) The EU’s readout also notes that it acknowledges TikTok “recognises that non-EU state actors try to manipulate the content on the platform to spread disinformation and puts efforts to address this issue,” adding the company informed it it is investing in Ukraine and will deliver a detailed report under the Disinformation Code. (That might make interesting reading — given a study found Russian state propaganda to be flourishing on TikTok in spite of a claimed ban on uploads.) After being questioned by Jourová about the awkward issue of the (ab)use of the data of journalists to try to identify internal leakers, the EU said Chew confirmed this was wrong and told it the people responsible for the incident no longer work for the company. (And there’s also a tacit contrast with the who had been reporting on Musk’s decision-making at Twitter.) Per the EU, the TikTok CEO also discussed TikTok’s efforts around GDPR compliance — and talked about its investment in content moderation practices, which he told it aim to limit the effect of hate speech and other “toxic content.” Chew also used the opportunity of face-to-face time with EU commissioners to claim TikTok’s “mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy” — rather than, y’know, dwelling on awkward accusations (and/or ) that the platform is a societal manipulation project/”tool of cultural control” targeted as Western kids and with authoritarian links to the Chinese state… In a statement after the meeting, Jourová avoided direct reference to such concerns — opting instead for more diplomatic language about the need for TikTok to “regain regulatory trust”: I count on TikTok to fully execute its commitments to go the extra mile in respecting EU law and regaining trust of European regulators. There cannot be any doubt that data of users in Europe are safe and not exposed to illegal access from third-country authorities. It is important for TikTok and other platforms to swiftly get ready for compliance with the new EU digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. I am also looking forward to seeing the first report under the new anti-disinformation Code to be delivered by the end of January. Transparency will be a key element in this regard. The two current GDPR probes of TikTok in Ireland remain ongoing — with, per the regulator, the prospect of the children’s data inquiry being wrapped up by (or before) the middle of this year (depending on how quickly disputes between DPAs can be settled). The China data transfers inquiry could also reach a decision around midyear — but, again, we understand there are a variety of factors in play that could spin out the process so a final decision might not appear until the end of the year. TikTok was contacted for its view on the EU meetings but at the time of writing the company had not responded.
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TikTok launches a Talent Manager Portal so managers can negotiate brand deals for clients
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
TikTok is making it easier for brands to work with its “megastar” creators with an update to its that now invites talent managers to oversee, execute and analyze the brand opportunities and campaigns being presented to their clients. This week, the video entertainment platform introduced a new Talent Manager Portal as a part of the TikTok Creator Marketplace — its platform that allows brands and agencies to connect with 800,000 qualified creators around the world. The new service allows talent managers, with creator authorization, to log into the Creator Marketplace to manage deal flow, negotiate contracts on behalf of their talent, handle the creative feedback and review various reports and metrics about a campaign’s performance. The expansion allows TikTok to now not only serve the needs of creators with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers but those “celebrity-level” creators, as well. For example, TikTok stars like the as their online fame led them into new areas like podcasts, books, TV, licensing, tours and other endorsements. It would make sense that they’d want their UTA reps to review the brand inquiries and negotiate deals on their behalf through such a portal rather than doing it themselves. TikTok confirmed the Talent Manager Portal is in alpha testing right now. The free service has several agencies already signed up, but it isn’t able to share the names of testers at this time. In addition, TikTok notes that the talent managers will have access only to their client’s Marketplace accounts not the creators’ actual TikTok accounts. TikTok The system aims to complement the Creator Marketplace’s existing offerings targeted toward brands that want to capitalize on the performance of creator-led advertising, which TikTok says delivers higher ad recall among 71% of brands surveyed. First , TikTok Creator Marketplace plays a key role in the growing creator monetization ecosystem, joining similar platforms offered by , , and that aid creators in developing relationships within the influencer marketing space. Beyond being a destination itself, the Creator Marketplace also introduced an API in 2021 that allows marketing companies like Captiv8 and Influential to tap into its first-party data within their own systems. Before such marketplaces existed, brands looking to work with top creators would have to do more manual labor — they’d have to scroll the app or use search terms to discover creators, and they couldn’t target their searchers by specific parameters. The TikTok Creator Marketplace puts more tools at their fingertips, allowing brands to curate creators by keywords, the content being posted and filters around metrics like audience size and makeup. TikTok Brands can choose to work with talent by reaching out directly (aka a “direct invitation”) or through “application campaigns,” where they’ll create a brief and creators pitch themselves for the opportunity. The marketplace’s match tool also uses AI and natural language processing to map creators to the brief based on the content they’re posting, helping to further automate the process. Now leading the team behind the Creator Marketplace is , the global head of operations for TikTok’s Creator Marketing Solutions, previously COO at Influential. In her current role, which she’s held for around a year and a half, Lahens is focused on helping TikTok’s creators make a living through branded content and brand and creator collaborations. TikTok says brands who work with creators see a 26% lift in brand favorability and a 22% lift in brand recommendations. In addition, 71% of TikTok users say that a creator’s authenticity is what now motivates them to make a purchase from a brand. TikTok Overcoming challenges around creator monetization are key to retaining top talent on TikTok’s app, especially in light of heavy competition from other tech giants, including Meta, Snap and YouTube — the latter of which just announced it will (short-form video) creators as of February 1. (Though TikTok had announced a , it hasn’t yet scaled.) With brand campaigns, some top TikTok creators are earning tens of thousands and, in select cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars through the Creator Marketplace. Other campaigns may be smaller scale, only offering gifting, for instance, instead of payments. TikTok did not say how long its new Talent Manager Portal would remain in alpha testing before launching more publicly.
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YouTube rolls out new Partner Program terms as Shorts revenue sharing begins on February 1
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
YouTube will begin sharing creators on February 1, the company on Monday. To prepare for the upcoming change, YouTube is starting to roll out new terms for all creators in the YouTube Partner Program. Creators need to accept the new terms by July 10 to remain in the program. The major change to YouTube’s Partner Program will allow creators to earn money from ads that are viewed between videos in the Shorts Feed. Although the new revenue sharing model will replace the YouTube Shorts Fund, the company says it expects the majority of its Shorts Fund recipients to earn more with the new Shorts revenue sharing model. As , creators can apply to the program if they meet a new Shorts-specific threshold of 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over 90 days. As part of the new terms, creators need to accept specific monetization modules. The first module is called the “Watch Page Monetization Module” and allows creators to earn money from ads served on their long-form videos and YouTube Premium. The next module is called the “Shorts Monetization Module” and lets you earn money from ads that play between Shorts in the Shorts Feed and YouTube Premium. The last module is called the “Commerce Product Addendum” and is for features like Channel Memberships and Supers. YouTube recommends that creators accept all of the modules to unlock their full earning potential on the platform. Creators that make Shorts and have accepted the new Shorts Monetization Module will become eligible for Shorts ads revenue sharing on their Shorts views starting next month. As for how exactly the Shorts revenue sharing will work, it’s a bit complex due to music licensing. Each month, revenue from the ads appearing between Shorts will be added together and used to reward monetizing Shorts creators and cover the costs of music licensing. A portion of the total revenue will be allocated to the creator pool based on views and music usage across all watched Shorts. If a creator uploads a Short without music, all of the revenue associated with its views goes toward the creator pool. If a creator uploads a Short with music, the revenue based on its views will be split among the Creator Pool and music partners based on the number of tracks used. Next, the creator pool is allocated to creators. YouTube explains that it will allocate revenue to monetizing Shorts creators based on their share of total Shorts views in the Creator Pool. If a creator got 5% eligible views out of all Shorts uploaded by monetizing creators, they will then be allocated 5% of the revenue in the creator pool. Creators will keep 45% of their allocated Shorts revenue. For instance, if a creator is allocated $1,000 from the creator pool, they will be paid $450. It’s worth noting that non-original Shorts are not eligible for revenue sharing. Non-original Shorts are those that include unedited clips from movies or TV shows, re-uploaded content from other creators on YouTube or another platform, or compilations with no original content added. Shorts that receive artificial or fake views, such as from automated clicks or scroll bots, are also ineligible for revenue sharing. With these upcoming changes, YouTube Shorts is poised to become . If creators can make more money via YouTube Shorts than on TikTok, they’re incentivized to make original content for the YouTube platform. No short-form video platform has quite figured out how to share ad revenue up until now, which gives Shorts a notable leg up on the competition.
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Scale AI cuts 20% of its workforce
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Scale AI, the San Francisco–based company that uses software and people to label image, text, voice and video data for companies building machine learning algorithms, laid off 20% of its workforce this week. The decision, which was announced by founder and CEO Alexandr Wang via a , was made after rapid hiring in 2021 and 2022 came crashing into present-day macroeconomic challenges. The company did not say how many people work at Scale AI. However, back in February 2022, the company told TechCrunch it employed about 450 people. , which was last valued at $7.3 billion and is backed by a slew of investors such as Tiger Global, Coatue Management and Founders Fund, has been a rising star in the AI industry. The seven-year-old company got its start supplying autonomous vehicle companies with the labeled data needed to train machine learning models to develop and eventually commercialize robotaxis, self-driving trucks and automated bots used in warehouses and on-demand delivery. In 2020, that changed as e-commerce, enterprise automation, government, insurance, real estate and robotics companies turned to Scale’s visual data labeling platform to develop and apply artificial intelligence to their respective businesses. The company has since to enhance its real-world datasets. Its customer base is vast and varied, including the Department of Defense, Pinterest, Nuro, Zoox and General Motors. Interest from enterprises and governments in AI grew rapidly in the past few years, according to Wang. “As a result, I made the decision to grow the team aggressively in order to take advantage of what I thought was our new normal,” he wrote in the blog. “For a time, this seemed to prove out — we saw strong sales growth through 2021 and 2022. As a result, we increased headcount assuming the massive growth would continue. However, the macro environment has changed dramatically in recent quarters, which is something I failed to predict. Many of the industries we serve, such as e-commerce and consumer technology, have been buoyed by the pandemic and are now experiencing a painful market correction. As a result, we need to prepare ourselves for a very different economic environment.” Wang said he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that have led us to this point.” Workers who are affected will receive a minimum of eight weeks of severance and three months of healthcare. The company is also waiving the one-year equity cliff for employees with less than one year of tenure and is providing immigration support for those on visas that require continued employment. Wang added that Scale AI is also cutting its expenses, adjusting its hiring practices and is re-assessing new offices.
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Tinder and other Match dating apps will offer in-app tips on avoiding romance scams
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Lauren Forristal
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Match Group, the parent company to dating apps Tinder, Hinge, Match, Plenty of Fish, Meetic and OurTime, among others, announced today the launch of a new campaign that will introduce in-app messages and email notifications to give users tips on how to prevent being scammed online. Tinder and French online dating app Meetic will prompt users with in-app messages with tips and common behaviors to watch out for. Suggestions include making sure potential matches have their profile picture verified, video chatting with them before meeting in person and learning how to recognize scammer red flags. Meanwhile, Match, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and OurTime will send out emails and message notifications to users with the same scam-related tips. Starting today, the global public awareness campaign will roll out in more than 15 countries, including the United States, Canada, the U.K., India, Australia, Japan, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. It will last throughout the month of January, but Match Group told TechCrunch it will work to continue pushing the messages to users periodically. Match Group/Tinder “Scammers will often play the long game,” Buddy Loomis, senior director of Law Enforcement Operations and Investigations at Match Group told TechCrunch. “They want to really capture the victim’s confidence and trust, and they’ll spend a lot of time with them talking back and forth…that’s how scammers build a relationship with that person and make them feel safe. [Then] they’ll ask for money for either a child’s medical bill, visa or plane ticket.” Another red flag is when a scammer wants to chat via third-party platforms, which usually means they want to chat on an app that isn’t as moderated. Match Group recently launched a feature across its apps that sends users popup messages with safety tips if certain words are detected in the conversation. More and more online daters become victims of , and the number only continues to rise. In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission that consumers lost a staggering $547 million. The Global Anti-Scam Organization provided data showing that the average reported loss in the U.S. was $186,169 in 2022, up from $120,754 in 2021, Match Group wrote in today’s announcement. While there are many tools that Match Group dating apps use to catch fraudulent and suspicious profiles, there are still people using these apps to scam and steal from users. Loomis points out that romance scams and other related incidents are significantly underreported, so hopefully the new message alerts will help that side of the issue too. “One of the big messages here is to raise awareness around this type of scam and remove that stigma of reporting. We want members to feel safe and have more come in whether that’s proactive where they haven’t been victimized and had any loss of monetary value, or after,” she added. Match Group encourages users to report incidents on the platform they’re using as well as contact local law enforcement. The company’s new dating safety campaign comes almost a year after Netflix released “The Tinder Swindler,” a true crime documentary that centers around Israeli conman Simon Leviev tricking women on the dating app to send him money. Since the documentary premiered in February 2022, Tinder has launched various safety features, such as and a feature that from using the “unmatch” feature to hide from victims.
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The Easy Company raised $14.2M to build an easy-to-use ‘social’ crypto wallet
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
The Easy Company has raised $14.2 million in a seed round and launched its “social” crypto wallet to help onboard more mainstream audiences, it shared exclusively with TechCrunch. Easy aims to combine user-curated profiles with engaging social features so that people can search, navigate and discover the world of web3 on their own. Today, its to the public on iOS and Android after completing a 30-day private testing phase, Mike Dougherty, co-founder and CEO of Easy, said to TechCrunch. “We’re very focused on building the consumer layer,” Dougherty said. “We thought of the next chapter of web3 by mainstream adoption and usability.” The funding round included Lobby Capital, Relay Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Tapestry VC, Upside and Scribble Ventures, as well as angel investors from traditional social media and web3 groups like former heads of Instagram, Novi product and engineering and former executives from Airbnb, Twitter, Uber, OpenTable and Eventbrite, among others. “We want to deliver to the world a new way to engage with web3 but also a new digital wallet,” Kevin Swint, co-founder and chief product officer at The Easy Company, said to TechCrunch. “We think the digital wallet space is huge and hasn’t moved away from payments and it’s something we can grow quickly in.” A lot of web3 products and services today are too technical for the everyday person to use, Dougherty said. “If you look at the products and experiences in web3 they may be too technical and built by and for technical users. … We are shifting this to build a consumer product versus a tool, which leads to different design decisions.” The platform, which was demonstrated to TechCrunch over Zoom, had a similar layout to social media apps like Instagram through elements like showcasing of NFTs, where users can swipe to view both their own NFTs or NFTs of people they “watch,” like Instagram stories. The similarity was no accident, either, Swint said. “We have a couple key advisers from Instagram and we thought of ourselves as an Instagram-like experience for NFTs in a wallet.” While there are some traditional media elements in Easy’s wallet, it is “an embrace of both web3 and bringing some of web2 to that, rather than bringing web3 back to web2,” Swint noted. “The innovation around web3 is core to what we do. It’s a decentralized wallet; a lot of the wallet code is open sourced and we want to honor the web3 community to move the space forward.” The wallet also allows users to link their social identity from other sites and curate their profiles with their own NFTs from multiple wallet accounts and blockchains. There’s a rating system called Signal, which allows users to review anything from NFT collections to marketplaces and platforms — it also allows the community to flag possible fraud in an effort to increase safety. Separately, there’s a search function that allows users to look up terms like “bored” to see both members with that phrase in their name and collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Easy was designed with cross-chain functionality, and currently is compatible with Ethereum and Polygon NFTs, with plans to have more blockchains in the future, Swint noted. “Protocols serve products and products serve people,” Gary Clayton, co-founder of The Easy Company, said in a statement. “Web3 applications are incredibly complex from a user perspective, and the vast ecosystem of blockchains and required wallets for each is dizzying. If we build experiences that make using Web3 as easy and safe as current consumer web designs, more users will come to Web3.” In the app, people can also send crypto and tokens to profiles and real usernames, rather than a random variation of numbers and letters (which often make up one’s crypto wallet address), Swint said. “We started viewing the wallet as very strategic. The wallet is a personal companion that’s there with you on your journey at every step. The wallet itself can do a lot more to help us navigate, connect and stay safe,” Dougherty said. “We built Easy to be that wallet that we wanted to use that first day in web3.” The capital will be used to continue building out the social product, but also to expand blockchain support, Dougherty said. “We’re going to work hard on living up to the vision of ‘easy’ and making web3 as easy as what we’re used to in web2.”
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Tesla plans $770M expansion at Texas factory
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Tesla notified Texas regulators this week it plans to invest about $770 million into an expansion of its factory near Austin. The automaker registered plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Registration. The Austin Business Journal and were the first to report on the filings. The filings show Tesla intends to build new facilities at the site this year, including one for battery cell testing and another to manufacture cathode and drive units. Tesla also plans to build a die shop at the factory site, according to the registration. The expansion comes less than a year from the factory’s official opening. The Tesla factory in Austin officially opened in April 2022 with a a party attended by about 15,000 people. Today, the factory is used to assemble some of its Model Y vehicles. Production at the factory was initially constrained by the availability of the more-efficient 4680 cells that comprise its new battery architecture. Panasonic has said it plans to resolve the bottleneck in early 2024 when it starts producing the advanced cells at the it’s building in Kansas. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said once the Texas factory achieves volume production, the company will focus on the long-delayed Cybertruck. Production of the Cybertruck, which has been postponed multiple times, is supposed to .
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Amazon quietly tests even cheaper Prime membership in India
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Jagmeet Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 14 |
Amazon is quietly piloting a new tier for its Prime membership in India, providing customers with access to popular benefits such as free two-day delivery and ad-supported Prime Video in standard definition at a lower price. The new tier, called Prime Lite, is currently available to select customers at a discounted annual price of $12 (999 Indian rupees). This is a cost-effective alternative to the regular Prime membership, which is priced at $18 (1499 Indian rupees) per year, or $2.20 (179 Indian rupees) per month. [H/T ] Amazon’s Prime membership has been available in India . It was priced at $12 a year for some time, though the company increased its pricing to $18 in December 2021. In the U.S., the Prime subscription is at $139 per year or $14.99 per month. Amazon has listed Prime Lite membership benefits on its website Amazon has the benefits of its Prime Lite membership on its Indian website and the new tier in its terms and conditions page. The new offering comes just weeks after Amazon in India. The gaming-focused service is complementary to Amazon Prime and Prime Video subscribers. The company did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.
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BlackRock acquires minority stake in SMB 401(k) provider Human Interest
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Mary Ann Azevedo
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
Investment giant BlackRock announced Friday it is taking a minority stake in venture-backed fintech startup . Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Human Interest’s digital retirement benefits platform allows users “to launch a retirement plan in minutes and put it on autopilot,” according to the company. It also touts that it has eliminated all 401(k) transaction fees. The startup told TechCrunch previously that it works with “every kind of SMB” — from tech startups to law offices, to dentists to dog walkers, to manufacturing firms, to social justice nonprofits. The San Francisco–based company has raised a total of $500 million in funding since it was founded by Paul Sawaya and Roger Lee in 2015. The Rise Fund, TPG’s global impact investing platform, led a $200 million round for Human Interest in August 2021 that propelled it to unicorn status. Other backers include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Crosslink Capital, NewView Capital, Glynn Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Wing Venture Capital, Uncork Capital, Slow Capital and Susa Ventures, among others. Since the initial closing of that round, Human Interest said that it has seen has over 400% growth in the number of customers and revenue. At the time of that raise, execs told TechCrunch that the company was targeting a traditional IPO sometime in 2023, hoping to have “$200 million+ in run-rate revenue before going public.” In August of 2021, it was at “tens of millions of run-rate revenue, and adding millions of new revenue each month, according to execs. “BlackRock has an amazing team focused on providing high-quality retirement saving and investment options. We are excited to work with BlackRock to find ways to bring retirement within reach of millions of additional workers in the coming years,” said Jeff Schneble, CEO of Human Interest, in a written statement. “We look forward to helping Human Interest close the access gap,” said Anne Ackerley, head of BlackRock’s Retirement Group, in a statement. Human Interest co-founder Lee
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Oxbotica raises $140M more as its B2B autonomous vehicle platform gains ground
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Activity in the self-driving car industry, frenetic for years, has somewhat stalled in more recent times, but a handful of the most promising companies are continuing to see their businesses grow and attract investment in the process. In one of the more recent developments, , a startup out of England that develops software to power autonomous vehicles, has closed a Series C round of $140 million, money that it will be using to continue building out services for existing clients and to drum up new business in that wake. The size of the round is big by any terms, but it’s a signal of how AI startups especially continue to fare well at the moment. It also shows the kinds of companies that are working with, and looking to back, startups breaking new ground in the space of autonomous driving. The basic model for Oxbotica — eight years old and based out of Oxford, England — is B2B: It sells and customizes its autonomous software, which it dubs “Universal Autonomy,” for a range of enterprise customers. Its premise is that its flexible technology can power whatever it is that a customer needs: navigation, perception, user interfaces, fleet management or other features needed to run self-driving vehicles in multiple environments, regardless of the hardware being used and in integration with whatever other software its customers are using. Underscoring its traction with that premise, this latest funding is coming from a mix of investors that include some of those strategic backers and customers. Japan’s Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Co., Ltd., and ENEOS Innovation Partners, the corporate VC of the mining conglomerate Eneos, are among its new investors; previous backers in this round include BGF, safety equipment group Halma, hospitality and recreation investor Hostplus, climate fund Kiko Ventures (IP Group), the online shopping company Ocado Group, internet giant Tencent, Venture Science and automotive component maker ZF. Several of these companies also invested in Oxbotica’s last round, a Series B in of $47 million. This round brings the total raised by Oxbotica to $225 million. The startup is not disclosing its valuation, but Paul Newman, the company’s CTO and co-founder, noted that the fact that it was one of the autonomous startups that’s raising big right now, and the current appetite for artificial intelligence startups that are building applications around their innovations, have contributed to a healthy number. “You should take it to be in a space that investors are valuing greatly,” he said. At a moment when businesses, consumers, investors and startups themselves are reassessing things like self-driving technology through a more pragmatic lens, asking questions about unit economics and commercial and technical viability, Oxbotica, he said, has emerged as a leader in “the application of autonomy where the world needs it.” That translated also into much shorter conversations with investors, the kind that are generally not happening across other sectors in tech. “It didn’t take that much time at all to show you can solve what is really needed versus what is not a problem at all,” CEO Gavin Jackson added. “It was a distinction investors understood quickly in the first 30 seconds of us talking to them.” Indeed, while some of the more ambitious efforts around self-driving vehicles for consumers have been or some , it’s emerged that campus-style, closed environments where it’s either more dangerous and/or less efficient to employ humans to navigate vehicles have shaped up to be some of the most popular use cases for it and others building autonomous systems. In addition to the industries of its strategic investors, other use cases where Oxbotica is building services include agriculture, airports, energy and shared passenger transportation. Not to say that things are perfect. Some (and perhaps all) of its actual commercial deployments appear to be quite medium- to long-term. One of its big milestones from this year was in May 2022, when it ran Europe’s first zero-occupancy trial (note the word trial) on a publicly accessible road. It also worked on “metaverse-based testing” and forged alliances with insurance companies. Newman admits what he described in our interview as “sticking points” that still need addressing in the very complex world of building autonomous vehicles and systems. “It’s exhilarating when we can connect fleet management to our operating system,” he told me. In its favor, once something is solved, it’s solved for everyone. A mining company’s need to integrate Oxbotica with its system to dispatch drivers into mines is the same that Ocado will have for connecting its delivery vehicles. The amount that it has proven, meanwhile, has convinced customers and backers that it’s not a matter of “if” anymore, but rather when this comes to fruition. “Oxbotica really sets itself apart from its competitors thanks to its ambitious vision to unlock Universal Autonomy,” said Mitsuru Yamaguchi, senior managing executive officer at Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance, in a statement. “We are excited to combine Oxbotica’s world-class AI and robotic techniques with our own pioneering expertise in the telematics insurance arena. This will leave us well placed to develop innovative insurance products and services which will create a safer, greener and more secure society for everyone.” “We are excited to grow our investment in Oxbotica, which has become a global leader in autonomous vehicle software,” added Erin Hallock, managing partner at bp ventures. “Our sustained support is a great example of bp ventures’ continued investment in game-changing technology companies. By leveraging automation and digital technology we believe the team can improve safety and increase efficiency across a wide range of vehicles, and support bp’s ambition to accelerate the global revolution in mobility.”
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Is it time for a Common App for startup founders?
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Natasha Mascarenhas
| 2,023 | 1 | 14 |
control capital, but one currency that they’re always in search of is an elusive, evolving one: deal flow. Betting early on the next big startup is enough to cement the entire (and then some) — and help that plucky investor make a name for themselves. This reality makes Afore Capital’s latest product launch appear all the more benevolent. The venture firm, , is launching what it describes as a common application for pre-seed startup founders. Similar to the well-known undergraduate college admission application, a startup Common App would allow founders to seamlessly pitch multiple investors using the same basic form and pitch deck — all at once. Here’s how it works: Afore Capital has an accelerator-like program, Afore Alpha, that offers a standard pre-seed deal to founders. The application includes questions about the founding team, pitch deck, recent wins, inspiration and, interestingly, whether the startup has applied to or interviewed at Y Combinator for the firm’s internal benchmarking process. Those accepted land a $1 million lead investment via a $10 million post-money SAFE, a deal that Afore notes is five times more capital and five times the valuation that accelerators like YC and Techstars offer. Now, the same founding teams that apply to Afore’s program will automatically have their application blasted to 30-some investors in the venture firm’s network. The cohort, which Afore dubs as pre-seed experts, includes Trail Run Capital’s Allison Barr Allen, The New Normal Fund’s Allison Pickens, Night Ventures’ Em Herrera and Cambrian Ventures’ Rex Salisbury.
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Lucid shares pop after exceeding EV production goal
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Lucid Group eked out a small win in 2022. The EV automaker said Thursday it produced 7,180 of its luxury Air sedans in 2022, exceeding its previously lowered guidance for the year. Lucid adjusted its guidance last fall, stating it would produce 6,000 to 7,000 vehicles in 2022. Shares popped more than 6% immediately following the news before settling. Shares are now up 2.33% to $8.12. Lucid produced 3,493 vehicles in the fourth quarter, meaning nearly half of the year’s total production numbers occurred at the end of the year. That win comes after a year of supply chain challenges that forced Lucid to slash its annual production guidance twice last year. Lucid initially planned to produce 20,000 luxury Air sedans at a factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. In February, the company . Lucid lowered that guidance again in September — this time — due to what CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson described as “extraordinary supply chain and logistics challenges.” Lucid’s delivery numbers still lag its production, suggesting the company is still working out the logistics of getting finished vehicles into the hands of customers. Lucid delivered 4,369 vehicles in 2022, about 60% of its total production. The company delivered 1,932 vehicles in the fourth quarter. Lucid is scheduled to report its fourth quarter financial results at 2:30 p.m. PST on February 22.
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5 of the best journaling apps to log your thoughts and experiences
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
As we look to the year ahead, you may be interested in creating new habits and setting goals. Journaling is a popular practice that helps you reflect on your life, while also keeping track of your goals. If you’re looking to get into journaling and would prefer to keep a digital journal instead of a physical one, you can choose from numerous journaling apps available across iPhone and Android. Whether you want to store specific memories about your everyday life or reflect on your day with a few sentences before bed, there are many apps out there that are designed to help you keep track of your thoughts and experiences. We compiled a list of some of the best ones to help you pick one that’s to your liking. Day One is a personal journaling app that is somewhat like a freeform digital diary. The app features daily prompts to keep you on top of your goals, and includes customizable templates that help you save time when journaling. Each entry automatically tracks the time, date, weather, moon phase and more. Day One lets you bring in content from other apps, like Photos and Safari. A portion of the app is designed to help users reminisce about the past. For example, there is an “On This Day” feature that allows you to revisit past memories. What makes the app unique is the ability to add tags to entries, which can make it easier to find specific entries from the past. Day One also features a map view that shows you all of the places you have journaled from. The app is a good fit for people who want an open-ended journal, as opposed to a structured format. Day One is free to use, but also offers a $3 monthly subscription that unlocks premium features. The app is available on and 5 Minute Journal The 5 Minute Journal app offers a guided gratitude journaling format. Each morning and evening, you receive specific prompts to reflect on your day and your goals. The goal of the app is to encourage you to reflect on your life in just five minutes, twice a day. In the morning, you may be asked to write about what you’re grateful for, and in the evening, you could be asked to write about some good things that happened that day. You can set daily notifications to keep up with your journaling habit. There’s also an option to receive daily inspiring quotes that you can share to your social media accounts. In addition, you can add a photo to your posts to have a visual aspect when tracking everyday moments. The app is a good fit for people who want to get into mindfulness with the help of a structured format. The 5 Minute Journal is free to use but also offers a $4.99 monthly subscription that includes additional features. The app is available on and . Daylio is an easy to use journaling app that helps you quickly track your daily mood and activities. The app is perfect for people who want to keep their journaling short and sweet, and don’t really want to write anything. If you do want to expand on an entry, you can add notes. You can pick the things you want to track, such as your social activities, hobbies, sleep, health, chores, food and more. The app also lets you create daily, weekly or monthly goals to motivate you. You can choose from preset goals, such as drinking more water or meditating, or you can create custom goals. You can also build habits and collect achievements along the way. In addition, you can back up and restore your entries on your Google Drive. Daylio is a good fit for people who want an alternative to traditional journaling apps. The app is free to use, but also offers a $2.99 monthly subscription that unlocks premium features. Daylio is available on and Memento is a multipurpose journal that can be used for many different things. You can use it as a personal life journal or as a work journal. There are several templates that you can choose from if you want to track specific things, such as health, food or travel. You can add photos and location tags to your journal entries to keep a detailed record of your everyday life. What makes Momento unique is the ability to connect the app with your social networks to automatically import your activities, photos and videos. The app also lets you relive your memories by browsing by day, month or year. There’s also a “This Day” feature that allows you to look back on what you were doing exactly a year ago. Momento is a good journaling option for people who want to capture everything about their everyday lives. The app is free to use, but also has a $2.49 monthly subscription that gives you access to more features. The app is available on only. DailyBean DailyBean is a simple app that lets you record your everyday life with a few taps in a way that almost feels like a game. You can choose what you want to track, such as your emotions, social activities, the weather, your meals, romantic life and more. To add an entry, you start off by tracking how you felt about your day using one of five mood beans. Then you can add additional details about your emotions. For example, you can note if you felt refreshed or gloomy that day. You can also track how much sleep you got that day, and there’s an option to add up to three photos to your daily entries. If you want to go beyond the simple means of tracking your day, you can add notes to your entries. The app’s calendar view also gives you an overview of how you have been feeling recently. DailyBean is a good fit for people who don’t want to spend too much time journaling and want something simple. The app costs $1.99 per month after a 7-day free trial. DailyBean is available on and .
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The mixed messaging of mixed reality
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
my first Vive experience. It was many CESes ago. I was managing a different site. Budgets were tight and I had the most on-the-ground experience, so I went solo. I had a different kind of fire back then, writing 100 stories over five days and walking every possible inch of the show floor — even the areas that devolve into row after row of knockoffs cribbed from the consumer electronics flavor of the day. A day in, I met with HTC and slipped the headset on. The din of humanity melted away. I was underwater. It was quiet, serene — meditative, even. It was dark inside there. Rays and other fish swam by, silhouetted against a navy blue backdrop. Next came the largest animal to ever exist on this planet, purring and singing serenely. A blue whale’s eye is surprisingly small in proportion to the rest of its massive form. It’s roughly the size of a grapefruit or softball. It blinked a few times, attempting to determine what it was seeing. When the demo ended, I was reluctant to take the thing off and reenter the throng. For me, this feeling is the height of virtual reality. Quietude. I paid the stupid premium to watch the new Avatar in 3D and all the other trappings. The fight scenes were fun, but I’d have been perfectly content if the whole thing had been hyper-intelligent space whales and moody adolescent Na’vi learning to swim. It doesn’t have to be underwater, of course. I’ve played around with a few different planet simulators that made me feel similarly at peace for a few, fleeting moments. In the years since, I’ve become far more disciplined in my meditation practice, and I can say that these sorts of VR demos are the closet tech has come to offering a shortcut to the sensation of a good sit. All of this, I’m sure, says far more about me than VR. People gravitate to different experiences. Chatting with HTC’s global head of Product, Shen Ye, at the show, I mentioned another VR demo for work. The company was using some kind of Olympics-style game package. One of the attendees asked if they had Office Simulator. Said he liked to use that as a baseline for testing headsets. I’ve always been fascinated by this, the use of expensive, powerful technology to do the most mundane things imaginable. Ye suggested the appeal was the ability to mess things up. It’s a freedom to do something most of us wouldn’t do in our normal, non-virtual lives. Think Grand Theft Auto, only you’re intentionally knocking over a cup full of pencils. Far be it for me to judge how other folks get their kicks. I made a point of trying the big headsets at this year’s show — specifically the Magic Leap 2, Meta Quest Pro, Vive XR Elite and PSVR2. It was a valuable exercise, in terms of comparing and contrasting technologies, and also offered some insight into the different approaches. When you put on , for example, it’s instantly clear why gaming has long been so central to the virtual reality pitch. Horizon Call of the Mountain is a terrific way to get to know the tech. The demo starts as a bag is pulled off your head. You find yourself in the rear of a three-person canoe, as it’s explained to you that you’ve recently been sprung from jail to help with a mission. I’m generally not a fan of lengthy setups, but here it makes sense. You need to get your bearings and take some time to enjoy the scenery as a menagerie of robot animals live their lives among the foliage. One of the two characters in front of you paddles slowly, so as to avoid detection from more sinister creatures. Naturally, you’re detected and all hell breaks loose. There’s a quick blackout, you get submerged and then the gameplay really starts. One downside to VR is all of those uncanny aspects of the virtual human form are on full display, as your entire field of view is occupied by the game. But the scenery is gorgeous. After climbing the side of a cliff, the Sony rep running the demo taps you on your shoulder and reminds you to take it all in. When you eventually take the headset off, you find yourself in a similar position as the whale demo, inside a packed convention center, only this time, passersby have been watching you flail around for 30 minutes. Magic Leap represents the opposite end of the spectrum with its mixed reality offering. The company’s financial struggles have been well documented. That’s resulted in two key things: First, the company just sold a majority share to . Second, . Short term, there appears to be a lot more money to be made in enterprise. A lot of corporations have deep pockets, and these headsets are just way, way too prohibitively expensive for 99% of consumers. Pricing is going to be a big issue for the foreseeable future. If there’s a sweet spot between expensive enough to be good and cheap enough to be affordable, it’s thus far been elusive. Magic Leap hasn’t struggled because it’s an inferior product. The demos I got at CES were, frankly, incredible. In one, a 3D scan of the human brain emerges, pointing the way toward use in medical settings. In another, a mountain pops up. In the foreground, a wildfire advances. Tiny helicopters circle around in the air above. While the mixed reality experience isn’t as intentionally isolating as VR, it’s still easy to get lost in. It clicks quickly. It really does feel like the future. The efficacy of the technology in the field is, perhaps, another question entirely. Remember how Microsoft’s massive military HoloLens contract bellyflopped, in part, due to the fact that light bleed on a soldier’s face could potentially be seen by the other side? That’s a dramatic example, of course, but there’s a lot of work to be done across the board to make these kinds of systems truly valuable to business. Still, of the three MR headsets I tried, Magic Leap really was the standout. It’s also more than double the price of HTC and Meta’s systems. Ye described the battle for pricing as a in our conversation. I certainly agree that the prevalence of bad AR/VR/MR systems is probably a net setback for the industry. Sure, things like Google Cardboard were very accessible, but is a bad VR experience better than no experience at all, when it comes to moving the industry forward? “The giants that are really trying to disrupt are on this race to the bottom, making cheap headsets that they’re losing money,” Ye says. “At the end of the day, what’s the cost of your personal data? We’re not a social media company. Our business model doesn’t rely on advertising revenue, so it’s not something we’re doing. We want to build good hardware.” The “personal data” bit here is, of course, a potshot at companies, like Meta, which are in the data monetizing game. Is using your personal information to subsidize access worth it? Depends on the person, I suppose. Plenty of people have given up more for less in the social media arena. One thing all parties seem to agree on is that Apple’s inevitable entry in the space — if successful — will be a net positive. Rising tide, ships, etc. It would, certainly, be validation for a technology that’s felt like the next big thing for decades. The inevitable next question then, is: Will there be enough room for everyone?
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TechCrunch+ roundup: 2022 stock options report, pivot to SaaS, crypto investor survey
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Walter Thompson
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
of time praising tech investors and entrepreneurs for their risk appetite. But why don’t we put startup workers on the same pedestal? Who’s taking on more risk: A Stanford grad who leveraged their network to raise a seed round or an immigrant worker who relocates to an expensive city for a startup job? In its latest yearly report, Secfi, which helps workers manage equity, found that . “For people working at those startups, that means some (in some cases, all) of their employee stock options spent 2022 underwater,” writes Secfi CEO Frederik Mijnhardt. Considering how central equity is to attracting tech talent, “underwater stock options have the potential to negatively impact hiring and retention across the startup ecosystem,” he writes. Investors won’t stop pushing for down rounds anytime soon and more layoffs are coming. Here’s some candid advice for late-stage startup workers: Hoping for the best is not a strategy, and your employers will say whatever they need to keep you focused and productive. If or when you get laid off, there’s a chance that a TechCrunch reporter will find out before you do. If you’ve been nurturing an idea for a company, put together a pitch deck and start reaching out now to investors. They will be more receptive than you think. That’s no hot take. Yesterday, Monique Woodard tweeted that , “a $17M seed and pre-seed fund.” Similarly, Axios reports that Social Capital is shifting the focus of its new fund to early-stage deals. Expect other VC firms to follow suit; despite the maverick myth of the tech investor, herd mentality dominates. Raising enough funds to build your MVP and strive for product-market fit might sound risky, but is it any more precarious than working at a late-stage startup in Q1 2023? Thanks for reading, Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images Many, if not most, founders who are attached to their 2021 valuations are living in a fantasy, according to Jeremy Abelson and Jacob Sonnenberg of Irving Investors. For this TC+ post, they worked out “the simple math behind how long it will take companies to price their IPO at a flat round to their previous 2021 valuations.” Companies with 75% YoY growth “can entertain the discussion,” but “if you are growing sub-30%, there is a strong chance that growing into your 2021 valuation is impossible.” Getty Images Unicorns are becoming an endangered species in Africa’s startup ecosystem, reports Tage Kene-Okafor. Although funding in the region increased slightly in 2022, “no unicorns popped up throughout the year, compared to five in 2021,” he writes. “So what happened in Africa in 2022 that made it so … weird?” / Getty Images A silver tsunami is approaching. “By 2030, the 50-plus market is projected to swell to 132 million people, who are projected to spend an average of $108 billion every year on tech products,” according to Abby Miller Levy, managing partner and founding president of Primetime Partners. Services like telemedicine and preventative care are just two aspects of the market: Longevity tech also encompasses retirement planning and other services targeted at older adults. “We see incredible founder momentum, untapped areas to build new businesses and a window to an increasingly tech-accessible, rapidly growing consumer market.” / Getty Images Can AI turn out polite pitch rejection letters, automate aspects of due diligence or draft accurate market maps? Some investors are already evaluating ways to fold ChatGPT “into their workflows to do their jobs better, smarter and maybe even cheaper,” report Natasha Mascarenhas, Christine Hall and Kyle Wiggers. They interviewed several VCs to learn more about potential use cases, some early experiments and the tech’s limitations when it comes to nuance and tone. / Getty Images Soon after launching iOS location app Burbn, its developers realized that users were mostly interested in its photo-sharing features. After making a data-driven pivot, they retooled and rebranded their app, which we now know as Instagram. ECM PCB Stator Technology was formed to build next-generation electric motors, but after studying the market more closely, CEO Brian Casey determined that a SaaS model offered clear advantages. “The market forces, customer needs and opportunities that existed for your venture at first raise and launch will almost certainly change down the road,” says Casey. / Getty Images Jacquelyn Melinek surveyed several crypto investors to learn more about what they’re looking for and how they’re advising their portfolio companies in Q1 2023: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
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Bugatti’s new electric scooter is bigger with W16 Mistral vibes
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
Somewhere hidden amid the thousands of flashy displays and exhibits at in Las Vegas was the newly upgraded 2023 Bugatti electric scooter. TechCrunch never saw it. Did anyone? Luckily, details and images of the 2023 model, a 10% larger, more premium electric scooter, have now been released into the world. , through a partnership with tech accessory company Bytech, launched a $1,200 electric scooter in 2022. The two companies paired up again for a second-generation scooter that is beefier, equipped with new features and colors, and has larger “self-repairing” tires. The 2023 scooter is 10% larger than its predecessor and is equipped with a 36-volt/15.6Ah battery and an electric motor with a maximum output of 1,000 watts, according to the companies. That battery and motor combo allows the scooter to handle up to an 18-degree incline, max speed of 22 miles per hour and can cover 35 miles on a single charge, according to the company. (That’s up from the 22-mile range in the previous model.) No word yet on the pricing for this bigger second-generation model. Perhaps this is one of those “if you have to ask” moments. Bugatti/Bytech The overall expanded size extends to a larger deck area for standing and a 10-inch tire (the previous one was nine inches) with a pneumatic tubeless design that comes with a built-in glue repair mechanism that repairs potential tire punctures. (The technology sounds a lot like tubeless tires used in bicycles. The tires can be filled with a sealant that is released and coats the interior if there is a puncture.) The new Bugatti scooter now has passcode protection, a touchscreen that displays speed, rider mode, battery life and headlight operations. The scooter is equipped with leather handle grips and comes in three colors, including a new yellow and black design that gives homage to Bugatti founder Ettore Bugatti (apparently his favorite color combo) and the W16 Mistral roadster, which has a similar color scheme. At the end of those leather handles are two small LED lights. For added safety and visibility, the turn signals are synchronized and displayed on the accompanying MIPS certified helmet.
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Daily Crunch: 2 Tesla models qualify for EV tax credits after company marks prices down by 20%
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
The team who went to CES is back at their desks. If you missed the barrage of stories — or simply couldn’t stay on top of them — wrote up an amazing . Give that a skim, and you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you didn’t miss anything major as you grab your favorite easy chair and a book to settle in for the weekend. — and It seems like SPACs aren’t completely dead yet, as World View, a company developing stratospheric balloons for Earth observation and tourism, is heading to the public markets, reports. The company announced Friday that it would merge with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Leo Holdings Corp. II And we have five more for you: / Getty Images Many, if not most, of the founders who are attached to their 2021 valuations are living in a fantasy, according to Jeremy Abelson and Jacob Sonnenberg of Irving Investors. For this TC+ post, they worked out “the simple math behind how long it will take companies to price their IPO at a flat round to their previous 2021 valuations.” Companies with 75% YoY growth “can entertain the discussion,” but “if you are growing sub 30%, there is a strong chance that growing into your 2021 valuation is impossible.” Three more from the TC+ team: Are you scooting around Paris right now? Well, this could be your last time. has a lengthy look at how as the city ponders whether to put the brakes on renewing contracts with three companies. As , “Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy one.” Meanwhile, and paired up on a scoop that Tokyo-based . And we have five more for you:
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Predictions for the longevity industry in 2023
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Abby Miller Levy
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
when we all got the wake-up call about longevity. From major reports published on the impact of longevity by the and to every leading newspaper, public discourse highlighted how our global healthcare, financial and housing infrastructure was failing to serve a rapidly growing older adult population. While this demographic data is not new, from kitchen table talk to Congress, there was a heightened call for urgency and immediate action. At Primetime, we observed this wake-up call beyond the research and media attention. First, our deal flow of early-stage businesses in the sector increased from 70 in Q4 2021 to 120 in Q4 2022. And, we were one of only three dedicated funds investing in aging and longevity when we launched in 2020, but we are now aware of at least six more agetech funds in formation, in addition to many other existing funds keen to expand their team to cover the sector. We are very optimistic for 2023 as we see incredible founder momentum, untapped areas to build new businesses and a window to an increasingly tech-accessible, rapidly growing consumer market. Here are our top predictions for the longevity industry in 2023. The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on older adult behavior with regard to technology usage, penetration of telemedicine and remote health monitoring, early retirement and financial insecurity. Sadly, one of the of the pandemic was that life expectancy in the U.S. declined to 77 from 79. This year will shift the conversation from “life span” to “health span” — how we live healthier for longer. While telemedicine usage has declined from its peak during the pandemic, the new average is much higher than before the pandemic. We are particularly excited about companies that will accelerate the growth of 100+ primary and specialty-care telemedicine startups by managing their technology, patient payments and reimbursement, as well as provider acquisition and certification. In an effort to prevent costly hospital visits, the past few years have seen a proliferation of startups offering for older adults — from transportation to home modification.
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HTC’s global head of Product on VR’s ‘race to the bottom’
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
It was the year of XR. But then, they all seem to be, these days. Strong presences from Meta, Magic Leap, Sony and HTC led the way at , with hundreds of startups picking up the rear. I was dazzled by a few demos but ultimately left wondering what form a true mainstreaming of AR/VR might ultimately take — if it ever actually takes such a form at all. There’s something about the technology that feels warm and welcoming, after a long day on your feet, glad handing your way across Las Vegas venues. Strap on a headset and feel the show floor slip away for a minute or two. I believe that most of the people who try these technologies in this context get it, but there are currently far too many barriers to getting these products on most people’s faces. Good VR is still prohibitively expensive. Content is fairly limited as well. Both of these factors are moving in the right direction, certainly, but there’s a big, open question around whether they’re doing so at a fast enough clip to hit a critical mass in this iteration of the perennial hype cycle. HTC’s approach is still baby steps. It’s the recognition that — in spite of years of hearing otherwise — true mainstream adoption is still some ways off. In the meantime, that means focusing on a core audience. It means being okay with remaining a relative niche — a far cry from the Taiwanese manufacturer’s high-flying days as a phone maker — while chipping away at those big granite boulders standing between it and the general public. For HTC, the Vive XR Elite was the star of the show. At $1,099, it’s a few hundred dollars less expensive than Meta’s Quest Pro but still way too expensive to see it as some kind of breakthrough for the industry at large. “This is for an audience that wants an upgraded experience,” Shen Ye, the company’s senior director, global head of Product said in an interview with TechCrunch, “gamers and just people who want a good headset that is comfortable.” At this point in the evolutionary process, it might be unfair to put the bar for success at an XR headset in every home. Leap Motion’s well-publicized struggles are a decent barometer here. Even more so is the fact that the company made an outright pivot into enterprise. There’s a lot of money to be made selling product to businesses — certainly more than currently appears to be kicking around for pure consumer plays. HTC has undoubtedly made some impressive gains here. I can’t say I spent a ton of time in the XR Elite, but the headset was as comfortable and engaging as advertised. It’s a piece of the puzzle that has long felt like an afterthought for manufacturers. It’s a strange thing to overlook in a piece of hardware designed to sit on your face for long stretches. HTC Ye compares potential buyers to gamers who have been patiently — and frustratingly — awaiting the arrival of a pro version of Nintendo’s popular convertible console “To this day, people still want a Switch Pro,” he tells TechCrunch. “They want something portable, but they want something better. Mobile VR is currently like that. There isn’t a decent upgrade. People who want a good experience are stuck with these products that are racing to the bottom.” The “race to the bottom” he’s referring to here is precisely that main talking point connected to mainstream adoption: price. The market has been flooded with low-cost VR solutions for years, from Google Cardboard/Daydream to Samsung Gear VR to thousands of products and companies you’ve never heard of. One can credibly make the argument that these things ultimately did more harm than good. They did a fine job getting some version of virtual reality into a lot of hands, but when that experience isn’t a particularly good one, it’s easy to imagine those people writing off paying a lot more money for VR in the future. “I do think that one day there will be much cheaper headsets,” Ye says of HTC’s efforts. “But right now, our focus is on how we better drive the market to make it better, to be more inclusive, to have better experiences.” One thing is for certain: HTC is committed to VR on a level few are. Vive hardware and related software/metaverse technologies are the company’s primary focus, as its phone business has slowed to a trickle (remember last year’s “metaverse” phone, the Desire 22 Pro?). The company’s future hinges on its ability to push VR/XR forward. It can be a tricky line to walk, being all in on a technology while remaining pragmatic about the speed and scope of its potential growth. Many in the industry are anticipating validation from Apple in particular. The hope is that the company will enter the AR or XR category with guns blazing, and the buzz will be a tide that raises all boats. “I think the nice thing about an Apple coming in is that they’re not a social media company,” says Ye. “The giants that are really trying to disrupt are on this race to the bottom, making cheap headsets that they’re losing money. At the end of the day, what’s the cost of your personal data? We’re not a social media company. Our business model doesn’t rely on advertising revenue, so it’s not something we’re doing. We want to build good hardware.”
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Bad Meta! and other TC news
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Podcast. This week Christine Hall is here to talk about how VCs are using ChatGPT and Natasha Lomas comes on to explain why Meta is in regulatory hot water. And as always, Darrell breaks down the biggest stories in tech. Articles from the episode: More from TechCrunch
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Meta’s ads being found unlawful in the EU is a warning to other ad-funded platforms
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Elon Musk should take note of a recent before forging ahead with in the European Union. To wit: In , following the publication of against Meta by EU privacy regulators applying the to Facebook and Instagram — decisions which include a total of around $410 million in fines (still with a third decision against WhatsApp due shortly), along with orders to correct its unlawful data processing within three months — t “The EDPB binding decisions clarify that Meta unlawfully processed personal data for behavioural advertising. Such advertising is not necessary for the performance of an alleged contract with Facebook and Instagram users. These decisions may also have an important impact on other platforms that have behavioural ads at the centre of their business model,” said EDPB chair, Andrea Jelinek, in a statement. The Board also dubbed the relationship between Meta and its users “imbalanced”, citing “grave breaches” of transparency obligations it said had “impacted the reasonable expectations of the users”, as well as criticizing the tech giant for presenting its services to users “in a misleading manner” — which led to the EDPB also finding a breach of the GDPR’s fairness principle as well as transparency failings. Behavioral refers to a form of targeted advertising whereby the choice of ad served is determined as a result of tracking and profiling individual users via their online activity (and sometimes also by combining offline data-sets to further enrich these per-user profiles) — so, in EU data protection law terms, by processing personal data — an activity that requires a valid legal basis. Other types of targeted advertising which do not require processing personal data (such as contextually targeted advertising) are available. Hence Meta’s claim that intrusive tracking and profiling of individuals is a necessary core component of its services also failed to pass muster with the Board. The EDPB’s remarks today — of the “important impact” the Meta ads decision could have on other platforms — also look relevant for — saying it planned to change the legal base for “personalized” advertising from consent to legitimate interest — before quickly freezing the move in the face of warnings from privacy regulators. Any move by TikTok now to revive such a switch — with these two major GDPR decisions against Meta’s ‘forced consent’ standing — would only invite swift regulatory scrutiny so such a shift to its claimed legal basis is surely highly unlikely (not least as the video sharing platform is — as the Commission starts applying new oversight powers on digital platforms under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA)). So just because Facebook has — — processed and profited off of Europeans’ data by running unlawful ads does not mean other ad-funded platforms are going to get the same free ride from the bloc’s regulators. Enforcement is here at last. (For the record, Meta has said it will appeal the two GDPR decisions. It also they mean it has no option but to ask European users for their consent to its behavioral ads — pointing out that the regulation allows for “ ” of legal bases but without specifying which of these limited (and bounded) alternatives to consent might fly… So, er, public interest behavioral Facebook ads anyone?!) Twitter, meanwhile, has also just announced its — requiring users to actively swipe to view their usual chronological feed — which could raise questions over the legal basis the company is relying upon to push content personalization in front of users who may not want it. So there’s no shortage of interesting considerations flowing from Meta’s GDPR spanking. This new GDPR enforcement dynamic (if we dare call it that) presents regional opportunities for other approaches (and innovation) in the area of targeted advertising — whether that’s tracking based ads Or forms of ad targeting that . (Or, well, which seek to claim they don’t.) And we’re already seeing some high level moves to capitalize on the slow decline/demise of , such as Google’s plan to switch away from individual-level ad targeting to alternative ‘ — or a (which the carriers say would limit targeting to first party data and gather explicit user consent to the ads per advertiser/brand). How Meta gets its ad-targeting operation in legal order, meanwhile, remains to be seen. But, well, fixing that’s never cared to comply seems like it could be very expensive… The EDPB’s press release today also addresses the reason why it instructed the DPC to investigate Meta’s processing of sensitive data — something that has led the Irish regulator to accuse the Board of jurisdictional overreach and announce that it’s taking legal action to try to annul that component of its instruction. On this, the Board said it examined whether the complaints against the legality of Meta’s ads had been addressed with due diligence by the DPC. “The complainant had raised the fact that sensitive data is processed by Meta IE [Ireland]. However, the IE DPA [aka the DPC] did not assess processing of sensitive data and therefore, the EDPB did not have sufficient factual evidence to enable it to make findings on any possible infringement of the controller’s obligations under Art. 9 GDPR [which deals with the processing of special category data],” it writes. “As a result, the EDPB disagreed with the IE DPA’s proposed conclusion that Meta IE is not legally obliged to rely on consent to carry out the processing activities involved in the delivery of its Facebook and Instagram services, as this could not be categorically concluded without further investigations. Therefore, the EDPB decided that the IE DPA must carry out a new investigation.” The DPC has frequently been accused of ‘fiddling round the edges’ of GDPR complaints — such as by opening narrower enquiries than complainants had called for (or not opening a probe at all). It is also being (and has ) in a couple of cases. So it’s certainly notable (and awkward for Ireland) that the EDPB’s binding decision concludes the Irish regulator failed to investigate elements of Meta’s data processing it says were required for it to reach its proposed conclusion that Meta was not legally obliged to rely on consent. As black marks against the DPC’s approach to GDPR enforcement go, this schooling from the Board is a major addition to Dublin’s tally. Still, the EDPB’s instruction that the DPC open a whole new investigation of Meta’s data processing has invited some quizzical attention — given EU law provides for the independence of data protection authorities. On this, noyb’s honorary chairman, Max Schrems — a long time critic of (especially) the DPC’s approach to GDPR enforcement but also, more generally, how poorly resources EU DPAs are and how difficult it is for Europeans to exercise their rights — suggests it still shows the system does not work. Few would say GDPR enforcement is smooth sailing — but heading towards the fifth birthday of the regulation coming into application (this May) there is now a regular flow of decisions, including with implications for rights hostile business models. So the needle appears to be moving — even though the story rarely ends at a final decision (since years of legal appeals can follow). A lot of attention to regulatory-working in the EU this year will also swivel onto the European Commission — to see how it enforces two newer regulations on larger digital platforms (the aforementioned DSA and DMA); a new centralized enforcement structure devised by the bloc’s lawmakers that was undoubtedly informed by years of criticism of slow and weak GDPR enforcement. So the legacy of Meta’s lawless ads, and Ireland’s dilly-dallying to enforce against its consentless tracking-and-profiling, is already a lasting one.
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All US domestic flights grounded as key FAA system goes down
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Flights across the U.S. — including potentially all that fly through any domestic U.S. airspace — are delayed this morning as a major system outage means the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) can’t send out key hazard notices to commercial pilots. The FAA says it’s working to resolve the issue, but the widespread impact continues as of early Wednesday morning. The agency said via Twitter at just before 6:30 AM ET on Wednesday that it (aka NOTAM) — an alert that came after many passengers were already reporting delays to their flights at airports across the country. The Notice to Air Missions System provides key real-time updates about potential flight hazards, as well as any airspace restrictions in place. Flights across the country appear to be grounded as they wait for the system to come back online. pending further updates from the FAA. International flights going into the country are also impacted according to user reports via social media. The agency said via its own account that it has ordered airlines to pause all their flights domestically until 9 AM ET, as it works “to validate the integrity of flight and safety information” after earlier noting that it has started to bring elements of the system back online. The FAA issued a failure notice for the system early on Wednesday, though no cause has currently been given. The White House says that on the situation and that “no evidence of a cyberattack” exists at this time. , “all flights currently in the sky are safe to land,” despite the issues and ongoing attempts to resolve the problem. It also reported that it’s “making progress” to restore NOTAM and that departures have already resumed at two airports, Newark and Atlanta, and that others should be back in progress as of 9 AM ET. The FAA now says normal operations are resuming and the grounding of flights was officially lifted as of 8:50 AM ET. It has not yet revealed any details regarding the cause, but says it’s looking into that.
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Major EU privacy decisions against Meta’s legal basis for ads raise fresh complaints
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Privacy watchers keen to dig into the regulatory reasoning underpinning two major decisions against Meta — which struck down Facebook and Instagram’s claim of contractual necessity as a valid legal basis to run behavioral advertising on users in the European Union — can now sift through the detail after the complainant, privacy rights group , published the decision documents online. You can find the 188-page and the 196-page — both of which feature redactions made by Meta as it was allowed to remove commercially sensitive information so some juicy details are missing. (For example, a paragraph in the Facebook document where the company provides an estimate of how long it will take it to apply the compliance orders has been blacked out, along with another sentence from this section in which it details the work involved. So we can only speculate whether words have actually been covered here — or just a line of screaming emojis.) Meta’s lead data protection regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), issued the final decisions but only after more than a year of dispute with over EU DPAs who disagreed with its (which did not object to Meta claiming contractual necessity to microtarget ads); and, at the last, after incorporating a binding decision by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) — which settled the dispute by forcing the DPC to reject Meta’s claim of contractual necessity. The EDPB also required Meta to substantially increase the size of the financial penalty issued to Meta for breaching the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). So while the Irish DPC’s name and branding is on these documents they are a product of a co-regulatory process that’s baked into the GDPR, via a cooperation mechanism for dealing with cross-border cases. Details in the document are already powering fresh attacks on the DPC over its much critized approach to GDPR enforcement — with noyb questioning why the Irish regulator has amended the (binding) EDPB decision — which it says requested a t It also takes issue with the DPC apparently narrowing the scope of the EDPB decision — to limit it to Noyb also raises concerns over the level of financial sanction imposed by the Irish regulator — which the DPC was required by the EDPB to reassess and increase substantially in line with its binding decision that there was a breach of legal basis (and of the GDPR’s fairness principle), not only of transparency as the DPC initially decided. The privacy group points out that the Irish regulator has opted to apply the smallest sanction in relation to “the actual unlawful processing of personal data of millions of EU users” — just €60 million in the case of Facebook and €50 million in the case of Instagram, which represents a tiny fraction of the revenues Meta has been able to generate over this period while unlawfully processing people’s data. Noyb goes on to warn that the DPC’s decisions may not end a case which has already racked up more than 4.5 years since the original “forced consent” complaints were filed back in May 2018 — as it argues the regulator’s findings don’t appear to fully deal with its complaints as the decisions focus on personalized ads and don’t cover issues like the use of personal data for improving the Facebook platform or for personalized content (which also require a valid legal basis under EU law). Another issue noyb highlights is the DPC’s refusal to carry out additional investigations asked for by the EDPB — something the DPC is challenging as jurisdictional overreach and seeking to annul, as we reported . It also flags a further conflict which it says could lead it to appeal the decision — pointing out that The DPC has been contacted for comment.
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Inside Secfi’s 2022 state of stock options equity report
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Frederik Mijnhardt
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
a painful one for startups and their employees. Venture capitalists tightened their investments, thousands of people lost their jobs and company valuations stalled or fell amid a protracted bear market. An estimated 24% of startups on the Secfi platform reduced their fair market valuations in 2022, according to an internal analysis. For people working at those startups, that means some (in some cases, all) of their employee stock options spent 2022 underwater. Separately, a Secfi analysis of 1,502 funding rounds at late-stage startups since March 2021 finds that startups are raising more flat rounds and down rounds than before. A number of startups that raised money in 2022 did not disclose their post-money valuations, suggesting that the true number of startups that lowered their valuations in the past 12 months could be even higher than publicly reported. Employee stock options are a meaningful factor in startup compensation, and underwater stock options have the potential to negatively impact hiring and retention across the startup ecosystem. An analysis of more than 4,300 stock option grants uploaded to the Secfi platform in 2022 shows that nearly one of every four startups reduced their fair market valuations at some point during the year. The highest-profile example of this phenomenon was , which raised venture capital in mid-2021 at a $45.6 billion valuation but was forced to raise a new round of funding in mid-2022 at a $6.7 billion valuation — an 85% decline. Other large companies that cut their valuations (without raising funding) include Instacart and Checkout.com. Stock options are a high-risk, high-reward form of compensation and remain one of the most compelling drivers of startup employment and retention. An analysis by Carta of employment data from 2018 the average startup employee works for just two years at a company before jumping to their next opportunity. Underwater stock options are a problem for people who joined a startup in 2020 or 2021, as they’re now finding that their shares are worth less than when they were hired. The average startup employee in Silicon Valley received 12% to 14% of the value of their salary in the form of stock options, . In other words, a startup worker who earns a $150,000 annual salary could expect to earn an average of $21,000 worth of stock options as part of their total compensation package. When a startup is successful, stock options rise in value — in some cases, by many multiples. Stock options make up 86% of the total net worth of the average startup employee, according to financial data that employees voluntarily shared with Secfi. Underwater stock options can impact employee retention, as employees instead look to other startups with a stronger valuation growth. As a result, startup leaders who want to retain their employees may need to consider cash and retention bonuses, higher salaries or a stock option repricing program. Despite economic headwinds, the cost to exercise stock options remains high. In 2022, the average Secfi client required $846,000 to exercise their stock options and pay associated taxes. Like in previous years, taxes continue to make up the majority of the total cost to exercise. Secfi High costs remain a major reason why startup employees fail to exercise their stock options.
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Kenya’s Xetova exploring market data gaps in Africa to boost trade insight access
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Annie Njanja
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
Africa is seen as the next trade frontier, following the coming into force of The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which created the single largest unrestricted trade region in the world. However, while trade liberalization is meant to spur intra-regional commerce, its take-off is dependent on key infrastructure investments to ensure supply chain efficiency. More progress is linked to how quickly market information circulates to key stakeholders, including traders, regulators and financiers. Realizing emerging opportunities, , a Kenyan startup, is deploying technologies that make information on market opportunities accessible to traders. It is now building a network of large, medium and small enterprises, which will be tapped to draw insights and foresights on market opportunities and risks. “We are building a trust network that, for example, allows a company in Kenya to know who to work with in a country like Nigeria, South Africa. This trust network can only be built with the ability to collect verifiable data,” said , Xetova founder and CEO, adding that his company is working on the largest trade intelligence and supply chain support network. To ensure that trade trends, reports and highlights are authentic, Xetova, which was founded in 2019, is positioning its network on data from its insights service, which businesses use to interpret data on supply chains, spend, revenue and general management performance into actionable insights. The insights service is the first in Xetova’s suite that clients sign up before subscribing to others that include trade financing and linkages to wide trade networks. Mwalo’s interest in African trade was driven by research he was part of that showed that entrepreneurs have a high chance of success if they gain access to large procurement deals and less fragmented distribution channels. “That finding made me curious about B2B trade, large supply chains and how entrepreneurs in Africa access large procurement opportunities. I developed this theory that data can significantly drive trade and how businesses access opportunities, manage risk and relate to each other,” said Mwalo. “Then my PhD thesis explored ways of getting B2B data accessible in the sense that everybody in Africa who’s trying to do business should actually access data on opportunity, and risk and network. This information should be readily available to the market and where it is available, it significantly changes how trade is done, because at the end of the day, we perceive risk differently,” he said. Mid his studies, Mwalo took time off to join Kountable, a financier that provided loans to SMEs that are locked out of formal institutions because of lack of collateral. In his two years as a Kountable executive, he says, they financed $32 million worth of deals, supporting 200 entrepreneurs in several countries including Kenya and Rwanda. It, however, proved hard for them to scale lending, even with a $150 million line of credit, due to lack of verifiable data on the operations of many enterprises. “Initially, business went really well, and the uptake was fantastic. The challenge came when we needed to scale beyond the 200. Every time we started engaging businesses outside our network, we lost money. Their needs were growing too fast, faster than our ability to do due diligence,” Mwalo said. “That point is when I realized the biggest issue in trade within Africa is not capital, it is information asymmetry in terms of where value, security and returns are,” he said. This experience drove him to launch Xetova to ensure that businesses understand and unlock the value of the data they possess, use it to inform solutions for their challenges and demonstrate how it can be harnessed at scale for trade intelligence that can open up new partnerships and bigger markets. This is in addition to making it possible for businesses to access loans based on their own data and insights, which are used by lenders within Xetova’s networks to offer tailor-made loans. Besides serving enterprises, Xetova counts government agencies among its clients, with whom it is working to improve efficiency in healthcare. For such entities it provides insights on consumption, distribution, procurement spending, supplier and payment performance. The company claims to have booked $2.45 million in revenues by December last year, and facilitated trade finance to the tune of $7 million. Xetova is looking to grow its clientele base from the current 60 large enterprises to 300 in the next 18 months. The firm is targeting to sign up 10 major distributors in Africa, to increase access to over 10 countries from the current seven and to facilitate $20 million in trade finance. Xetova, which raised $4 million in an equity-debt seed round last year led by South Africa’s TRT Investments, is also launching a fellowship program for potential investors.
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Dear Sophie: Any tips for presenting a strong H-1B case? What if I’m not selected?
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Sophie Alcorn
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . Dear Proficient, Thank you for asking the two questions that I’m sure are on every first-time H-1B candidate’s mind. Even though the H-1B lottery isn’t until March, it’s important for companies and their immigrant employees to start getting things in order right now. With the tech layoffs, there is a chance of fewer registrations for the upcoming lottery, which could lead to higher chances of selection. If you’re selected in the lottery, your company will be notified by March 31 and will have until June 30 to file your petition for the H-1B specialty occupation visa. As always, I suggest that employers work with their immigration attorneys to establish a strategy now. If you are selected in the lottery, your company will need to craft a strong H-1B for you with its legal counsel. Crafting a strong H-1B petition begins with getting a Labor Condition Application (LCA) approved by the U.S. Department of Labor. An approved LCA is required for all H-1B petitions. The Labor Department typically decides on whether to certify an LCA within 10 business days. For the LCA, your employer must promise to pay you at least the prevailing wage based on your position and work location and ensure that your employment conditions won’t negatively affect American workers. Employers don’t need to submit evidence to the Labor Department with the LCA, but they must post a copy of the H-1B notification, which can be done electronically, keep all supporting documents in a file and make it available for public viewing. Joanna Buniak / For the H-1B specialty occupation visa, your employer will need to fill out (Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker) and include evidence and supporting documents. Crafting a strong H-1B petition also requires the following:
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Daily Crunch: Pet tech startup Digitail fetches $11M Series A led by Atomico
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Hello, dear readers! We’re back once again ( ) with a wall of great tech news stories. Plug in some headphones and bop your head to that song while you catch up on what’s happening out there in the wider worlds. Remember: There’s no such thing as a standing desk. It’s a dancing desk. Aw yessss. (We may have had a little bit too much coffee this morning. That might explain our ill behavior.) — and The as the country gradually phases out its draconian zero-COVID policy, which has caused disruptions in businesses of all kinds and kept the country’s borders shut for the last three years, reports. For venture capitalists, the pandemic has been a tumultuous ride. Tony Wu, a partner at Northern Light Venture Capital, a China-focused VC firm with $4.5 billion assets under management, calls 2022 the “toughest” in his 15 years of investing in Chinese startups. Another fistful of headlines for your edification: Getty Images Unicorns are becoming an endangered species in Africa’s startup ecosystem, reports Tage Kene-Okafor. Although funding in the region increased slightly in 2022, “no unicorns popped up throughout the year, compared to five in 2021,” he writes. “So what happened in Africa in 2022 that made it so … weird?” And there’s more for our trusty TC+ subscribers: We started some of this yesterday, but brings us a warning article to other ad-funded programs to take heed of in the European Union. She writes that “just because Facebook has — — processed and profited off of Europeans’ data by running unlawful ads does not mean other ad-funded platforms are going to get the same free ride from the bloc’s regulators. Enforcement is here at last.” And we have five more for you:
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Biden’s call to ‘unite against big tech abuses’ sure sounds familiar
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
President Biden putting Big Tech on notice that his administration was working — in fact, has been working — to rein in its worst abuses. But these “broad principles for reform” sound pretty familiar. The op-ed begins by thanking the tech sector for its hard work (and contributions to the GDP, it is understood) and immediately begins deploring its depredations of children and the otherwise vulnerable. “I’m concerned about how some in the industry collect, share and exploit our most personal data, deepen extremism and polarization in our country, tilt our economy’s playing field, violate the civil rights of women and minorities, and even put our children at risk,” writes the president. He cites three major areas where the federal government needs to intervene: privacy, algorithmic responsibility, and competition. Regarding privacy, his worry is that companies “collect, use and share highly personal data,” mostly for ad targeting. He says the White House is “developing new privacy rules for commercial data.” Good! The industry has been — sure, it was because they didn’t like California’s, but they’ve definitely been asking for it. The time to establish these was a long, long time ago — they take forever to figure out and then lead to dozens of court cases that define their finer contours, as we’ve seen in the European Union’s GDPR efforts. We’ve seen privacy bills come and go, but like everything else, they fall prey to partisan politics and that seems unlikely to change. But at least we’re getting a preview of what challenges await with the and other state-led efforts. And the FTC may be gearing up to take its shot too. The second matter is that tech must “take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use.” For this he proposes reforming Section 230, which is a can of worms everyone has had on their desk for years but no one seems to want to open. Do too little and nothing changes; do too much and the tech sector falters under a hail of lawsuits. Easier to complain than try to thread that needle, it seems. Transparency of algorithms may be easier to accomplish, especially if one were to connect it with AI-related policy and questions of protected classes and categories. Last is the need to “bring competition back to the tech sector.” On this Biden is clearly banking on the ascendant Lina Khan, FTC chair and archenemy to , , and now . “We recently secured a significant funding boost for our antitrust enforcers,” Biden writes. Khan and others have complained that the FTC has lacked the funding, authority, and headcount (not to mention inclination, under some administrations) to take on industry giants buying up competitors like it’s nothing. Spinning up a new antitrust team with a new antitrust philosophy (ask Khan about it) could actually accomplish what Biden wants. But of course this is hardly the first time someone has complained about things like Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp. Systemic advantages awarded to those who can afford to lobby the government have allowed all this to happen — don’t forget that many of the “great American companies…smothered by the dominant incumbents” came and went while Biden was vice president or senator. So we’ve heard this song before. What comes next? Usually nothing. While Biden’s op-ed adds nothing to the debate over tech’s excesses and potential remedies, it isn’t meant to. Instead, it serves as a public declaration of his (grudging) opposition to the problems of the tech world. “You brought this on yourselves, my friends,” he seems to say. Perhaps this legislative period will be full of the long-promised nips and tucks tech has desperately needed and indeed asked for. Unfortunately, as he notes in the last paragraph: “There will be many policy issues we disagree on in the new Congress, but…let’s unite behind our shared values” for tech reform, he writes. Good luck, Mr. President! This time for sure.
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After struggling with consumers, Magic Leap hang its hopes on enterprise
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 7 |
Something wasn’t working. In late 2020, Magic Leap announced a major change spearheaded by incoming CEO, Peggy Johnson. “[W]hat I found was nothing was really broken,” she at the time, “It just needed to have a bit more focus.” From the outside, certainly, it seemed like typically understated chief executive speak. It doesn’t take a business genius to point out that things weren’t working. It wasn’t a reflection on the technology, certainly. Those who’ve managed to try Magic Leap’s mixed reality headsets have been impressed. I spent time with the product at CES this week, and it certainly like the future. But the company ran afoul of an issue that plagued countless others in this category — the consumer audience for a $2,300 mixed-reality headset simply wasn’t there. So it did what any extremely well-funded but struggling company does. Magic Leap pivoted. It suddenly found itself in the business of business, chasing the same enterprise audience that lured in Microsoft and Epson. The pivot was very much on display on the show floor this week. The demos weren’t games; they were the output of developers looking toward profoundly serious use cases. In one, a 3D scan of the human brain emerges, pointing the way toward use in medical settings. In another, a mountain pops up. In the foreground, a wildfire advances. Tiny helicopters circle around in the air above. CTO Daniel Diez tells TechCrunch that the shift in focus began in earnest at the tail end of 2019. The timing was certainly fortuitous, as the prolonged financial slowdown of the past three years have made a $1,000+ item of luxury technology even more unattainable for the average consumer. “We really saw that there was a value to be derived from AR much sooner from enterprise,” Diez explains. “The feedback we were getting from them was that. It also gave us insight into how the product needed to evolve to be truly purpose-built for enterprise, and that’s what you see in the Magic Leap 2.” While others, like Meta and HTC, are doing their best to be all things to all people in terms of content, Magic Leap appears to be in no specific rush to get their systems into the hands of more consumers — or at least not to make the sorts of sacrifices to the hardware required in order to get there. “We see an immediate opportunity in enterprise,” says CTO, Julie Larson-Green. “I think on consumer, you kind of have to have some other consumer content business alongside that, really. So we’re not really focused on that side right now.” In recent weeks, the company has made more headlines for its fundraising than any specific piece of content or hardware. At the tail end of the year, a controlling stake through its public investment firm. The new influx of funds joined nearly $3.5 billion previously raised by the company with help from Google, Alibaba and Qualcomm, among others. Magic Leap’s public struggles, coupled with massive fundraising, have created some open-ended questions about the firm’s future. Asked whether recent funding will have a direct impact on Magic Leap’s future roadmap, Diez says, “We’re very lucky to have a very supportive investor base. They are very much in line with our vision of really focusing on enterprise and making sure the devices can amplify the ability of folks to do really complicated things. Our board and our financiers are all on the same page.”
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DeFi startups need to experiment with new use cases and build solutions, investors say
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Although the crypto ecosystem has faced its fair share of bumps, venture capitalists are still bullish about the space and continue to look at decentralized finance (DeFi) as a promising opportunity. TechCrunch about the road ahead for crypto adoption, their sentiment toward DeFi and how the focus in that subsector (by both investors and founders) is growing. The total value locked (TVL) on DeFi protocols has fallen roughly 77% from all-time highs around $180 billion in December 2021 to about $41 billion on Wednesday, according to DeFiLlama . But that hasn’t stopped founders, developers and investors from diving into the space. “While TVL as a metric certainly has its flaws, we think it’s still a decent measure of activity in the sector,” said Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures. “As TVL increases, we also think it’s possible that total market cap could follow.” Paul Veradittakit, general partner of Pantera, echoed that sentiment. “Naturally, we expect that in the next five years, as DeFi matures and begins catering to (as well as capturing share from) its TradFi counterparts, the TVL metric could easily surpass the $500 billion mark.” Anywhere from 20% to 50% of crypto-related pitches today are DeFi-focused, five of the investors surveyed said. With all these DeFi startups launching and pitching to investors, it’s hard to determine what it takes to stand out. “As venture investors, we’re looking to back innovators who are not afraid to experiment and create new products,” Veradittakit said. But DeFi’s growth will depend on more than just rising use cases, according to Alex Marinier, founder and general partner at New Form Capital. “It will also be influenced by developments in infrastructure, regulation and financial innovation.” In general, DeFi primitives like automated market makers and lending protocols are “established and crowded,” said David Gan, founder and general partner of OP Crypto. “Founders need to go back and think about the true use cases and pain points for non-crypto/non-technical users, and then build solutions and user experiences.” Founders should highlight unique technology and clear advantages for a specific use case, Marinier said. “Too many projects are simply positioning themselves as ‘X protocol, but on Y chain,’ without offering anything truly innovative or novel.” Investors are also interested in projects that strategize or connect to institutional players. As DeFi grows, so does the need for its products to realistically accommodate institutions, Anderson said. Unfortunately, institutional players might be spooked by the in 2022, like in May and crypto exchange in November. So these investors are unlikely to return for a few years, Anderson said. “As a result, we’re focusing more on projects that are thinking about addressing new, more institutional users and markets,” Anderson added. Gan agreed: “We’re investing in the building blocks for institutional adoption, projects that fill the gap in the completeness of DeFi and protocols geared toward non-crypto users.”
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Nvidia unveils new AI workflows to help the retail industry with loss prevention
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
In a recent episode of “ ” a woman put a chainsaw down her pants in an effort to steal it. And you might have caught the video of the . Videos like this are all over the internet, and the retail industry is reporting that theft continues to rise. attributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit losses in 2022 to organized retail theft, while recently said increased thefts may result in higher prices and store closures. “Shrinkage” is the term retailers use to convey losses due to product theft, damage or misplacement. The National Retail Federation reported that in the past five years, shrinkage has increasingly become a $100 billion problem for retailers. Digging into shrinkage, the NRF says . Enter Nvidia. Known for developing and manufacturing graphics processing units, the company announced three new Retail AI Workflows as part of its These workflows are meant to help developers more quickly build and deploy applications designed to prevent theft. The workflows are built on Nvidia’s Metropolis Microservices, a low- or no-code way of building artificial intelligence applications and then integrating them with a company’s legacy systems, like point-of-sale, said Azita Martin, Nvidia’s vice president for AI for retail, CPG and QSR, in a pre-brief with media this week. The three tools include: “We primarily focused on the brands that are manufactured by consumer packaged goods companies, but it can be customized for a specific retailer,” Martin added. “They can use synthetic data generation and some additional data to further train it for all of the different types of products that that particular retailer is selling in their stores.” “As customers are moving throughout the store, if products are being moved, it tracks those products or even tracks shopping baskets or carts from camera to camera,” Martin explained. “It also gives retailers an overview of the customer journey throughout the store. So this is another area where we see tremendous amounts of interest from retailers.” “Using a heat map, you know where your customers are mostly going and what are the most popular paths for customers,” Martin said. “That allows you to optimize the assortment and merchandising in the store to increase revenue.” Additional details on these new tools will be unveiled at the National Retail Federation Conference in New York beginning January 15.
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Why the time is right for a Mercedes-Benz charging network
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Tim Stevens
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
When your Rolex is due for servicing, you’ll probably take the time to take it to a specialty service center. Likewise, you’re not going to trust the repair of the crimson soles of your Louboutins to the corner shoe-shiner. So why, then, should you be forced to use any plebeian charging network for your premium EV? Mercedes-Benz is hoping that its well-heeled clientele will want to give their luxury EVs the same sort of premium treatment. At in Las Vegas last week, Mercedes announced the creation of a bespoke for its growing line of EVs — all-electric offerings that will make up the company’s . The $1 billion initial investment, split with Mn8 Energy, will create an initial 400-plus charging sites across North America, with an eventual 2,000 sites globally offering 10,000 total chargers. By way of context, that’s one quarter the size of Tesla’s current Supercharger network, a charging offering that has taken a decade to build. TechCrunch spoke with Magnus Östberg, chief software officer, and Markus Schäfer, chief technology officer, for more details on why Mercedes is jumping into EV charging and it how it will execute its plan. Schäfer said the final cost to build the network will total a “couple billion dollars” based on the scope of the initial investment (“you can do the math,” he said). “We think it’s absolutely worthwhile,” he said during an interview at CES 2023. “If you’re an EV driver, you know what kind of experience you have, especially in the holidays and traveling with an EV. And that’s not Mercedes-like.” Though the initial investment is steep, Schäfer said it’s just another big spend the company is prepared to make to own the EV space. “We talk about tens of billions in cost of transforming the company,” he said. “It was not our first priority to deal with the raw material supply chain or with cell-making, or with charging in the first place.” But, these are things Mercedes has had to do, partnering with and others for supply of raw materials, and committing to build globally. Mercedes is now turning its attention to a charging network because nobody else has created a network they’re happy with. “We thought really some other entities would take care [of it] and you know, energy companies running gas stations today would take care [of it]. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen,” Schäfer lamented. Of course, plunking down the billions in capital needed to build an EV charging network is just one piece — albeit an important one — to successfully complete such an ambitious project. Where these chargers are located and how they are maintained are the other critical components to the EV charging network pie. Both CSO Östberg and CTO Schäfer said that dealers will have input here, but that customer density and usage patterns will be the most significant factors in selecting locations. “We know their preferences in traveling,” Schäfer said, “and that’s exactly going to be the basis for selecting the perfect site.” Reading between the lines, that means this will not be a network designed to fill gaps in existing charging networks. It’ll instead be a premium choice offered in population-dense areas, places surely already well-serviced by Electrify America, Tesla’s Supercharger network and others. Östberg said each spot will be selected to create a “luxury Mercedes experience,” ensuring none are installed at a “scary location.” Proximity to good food will be a priority, while each location will have plenty of light and surveillance systems. Mercedes said it will invest to ensure each location is up to snuff, buying or leasing land as needed. Chargers will be high-speed, 350 kW to start but upgradeable even beyond that, and Mercedes-Benz is taking steps to ensure up-time, the bane of many an EV road trip. ChargePoint will provide the physical chargers and the back-end to monitor them. Schäfer said Mercedes and partner Mn8 will ensure spare parts are readily available nearby, along with on-call technicians to install them, but that it’ll be up to ChargePoint to keep the software side operational. That’s a reason for concern. When chargers break, it’s usually the software at fault. A 2022 survey of 657 Bay Area chargers found that 22.7% were non-functional due to various system failures like non-responsive touchscreens. Only 0.9% of the chargers had an obvious hardware fault like a broken connector. The final luxury aspect here will be availability. While these chargers will be open for use by any EV, Mercedes-Benz owners will have the extra privilege of a charger reservation system. Today’s MBUX navigation already suggests charging stops along the way and preconditions the battery when approaching one. When selecting a Mercedes-owned charger, the car will take the additional step of saving them a spot. “If you’re in a traffic jam and, you know, you can’t make it to this time, the system will know that you’re arriving later, and it’s going to update your reservation,” Schäfer said. This, of course, will only happen if you’re using the integrated Mercedes navigation experience, not Apple or Google Maps. “The idea is also the key to keep them in our ecosystem,” Schäfer said. The $1 billion spent up-front to launch this network will just be the beginning of the investment, but Schäfer is adamant that it will eventually be a profitable endeavor: “It has to be a self-sustaining business. Absolutely.” Schäfer said the enterprise will eventually be profitable and cites Ionity as an example of what can go right. “The valuation of this network has grown so much,” he said. “So it was a great investment… We think we can do the same here.”
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European carriers file to create joint venture for opt-in ad targeting of mobile users
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
European telcos are moving ahead with a plan to create a joint venture to offer opt-in “personalized” ad targeting of regional mobile network users following trials last year in Germany. Although it remains to be seen whether European Union regulators will sign off on their plan. In a submitted to the European Commission’s competition division (spotted earlier by ), Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, France’s Orange, Spain’s Telefónica and the UK’s Vodafone set out the proposed concentration to create a jointly controlled and equally owned joint venture — to offer “a privacy-led, digital identification solution to support the digital marketing and advertising activities of brands and publishers,” as they describe the proposed “first party” data ad-targeting infrastructure. The Commission has until February 10 to make a decision on whether to clear the joint venture (JV) and, therefore, whether or not to let the carriers go ahead with a commercial launch. A spokesman for Vodafone said the telcos are not in a position to comment on the intended JV at this stage while the Commission considers whether to clear the initiative — and wouldn’t be drawn on a potential launch timeframe. They suggested public messaging on the project will follow approval — assuming the telcos do get a green light from Brussels to work together on the mobile ad targeting infrastructure. Details about the plan for the carriers to dive into personalized ad-targeting emerged during initial trials in Germany. The tech was described then as a “cross-operator infrastructure for digital advertising and digital marketing” — and Vodafone said they would be relying on user consent to the data processing. The project was also given the initial moniker “TrustPid” (but if it flies, expect that clunky label to be replaced with some slicker marketing). The telco ad-targeting proposal quickly landed on the radar of a privacy watcher, who raised concerns about the legal basis for processing mobile users’ data for ads — given the European Union’s comprehensive data protection and privacy laws, and given existing microtargeting adtech (which also relies on a claim of user consent), was found in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation in . The project also faced some early attention from data protection authorities in Germany and Spain. We’re told engagement with regulators led to some tweaks to how the telcos proposed to gather consent — to make the process more explicit. The telcos’ filing submission proposing to create a JV, which is dated January 6, 2023, confirms that “explicit user consent” (via an opt-in) is the intended legal basis for the targeting, writing: Subject to explicit user consent provided to a brand or publisher (on an opt-in basis only), the JV will generate a secure, pseudonymized token derived from a hashed/encrypted pseudonymous internal identity linked to a user’s network subscription which will be provided by participating network operators. This token will allow the brand/publisher concerned to recognize a user without revealing any directly identifiable personal data and thereby enable them to optimize the delivery of online display advertising and perform site/app optimization. Users will have access to a user-friendly privacy portal. They can review which brands and publishers they have given consent to, and withdraw their consent. Discussing their approach, a representative for one of the involved telcos (Vodafone) confirmed the intent is to rely on gathering consent from users via pop-ups. So if anyone was hoping that the would knock consent spam on its head, that looks, well, premature. A first-party data-based alternative to the (still, for now) ubiquitous tracking cookie also requires a legal basis to process people’s data for marketing — and alternatives to consent look increasingly tricky given ongoing guidance (and enforcement) by EU data protection regulators, such as the for trying to claim contractual necessity for processing user data for ads; or the when it sought to switch from consent to a claim of legitimate interest for its “personalized ads” — a move it was forced to back away from. Consent as the legal basis for “personalized ads” is no picnic either, though: The IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) — which relies upon a claim of consent to third-party ad tracking — was found in breach of the GDPR (as was the IAB Europe). And the Belgian DPA issued the adtech industry with a hard reform mandate. However, for now, the tracking-ads status quo lumbers on, zombie-like — pending a final legal reckoning. The distinction the four telcos behind the proposed JV are seeking to claim for their proposal for consent-based ad targeting — versus current-gen (legally clouded) adtech targeting — is, firstly, that it’s based on first-party data (the claim for the TrustPid project is no syncing and/or enriching of the individual-linked targeting tokens is allowed or possible between participating advertisers). So it’s not the kind of consentless-by-design background “superprofiling” of users that’s landed current-gen adtech into such legal (and reputational) hot water. The proposed tracking is siloed per brand/advertiser — with each needing to gain upfront consent from their own users and only able to target against data points they gather. (Plus we’re told user-linked tokens would be cycled regularly, with the initial proposal being to reset them every 90 days.) Secondly, the telcos are proposing to put contractual limits on participants — such as requiring that no special category data (e.g., health data, political affiliation) can be attached by an advertiser as a targetable interest to a user-linked token. They also want the JV to have the final say on the language/design of consent pop-ups (which they say will offer users a top-level refusal, rather than burying that option as routinely happens with cookie consent pop-ups). And they say they will audit all participating websites on a regular basis. There is a third check: a portal where mobile users can view (and revoke) any consents they have provided to individual brands/publishers to use their first-party data for ads — and that, we’re told, will provide an option that lets mobile users block the entire system (so a hard opt-out). Although we understand it’s not currently the case (in the trial) that users who apply such a block are prevented from receiving pop-ups asking for their consent to the ad targeting — so, again, consent spam and consent fatigue look set to continue. (And, well, could plausibly multiply as consent gets unbundled — that is, if the system takes off with lots of brands and advertisers.) At least, unless or until they can figure out an appropriate legal basis that does not require ongoing pestering of users who already denied consent with pop-ups. If the telcos’ JV gets the green light from the Commission, scrutiny on the project will of course dial up — and close attention to technical (and contractual) details may well throw up fresh concerns. So it’s too soon to judge whether the approach will/would pass muster with regulators and privacy experts. There could also be friction from mobile network users themselves — if they suddenly find they’re encountering a fresh, irritating layer of consent spam when browsing the mobile web, a service they do, after all, pay the telcos to provide them with. So tolerance for extra consent spam could be very low. Moreover, convincing mobile users to actually opt in to ads — assuming they are indeed provided with a genuinely free (and fair/non-manipulative) choice to deny tracking, rather than being forced or bamboozled into it as has been the dark pattern rule for years — presents a major barrier for uptake. Plenty of people will deny tracking if they are actually asked about it (see, for example, the impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency requirement on third-party iOS apps’ ability to track users). So even if the telcos are allowed to build their ad targeting JV, there’s no guarantee mobile users on their networks will agree to play ball. Still, if this flies, there could be a chance for brands to win web users over with a fresh approach. Being transparently upfront about wanting to process people’s personal data for ads — and, potentially, also able to offer incentives for users to agree — offers an opportunity to do things differently versus a creepy status quo that can’t clearly explain how people’s data got sucked up, where it may have ended up, or what’s really been done with it. An upfront approach could thus provide a route for savvier brands to deepen their relationships with loyal customers by making straightforward asks, not resorting to sneaky surveillance.
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Company created by Citrix-Tibco merger confirms it has laid off 15% of staff
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Ron Miller
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
The continuing onslaught of has not let up in the new year. Last week, we saw big layoff announcements from and with thousands of employees being let go. Yesterday that Cloud Software Group was undertaking massive layoffs. Today the company confirmed it was laying off 15% of the workforce. Although the company would not share just how many people were involved, it appears to be in the thousands. Cloud Software Group was formed last year after PE firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital (an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management) took Citrix private in , the third biggest of last year. At the time, the firms indicated they would be combining Citrix with Tibco, another enterprise firm that Vista had purchased previously. In from CEO Tom Krause, who was put in charge when the combined company was formed, he confirmed that layoffs had indeed happened. “Yesterday, we notified roughly 15% of the total Cloud Software Group workforce that their roles have been eliminated or made redundant as part of our planning process for the new company,” he said, not pulling any punches. Krause wrote that layoffs are among the toughest decisions any executive has to make, and he acknowledged the pain that comes with these moves. “Please know that these decisions were not taken lightly. Rather, they were practical business decisions designed to strengthen the combined companies,” he wrote. When Vista and Elliott announced that they were acquiring Citrix for such a hefty amount, and combining the two companies, it seemed likely that cost-cutting would follow. At the time, Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller expected as much when : “The combo has a lot of assets to play with on the tech side, especially with Citrix’s virtualization and the future of work. But it will be all about execution, and we will see in a few months if Vista and Elliott are undertaking a go-forward and growth strategy, or if they will save costs and ‘milk’ the install base. The high price tag will make the latter strategy hard to lay off, but perhaps with some asset sales, it could work well,” Mueller said. It’s worth noting that Krause said that in addition to eliminating duplicate positions across the two companies, it would be looking at top customers and aligning the product roadmap to meet those customers, so it seems it’s looking at the installed base that Mueller alluded to. But each of those jobs, redundant or not from a business perspective, was held by an individual who is out of work today, and they join the thousands of other tech workers who have been laid off in recent months. If there is any silver lining to be found here, multiple reports have stated over the last several months that laid off tech workers .
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DirecTV is the latest pay-TV company to lay off staff amid the ongoing shift to streaming
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Lauren Forristal
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
DirecTV plans to lay off approximately 10% of its management staff, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. The layoffs will be in effect next Friday, January 20. The staff reduction comes as DirecTV, among other pay-TV companies, grapple with the continuous loss of consumers moving away from linear television and shifting over to streaming. DirecTV no longer publicly reports subscriber numbers; however, credit rating agency Fitch Ratings that the company lost approximately 500,000 subs in Q3 2022, bringing the total to 13.3 million. For comparison, Comcast has around . In September, that Comcast plans to cut $1 billion from its traditional TV network division. “The entire pay-TV industry is impacted by the secular decline and the increasing rates to secure and distribute programming. We’re adjusting our operations costs to align with these changes and will continue to invest in new entertainment products and service enhancements,” the DirecTV spokesperson said. DirecTV has its satellite TV service and DirectTV Stream, its streaming business. The management staff makes up less than half of DirecTV’s overall workforce, , which broke the news of the layoffs. Cable and broadcast viewership continues to decline. In July 2022, streaming represented a 34.8% share of total TV viewing in the U.S., whereas cable’s share of TV viewing was at 34.4% and broadcast was 21.6%, . As of October 2022, Leichtman Research Group that only two-thirds (66%) of households in the U.S. have a pay-TV service, a decrease of 79% in 2017. It’s likely DirecTV experienced a drop in subs when it lost the rights to NFL’s “Sunday Ticket.” Last year was DirecTV’s final year as the exclusive home of “Sunday Ticket.” However, fans were disappointed when its website and app during opening weekend. was announced the winner of the “Sunday Ticket” last month.
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The Logic School wants to teach tech workers activism
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Product folks and engineers know what they are doing, and by and large, they — and the companies they work for — have a disproportionate amount of power about how the world is shaped. Over a 13-week course called (delivered free, with support from the Omidyar Network), the school aims to teach tech workers to organize to help identify and rectify structural inequities. Ultimately, the goal of the school is laudable: offering the kind of people who are likely to throw their hands up and say ‘if only I could do something’ the means and techniques to do just that, whether that is through advocacy, identification or ideas for how to speak out in situations where that’s needed. The school goes through a range of writing and current research in tech and the broader tech industry, including on topics such as critical race theory, economics and sociology. In addition to a learning element, the school builds a cohort of colleagues who are all banded together to a common goal: working toward a more equitable goal. Lecturers include folks like Clarissa Redwine from the Kickstarter Union Oral History, Alex Hanna and Timnit Gebru from Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), Ari Melenciano from Afrotectopia/NYU/Google Creative Lab, Blunt from Hacking//Hustling, Erin McElroy, Assistant Professor of American Studies at UT Austin, Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Shazeda Ahmed, Princeton University, Center for Information Technology Policy. If this sounds exciting to you, — applications close tomorrow.
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Rent the Runway’s fashion comes to Amazon, including preworn items and design exclusives
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Fashion rentals marketplace was hit hard by the pandemic, as its subscribers were largely renting outfits to wear to in-person events. The , however, by slashing costs, renegotiating supplier contracts, and entering the . Today, the company is expanding that side of its business once again by bringing some of its preworn items and other exclusives to Amazon in a new partnership with Amazon Fashion. On Thursday, Amazon announced the launch of a , which will feature a selection of preworn fashion merchandise from over 35 brands across numerous styles. These preworn items have been inspected, cleaned, and restored but may have minor defects — though nothing that would impact the physical integrity of the garment. Customers will be able to shop items for “weekend wear, workwear, date night apparel and seasonal essentials like sweaters, tops, coats, and denim,” Amazon said. This isn’t the first time Rent the Runway has partnered with another retailer to help unload its preworn items. The fashion subscription service with resale marketplace thredUP on a collection of previously rented designer clothing called “ ” as well as with Last year, Rent the Runway also began , which agreed to sell preworn Rent the Runway clothes on its site as well. Plus, Rent the Runway sells preworn clothes on its own website to customers who don’t have a subscription. Amazon x Rent the Runway In addition to bringing preworn clothes to Amazon, Rent the Runway will also offer a selection of merchandise from its “Design Collective” through Amazon Fashion. These limited-edition fashion collections are created by design talent, including names like Thakoon and Peter Som, using Rent the Runway’s proprietary data and insights from its customer base. Other designers include Adam Lippes, Marina Moscone, and more, and will offer 1,000 styles in sizes 00–22 (though actual sizing may vary by availability). With this launch, Amazon Fashion will be the first retailer to carry the new, unworn Design Collective merchandise, aside from Rent the Runway itself. Some of the Design Collective items will also become available through Amazon Prime’s “Try Before You Buy” offering, which allows for home try-on and returns. The move is another way Rent the Runway is seeking growth in a postpandemic market. COVID could have easily destroyed Rent the Runway’s business entirely — and, for a time, things looked dire. In 2020, the company’s active subscribers declined from 133,000 to 55,000, . It was only a year after Rent the Runway’s IPO. To its credit, the business survived COVID and, saw a return to growth. In Q3 2022, Rent the Runway beat Wall Street expectations on quarterly revenue of $77.4 million compared with the $72.9 million analysts expected. It grew its active subscribers 15% from the year-ago quarter to 134,240 and raised its financial outlook for the year to $293–$295 million. (The company says the Amazon partnership was already baked into these projections.) Amazon x Rent the Runway ”Collaborating with Amazon Fashion brings Rent the Runway incredible brand awareness,” said Jenn Hyman, Rent the Runway co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “We believe strategic relationships like this can ignite a new engine of growth for our business. They also showcase demand for our products beyond our community and allow more customers to experience exclusive data-driven fashion from our top design partners.” Meanwhile, for Amazon, the partnership allows the retail giant to offer higher-end fashion while also dabbling in another area — fashion resale — without having to invest in spinning up a resale marketplace of its own. To date, Amazon has offered a way for consumers to browse select preowned merchandise through its but this doesn’t include women’s fashion. Instead, it’s a way to shop for preowned consumer electronics, like phones and smartwatches, plus tools, cameras, gaming equipment, and other home, kitchen, and entertainment items. It only has smaller investments in fashion resale through partners, including Shopbop’s “pre-loved” shop and with Luxury Stores at Amazon, focused on preloved handbags, jewelry and accessories, and “At Amazon Fashion, we continually expand our assortment through strategic relationships with brands to inspire and delight our customers,” said Muge Erdirik Dogan, president of Amazon Fashion, in a release. “Rent the Runway’s collection continues to grow our offering in pre-loved and designer fashion.” Starting today, customers will be able to browse and shop from Rent the Runway’s brand store via . Products are eligible for free shipping with Prime and will allow for returns through Amazon, not Rent the Runway’s stores.
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The Guardian confirms ransomware attack stole employee data
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Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
British newspaper The Guardian has confirmed that cybercriminals accessed the personal details of U.K. staff members during a ransomware attack last month. The Guardian confirmed the data breach in an update emailed to staff on Wednesday, which the shortly after. The email, signed by the news outlet’s chief executive Anna Bateson and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, told employees that the cyberattack involved “unauthorised third-party access to parts of our network,” and was likely triggered by a phishing attempt, but they did not elaborate further. Phishing is a common tactic employed by attackers and has been blamed for recent data breaches at , and . The Guardian warned U.K. staff that attackers had accessed their sensitive personal information. The newspaper has approximately 1,500 employees around the globe — with 90% in the United Kingdom. A spokesperson for The Guardian told TechCrunch that it confirmed “all U.K. staff are affected” by the breach, and data accessed “may include human resources data collected as part of everyone’s employment at The Guardian.” The spokesperson confirmed that employee names, addresses, national insurance numbers, government identity documents and salary details were compromised, as first reported by . The company added that it had no reason to believe the personal data of readers and subscribers had been accessed, nor does it believe that hackers accessed the personal data of staff in the U.S. or Australia. But there remain several unknowns about the cyberattack, such as who was responsible and whether The Guardian paid a ransom demand. The Guardian first that it had been hit by a ransomware attack on December 21. At the time, staff were told to work from home until at least January 23 as the organization battled with “behind the scenes” disruption. The newspaper said that while it expects some critical systems to be back up and running “within the next two weeks,” a return to office working by U.K. staff has been until early February.
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TikTok fined in France for manipulative cookie-consent flow
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
TikTok is the latest tech giant to be schooled by France’s data protection watchdog for breaking rules on cookie consent. The €5 million penalty today by the CNIL relates to a cookie-consent flow TikTok had used on its website (tiktok.com) until early last year — in which the regulator found it was not as easy for users to refuse cookies as to accept them — so it was essentially manipulating consent by making it easier for site visitors to accept its tracking than to opt out. This was the case when the watchdog checked in on TikTok’s process, in June 2021, until the implementation of a “Refuse all” button on the site in February 2022 — which appears to have resolved the matter. (And may explain the relatively small fine levied in this case, along with the number of users and minors affected — as well as the enforcement relating only to its website, not its mobile app.) Tracking cookies are typically used to serve behavioral advertising but can also be used for other site activity, such as analytics. “During the check carried out in June 2021, the CNIL noted that while the companies TikTok United Kingdom and TikTok Ireland did offer a button allowing cookies to be accepted immediately, they did not put in place an equivalent solution (button or other) to allow the Internet user to refuse their deposit just as easily. Several clicks were necessary to refuse all cookies, against only one to accept them,” the watchdog notes in a press release [translated from French with machine translation]. “The Restricted Committee considered that making the refusal mechanism more complex actually amounts to discouraging users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to favor the ease of the ‘Accept all’ button,” it added, saying it found TikTok had therefore breached a legal requirement for freedom of consent — a violation of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act “since it was not as simple to refuse cookies as to accept them.” In addition, the CNIL found that TikTok had not informed users “in a sufficiently precise manner” of the purposes of the cookies — both on the information banner presented at the first level of the cookie consent and within the framework of the “choice interface” that was accessible after clicking on a link presented in the banner. Hence finding several breaches of Article 82. The French enforcement has been taken under the European Union’s ePrivacy Directive — which, unlike the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), does not require complaints that affect users across the bloc to be referred back to a lead data supervisor in an EU country of main establishment (if a company claims that status — as TikTok does with Ireland for the GDPR). This has enabled the French regulator to issue a series of enforcements over Big Tech cookie infringements in recent years — hitting the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft with some hefty fines (and correction orders) , following a 2019 update which stipulated that consent is necessary for ad tracking. France’s activity to clean up cookie consent looks like an important adjunct to slower paced cross-border GDPR enforcement — which is only just starting to have an impact on ad-based business models centered on consent-less tracking, such as the final decisions against Facebook and Instagram issued by the Irish Data Protection Commission . If tracking-and-profiling ad giants are forced to rely on gaining user consent to run behavioral advertising it’s critical that the quality of consent gathered is free and fair — not manipulated by deploying deceptive design tricks, as has typically been the case — so the CNIL’s ePrivacy cookie enforcements look important. Only , for instance, TikTok was prevented from switching away from relying on user consent as its legal basis for processing people’s data to run ‘personalized’ ads to a claim of legitimate interest as the legal basis (implying it intended to stop asking users for their consent) after intervention by EU data protection authorities who it such a move would be incompatible with the ePrivacy Directive (and likely breach the GDPR too). While enforcements under ePrivacy only apply in the regulator’s own market (France, in this case), the impact of these decisions may be wider. Google, for example, followed a sanction from the CNIL by . That may not be how every company responds but there is a likely to be a cost associated to applying different compliance configurations for different EU markets — vs. just applying one (high) standard in all EU markets. So ePrivacy enforcement may help set the EU bar. TikTok was contacted for comment on the CNIL’s sanction. A spokesperson for the company sent us this statement: These findings relate to past practices that we addressed last year, including making it easier to reject non-essential cookies and providing additional information about the purposes of certain cookies. The CNIL itself highlighted our cooperation during the course of the investigation and user privacy remains a top priority for TikTok.
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HPE acquires Pachyderm as looks to bolster its AI dev offerings
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the company better known as HPE, today that it acquired , a startup developing a data science platform for “explainable, repeatable” AI. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed nor was the purchase price. But HPE said that it plans to integrate Pachyderm’s capabilities into a platform that’ll deliver a pipeline for automatically preparing, tracking and managing machine learning processes. Pachyderm’s software will remain available to current and new customers — for now, at least. HPE says that the transaction isn’t subject to any regulatory approvals and will likely close this month. Co-founded in 2014 by Joey Zwicker and Joe Doliner, a former Airbnb software engineer, Pachyderm delivers tools for versioning (i.e., creating and managing) “enterprise-scale” machine learning and AI projects. Using Pachyderm’s cloud-based and on-premises products, users could automate some aspects of AI system development through data transformations, data workflows and connectors. Pachyderm also offered versioning features for machine learning datasets and a “Git-like” structure to facilitate collaboration among data scientists, as well as the ability to generate an immutable record for all activities and assets on the platform. It also hosted Pachyderm Hub, a fully managed service with an on-demand compute cluster for AI development. Prior to the HPE acquisition, Pachyderm managed to attract $28.1 million in venture capital from backers including Benchmark, Microsoft’s M12, Y Combinator and HEP’s own Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. (Pathfinder invested in February 2022.) Among its customers were Shell, LogMeIn, Battelle Ecology and AgBiome. HPE sees Pachyderm bolstering its flagship AI development product, the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment, which provides software to build and train machine learning models for applications like computer vision, natural language processing and data analytics. In a press release, HPE lays out what it sees as the major benefits Pachyderm brings to the table, including incremental data processing, visibility on the origin of data and the ability to track different versions of data to understand when it was created or changed. “As AI projects become larger and increasingly involve complex data sets, data scientists will need reproducible AI solutions to efficiently maximize their machine learning initiatives, optimize their infrastructure cost and ensure data is reliable and safe no matter where they are in their AI journey,” HPE EVP of high-performance compute (HPC) and AI Justin Hotard said in a statement. “Pachyderm’s unique reproducible AI software augments HPE’s existing AI-at-scale offerings to automate and accelerate AI and unlock greater opportunities in image, video and text analysis, generative AI and other emerging large language model needs to realize transformative outcomes.” Pachyderm is HPE’s second AI-related acquisition since Determined AI in June 2021. Determined AI, similarly, was focused on creating a platform for building and retraining machine learning models. HPE sees AI and HPC as a potential major profit driver, but the company has struggled to maintain momentum in the increasingly competitive market. In its Q4 2022 earnings , HPE’s HPC and AI revenue dipped 14% year over year to $862 million, bringing the operating profit margin down to 3.5% compared to 14.2% in the prior-year period.
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Can we get more crypto partnerships and less crypto layoffs, please?
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Welcome back to For the first time in a long time, there was less talk circulating about a certain three-letter crypto exchange, ahem, FTX. But of course, that didn’t last long as the former FTX CEO (who also goes by three letters — SBF) created a and shared his perspective on Thursday — in a 2,300-word overview — detailing what FTX and Alameda were “pre-mortem.” Over the past seven days, there have also been a handful of cuts announced across the crypto space, from the second-largest exchange to NFT marketplace . This is Coinbase’s second round of major layoffs, after eliminating 18% of its employees, or about 1,100 jobs last June, but there was “no way to reduce our expenses significantly enough, without considering changes to headcount,” Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong wrote in a Tuesday. Amid the doomy and gloomy sentiment from these layoffs, a number of market players were those affected by the cuts, including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who , “If you are a departing Coinbase employee, reach out! I would love to find you a home in the ecosystem.” See, not all hope in humanity has to be lost. It was also a big week for partnerships as more crypto companies joined forces with mainstream Web 2.0 and financial companies like AWS and Mastercard. But instead of saying more here, I’ll let the stories speak for themselves. Read more about them below. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Ava Labs, the company building out layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, to help scale blockchain adoption across enterprises, institutions and governments, the two firms exclusively told TechCrunch. “Looking forward, web3 and blockchain is inevitable,” Howard Wright, VP and global head of startups at AWS, said to TechCrunch. “No one can call the time or date or quarter that it’s going to happen and it’ll be mainstream, but we’ve seen the cycles of growth before. The velocity of this one seems like it’s accelerating and we’re just excited to be a part of this.” (TC+) The crypto venture capital industry has become more selective thanks to the general market downturn and wavering trust caused by a slew of scandals and market disruptions, but investors at major firms are still writing checks in the space. As the market looks toward the future, some venture capitalists are revamping their investing strategies, while others are holding to their current plans, with perhaps a small tweak or two. Read on to find out how active investors are thinking about DeFi, how they’re advising their portfolio companies amid the lack of funding, the best way to approach them and more. Mastercard, one of the biggest financial payments providers in the world, is launching a web3-focused incubator to help artists connect with fans through a new medium, the company shared. Mastercard partnered with Polygon, a scaling blockchain built on top of Ethereum, which has been making huge strides in the Web 2.0 ecosystem lately. After joining the incubator, participating artists should know how to mint NFTs, represent themselves in virtual worlds and establish a community, Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, said to TechCrunch. We’re only in the second week of 2023, but demo days have already begun as founders try to keep momentum alive in the ever-changing crypto market. Beacon, a web3-focused early-stage accelerator program, launched last year, and its flagship cohort just graduated. The teams in the first cohort, known as Cohort 0, presented their ideas on Tuesday during a demo day, exclusively covered by TechCrunch. (TC+) Hyped or not, web3 companies seem like they’re here to stay, and investors seem more than willing to keep backing them. To get a better idea of how the people writing the checks are thinking about web3, TechCrunch surveyed more than 35 investors, and it turns out the majority are not only actively investing in the category, they also harbor hopes of a shining future for what they feel is a potentially transformative technology. Chain Reaction is back in action with the launch of Season 2! For this week’s , I talked to Ryan Wyatt, president of Polygon Labs, one of the biggest market shakers and layer-2 blockchains in the crypto space that’s building on top of the Ethereum ecosystem. The past year has been huge for Polygon as it partnered with big-brand names like , Disney and to launch loyalty rewards and accelerator programs. Now, Polygon is looking to 2023 and new opportunities, and Wyatt shares what’s in store for it and how the space still has room to grow. We also discussed: Subscribe to on or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!
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Virgin Orbit says issue with rocket’s second stage led to mission failure
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Virgin Orbit, the unconventional rocket company founded by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, said its was due to an anomaly with the rocket’s second stage. Although the LauncherOne rocket managed to reach space and achieve stage separation, the anomaly prematurely terminated the first burn of the upper stage’s engines, at an altitude of around 180 kilometers, Virgin said in a statement. Due to this engine anomaly, both the rocket components and payload fell back to Earth and were destroyed upon atmospheric reentry. The mission payload consisted of nine small satellites, including two CubeSats for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense, a first test satellite from Welsh in-space manufacturing startup Space Forge and what would’ve been Oman’s first Earth-observation satellite. Virgin Orbit engineers and board members have already begun an analysis of mission telemetry data to identify the cause of the anomaly. The company added that a formal investigation into the source of the failure will be led by Jim Sponnick, former VP for the Atlas and Delta launch system programs at United Launch Alliance, and Virgin Orbit’s chief engineer, Chad Foerster. The company said the investigation will be complete, and corrective measures implemented, before LaucherOne’s next flight from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. But how long that will take, and when we’ll next see Virgin’s Boeing 747 and rocket system take to the air again, is far from clear. Virgin said it was in talks with the U.K. government to conduct another launch from the country’s new Space Port in Cornwall for “as soon as later this year.” That degree of uncertainty is never good for a public company, but it’s likely especially straining for Virgin Orbit, which is facing and a pressing need to ramp up launch cadence to boost revenues. As of September 30, the company had $71 million in cash on hand; by the end of the year, Virgin got an injection of $25 million from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and $20 million from Virgin Investments Ltd. But these funds will do little but delay the inevitable if Virgin doesn’t return to launch soon.
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FPGA startup Rapid Silicon lands $15M to bring its first chip to market
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
, or integrated circuits sold off-the-shelf, are a hot topic in tech. Because they’re relatively affordable and can be programmed for a range of use cases, they’ve caught on particularly in the AI and machine learning space where they’ve been used to accelerate the training of AI systems. The global FPGA market size could reach $14 billion by 2028, to one estimate, up from $6 billion in 2021. One startup looking to get in on the ground floor is Rapid Silicon, which this week that it raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Cambium Capital. Launched in 2021, the goal with Rapid Silicon is to promote, adopt and implement open source tech to address the low- to mid-range FPGA market, according to CEO and co-founder Naveed Sherwani. “Rapid Silicon’s … software leads the programmable revolution as the industry’s first and only commercial open source FPGA design suite,” Sherwani, previously a GM at Intel and the former CEO of semiconductor startup SiFive, said in an email interview. “The latest round of funding will be used to further invest in Rapid Silicon’s product portfolio, support the launch of its premier low-end FPGA product … and to build on the company’s momentum in leading the adoption of open source software for commercial applications.” Rapid Silicon is developing two products at present: Raptor and Gemini. Raptor is software with an interface for FPGA application design, while Gemini is a 16-nanometer FPGA with hardware including a dual-core Arm processor, external memory controller and ethernet connectivity. Sherwani emphasized that Rapid is based on open source software — another industry first, according to him — and designed to meet the needs of FPGA developers tackling challenges in sectors such as healthcare, automotive and industry. “Customers are looking for innovative ways to program FPGAs, reduce support load by leveraging the open source ecosystem of active expertise and development engineers, and shorten time to market,” Sherwani added. “With open source software, Rapid Silicon is removing the barriers and providing its customers with a robust end-to-end FPGA design workflow. The open source software enables users to design complex applications quickly and efficiently on our FPGA devices.” Gemini isn’t commercially available, but Sherwani says he expects the FPGA will come to market by the end of Q1. In the meantime, Rapid Silicon is generating revenue — between $2 million and $3 million a year — from licensing its IP. The FPGA space has formidable competitors including Intel, which several years ago acquired U.K.-based and to double down on FPGA-based solutions for video and AI applications. But Landon Downs, the managing partner at Cambium Capital, said that he sees “immense” potential in Rapid Silicon’s tooling and hardware strategy. While that might sound like hyperbole coming from a VC, Rapid Silicon evidently has investors intrigued; the company expects to close a $15 million extension of its Series A within the next few months at an $80 million pre-money valuation. “Driven by its purpose and world-class talent, we believe Rapid Silicon is ready to revolutionize design-to-silicon turnaround time and provide solutions that meet and exceed the robust performance, power, area and time-to-market requirements for next-generation applications,” he said in a press release. “We see immense potential in the company’s AI-enhanced EDA tools, and we believe this team has the experience needed to bring these solutions to the global market.”
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Robot or fauxbot?
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
of debriefs. CES has a way of hurling you into the new year, kicking and screaming, and it can be hard to find your bearings as you emerge on the other side. As the dust has cleared, one thing remains very clear: No two people have the same notion of what does and doesn’t constitute a robot. That’s not a problem, per se. Language evolves and so does technology. I was on the this week to talk with Haje, one of our hardware reporters. He posited that much — or even most — technology is essentially a robot at this point. One can fairly credibly make the argument that “robot” as a term is much broader than how we tend to deploy it. Certainly, machine learning is becoming pervasive in ways few imagined. The upside of casting as wide a net as possible is that one can also make the case that ubiquitous robotics isn’t some vision of the future. It’s very much already here, and maybe that’s heartening. A stricter definition — and one I’ve tended to prefer — involves some level of autonomy and perception. You know, taking in information from external sources and making decisions accordingly, much like we do. I’m not wedded to this definition to the point that it precludes me from covering other stories in the space that don’t precisely line up. Nor is everything that qualifies necessarily in my purview. For one thing, we have a couple of automotive reporters who are very good at their jobs, so they take first crack at all of the self-driving car stuff. Truth of the matter is, our definition of what does and doesn’t qualify as a robot is also governed by some editorial decision making. It can also be porous. This could easily become a newsletter about the eight billion lidar startups out there, but I don’t really want that, and I suspect most of you don’t, either. For me, at least, there’s not that much value in strict adherence to pedantry or orthodoxy when I determine what does and doesn’t make sense on these pages. But it is helpful to have some guardrails. Seeing a “smart” washing machine in this newsletter might be novel the first time, but you would (rightfully) get annoyed with me if I suddenly started forcing them on you every week. Robotic vacuums, on the other hand, do tick off the robot requirements for many — or most — people, myself include. I absolutely cover them here, but I’ve also been doing this long enough to know that covering every single robot vacuum on the market is a good way to hemorrhage readers. Robosen All of this stuff bleeds together at a show like CES. I spent time with Robosen’s extremely neat Transformer robots, for example. But I think it does a disservice to both parties if we attempt to compare those toys to, say, some industrial fulfillment robot exhibiting at the show. I — somewhat cheekily — suggested that robots are “cool technology used for uncool things.” This is obviously not a guiding principle, but it does point to something worth discussing here. Weird and wacky robot toys are going to grab the headlines at a show like CES. We get that. They’re good for traffic and they’re fun. I’ve written about plenty of them and will likely continue to do so in the future when genuinely interesting ones surface. Another reason people are drawn to them is that they more closely resemble a kind of platonic robot ideal. Robot toys look how we think a robot look. Whatever you ultimately think about science fiction’s impact on public perception, it’s important to realize that it will never go away. As robots become a bigger fixture in our daily lives, however, the impact will increasingly be a dialogue. I paid some ungodly sum to see the new “Avatar” in the theater with all of the trappings. One thing that struck me — and likely you, too — was how much the U.S. military robots on Pandora resemble robots that exist in the world today. Want to annoy your date? Point out where each robot in a sci-fi movie gets its inspiration. Predictably, the robotics writing I’ve done over the past week has largely revolved around CES because, frankly, most everything I’ve done over the past week has revolved around CES. No one ever said the life of a hardware editor would be an easy one, friends. But two and a half newsletters is more than ample coverage for the show, so let’s round up a couple of the top non-CES stories, shall we? Mineral Another company graduated the Alphabet X “moonshot” labs this week. Two years after exiting stealth, . The robot aspect largely revolves around data collection here, monitoring crops to give farmers deep and rich actionable information for growing more sustainably and efficiently. “After five years incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Mineral is now an Alphabet company,” said CEO Elliott Grant. “Our mission is to help scale sustainable agriculture. We’re doing this by developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world — and make it useful and actionable.” iRobot File this one under: not the best look. Home robots and privacy are coming to an inevitable head. from Roomba that eventually made their way onto social media; iRobot responded that the shots were all taken with user consent. This is an increasingly important discussion as we bring robots and camera-sporting tech into our homes. And it will likely be pointed to as a compelling argument against Amazon’s acquisition of the firm. One user called it “a clear breach of the agreement on their side […and] also a violation of trust.” The big question that immediately springs to mind here is what is the reasonable expectation of privacy when inviting this sort of technology into your home? Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch That’s it for this week. Bit of a short one, but I’m gonna do my best to sleep through the weekend and be back with you this time next week. Meantime, please , if you haven’t already.
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Veteran enterprise VC Peter Wagner on the opportunities for AI startups
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Connie Loizos
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
you ask, artificial intelligence will either vastly improve our lives or take away our jobs. For veteran venture investor Peter Wagner, it’s a little more nuanced than that. We recently caught up with Wagner, who, along with fellow veteran investor Gaurav Garg, launched . Combined, they have upward of 25 years of experience at storied investment firms: Wagner joined Accel as an associate in 1996 and stayed more than 14 years before leaving as a managing director to co-found Wing, and Garg spent 11 years as a partner at Sequoia Capital. Since launching Wing in 2011, the two have been steadily growing their team and portfolio, backing such companies as Snowflake, Gong and Cohesity, among others, and “helping people do their best work,” as Wagner told us. We initially reached out to discuss a list of enterprise angel investors that Wagner and his team recently assembled for the sake of the enterprise investing “community,” but we wound up talking for a bit about the firm’s growing focus on AI startups in particular and some of Wagner’s separate thoughts on the current state of the venture industry. We’re big believers that AI is not replacing humans, but that humans working with AI will replace humans who work with AI. That set of types of products really empowers customers to do more and to reach their full potential. … The whole notion of helping founders and their customers do their best work through the application of AI-first technologies, that’s really my mission statement. And that is a lot of what is driving enterprise technology these days, the question of: How do I develop and apply that set of AI-first technologies to drive business results?
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NFT marketplace SuperRare cuts 30% of staff
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Amanda Silberling
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
The NFT marketplace SuperRare is cutting 30% of its staff, according to a Slack message from CEO John Crain. Crain posted a screenshot of the message on . I have some tough news to share: — SuperRare John 💎 (@SuperRareJohn) “During the recent bull run, we grew in tandem with the market. In recent months, it’s become clear that this aggressive growth was unsustainable,” Crain wrote. “We over-hired, and I take full ownership of this mistake.” TechCrunch reached out to Crain for comment. SuperRare raised a $9 million in March 2021, led by Velvet Sea Ventures and 1confirmation. The round also included celebrity investors like Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff and Ashton Kutcher. SuperRare differentiates itself from competitors by focusing more closely on working with artists, but broader platforms like OpenSea were more successfully able to take advantage of the bull market. Yet even though OpenSea has managed to raise at a of over $13 billion, it has not been immune to the downmarket. The company laid off , leaving it with 230 employees, in July. “We know that there is still much innovation and transformation yet to come for Web3, NFTs, cryptoart, decentralized finance and governance,” Crain wrote. “We are facing headwinds, yes — but there remains an incredible uncaptured opportunity as we continue building something totally new.”
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AWS partners with Avalanche to scale blockchain solutions for enterprises, governments
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Ava Labs, the company building out layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, to help scale blockchain adoption across enterprises, institutions and governments, the two firms exclusively told TechCrunch. “Looking forward, web3 and blockchain is inevitable,” Howard Wright, VP and global head of startups at , said to TechCrunch. “No one can call the time or date or quarter that it’s going to happen and it’ll be mainstream, but we’ve seen the cycles of growth before. The velocity of this one seems like it’s accelerating and we’re just excited to be a part of this.” The partnership intends to make it easier for individuals to launch and manage nodes on Avalanche while also aiming to give the network more strength and flexibility for developers. will support Avalanche’s infrastructure and decentralized application (dApp) ecosystem, alongside one-click node deployments, through its marketplace. The affiliation will also include Ava Labs joining , a program that helps startups and early-stage entrepreneurs get started on its platform. “For us this means a lot of things,” John Wu, president of Ava Labs, said to TechCrunch. “We have over 500 applications on the chain and we would love to give them a better experience and now we have a real partnership that we can direct to the Activate program. On top of that, our users are always looking for a better experience. The one-click node is an incredible way to do it.” A number of blockchains already use AWS to power their networks — about 25% of all Ethereum workloads in the world run on AWS, according to its . The technology itself is “natively agnostic” and supports all blockchain protocols, Wright said, though this is AWS’ first foundational partnership with a blockchain. Ava Labs plans to add its Subnet deployment as a managed service to the AWS marketplace, so both individuals and institutions can launch their own custom Subnets easily. Subnets are a part of Avalanche’s scaling solution that divert traffic away from the main blockchain and allow projects to stake its native token, AVAX, while creating their own layer-1 or layer-2 blockchains. “This is the beginning of something much, much bigger,” Wu said, adding that the Subnets will allow developers “to spin up their own blockchain, a full blockchain, in Amazon very easily.” Last quarter, Avalanche started developing five to six live Subnets, Wu said. But in the testnet phase, there are over 100 Subnets that will be deployed in the next six to 12 months “at least.” “We’re looking forward to sharing this partnership with the hundreds of Subnets that will be launched this year […] so I’m excited about what this can be, not just what it is.” Wright echoed that sentiment: “When you multiply Activate times Avalanche times Subnet, you have something that’s a seminal moment. I think blockchain [technology] will become a commonplace and used in our marketplace by developers.” Ava Labs has also become a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), giving the firm access to deploy offerings on AWS with more than 100,000 partners in over 150 countries, Wright said. “[APN] with Ava Labs and Avalanche is the jet fuel for blockchain and crypto that will democratize access for all corners of the world.” Avalanche is far from the first startup to come through Amazon’s network, Wright shared. “Over 200,000 startups came through our doors, so we know what excellence looks like. That’s [including] Netflix, Uber and Airbnb — they have redefined verticals and we have the audacity to think others [like them] are out there, including Ava.” “We’re still in the early stages of enterprises and governments building on-chain,” Emin Gün Sirer, founder and CEO of Ava Labs, said to TechCrunch. But the pace of these initiatives will accelerate now that Avalanche and AWS are delivering a more complete and more reliable solution for their needs, Sirer added. With that said, the size of this network could significantly extend the reach of the crypto-based company and its developers building on its blockchain. “The underlying technology and capabilities is something we’re trying to tap into with John and his team,” Wright said. “It comes back to ease and access.” And the “ease and access” that both AWS and Avalanche aim to provide through the partnership is only going to accelerate adoption, Wu thinks. “A lot of the developers and newer entrepreneurs are crossovers from web2 into web3, it’s no longer hard-core web3 people,” Wu said. “And I think with them, they already have great experience with Amazon and having Activate and Avalanche will only make it easier for the crossover and it will be an accelerator and amplifier for that.” The two companies are also collaborating on events for entrepreneurs and developers through Avalanche Summit, Avalanche Creates and hackathons to help builders build on the blockchain. “We aspire to be strategic long-term partners; it’s a differentiating and motivating factor for us,” Wright said. “So the complement of the Subnets and our Activate we think is the perfect time, perfect opportunity and we humbly think we’ll look back years in time and see this as a significant time for blockchain expansion.” As for the future for AWS? It plans to be “more proximate to developers and partners,” Wright said. “Not just a Seattle headquarters […] we’re trying to bring this to the proverbial seven kids in a garage somewhere and we’re going to be more proximate and nimble with high-value partners like Ava.” “We want to push the envelope of what’s possible,” Wright said.
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SEC filing shows Adobe had interest in buying Figma as early as 2020
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Ron Miller
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
A document recently provides a detailed timeline of the negotiations between Adobe and Figma that paints a picture of how the two companies came together on last year. One point previously unknown is that Adobe approached Figma as early as 2020, and Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field met with Adobe representatives several times during those years before finally coming to an agreement in September. According to the document, preliminary discussions about a possible partnership or acquisition first began in early 2020 when Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer and executive vice president for Creative Cloud, met with Field, but he eventually cut off the discussions, and the startup announced in April that year led by Andreessen Horowitz. Reports of the company at that point at $2 billion. The discussion didn’t end there, however. In early 2021, Field met with Adobe again, this time with CEO Shantanu Narayen, to discuss a possible acquisition, but once again Field ended the discussions without a deal. By June, Figma secured a $200 million Series E, which valued the company at a whopping $10 billion, And that’s how it remained until April last year when Belsky and David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media business, once again approached Field, and this time the discussions started to heat up. It would take months for the deal to come together, with Field at one point trying to negotiate a higher price of $23 billion, which the company rejected. He even invited another company to bid, known as Party A in the document and as Microsoft. Microsoft had already agreed for $69 billion in January last year, which could account for its reticence to join the bidding. Whatever the reason, the company never put in a bid, according to the report. Eventually, after lots of additional discussions between legal representatives on both sides of the table, the companies would agree to the $20 billion price tag, which the parties announced on September 15, 2022. In an interview in October, Field talked about the process and indicated that in spite of the company’s anti-Adobe rhetoric over the years, he had undertaken regular discussions with Adobe executives going back to as early as 2012, something the SEC timeline supports. “It’s actually kind of interesting because as part of the acquisition process, you have to make a timeline of events. And I looked back at all the interactions we’ve had with Adobe over the years. The first interaction with Adobe was days after we announced Figma in August 2012,” he said. Field characterized that first meeting as an attempt to recruit them, and while nothing really came of it, they continued to have conversations over the years, which culminated with a $20 billion acquisition offer last year. At Disrupt, he emphasized that his company was in a good position financially, and this was a choice to team up with Adobe. “We’re definitely in a great place in terms of choosing our own destiny. We are doubling year over year in terms of our revenue. We’re free cash flow positive. So it wasn’t like, ‘oh, gosh, we need to sell this company.’ That was never the consideration here. Instead, it was what’s the best opportunity to achieve our vision,” Field said at Disrupt. Regardless, the deal is still subject to regulatory approval and is facing scrutiny from . U.K regulators are also . The EU is expected to as well. If all goes well, Adobe expects the deal to close some time later this year.
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Mastercard launches web3-focused artist incubator with Polygon
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
biggest financial payments providers in the world, is launching a web3-focused to help artists connect with fans through a new medium, the company shared at CES 2023 on Friday. “The core of this program is providing emerging artists with the web3 tools and skills they need to excel and advance their music careers in this digital economy,” Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, said to TechCrunch. “By providing access to experts and innovators in the space, the artists will be guided on how to incorporate web3 into their work throughout the entire program and then beyond.” Mastercard partnered with Polygon, a scaling blockchain built on top of Ethereum, which has been making huge strides in the Web 2.0 ecosystem lately. In the past year, Polygon partnered with a number of other big brands like Starbucks for its and Disney for its , while also having major clothing brands like launch NFT projects through its blockchain. After joining the incubator, participating artists should know how to mint NFTs, represent themselves in virtual worlds and establish a community, Rajamannar said. “We see that web3 holds tremendous promise for artists and creators to create, own and monetize their content, but only if they know how to leverage it.” This announcement points to the company’s expansion further into the digital asset world as it joined forces with a number of crypto-focused companies to launch credit cards and to help expand the NFT ecosystem, among other things. “This past year was big for us, with experimental web3 activations around the world,” Rajamannar said. For example, Mastercard the first Grammy week with Roblox in the metaverse, where it provided immersive activations, in-game branding, artist meet and greets, red-carpet photo opportunities and more. In the past, high-level employees at Mastercard have been vocal about their bullish sentiments toward the crypto space. “I feel like once you get the momentum for an institution up and running, it’s hard to get them to turn their head and pivot,” Grace Berkery, director of startup engagement at Mastercard, in December. “So if [institutions are] going to enter, they’re going to stay in the space.”
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Coho AI, which uses AI to help B2B SaaS companies boost revenue, raises $8.5M
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
Teams dedicated to boosting customer acquisition, retention and sales don’t necessarily have the time or tools to use data insights effectively. In a 2019 , NewVantage partners found that the That’s why Ariel Maislos, who sold semiconductor startup Anobit to Apple for $400 million in 2012, partnered with Itamar Falcon and Michael Ehrlich to launch , a product-led revenue optimization platform designed to help businesses — specifically software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses — access insights for upselling and growth. Coho AI today announced that it raised $8.5 million in a seed funding round led by Eight Roads, TechAviv and angel investors. CEO Falcon says that the capital will be put toward product R&D and expanding the size of Coho AI’s team, which currently stands at 17 people. “Coho AI has developed a unique data consolidation platform that models the business value of a software-as-a-service company and maps it to the behavior of the customers in real time using machine learning and advanced analytics,” Falcon told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Coho AI’s behavioral modeling allows the crafting of personalized customer journeys that improve conversion metrics and help revenue teams, from sales and customer success, together with product teams, achieve higher growth and sales efficiencies.” Coho AI’s target audience is sales, customer success and product teams within business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies. The platform provides AI models to discover what makes a product “sticky” and what drives users to upgrade to a paid B2B SaaS subscription plan, as well as real-time usage models to spotlight upsell opportunities and churn risks and segmentation models to identify different users based on their behavior. Falcon says that all the models are trained using anonymized data from Coho AI’s customer base. “By doing so, we are creating a network effect that each of our customers gets the benefits of a larger dataset, which results in a more accurate model,” he added. Beyond the AI-driven features, Coho AI delivers a single source of truth that sales, product and customer success teams can pull data from on both users and accounts. An observability dashboard enables growth teams to identify where users are in the customer journey and tailor a specific experience to reduce drop-offs, while real-time triggers highlight growth opportunities including “free-to-play” and upsells. “There is skepticism among SaaS leaders about whether an external tool can model their unique product value and turn it into actionable insights for go-to-market teams,” Falcon said. “[But] Coho AI truly helps companies improve metrics such as net revenue retention rate and sales efficiency, which have become more crucial in the current economic climate.” Coho AI competes with startups including Correlated and Endgame, but Falcon says the company already has “dozens” of customers and partners. He declined to provide revenue figures, however.
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Venom Foundation and Iceberg Capital launch $1B venture fund to invest in web3
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Venom Foundation, a layer-1 blockchain licensed and regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and investment manager Iceberg Capital have partnered to launch a $1 billion venture fund, the two firms announced on Wednesday. The $1 billion vehicle, Venom Ventures Fund (VVF), is a blockchain-agnostic fund that will invest in pre-seed to Series A rounds for web3 protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) that focus on trends like payments, asset management, DeFi, banking services and GameFi. The fund’s leadership team includes Peter Knez, ex-CIO of BlackRock and former global CIO for fixed income at Barclays Global Investors, and Mustafa Kheriba, a board member for multiple family offices and long-term investment professional in the Middle East and North African regions. The fund aims to be the intersection where “old money meets new,” according to its . In general, the VVF team has experience growing both web3 funds and traditional funds as well as experience in providing growth capital for both startups and scaleups. “Through the provision of our accelerator programs, grants and targeted capital injections, VVF provides the support and resources required to help its portfolio companies,” Knez said to TechCrunch. VVF will also use Iceberg Capital’s resources to offer incubation programs, among other things. It will also assist projects with marketing, exchange listing, technical, legal and regulatory support, the two firms said in a press release. “With a steadfast commitment to identifying and investing in highly promising, scalable and consumer-focused companies within the rapidly emerging web3 ecosystem, VVVF is actively investing and building a portfolio of leading-edge web3 firms that are poised to achieve widespread adoption and achieve significant growth,” Knez said. Alongside the fund’s announcement, VVF also made its first investment leading digital world-focused ’s $20 million funding round. Amid the current downward market, this fund is one of the few massive funds popping up in the space right now. During the last bull run, it seemed like a number of billion-dollar to multibillion-dollar funds were popping up frequently, but now, not so much. “Venom Ventures is determined to make a meaningful impact by leveraging its financial strength to provide value in a number of key areas including regulation, technology and acceleration,” Knez said. “Recognizing that these are challenging times, VVF is committed to fostering innovation, driving growth and creating opportunities for its portfolio companies to succeed.”
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When it comes to web3, investors say they’re in it for the long haul
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Rebecca Szkutak
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
of 2021’s record-setting venture market, you couldn’t avoid the growing noise from the burgeoning web3 sector. Trust me, I . But while some of that momentum carried into 2022 (Yuga Labs closed a $450 million in March), the rest of the year was relatively quiet. Yes, venture as a whole had a overall in 2022, but the lack of web3 deals stood out particularly because the sector entered the year with so much momentum. Maybe the dramatic meltdowns of token and the second-largest crypto exchange scared investors off web3 as a whole? Did the rapid decline of consumer interest in NFTs spur VCs to rethink the category? We decided to find out. To get a better idea of how the people writing the checks are thinking about web3, TechCrunch surveyed more than , and it turns out the majority are not only actively investing in the category, they also harbor hopes of a shining future for what they feel is a potentially transformative technology. One VC, who asked to remain anonymous, said that because the technology is so nascent, we aren’t seeing the true potential use cases yet, which could explain the lack of continued excitement after 2021’s rally. “Those who understand the space know there’s a lucrative future that’s still in its earliest days,” they said. “Those who don’t understand the space also know that but will be more hesitant to deploy without a fundamental grasp of the real-world applications. Almost none of the purported benefits of web3 (decentralization, pseudonymous identities, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.) have been realized in full yet. It’s like the era of the [early World Wide Web], when every web page was simple HTML with ridiculous graphics and archaic capabilities.”
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Web3-focused Beacon launches flagship demo day with 13 crypto startups
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
We’re only in the second week of 2023, but demo days have already begun as founders try to keep momentum alive in the ever-changing crypto market. Beacon, a web3-focused early-stage accelerator program, launched last year, and its flagship cohort just graduated. The teams in the first cohort, known as Cohort 0, presented their ideas on Tuesday during a demo day, exclusively covered by TechCrunch. “For Cohort 0, we spoke with over 1,000 projects to end up at 15 companies in Cohort 0 with 13 graduating at our Demo Day,” Sandeep Nailwal, core contributor of Beacon and co-founder of , said to TechCrunch. “With the current rate of applications for Cohort 1, we’re planning to land at a similar 1% acceptance rate.” The three-month program runs twice a year and accepts about 15 to 20 for its fall and spring cohorts. “We feel like Cohort 0 is our MVP of Beacon,” Nailwal said. “So for this cohort, we hand-picked our favorite teams through taking calls with founders sourced through our networks.” include Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden; a handful of venture capitalists; Rob Behnke, co-founder of Halborn; Brendan Farmer, co-lead at Polygon Zero; Dan Kim, VP of business development and listing at Coinbase; and Miles Anthony, CEO and co-founder of Decentral Games, to name a few. For the next cohort, there will be a standard $250,000 investment, with an $8 million post-money valuation from Beacon for each company in the program, Nailwal noted. In Cohort 0, investments were done on a case-by-case basis as the team was refining its process, he added. Beacon is “chain-agnostic,” which means most of the teams in Cohort 0 were building cross-chain applications, Nailwal said. However, Ethereum topped the list for the most teams building on that blockchain. Of the 13 companies, there were 29 founders across nine countries and 13 cities, Kenzi Wang, core contributor at Beacon and co-founder of Symbolic Capital, said during the demo day. The startups focused on a range of crypto subsectors, like gaming, infrastructure, decentralized lending and borrowing, and developer tooling, to name a few. Almost all of the startups in the cohort are seed stage, with the exception of one company, Community Gaming, at Series A. Here are the details behind Cohort 0’s 13 startups:
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PasarPolis is now one of Indonesia’s first full-stack insurtechs
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Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Indonesia’s is now able to underwrite its own products, making it one of Indonesia’s first full-stack insurtechs. This means PasarPolis will be able to offer new products and work with partners like Tokopedia, Gojek, Traveloka, Xiaomi and IKEA Indonesia to create custom insurance policies. PasarPolis is able to underwrite insurance products because of its strategic partnership with Tap Insurance. Tap Insurance received a full license for insurance underwriting from OJK (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan, or the Financial Services Authority of Indonesia). Cleosent Randing, the founder and CEO of PasarPolis, told TechCrunch that the first products from the strategic partnership will include fire and vehicle insurance. Founded in 2015, PasarPolis has raised over $59 million in total to date and is backed by investors like Gojek, Tokopedia, Traveloka, LeapFrog and SBI. Its policies include travel, home content, logistics, electronic devices, life and vehicle insurance. PasarPolis’ team PasarPolis PasarPolis currently has 60,000 registered agents in Indonesia, and partners with 50 insurance providers. It says it has served more than 80 million customers and issued 1 billion policies between 2019 and 2021, partnering with 40 companies to distribute products. Distribution partners include Shopee, Tokopedia, Gojek and Xiaomi. Customers can add micro-insurance policies to their purchases from their platform for about 5,000 to 20,000 Indonesian rupiah (or 32 cents to $1.29 USD). PasarPolis is able to scale because it uses machine learning and data analytics to make the underwriting and claims process faster and more cost-effective. It says that 87% of noncredit insurance claims in 2022 were settled within 24 hours. PasarPolis’ tech includes algorithms that automate the claims approval process, based on data submitted by customers, like photos, chronology and date and time of events. The algorithm then filters information to PasarPolis’ faster “green” channel. The company’s most recent launches include its Unified Claims Interface (POLI), which lets customers file multiple claims through different channels like email, WhatsApp, SMS and PasarPolis’ mobile app. Randing says PasarPolis’ goal is to reduce the cost of insurance and increase penetration in Indonesia, where insurance penetration rate was only 4% as of 2022. “We think that inclusive insurance is a vital add-on to basic state social,” he said. “Particularly the health protection in line with the increasing concern of many to protect their families’ health, especially during the pandemic.”
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HBO/HBO Max dominates Golden Globes with most wins
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Lauren Forristal
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
It may have been a weird feeling to watch Golden Globe Awards live on television this year. Last year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization that hosts the ceremony, was criticized for lacking diversity, so NBC announced it wouldn’t broadcast the awards show and the event’s winners were instead. The HFPA claims it’s more diverse this time around, that the total voting body is 51.8% “racially and ethnically diverse.” Last night, returned to the big screen. From HBO’s “The White Lotus” and “Euphoria” to “ ,” the combined HBO/HBO Max had a successful night with the most and wins of any network. The company took home a total of four wins after being nominated for 14. Meanwhile, Netflix managed to scoop up three wins, which included wins for Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio,” “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and “Ozark.” The streaming giant was nominated for 14. Hulu’s “ ” won Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series, which was thanks to Amanda Seyfried’s interpretation of , the Theranos CEO and founder who was just sentenced to in prison. Hulu had 10 Golden Globe nominations. “The Bear” and “Abbott Elementary” were also on the Golden Globes winner list. Both shows have Hulu as their streaming home. “ ,” the most nominated TV series, also streams on HBO Max. Although Apple TV+ pulled six noms this year, “Black Bird” was the only show to win an award, with Paul Walter Hauser (who plays Larry Hall) taking the trophy for Supporting Actor in a TV Drama. Disney also had six nominations this year; however, the media company had just one win, even though “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “ ” were among the highest-grossing films at the box office. Angela Bassett from the “Black Panther” sequel won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture. It’s important to note that the Golden Globes has been accused of being corrupt, with evidence of some HFPA members accepting gifts and bribes. It’s also been accused of heavily influencing Oscar nominations. A few celebrities didn’t even attend the award show this year, including Brendan Fraser and Tom Cruise. However, despite the controversies, the Golden Globes continues to be a hit, generating millions of dollars for Hollywood businesses.
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Daily Crunch: In ‘an early experimental program,’ OpenAI opens waitlist for GPT Professional
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Hello from a very rain-drenched, the Cure-themed, semi-goth-and-sad Silicon Valley (Haje) and a lovely, sunny and warm day (Christine). It’s hard to imagine one from the other, and so here we are, learning a lesson of empathy and realizing that our immediate experience may not be universal. Whoa. Didn’t expect that level of depth from your friendly neighborhood tech newsletter, didya? May we continue to surprise you for the rest of 2023 as well. — and Getting smart home devices to talk to each other has taken forever, but something changed. Why now? Or, more explicitly, why did the Matter rollout take so long? questions. For starters, the obvious issue alluded to above is that most of these big companies would really rather not work with their competitors if they can avoid it. As such, getting everyone on the same page about something like this is a bit of a cat-herding scenario. We finally got there, however, and that’s . Venom Foundation and investment manager Iceberg Capital have partnered to , reports. The $1 billion vehicle is a blockchain-agnostic fund that will invest in web3 protocols and decentralized applications (dApps). Okay, fine, you can have another fistful of highlights from the past 24 hours: / Getty Images Can AI turn out polite pitch rejection letters, automate aspects of due diligence, or draft accurate market maps? Some investors are already evaluating ways to fold ChatGPT “into their workflows to do their jobs better, smarter and maybe even cheaper,” report Natasha Mascarenhas, Christine Hall and Kyle Wiggers. They interviewed several VCs to learn more about potential use cases, some early experiments and the tech’s limitations when it comes to nuance and tone. “It’s not automating the important conversations we have with journalists,” said Brianne Kimmel, founder of Worklife Ventures, “but I think it’s sufficient for things that are pretty straightforward.” Three more from the TC+ team: It’s a Meta kind of day. First, what Meta giveth, Meta taketh away, as found out. First it was internships and now Meta is . Meanwhile, a privacy rights group in Europe published a lengthy set of documents related to privacy decisions the EU made against Meta. tells you what they said. And finally, reports that Meta’s main content moderation partner in Africa . We all have a lot of apps on our phones, but reports that for the first time in a while, , with consumer spending in this category down 2% to $167 billion. She goes into what happened and why. Now here’s five more for you:
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Inbenta, a provider of AI-powered chatbots and more, lands $40M
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
In 2011, Jordi Torras, a former Oracle VP, had a realization: Companies weren’t optimizing their search technologies as well as they could be. He founded Inbenta to solve this, providing professional consulting services while simultaneously developing an internal AI toolkit for search optimization. Over the years, transitioned from consulting to providing conversational AI as a service — inclusive of AI-powered chatbots, knowledge management and search engine tools. This proved to be a wise move — Inbenta’s customer base has grown to more than 250 brands across industries including financial services, travel, e-commerce, insurance, auto and telecom. In a sign that investors approve, Inbenta today closed a $40 million funding round led by Tritium Partners, bringing the startup’s total raised to over $60 million. Melissa Solis, Inbenta’s newly appointed CEO, says that the new cash will be put toward people, processes and platform R&D to — in his words — “position Inbenta for the anticipated explosive growth in the conversational AI space.” “ is developing a comprehensive platform that tailors AI-driven solutions across industries and use cases for the needs of all enterprises,” Solis continued. “We’ve spent over a decade fine-tuning our proprietary and patented AI toolkit globally, in 35 languages, perpetually advancing it through billions of customer interactions.” Inbenta offers four main products: Chatbot and Messenger, Knowledge and Search. Chatbot and Messenger — both chatbots — can be built into existing websites and apps (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Slack) to provide answers to customer questions. They retain conversation histories, automatically escalating complex queries to human agents or a ticketing system, and leverage automation to handle tasks like securing bookings, scheduling meetings and modifying orders. Inbenta Knowledge similarly supplies answers to common questions. But it’s not a chatbot — rather, it’s a sort of proactive knowledge base that can suggest contents for forms, auto-complete requests and predictively search for information. As for Search, it indexes data from different sources such as product catalogs and uses algorithms to tackle search queries, auto-correcting typos and spelling mistakes. Like Chatbot and Messenger, Knowledge and Search can be embedded in most apps and web pages. “From an enterprise perspective, Inbenta helps firms automate customer interactions, reduce the need and cost associated with human intervention and create an always-on channel for sales, marketing and HR,” Solis said. One might wonder how Inbenta’s AI was developed, given that chatbot vendors have a history of training their algorithms on user data without those users’ knowledge or consent. Solis says that Inbenta’s AI — which is “curated by a team of experienced analysts and computational linguists,” he claims — is “fully anonymized,” with controls to let users delete their data from the platform if they wish. With its portfolio, Inbenta is competing for market share on a number of fronts. In the chatbot space, the company has rivals in and , which deliver customizable, AI-powered chatbot services to brands. Inbenta’s Knowledge product competes with offerings from startups like , while Search squares off against document indexing tool. Solis declined to reveal Inbenta’s revenue when asked, making it tough to gauge the company’s traction. Matt Bowman, the managing partner at Tritium Partners, didn’t express concerns — not that he would, given that he’s an investor. But in an emailed statement, Bowman stressed what he sees as Inbenta’s differentiator: “multilingual capability that requires zero data training and is perpetually improving with each interaction.” “Being highly configurable across use cases and industries, Inbenta allows customers to get an immediate return on investment while having a platform that can meet future needs as usage expands,” Bowman added. Dallas, Texas-based Inbenta has more than 160 employees currently. It plans to grow that number to more than 200 by 2024.
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Hack The Box, a gamified cybersecurity training platform with 1.7M users, raises $55M
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
There’s long existed a divide in the world of computer hacking between those who are taking a malicious approach to crack a system, and those who are using the same techniques to understand the system’s vulnerabilities, help fix them and at the same time fight against the malicious actors. Today, , one of the startups that’s built a platform to help cultivate more of the latter group with a gamified approach, is announcing $55 million in funding to expand its business after racking up 1.7 million users. The funding is being led by Carlyle, with Paladin Capital Group, Osage University Partners, Marathon Venture Capital, Brighteye Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst Fund also participating. The U.K. startup is not disclosing valuation at the moment. But for some context, according to , the startup, based out of England but with offices in New York and with founding roots out of Greece — where it also has an office (and where it seems of this round leaked out a couple of days ago) — had raised just over $24 million since being founded in 2017 (with about $15 million of that in equity: the company says it’s now raised about $70 million). Its last valuation, previously updated in 2021 after it , was a very modest $52 million. “Modest” because the scale of what the company has achieved is pretty impressive. The 1.7 million community members that use the platform cover both individuals who have joined HTB on their own steam to learn skills and get certifications, as well as some 1,500 enterprises, universities, governments and other organizations that have sent their teams to HTB to be put through their paces. The company says it currently runs some 450 “hacking labs” across more than 300 machines. Similar to companies like Kahoot (which works in a very different environment to be clear, K-12 education and corporate training) the idea with HTB is that its learning environment is built around gamification, simulations with avatars and narrative scenarios that are designed to throw users into what are built to mimic classic cyber hacks of varying and increasing sophistication. It also has a “pro lab” tier that takes on typical network configurations, such as Active Directory or fully patched environments, to test and train people on different attacks and approaches around common enterprise tools and scenarios. Penetration testing, misconfigurations and evading endpoint protections are among the situations that are thrown at users. On top of this, in addition to its training platform for individuals and teams, it offers a careers platform, where those looking to hire ethical hackers, or ethical hackers looking for work, can connect. HTB is not the first nor only company to build cyber training around a gamified environment. , built in conjunction with U.S. government organizations, is built out as a mass-player environment that is used to identify and train would be white-hat hackers. (It also has a careers service.) HTB is actually one of the US Cyber Games’ sponsors and supporters. Others like SafeTitan, Phished and Immersive Labs offer a range of approaches both for technical teams as well as employees to help raise awareness. The latter is not a category currently addressed by HTB, although it’s an obvious area into which it might grow. “Our mission is to create and connect cyber-ready humans and organizations through highly engaging hacking experiences that cultivate out-of-the-box thinking,” said Haris Pylarinos, the CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “The game in cyber has changed with defensive, reactive and recovery postures not being fit-for-purpose in the face of an ever-increasing and ever-evolving wave of sophisticated attacks. A new proactive offensive & defensive approach is needed to take the fight to cybercriminals rather than waiting to be hit. From individual security professionals to companies, this means adopting a ‘hacker mindset’, learning to think and act like an attacker. This is the kind of mindset that we cultivate through Hack The Box.” Something we have been regularly returning to on TechCrunch at the moment is the fact that funding has become a lot harder to come by in certain segments of tech. HTB is in one of the categories that is continuing to see attention, not least because security breaches certainly have not slowed down with the rest of the economy. That’s one reason why investors would back those in the field that are scaling and have so far done so with relatively little outside capital. “The demands on security and IT professionals have never been greater. An industry-wide talent shortage and an exponentially growing number of cyber threats place great importance on professionals and organizations to maintain best-in-class security practices,” Constantin Boye, a director at Carlyle, in a statement. “Hack The Box is a pioneer in constantly providing fresh and curated training and upskilling content, in a fully gamified and intuitive environment, enabling individuals and organizations to tackle real-world hacking problems. We are excited for the next stage of Hack The Box’s evolution and are proud to be part of this journey.”
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Seek lands $7.5M investment for AI that answers domain-specific questions
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
, an automation platform for data analytics tasks, today announced that it raised $7.5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds that had participation from Conviction Partners, Battery Ventures and former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia. CEO Sarah Nagy says that the funding will be put toward growing Seek’s team into the next year, particularly on the engineering and data science side of the company. “I founded Seek last year, after working as a quant and data scientist for more than a decade,” Nagy told TechCrunch in an email interview. “I wanted to solve a pain point that I experienced over and over again throughout my career. I’ve often found myself feeling like a ‘human computer’ to translate between my less technical colleagues and the data they needed. For example, sales reps would send me messages asking me to pull some basic, but custom, statistics for our customers. It would frustrate me because it would take time away from the research that I wanted to be doing, that added long-term value to the business. From my colleagues’ perspective, it was also really annoying to wait a long time for me to manually get them the data.” Seek’s core product is a natural language interface for data that can plug into existing data and communication tools, including cloud data warehouses (i.e., analytics databases stored in the public cloud), within a business. Users can ask questions of Seek they’d normally ask a data team across apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams and email. Powering Seek’s search and cataloging features is a family of AI language models trained on data including ebooks, online articles and websites as well as proprietary data. The platform stores both questions and answers from users inside a knowledge base, so they can be found quickly. In this way, Seek becomes more “intelligent” at working with a company’s data the more it’s used, according to Nagy. “What Seek is hoping to do for data teams is automate the mundane, manual work that must be done by hand as it has historically been too complicated to automate,” Nagy said. “As a former data scientist who used to do this kind of work, I know that my quality of life would have improved if these tasks had been automated, and the work that I could have done with the time saved would have produced long-term, fundamental differences in my companies’ strategy and product.” There’s been lots in the news lately about AI that . When asked what Seek’s doing about it with respect to its own AI, Nagy said the company has a patent pending for a “control flow” to limit inaccuracies presented to users. Seek.ai “I predict that, as the generative AI hype cycle plays out, more conversations will be had about the flaws in the quality of AI-generated content, and how users can protect themselves from any inaccuracies,” She added. “My hope is that we will become a thought leader when it comes to educating customers on how to maximize the benefits of generative AI while having the right process in place to handle its limitations.” Seek falls into the category of enterprise search engines known as “cognitive search.” Rivals include and Microsoft SharePoint Syntex, which draw on knowledge bases to cobble together answers to company-specific questions. Startups like , Kagi, and also leverage AI models to return specific content in response to queries as opposed to straightforward lists of results. Despite the competition, nine-employee Seek has managed to sign on “household-name” customers, Nagy claims. She wouldn’t reveal revenue or name names, save saying that Seek’s roughly dozen clients — which range from “startups to the Fortune 100” — come from industries including business-to-business software as a service, fintech, direct-to-consumer and consumer packaged goods. “Generative AI seems to be the exception to the slowdown in tech right now, and Seek has benefited from the explosion in popularity of tools like ChatGPT,” Muglia said. “[Moreover,] Seek was founded post-pandemic, and our users are knowledge workers who can work from home. As companies’ digital transformation initiatives accelerated during the pandemic, including more organizations adopting ambitious data initiatives, my hypothesis for building Seek strengthened.” In the coming months, Nagy says that Seek’s focus will be on
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Want the Nothing phone in the US? Be a beta
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Here’s something that seems all but a guarantee: The way we purchase expensive electronics is going to change. Years after the U.S. began moving away from the carrier-based model of phone purchases, it seems as though we’re heading toward another sort of subscription model in the form of hardware as a service. Even with that in mind, this is a strange one — though Nothing has made breaking from orthodoxy a central tenet of its existence since day one. As we’ve known for some time, the wasn’t destined for the U.S. market — at least not through any traditional means. Today, however, the London-based firm announced it is available through a far less traditional route. “The United States represents a high potential market for Nothing and so the company is seeking to better understand users’ needs,” the company said in a note sent to TechCrunch. The is a $299 program designed to help the company get a better grip on the world’s third-largest smartphone market — one that’s been notoriously difficult to crack. The price includes a Nothing phone that’s yours to keep, even after the program runs its course at the end of June. Nothing notes: Please note, the Phone (1)’s distributed are for testing purposes. Whilst these are final models, devices may not work with all US carriers. Since this is a Beta version of the software, users may experience some limitations. Please read the below FAQs before continuing. Interested parties can sign up for the program starting today and save themselves ~$173 off the retail price. A little nothing for something, if you will.
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India’s Jio says it has rolled out 5G to over 100 cities in 100 days
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Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Jio Platforms said on Wednesday it has rolled out 5G to 101 cities in just as many days as the Indian telecom giant looks to court customers aggressively with faster data speeds. The firm said on Wednesday that its 5G network is now live across at least one city each in 18 Indian states. Bharti Airtel, Jio Platform’s chief rival in India, in comparison has extended 5G to about 30 cities, it said earlier Wednesday. India, the world’s second largest wireless market, was one of the last nations to adopt 5G. The government generated about $19 billion from auctioning the spectrum. Reliance spent from the government than any other telecom player in the country in August last year. Jio Platforms, part of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, is to bring 5G to “every town” in the South Asian market by the end of 2023. A lot is banking on 5G for Reliance. The company last year unveiled the AirFiber, a wireless plug-and-play 5G hotspot that doesn’t require fiber cables to reach homes in a move to take further share away from the fiber broadband industry. Faster data access has become a key differentiator for telecom networks in India to lure customers away from their rivals, analysts say. Reliance entered the telecom market seven years ago and now commands the lion’s share, thanks to it being early with the rollout of 4G — and cut-rate cheap data and free voice calls offerings. “With such high expected data loads, Indian CSPs have pinned their hope on promise of 5G, which will allow them to bring in enhancement in capacities, efficiencies in their network, increase in ARPU and at the same time open new realms of revenue streams from the 5G play,” KPMG wrote in a report last year.
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Blaze makes coding more accessible with AI-driven, no code app builder
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Ron Miller
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
There are lots of people out there with their finger on the pulse of the business, who have ideas on how to build useful apps, but lack basic coding skills and the ability to put their ideas to work. What if those people could describe an app they wanted to build, then add connectors to common data sources, or even build a complex workflow — all without writing a single line of code? That’s what is attempting to do as an early-stage startup from two women founders who have already built and sold one company. Today the company announced the product is generally available for the first time, and also announced a $3.5 million pre-seed round. “The problem we solve is enabling any team to build very custom, and also complex, highly secure applications and tools without needing code. And one of the really exciting pieces for us is that it’s also AI-powered,” co-founder and co-CEO Nanxi Liu told TechCrunch. The AI-powered bits are natural language processing delivered via the , which enables users to simply tell Blaze what they want to do by typing a description, which the service then turns into code. Company co-founder and co-CEO Tina Denuit-Wojcik explained that it requires a great deal of pre- and post-processing on Blaze’s part to translate the typed commands into operational code, but the API helps drive it. “The user can type just a few sentences, but we have to make it aware of all the context of the data, and other things that are on the page, how to connect and what actions are possible,” Denuit-Wojcik said. As they build an application, users can drag and drop connectors such as e-commerce tools like Shopify or payments like Stripe. Other pre-built integrations include Airtable, DocuSign, Freshdesk, Google Sheets, Salesforce and others. The company has even built its own database called Blaze Tables. Among the kinds of applications they are helping people build include document portals, customer success dashboards, inventory management systems and contract workflows. The two founders have been working together for over a decade, having founded a digital signage company called Enplug in 2012, which raised $3.7 million (per ) before being in early 2021. Liu says she and Denuit-Wojcik were inspired to launch another startup, and began focusing on no-code solutions, based on their experience at their previous company where they recognized a need for such a tool. The new company has a dozen employees to this point. As two immigrant women founding a company, they are acutely aware of the need to build a diverse and inclusive team. Plus, Liu says that the product itself will open up the sector to more people who are traditionally left out of tech jobs because they lack coding skills. “I think it’s just as how we operate. We are very thoughtful about this. And we also are very thoughtful in terms of how this product can help more women who maybe don’t have the technical skill set, and now they can go build technical products,” Liu said. Today’s $3.5 million investment closed at the end of last year. Flybridge Capital and MaC Venture Capital led the round, with participation from a slew of industry angels.
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Meta rescinded some full-time job offers
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Amanda Silberling
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Meta rescinded full-time offers from some job candidates, a spokesperson confirmed. “As we continue to reassess our hiring needs, we’ve made the difficult decision to withdraw offers to a small number of candidates,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “While this decision did not come lightly, it allows us to remain thoughtful as we readjust our hiring through 2023 to align with our highest-priority work.” Meta did not comment on how many people were impacted or what departments had rescinded offers. Just in: Meta has rescinded fulltime offers in London, as I confirmed with devs impacted. New grads with offers due to start in February have been taken back in bulk. I know of about 20 people so far. This is the first time I'm aware that Meta is taking back signed, FTE offers. — Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) According to engineer and writer , about 20 recent grads had offers rescinded to work in Meta’s office. TechCrunch viewed LinkedIn posts from two rescinded candidates who had jobs lined up in software engineering. Meta previously at its London office. Across the whole company, Meta laid off (or 13% of its workforce) in November. As Meta funnels billions of dollars into its unprofitable Reality Labs division, the company’s financial outlook has inspired uncertainty in its investors. In the second quarter of 2022, Meta posted its ; the following quarter, Meta’s 4% year over year to hit $27.7 billion. Meanwhile, net income was just $4.395 billion, down from $9.194 billion year over year. Reality Labs, Meta’s division for augmented and virtual reality projects, lost $3.672 billion alone in Q3. Meta’s situation is not helped by the overall state of the tech industry. Companies like and have also rescinded job offers and waged .
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Hackers stole data of 460,000 individuals in MFHS ransomware attack
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Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Pennsylvania-based nonprofit health provider Maternal & Family Health Services has confirmed cybercriminals accessed the sensitive data of close to half a million people. MFHS revealed that it had been hit by ransomware that exposed the personal data of current and former patients, employees and vendors. The healthcare giant said it was made aware of the incident on April 4, 2022 but admitted that may have been initially compromised as far back as August 21, 2021. When asked by TechCrunch at the time, MFHS declined to confirm how many individuals were affected. However, this week reported that a total of 461,070 people, including 68 Maine residents, are affected by the breach. In a letter sent to affected residents on January 10 — more than nine months after the organization was first alerted to the ransomware incident — MFHS said that attackers accessed sensitive data, including names, addresses, date of birth, driver license numbers, Social Security numbers, usernames and passwords, health insurance and medical information, and financial information. The attackers also took credit and debit card numbers, the notification said. It remains unclear who was behind the ransomware attack, if MFHS paid a ransom demand and why the nonprofit didn’t disclose the incident sooner. MFHS didn’t immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions on Wednesday, and it doesn’t appear that any major ransomware group has yet claimed responsibility for the incident.
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Samsung is holding its next Galaxy Unpacked event on February 1, teases camera improvements
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Samsung announced today that it’s holding the next Galaxy Unpacked event on February 1 at 10:30 AM PT/1:30 PM ET. The company will expectedly announce the S23 series of phones at its first in-person event in three years. The South Korean tech giant is hosting this event in San Fransico with a “Get ready to share the epic” tagline. While Samsung’s press announcement just had a GIF indicating multiple camera arrays, it posted hinting toward high-megapixel sensors and improved low-light photography. The first teaser said “WOW-worthy resolution is coming” while the second teaser said, “Stunning night photos are coming soon.” Weibo/Samsung Samsung used a 108-megapixel sensor in S22 Ultra last year. The teasers posted by the company indicated that it could use Samsung’s own 200-megapixel sensor — which was — in S23 Ultra. The company’s latest phone is likely to be powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor. While there might be small design changes and spec bumps across the lineup, it won’t be as drastic as deciding to dedicate a slot for . Just like the last year, Samsung is letting customers reserve in exchange for $50 of Samsung Store credit. Thankfully, buyers will have a choice to not buy the device at all. Samsung is strategically placing this event right between , which just concluded, and the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, which is scheduled for the end of February. Last week, the Korean tech company posted , registering record low profits in the last eight years. The company blamed the economic downturn and lower demand for smartphones as core reasons for these numbers.
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Meta’s main content moderation partner in Africa shuts down operations
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Annie Njanja
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Meta’s main subcontractor for content moderation in Africa, Sama, announced earlier Tuesday the closure of its content moderation arm at its hub in Kenya, citing the need to streamline operations. This comes months after Sama and Meta were and exploitation, and just weeks after called for Meta to increase its content moderation capacity in Kenya. Following the announcement by Sama, 200 employees, representing 3% of its team, will be let go as the company exits content review services and concentrates on labeling work (computer vision data annotation). The company sourced moderators from across Africa, and the closure of the arm is said to leave a section without work permits. Sama’s moderators were required to sift through social media posts on all its platforms, including Facebook, to remove those perpetrating and perpetuating hate, misinformation and violence. Reports indicate Sama encouraged staff affected by the closure to apply for other job opportunities at its Kenya and Uganda offices. “The current economic climate requires more efficient and streamlined business operations,” said Sama, according to a by the Financial Times, which said that the social media giant has contracted Luxembourg-based Majorel to fill up the gap. The decision to drop Meta’s contract, which expires at the end of March, comes months after a lawsuit was filed by Daniel Motaung, a South African national and ex-Sama content moderator, in Kenya last year accusing the two firms of forced labor and human trafficking, unfair labor relations, union busting and failure to provide “adequate” mental health and psychosocial support. Sama’s decision also comes at a time when Meta is facing another lawsuit in Kenya over claims that the social media giant has failed to employ enough safety measures on Facebook, which has, in turn, fueled conflicts that have led to deaths, including of 500,000 Ethiopians during the recently ended Tigray War. The lawsuit claims the social site amplified hateful content and failed to hire enough personnel with an understanding of local languages to moderate content.
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Google users not given sufficient choice over its data processing, says German antitrust watchdog
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Bad news for Google in Germany — where the antitrust watchdog has issued a preliminary statement of objections over its data processing terms and said it’s currently planning to require the tech giant to provide users with more choice over what it does with their information. The Bundeskartellamt, or Federal Cartel Office (FCO), has been investigating Google’s T&Cs for processing user data since . At issue is how Google collects and connects user data across multiple services — and whether it offers users sufficient choice over its profiling of them for ad targeting. This has landed on the radar of the antitrust regulator since a lack of choice for consumers can negatively affect competition. “The Bundeskartellamt has reached the preliminary conclusion that, based on the current terms, users are not given sufficient choice as to whether and to what extent they agree to this far-reaching processing of their data across services. The choices offered so far, if any, are, in particular, not sufficiently transparent and too general,” the FCO writes in a . “According to the Bundeskartellamt’s current assessment, sufficient choice particularly requires that users are able to limit the processing of data to the specific service used. In addition, they also have to be able to differentiate between the purposes for which the data are processed. “Moreover, the choices offered must not be devised in a way that makes it easier for users to consent to the processing of data across services than not to consent to this. General and indiscriminate data retention and processing across services without a specific cause as a preventive measure, including for security purposes, is not permissible either without giving users any choice. Therefore, the Bundeskartellamt is currently planning to oblige the company to change the choices offered.” A the German regulator confirmed the adtech giant falls under a special abuse control regime that was passed as an update to domestic competition law at the start of 2021 — aimed at digital giants with so called “paramount significance across markets” — allowing the FCO to take proactive measures to correct anti-competitive practices it identifies. That means the German competition regulator is already empowered to order corrections on Google more efficiently than would be possible under traditional ‘ex-post’ antitrust laws. In a statement, the watchdog’s president, Andreas Mundt, added: “Google’s business model relies heavily on the processing of user data. Due to its established access to relevant data gathered from a large number of different services, Google enjoys a strategic advantage over other companies. Google’s practices must be measured against the requirements under the new competition rules for large digital companies. The company has to give users sufficient choice as to how their data are processed.” Google will now have an opportunity to comment on the FCO’s objections, as its administrative proceeding continues — and the tech giant could either try to justify its practices to the regulator or offer suggested remedies to alleviate its concerns (as it did to seek to settle an FCO probe of its News Showcase product ). A final decision on the matter expected this year, per the Bundeskartellamt. Google was contacted for comment on the statement of objections. A Google spokesperson said: People expect us to operate our business responsibly — by both maintaining product experiences that put users first and updating our services continuously to meet the expectations of regulators. We’ll continue to engage constructively with the FCO to try and resolve their concerns. If the FCO presses ahead, and requires that Google offer its users a meaningful choice to refuse cross-service tracking, it could have broad significance — given the future of ad targeting looks set to be tied to processing of so-called first party data (aka, data collected by a company from its own users). (Reminder: , Google announced a plan to deprecate support for third party tracking technologies in its Chrome browser and switch to (it claims) more privacy-preserving alternatives for ad targeting (aka its “ ” proposal). That project is ongoing — under .) Google’s planned deprecation of support for tracking cookies has triggered competition complaints from regional and — who are concerned the shift will further entrench its dominance of online advertising, given how much first party data its business gathers by tracking and triangulating usage of popular web services like search, YouTube, Google Maps and on mobile via Google’s Android platform. This suggests that any regulatory mandate that makes it harder for Google to join-up first party data — and beat against its ability to build superprofiles of its own users by tracking them across multiple mainstream services it owns — could be highly significant in shrinking its competitive advantage in a post-tracking cookie world. And while any FCO order to Google that reduced its ability to join up usage across different services would only apply to its business in Germany, the European Union now has a similar ex ante update to competition regulation — in the form of the Digital Markets Act ( ) — which could end up applying (broader) obligations and/or restrictions on how Google processes data right across the bloc. The DMA, which came into force last November and will , applies a set of up-front rules to the core platform services of tech giants that are designated as Internet gatekeepers once the European Commission makes those designations. That work will take place in the coming months — and Google is widely expected to be subject to the pan-EU special abuse regime — although it remains to be seen which of its services may be designated as core platform services under the DMA. It’s worth emphasizing there is some difference of approach between the German special abuse regime and the DMA. So the FCO’s action here likely won’t be exactly replicated by the Commission’s application of the DMA. But while the latter — a pan-EU regulation — will have primary application once it’s fully up and running, national regimes (such as the one the FCO is applying here against Google) can continue to be applied in parallel provided that specific rules on conflicts are observed (so, basically, use will need to be complementary). That suggests Google is unlikely to be able to rely on the DMA to wiggle out of any more fulsome restrictions applied to its business in Germany — which is also the largest consumer market in the EU. So the FCO’s intervention remains a significant one. The regulator’s press release notes that its proceeding against Google is based on its assessment of German competition law — but it also suggests the DMA is “likely to apply to certain Google services in the future”. “While the also includes a provision which addresses the processing of data across services, this applies only if so-called core platform services, which still have to be designated by the European Commission, are involved,” it adds. “The present proceeding based on the national provision under Section 19a partially exceeds the future requirements of the DMA. In this regard, the is in close contact with the European Commission.”
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Peppy secures a $45M Series B to expand its B2B2C health services platform to the US
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Mike Butcher
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
There are some mega-trends playing out across developed-world workforces that startups are picking up on. There’s the digitization of healthcare, the “platforming” of employee services and the macro effects of older employees, combined with the cost of living crisis for new parents. Founded in London in 2018, offer services around menopause, fertility, pregnancy and early parenthood to a corporate customer base, which then offers it for free to employees. The twist is that those services are largely individualised, with personal video consultations and the like. Peppy was partly lucky and partly prescient: The massive digitization that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic threw employee services like this online, by necessity. Employees using Peppy can access experts via a mobile app, with instant messaging, group chat, video consultations, live events, articles, videos and programs, as well as join communities. Back in 2021 we covered how it had a $10 million Series A led round by Felix Capital. It’s now secured funding to expand in the U.S., with a $45 million Series B led by AlbionVC. The round was joined by Kathaka, MTech Capital, Simplyhealth and Sony Innovation Fund. Previous investors Felix Capital, Hambro Perks, Outward VC and Seedcamp also participated. Peppy started out addressing the oft-ignored issue of menopause support as an employee benefit. This was a fairly untapped area, which led it to gaining a lot of growth quite quickly (the global menopause market reached a valuation of $15.4 billion, and is expected to continue growing at 5% annually through 2030, according to some estimates). In the U.S., around 6,000 women reach menopause every day. Peppy now supports endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), conditions that each affect roughly one in 10 women in the U.S. Dr. Mridula Pore, co-founder and co-CEO of Peppy, said in a statement: “We’re on a mission to become a household name across the world and our Series B funding is just the start. We already dominate Europe’s employer-funded gender-based healthcare market.” Peppy clients now include Accenture, Adobe, Canada Life, Disney and Marsh McLennan.
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Daily Crunch: Citing ‘unscrupulous actors’ and market trends, Coinbase CEO lays off 950 workers
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Haje is still dazed from spending a week deep in the bowels of Las Vegas for CES 2023 but is grateful to be back in the Daily Crunch saddle. Let’s see what’s happening in tech land! — and German-based biotech company BioNTech — one of the big manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines, among other things — , a Tunis-born and U.K.-based AI startup for up to £562 million (~$680 million) in its largest deal yet, reports. The German vaccine maker intends to use InstaDeep’s machine learning to “improve its drug discovery process, including developing personalised treatments tailored to a patient’s cancer.” Supermom, a parenting platform with 20 million users in six Southeast Asian countries, by completing surveys, reports. It gives brands a way to conduct market research and collect first-party data, which is important as marketers prepare for a post-cookie world. And we have a smattering of additional stories for you: / Getty Images “Not all companies are best positioned to go it alone, and that’s okay,” writes Vishal Lugani, general partner and co-founder at Acrew Capital. In his detailed guide to the M&A process, Lugani offers a week-by-week deal timeline that breaks down every step between sourcing offers and post-close integration. A lot can happen over the months it can take for a deal to close, so the article includes strategies for selecting an acquirer, maintaining product momentum, and managing your team (and investors!). Three more from the TC+ team: Some sources told that in silicon chip bigwigs Sam Zeloof and Jim Keller, who started Atomic Semi to manufacture chips. And get this: the proposed $15 million investment will value the company at $100 million. Not too shabby, er, should we say silicon-y. And we have five more for you:
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