In BriefPosted:11:12 AM PST November 23, 2024Image Credits:Sjoerd van der Wal / Getty ImagesTesla says it has reached a conditional settlement in Rivian trade secrets lawsuitTesla and Rivian may have resolved a lawsuit in which Tesla accused Rivian of poaching employees and stealing trade secrets.Bloomberg reports that Tesla told a California judge that the companies have reached a conditional settlement, and that it expects to seek dismissal of the lawsuit by December 24.Tesla filed the suit, which was set to go to trial in March of next year, back in 2020. The EV maker alleged that it had discovered an alarming pattern in which Rivian was recruiting Tesla employees and encouraging them to take proprietary information with them as they left.In response, Rivian filed to dismiss the suit, arguing that it was an improper and malicious attempt to slow Rivians momentum and to scare Tesla employees who might be thinking of leaving.Tesla did not immediately respond to TechCrunchs request for comment. A Rivian spokesperson said the company does not comment on litigation.Topics

In BriefPosted:6:56 PM PST November 23, 2024Image Credits:ZoomHow a digital you can sit through your agonizing web conference callsNow you can appear to be on a Zoom call in your office, even when youre sipping a margarita in a hammock far, far away. Courtesy of a months-old startup called Pickle, its pitch is simple: just submit a five-minute-long training video of yourself to create an avatar, and within 24 hours, youre ready to go. Want to call your colleagues from the car? No problem. Too lazy to get out of bed? No problem. At a beach club? Youre probably pushing it, though judging by the demo video, its also ideal if no one on the call is paying close attention to you. (The service currently comes in basic, standard, and pro versions, from roughly $300 per year to $1,150 per year.)Backed by the nascent L.A. venture firm, Krew Capital, the tech only works right now with MacOS, says Pickle, though it says a Windows version is coming next month. As for the conferencing apps from which users can choose, these include Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, says Pickle, adding on its site that due to high demand, clone generation is currently delayed.Topics

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, were exploring the DOJ telling Google to sell off Chrome to break up its monopoly, OpenAI accidentally deleting potential evidence in The New York Times copyright lawsuit against it, and how AI companies are using TikTok brainrot for study tools. Lets do this.The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should divest its Chrome browser to help break up the companys illegal monopoly in online search. District Court judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google was an illegal monopoly for abusing its power over the search business, and the DOJs latest filing suggests that Googles ownership of Android and Chrome pose a significant challenge to apply remedies for making the search market competitive.Anthropic has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services the primary place itll train its flagship generative AI models. Anthropic is also working with Annapurna Labs, AWS chipmaking division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS custom-built chips for training AI models. The new cash infusion from Amazon brings the tech giants total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News copyright lawsuit, lawyers for the publishers allege. As part of the suit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel could perform searches for their copyrighted content in its AI training sets. But in a letter, attorneys for the publishers say that OpenAI engineers erased all the publishers search data stored on one of the virtual machines.If youd like to receive the Week in Review newsletter in your inbox every Saturday, sign up here!NewsImage Credits:Presley Ann/Getty Images and CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty ImagesKim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul got some hands-on experience with Teslas bipedal, humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian prompts Optimus to make a heart with its hand, dance like its at a luau, and play rock, paper, scissors. Read moreOuras valuation surpasses $5B: The smart ring maker received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which marks Ouras Series D funding round, brings the companys valuation to more than $5 billion. Read moreLets throw a party for Partiful: The customizable event-planning app challenging older solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events is a favorite among Gen Z users and has just been named Googles best app of 2024. Read moreTalk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon let Teams users clone their voices so they can have their sound-alikes speak to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Read moreHackers go after Andrew Tate: According to The Daily Dot, hackers breached an online course founded by the influencer and self-described misogynist, leaking data on close to 800,000 users. Tate is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on charges of human trafficking and rape. Read moreWhat makes a bank a bank? The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ruled that all digital services that handle a significant number of transactions should be subject to bank-like supervision, which could affect Apple Pay, Cash App, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo. Read moreA more conversational Siri: Apple is developing a new version of Siri powered by advanced large language models, according to sources cited by Bloomberg, in an attempt to catch up with more natural-sounding competitors like Googles Gemini Live. Read moreCashing in on TikTok brainrot: Several AI-based study tools are capitalizing on a PDF to Brainrot trend, in which the text of a document you upload is read to you in a monotone voice over oddly satisfying vertical videos like Subway Surfers gameplay.Read moreThreads takes a stab at Bluesky: As Bluesky tops 20 million users, Instagram Threads has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds in an effort to capitalize on the user demand for more personalization. Read moreChatGPT in the classroom: OpenAI released a free online course designed to help K-12 teachers learn how to bring ChatGPT into their classrooms. But some educators are wary of the technology and its potential to go awry. Read moreDo we need another daily word game? I am a daily word game and crossword puzzle evangelist, but it feels like were quickly approaching oversaturation in the market. Netflix, in collaboration with TED, launched its new daily word puzzle called TED Tumblewords. Read moreAnalysisImage Credits:Real444 / Getty ImagesPlease dont upload your X-rays to a chatbot: People frequently turn to generative AI chatbots to ask questions about their medical concerns and to better understand their health. Since October, X users have been encouraged to upload their X-rays, MRIs, and PET scans to the platforms AI chatbot, Grok, to help interpret their results. Medical data is a special category with federal protections that, for the most part, only you can choose to circumvent. But just because you can doesnt mean you should. As Zack Whittaker writes, its good to remember that what goes on the internet never leaves the internet. Read more

In BriefPosted:2:26 PM PST November 23, 2024Image Credits:Apple TV+ /Wolfs sequel canceled because director no longer trusted AppleIt may be hard to remember, but George Clooney and Brad Pitt co-starred in a movie, Wolfs, that Apple released just two months ago.On Friday, the films writer and director Jon Watts said Friday that a sequel is no longer happening; in a follow-up interview with Deadline, he explained that he no longer trusted [Apple] as a creative partner.The company is reportedly scaling back its movie strategy. Wolfs, for example, was supposed to get a big theatrical release, but instead, it played in a limited number of theaters for just one week before launching on Apple TV+.Watts, who also created the new Star Wars show Skeleton Crew, said Apples shift was a total surprise and made without any explanation or discussion.I was completely shocked and asked them to please not include the news that I was writing a sequel, Watts said. They ignored my request and announced it in their press release anyway, seemingly to create a positive spin to their streaming pivot.As a result, Watts said he quietly returned the money they gave me for the sequel and canceled the project.Topics

Illumen Capital is doubling down on its support for fund managers and founders from underrepresented communities.The firm is an impact fund of funds that has previously supported ways to address racial bias in investing. Yesterday, the firm, founded by Daryn Dodson, announced the raise of a $32.75 million Catalyst Fund to once again support emerging fund managers and founders, especially those hailing from underrepresented backgrounds.The news comes during a fraught time for many diverse funding managers and founders, who are seeing less financial support than in the years before. Black founders raised less than 1% of venture capital funding last year, according to Crunchbase, and as of H1, was on track to continue seeing a funding decline. Speaking to TechCrunch, Dodson said, During terms of economic uncertainty, political polarization, and concerns of ongoing inflation, weve seen biases increase, Dodson told TechCrunch, adding that these biases are also playing out in the venture space, where billions of capital are still going to the same people.When asked about fundraising, Dodson said that the firm was fortunate enough to have established deep relationships, with limited partners that are committed to backing the next generation of VC and PE managers.The firm has approximately $285 million in assets under management, it said. It last raised a $168 million Fund II in 2023 to also address racial and gender bias in investing.Dodson said the Catalyst Fund is a complementary strategy to its first two funds. Whereas our Fund I and Fund II focused on more established managers, the Catalyst Fund prioritizes first-time managers and early-stage founders, he continued. It was intentionally a smaller vehicle, and we were fortunate that two of our anchor investors from our Fund II Ford Foundation and Health Forward Foundation backed this latest fund.The Fund hopes to invest at least 65% of capital into first-time venture managers and up to 35% of capital as direct co-investments into companies sourced through any of its active funds. At least 90% of the fund will likely be focused domestically, Dodson continued. And up to 20% in emerging markets. The fund will look generally at managers working in education, health and wellness, financial inclusion, climate, and sustainability, he said.Dodson hopes to deploy the fund within the next year and a half. We see our Catalyst Fund taking advantage of a market inefficiency, he said. With the Catalyst Fund, we hope to demonstrate the intrinsic value of backing diverse-led funds, and identify the best of the next generation of venture managers.

In BriefPosted:3:54 PM PST November 22, 2024Image Credits:Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty ImagesSequoia marks up its 2020 fund by 25%Sequoia says no exits, no problem.The Silicon Valley titan of venture marked up the value of its 2020 Sequoia Capital U.S. Venture XVII fund by 24.6% in June, at the end of a 12-month period, according to PitchBook, which ran analysis on data from the Regents of the University of Californias endowment.Sequoias markup is notable because the fund has yet to have any exits. This is also a favorable change for a 2020 fund vintage, given the fact that funds from that year arent predicted to perform well for any VC after the frothy valuations of 2020 and 2021. The mismatch is likely due to lofty AI valuations giving venture a sense of recovery that hasnt come to fruition quite yet for other sectors. Sequoia is an investor in buzzy AI companies including: OpenAI, Glean and Harvey, among others.Sequoia raised more than $800 million for Fund XVII which closed in 2022. Topics

In BriefPosted:3:30 PM PST November 21, 2024Image Credits:Daniel Mihailescu / AFP / Getty ImagesHackers break into Andrew Tates online university, steal user data and flood chats with emojisHackers have breached an online course founded by ostensible influencer and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate, leaking data on close to 800,000 users, including thousands of email addresses and private user chat logs.The Daily Dot, which broke the news Thursday, reported that the hackers accessed the user data, then flooded the online courses chatroom with emojis that included a transgender flag, a feminist fist, an AI-generated image of Tate draped in a rainbow flag, another where his buttocks are enlarged, among others.The hacktivists provided the hacked data on the courses users to The Daily Dot, which handed the records to data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned, and DDoSecrets, a nonprofit collective that stores leaked datasets in the public interest.Per the BBC, Tate remains under house arrest in Romania awaiting trial on charges on allegations of human trafficking and rape.Topics

In BriefPosted:4:22 PM PST November 21, 2024Image Credits:Manabu Takahashi / Getty ImagesAmerican Airlines is deploying new tech to shame boarding line cuttersAmerican Airlines has a new tactic for shaming boarding line cutters: A loud beeper.CNBC reports that the airline is rolling out a system that emits two loud beeps when a traveler tries to get on an airplane before their boarding group is called.As of Wednesday, the new tech was in over 100 airports around the U.S. following tests at Albuquerque International Sunport, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and Tucson International Airport.CNBC notes that other airlines have experimented with less, well, audible ways to prevent gate crowding, which can interfere with the boarding process for flyers who pay a premium to get seated early. United, for example, texts customers when its time to board, provides a countdown-to-boarding clock via its iOS app, and has digital signs showing which boarding group has been called. Topics

The United States Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should divest its Chrome browser as part of a remedy to break up the companys illegal monopoly in online search, according to a filing with the U.S District Court of the District of Columbia. Google would not be allowed to re-enter the search market for five years if the DOJs proposed remedy is approved.Ultimately, it will be up to District Court Judge Amit Mehta to decide what Googles final punishment will be, a decision that could fundamentally change one of the worlds largest businesses and alter the structure of the internet as we know it. That phase of the trial is expected to kick off sometime in 2025.Judge Mehta ruled in August that Google was an illegal monopoly for abusing its power over the search business. The judge also took issue with Googles control of various gateways to the internet and the companys payments to third parties in order to retain its status as a default search engine.The DOJs latest filing suggested that Googles ownership of Android and Chrome, which are key distribution channels for its search business, pose a significant challenge to apply remedies for making the search market competitive.The Justice Department proposed other remedies to address the search giants monopoly, including that Google spin off its Android mobile operating system. The filing noted that Google and other partners might be against that spin-off and suggested strict remedies, including not using Android to disadvantage its search competitors. The DOJ hinted that if Google fails to put limitations on Android, it should be forced to sell it off.Prosecutors also argued that the company should be prohibited from entering into exclusionary third-party contracts with browser or phone companies, such as Googles contract with Apple, which is to be the default search engine on all Apple products.The DOJ also argued that Google should license its search data along with ad click data to rivals.Additionally, the DOJ also jotted out conditions prohibiting Google from entering the browser market again five years after the company spins off Chrome. Plus, it also proposed that after the Chrome sale, Google shouldnt acquire or own any rival ad text search, query-based AI product, or ads technology. Whats more, the document outlined provisions for publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train AI models.If the court accepts these remedies, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic in AI technology.Googles responseIn reponse, Google said DOJs latest filing was a radical interventionist agenda that would harm people the U.S. and the countrys tech prowess in the world. DOJs wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Courts decision. It would break a range of Google products even beyond Search that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives, president of global affairs and Googles chief legal officer Kent Walker said in a blog post. Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would put security and privacy of users at stake, detoriate quality of Chrome and Android, and hurt services like Mozilla Firefox, which depends on Goolge Search.He added that if the proposal goes through, it will hamper peoples ability to access Google Search. Plus, it would damage the companys prospects in AI race. DOJs approach would result in unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers, and small businesses and jeopardize Americas global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment its needed most, he said.The company is set to file its reponse to this filing next month.The Wednesday filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering pushing Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the browser market in the U.S., according to web traffic service StatCounter.

Here is yet one more sign of the travel industrys noticeable boom: a major growth round for one of the B2B startups servicing it. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C of $370 million. The KKR-led round catapults Lighthouse to a valuation of over $1 billion.The funding will be used to continue building out more data sets, analytics tools and AI functionality, the company said. It may also be using this large capital injection for acquisitions to evolve its business: the company has made four acquisitions to date, and one from earlier this year Stardekk has built all-in-one hotel software for managing reservations and more.The company is based out of London, and this is one of the biggest rounds for a startup based in the city, as well as one of the biggest rounds for the travel sector, for this year.For those tracking how Europes startup ecosystem is performing at the moment, Lighthouses funding track record is instructive: the company raised $80 million in 2021, at a peak moment for fundraising.This latest round is an affirmation from investors that its been doing the right things in the last several years.In Europe, startups have been beaten by slower activity across a number of segments of tech, geopolitical turmoil and slow economic growth. Lighthouse has aimed its business at a global market (currently estimated to be worth some $15 trillion annually), and its focus on business intelligence and applying newer technology like AI to providing it, underscores how data-driven businesses continue to see opportunities.The companys core set of tools are not directly related to taking bookings or managing staff and accounts per se. Instead, its focus is on business intelligence, specifically analytics and insights. It says that it crunches 400 terabytes of travel and market data daily, and leverages AI to provide insights to customers, with products targeting large hotel chains, and others targeting smaller operations.It says it has more than 70,000 hospitality providers using its tools, with some of the big names including Holiday Inn, Radisson and NH Hotel Group.The round is a testament to the demand among hotels for better tooling to improve its pricing and overall offer to customers, at a time when we have more choice than ever before, and more ways of finding and booking hotels.Were just getting started in making hospitality data and tools more powerful, accessible, and affordable, said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lighthouse, in a statement. I couldnt be more energized by what were working towards. Were hopefully speaking with him later today to hear more.The companys previous round included Spectrum Equity, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, and Highgate Technology Ventures, and all of these investors are also participating in this latest Series C.

Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to acquire Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, for an undisclosed sum.Snowflake unveiled the deal at the close of the market bell on Wednesday, when it also announced its Q3 2025 earnings. The purchase hasnt yet closed, and its subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted in a release.Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously CVP at Cloudera, while Roquet was Clouderas CMO and, before that, a business development executive at AWS.Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source project for data processing developed by the NSA, to power a platform for automating data flows between various enterprise data sources. Data processors extract, clean, transform, and enrich data, including for generative AI use cases.With Datavolo, which managed to raise $21 million in venture capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more versatile data processing pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says, Datavolo might enable users to replace single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that let them move data from cloud and on-premise sources to Snowflakes data cloud.By bringing Datavolo into the Snowflake fold, we are expanding how much of the data lifecycle Snowflake captures unlocking both simplicity and cost savings for our customers, without any sacrifice to data extensibility, Ramaswamy said in a statement. We are excited to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate what is the best platform for enterprise data unstructured and structured, batch and streaming and dedicated to the success of the open source community.Witt says that Snowflake will support and help to manage the Apache NiFi project following the close of the acquisition. Data engineering at scale can be incredibly costly and complex, and our aim has always been to simplify experiences for our customers so they can achieve value faster, he added in a press release. By joining forces with Snowflake, we can empower our customers with the immense scale and radical simplicity of Snowflakes platform, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.Thanks in part to AI, the demand for data management technologies has surged. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the market for global enterprise data management could be worth $224.87 billion by 2032.Data management was a challenge for enterprises long before the AI boom, though. According to a 2022 survey from Great Expectations, a platform for data quality, 91% of organizations said that data quality issues were impacting their performance.Against that backdrop, its not surprising to see firms like Datavolo rise to prominence. Today was a newsy day for Snowflake, which reported better-than-expected earnings that sent its stock climbing 19%. In addition to buying Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the AI startups models in its Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence, and Cortex Analyst products.

Social media platform Reddit experienced an outage this afternoon at around 12:20 p.m. PT (or possibly even earlier), resulting in thousands of users being unable to access its website and app. After four hours, it appears to be working again. Reddit confirmed it fixed the issue and is monitoring the results, according to its status page.We discovered the outage ourselves when attempting to visit the homepage, which displayed a black screen with the message: Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. Reset reason: connection failure. On the iOS app, we only saw the dead Snoo head, Reddits alien mascot.Over 47,000 users reported problems on Downdetector.com and many users took to X to voice their complaints, sharing images of the same connection error page that we encountered.TechCrunch has reached out to the company for comment.

In BriefPosted:6:35 PM PST November 19, 2024Image Credits:Janice Lee / Coldwell Banker RealtyYou have a few hours left to bid on this burned-out husk in San FranciscoHouses in San Francisco are notoriously expensive, with the average home price hovering around $1.26 million. Its no wonder that a fire-ravaged shack priced at $299,000 in one of San Franciscos southernmost neighborhoods saw at least 20 people tour the property this past weekend, according to The San Francisco Standard.Potential buyers were asked to sign a liability waiver before stepping foot into the buildings scorched remnants, notes the outlet. The real estate agent representing the property a fixer-upper gem that was reportedly inhabited by squatters before it caught fire expects it to fetch more than its asking price, too. (All bids were due on Tuesday.)Of course, buyers in San Francisco are used to even ramshackle buildings costing a small fortune. In early 2022, before many tech workers who left the city amid the pandemic returned, a moldering, a 122-year-old Victorian advertised as the the worst house on the best block of San Francisco sold for nearly $2 million.Topics

OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students. But some educators are wary of the technology and its potential to go awry. Today, OpenAI released a free online course designed to help K-12 teachers learn how to bring ChatGPT, the companys AI chatbot platform, into their classrooms. Created in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, with which OpenAI has an active partnership, the one-hour, nine-module program covers the basics of AI and its pedagogical applications.OpenAI says that its already deployed the course in dozens of schools, including the Agua Fria School District in Arizona, the San Bernardino School District in California, and the charter school system Challenger Schools. Per the companys internal research, 98% of participants said the program offered new ideas or strategies that they could apply to their work.Schools across the country are grappling with new opportunities and challenges as AI reshapes education, Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media, said in a statement. With this course, we are taking a proactive approach to support and educate teachers on the front lines and prepare for this transformation.But some educators dont see the program as helpful and think it could in fact mislead.Image Credits:OpenAILance Warwick, a sports lecturer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is concerned resources like OpenAIs will normalize AI use among educators unaware of the techs ethical implications. While OpenAIs course covers some of ChatGPTs limitations, like that it cant fairly grade students work, Warwick found the modules on privacy and safety to be very limited and contradictory.In the example prompts [OpenAI gives], one tells you to incorporate grades and feedback from past assignments, while another tells you to create a prompt for an activity to teach the Mexican Revolution, Warwick noted. In the next module on safety, it tells you to never input student data, and then talks about the bias inherent in generative AI and the issues with accuracy. Im not sure those are compatible with the use cases.Sin Tres Souhaits, a visual artist and educator at The University of Arizona, says that hes found AI tools to be helpful in writing assignment guides and other supplementary course materials. But he also says hes concerned that OpenAIs program doesnt directly address how the company might exercise control over content teachers create using its services.If educators are creating courses and coursework on a program that gives the company the right to recreate and sell that data, that would destabilize a lot, Tres Souhaits told TechCrunch. Its unclear to me how OpenAI will use, package, or sell whatever is generated by their models.loIn its ToS, OpenAI states that it doesnt sell user data, and that users of its services, including ChatGPT, own the outputs they generate to the extent permitted by applicable law. Without additional assurances, however, Tres Souhaits isnt convinced that OpenAI wont quietly change its policies in the future.Image Credits:OpenAIFor me, AI is like crypto, Tres Souhaits said. Its new, so it offers a lot of possibility but its also so deregulated that I wonder how much I would trust any guarantee.Late last year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)pushedfor governments to regulate the use of AI in education, including implementing age limits for users and guardrails on data protection and user privacy. But little progress has been made on those fronts since and on AI policy in general.Tres Souhaits also takes issue with the fact that OpenAIs program, which OpenAI markets as a guide to AI, generative AI, and ChatGPT, doesnt mention any AI tools besides OpenAIs own. It feels like this reinforces the idea that OpenAI is the AI company, he said. Its a smart idea for OpenAI as a business. But we already have a problem with these tech-opolies companies that have an outsize influence because, as the tech was developed, they put themselves at the center of innovation and made themselves synonymous with the thing itself.Josh Prieur, a classroom teacher-turned-product director at educational games company Prodigy Education, had a more upbeat take on OpenAIs educator outreach. Prieur argues that there are clear upsides for teachers if school systems adopt AI in a thoughtful and responsible way, and he believes that OpenAIs program is transparent about the risks.There remain concerns from teachers around using AI to plagiarize content and dehumanize the learning experience, and also risks around becoming overly reliant on AI, Preiur said. But education is often key to overcoming fears around the adoption of new technology in schools, while also ensuring the right safeguards are in place to ensure students are protected and teachers remain in full control.OpenAI is aggressively going after the education market, which it sees as a key area of growth. Image Credits:OpenAIIn September, OpenAI hired former Coursera chief revenue officer Leah Belsky as its first GM of education, and chargefd her bringing OpenAIs products to more schools. And in the spring, the company launched ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT built foruniversities.According to Allied Market Research, the AI in education market could be worth $88.2 billion within the next decade. But growth is off to a sluggish start, in large part thanks to skeptical pedagogues.In a survey this year by the Pew Research Center, a quarter of public K-12 teachers said that using AI tools in education does more harm than good. A separate poll by the Rand Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that just 18% of K-12 educators are using AI in their classrooms. Educational leaders have been similarly reluctant to try AI themselves, or introduce the technology to the educators they oversee. Per educational consulting firm EAB, few district superintendents view addressingAI as a very urgent needthis year particularly in light of pressing issues such as understaffing and chronic absenteeism.Mixed research on AIs educational impact hasnt helped convince the non-believers. University of Pennsylvania researchers found that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT did worse on a math test than students who didnt have access. In a separate study, researchers observed that German students using ChatGPT were able to find research materials more easily, but tended to synthesize those materials less skillfully than their non-ChatGPT-using peers.As OpenAI writes in its guide, ChatGPT isnt a substitute for engagement with students. Some educators and schools may never be convinced its a substitute for any step in the teaching process.

The U.K. government is not ruling out further beefing up existing online safety rules by adding an Australian-style ban on social media for under 16s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, has said. Back in the summer the government warned it may toughen laws for tech platforms in the wake of riots that were perceived to have been fuelled by online disinformation following a knife attack which killed three young girls. Since then its emerged that some of the people prosecuted for rioting were minors amping up concerns about social medias influence on impressionable, developing minds. Speaking to BBC Radio 4s Today program on Wednesday Kyle was asked whether the government would ban social media for under 16s. He responded by saying everything is on the table with me.Kyle was being interviewed as the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) set out its priorities for enforcement of the Online Safety Act (OSA) which parliament passed last year. The OSA targets a grab-bag of online harms, from cyberbullying and hate speech, to intimate image abuse, scam ads and animal cruelty, with U.K. legislators saying they want to make the country the safest place to go online in the world. Although the strongest driver has been a child safeguarding impetus, with lawmakers responding to concerns that kids are accessing harmful and inappropriate content. DSITs Statement of Strategic Priorities continues this theme, by putting child safety at the top of the list. Strategic Priorities for online safetyHere are DSITs five priorities for the OSA in full: 1. Safety by design:Embed safety by design to deliver safe online experiences for all users but especially children, tackle violence against women and girls, and work towards ensuring that there are no safe havens for illegal content and activity, including fraud, child sexual exploitation and abuse, and illegal disinformation.2. Transparency and accountability:Ensure industry transparency and accountability from platforms to deliver online safety outcomes, promoting increased trust and expanding the evidence-base to provide safer experiences for users.3. Agile regulation:Deliver an agile approach to regulation, ensuring the framework is robust in monitoring and tackling emerging harms such as AI generated content.4. Inclusivity and resilience:Create an inclusive, informed and vibrant digital world which is resilient to potential harms, including disinformation.5. Technology and innovation:Foster the innovation of online safety technologies to improve the safety of users and drive growth.The mention of illegal disinformation is interesting since the last government removed clauses in the bill that had focused on this area over freedom of speech concerns. But in the wake of the summer riots the government said it would review OSA powers and could seek to strengthen them in light of social media use during the disorder.It is essential that we learn from these events and hold platforms to account for their part in securing the UK online information environment and safeguarding the UK from future crises, the government wrote. In Wednesdays full draft statement, it also had this to say on online mis/disinformation:A particular area of focus for the government is the vast amount of misinformation and disinformation that can be encountered by users online. Platforms should have robust policies and tools in place to minimise this content where it relates to their duties under the Act.Countering misinformation and disinformation is challenging for services, given the need to preserve legitimate debate and free speech online. However, the growing presence of disinformation poses a unique threat to our democratic processes and to societal cohesion in the UK and must be robustly countered. Services should also remain live to emerging information threats, with the flexibility to quickly and robustly respond, and minimise the damaging effects on users, particularly vulnerable groups.DSITs intervention will steer how Ofcom enforces the law by requiring it to report back on the governments priorities.For over a year, Ofcom, the regulator tasked with overseeing Internet platforms and services compliance with the OSA, has been preparing to implement the OSA by consulting and producing detailed guidance, such as in areas like age verification technology. Enforcement of the regime is finally expected to start from next Spring when Ofcom will actively take up powers that could lead to fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover for tech firms that fail to meet the laws duty of care. What I want to do is look at the evidence, Kyle also said on kids and social media, pointing to the simultaneous launch of a feasibility study which he said would look at the areas where evidence is lacking.Per DSIT, this study will explore the effects of smartphone and social media use on children, to help bolster research and strengthen the evidence needed to build a safer online world.There are assumptions about the impact [social media] has on children and young people, but there is no firm, peer reviewed evidence, Kyle also told the BBC, suggesting that any U.K. ban on kids use of social media must be evidence-led. During the interview with the BBCs Emma Barnett, Kyle was also pressed on what the government has done to tackle gaps that he had previously suggested the online safety law contained. He responded by flagging a change its enacted that requires platforms to be more proactive about tackling intimate image abuse. Tackling intimate image abuseIn September DSIT announced that it is making sharing intimate images without consent a priority offence under the OSA requiring social media and other in-scope platforms and services to clamp down on the abusive practice or face the risk of big fines. The move effectively bumped up the severity of the intimate image abuse sharing offence within the Online Safety Act, so platforms have to be proactive in removing the content and prevent it from appearing in the first place, DSIT spokesman Glen Mcalpine confirmed. In further remarks to the BBC, Kyle said the change has meant social media companies must use algorithms to prevent intimate images from being uploaded in the first place. They had to proactively demonstrate to our regulator Ofcom that the algorithms would prevent that material going on in the first place. And if an image did appear online they needed to be taken down as fast as reasonably could be expected after being alerted, he said, warning of heavy fines for non-compliance. Its one area where you can see that harm is being prevented, rather than actually getting out into society and then us dealing with it afterwards which is what was happening before, he added. Now, thousands and thousands of women are now protected prevented from having the degradation, the humiliation, and sometimes being pushed towards suicidal thoughts because of that one power that I enacted.

SpaceX conducted the sixth flight test of its massive Starship rocket on Tuesday afternoon, and although the company did not replicate the history-making booster catch, the company did welcome a very special guest: President-elect Donald Trump.Trump, who will soon be sworn into office for his second term, said on X that he was headed to Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground.His visit is just the latest sign of a growing intimacy between himself and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who was recently appointed to head, along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a newly-created Department of Government Efficiency office. Its unclear how much power the office will have (it appears to be purely advisory), but judging by Musks public pronouncements, it could help to usher in wide-sweeping changes to major federal government programs.Trumps visit was also a sign of encouragement for SpaceXs Starship program, which the company says has been hampered by exactly the type of government inefficiencies Musk is looking to slash with DOGE specifically, the slow turnaround times for launch license approvals by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.Trump has said that he wants to enable SpaceX to reach Mars before the end of this term which could theoretically be possible, given that the next Mars-Earth transfer window is in 2026 and essentially gave his blessing to Musks Mars dreams: Get going, get that spaceship going, Elon, he said at an October 24 rally.Tuesdays flight test, the sixth in the Starship development program, did not feature any spectacular surprises or disappointments. The company was planning on attempting to catch the 233-foot-tall Super Heavy booster with arms of the massive launch tower, as it did during the fifth test in October, but the company said that the booster did not pass the commit criteria required for the mission director to authorize the attempt. Instead, the booster splashed down in a designated area in the Gulf of Mexico.SpaceX achieved at least one new milestone during this test: the upper stage of Starship, which is also called Starship, reignited one of its engines in space for the first time. Its a capability that will be key to enabling reuse of the upper stage in orbit, in addition to the booster.SpaceX has made rapid progress in its Starship development program since launching the first fully integrated rocket for the first time in April 2023. The nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle is a cornerstone of the companys plans to transport crew and cargo to interplanetary destinations, and also to NASAs plans to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era.Rewatch the launch here.

Bling Capital, one of the more prolific and well-connected seed VC firms, has nabbed another $270 million for a new flagship fourth fund. About half of those fresh millions are earmarked for its opportunity fund, money set aside to make follow-on investments into winners, Bling general partner Kyle Lui tells TechCrunch.Bling is the firm founded in 2018 by Ben Ling, a former general partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backed such companies as Gitlab and Webflow. He earned his Valley street cred from exec roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook. He also became such a stellar angel investor (Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, others), that its clear that seed investing is his true calling.Those experiences shaped his VC firm which operates what it calls a Product Council, a network of leaders at major tech firms that help advise Blings startups. With the new fund, the firms network is adding advisors to its roster from a bunch of the hottest startups including from Notion, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Stripe.All told, Ling has corralled about 19 unicorns under his belt. Lui, who was previously a partner at DCM, has notched at least 7 unicorns, including names like DocSend and Hims.In its six years, Bling has already invested in 170 companies, it says, including such names as Rippling, and Vise. The new fund isnt a huge step up from its last one, which launched about two years ago. That one was $212 million total, also split nearly evenly between a new seed fund and an opportunity fund.

One of Indias largest news agencies, Asian News International, has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the worlds most populous nation.Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Monday, alleging the AI company illegally used its content to train its AI models and generated false information attributed to the news agency. The case marks the first time an Indian media organization has taken legal action against OpenAI over copyright claims.During Tuesdays hearing, Justice Amit Bansal issued a summons to OpenAI after the company confirmed it had already ensured that ChatGPT wasnt accessing ANIs website. The bench said that it was not inclined to grant an injunction order on Tuesday, as the case required a detailed hearing for being a complex issue.The next hearing is scheduled to be held in January.We take great care in our products and design process to support news organizations, an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. We are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world, including India, to explore opportunities, listen to feedback, and work collaboratively.The lawsuit adds to mounting global pressure on AI companies over their use of copyrighted material. OpenAI currently faces over a dozen similar lawsuits in the US, two in Canada and one in Germany, according to statements made in court.OpenAIs counsel Amit Sibal defended the companys practices, arguing that copyright laws dont protect facts and that ChatGPT allows websites to opt out of data collection. The Microsoft-backed firm has no servers in India and maintains that the suit lacks jurisdiction, he added.ANIs lawyer, Sidhant Kumar of law firm UNUM Law, countered that public availability doesnt grant rights to exploit content. The agency expressed particular concern about ChatGPT attributing fabricated interviews to ANI, including a non-existent conversation with Rahul Gandhi, who leads the opposing party to the current party in power.In its lawsuit, ANI has argued that such hallucinations pose a real threat to the news agencys reputation, and that the spread of fake news can lead to public disorder.The court plans to appoint an independent expert to advise on the copyright implications of AI models using publicly available content. The judge will examine additional technical aspects of how news content spreads across multiple platforms in future hearings.

Youve heard of car airbags deploying within milliseconds to protect passengers. How about an airbag for your knee? Thats what former basketball hopeful Kylin Shaw is working on with his startup, Hippos Exoskeleton a knee sleeve that measures stress on the knee joint and inflates around the knee to protect it from major injuries like ACL and MCL tears. The sleeve inflates in 30 milliseconds, which the company says is faster than the 60 milliseconds it takes for ACL tears to occur. I, myself, have loved basketball since I was six years old, and for the next decade, it became my entire life, Shaw told TechCrunch.I dedicated myself to intensive training But at 17, just as I was preparing for a professional basketball career and NCAA trials, I heard a sickening pop from my knee while landing from a dunk, he said.The injury ended Shaws sporting career prospects, but it gave him the idea to combine AI-driven sensors and a knee-bag. He dropped out of the London School of Economics to develop it.Hippos said the brace uses predictive AI to detect risky movements in real-time and deploys airbags around the knee, potentially saving athletes thousands in medical expenses.Shaw and his co-founder Bhavy Metakar (CTO) initially bootstrapped Hippos by investing $1,000 of their savings to develop a prototype and generate initial pre-orders from clinics and athletes. The startup has now raised a $642,000 pre-seed round from investors Possible Ventures and Silicon Roundabout Ventures.Shaw told Techcrunch the company has already secured over six figures in pre-orders, and would use the new funding to develop the product further and push to a full launch in around three months.He said the eventual unit would cost around $129 and come with a $29/month to $99/month subscription plan covering AI-driven insights, small air canisters, and workout tracking.The startup has performed trials with U.K. football clubs as well as with star athletes, like world skiing champion Alex Schlopy of the U.S. Ski Team. In a statement, Schlopy said: Im impressed by the preventative function and it feels so light and comfortable! This brace gives me a sense of psychological safety.Beyond elite athletes, Shaw said the product could be used for injury prevention for anyone else, such as those in construction jobs or the elderly.Hippos may well be pushing at an open door. While approximately 150,000 ACL injuries are reported in the United States each year, and 8.6 million globally among adults, those stats dont include injuries among children. Also, most health solutions focus on rehabilitation rather than prevention. Moreover, existing companies addressing joint protection in sports and rehabilitation focus on traditional supportive devices or post-injury support.Brands in this space include Enovis DonJoy (orthopedic braces and supports), ExoKinetics Zeen (devices primarily for rehabilitation), and Shock Doctor (sports braces and protective gear for injury management). None of these solutions offer predictive or reactive technology in the way the Hippos air-bag does.Also participating in the round were Huggingfaces co-founder and CSO, Thomas Wolf; Wayves co-founder Amar Shah, and Dr. James Brown, the lead sports medicine doctor at UK Athletics.

Funding for European tech appears to have stabilised in 2024 after dropping precipitously in 2023, but the signs continue to point to more tough times ahead, according to the latest State of European Tech report.The annual survey produced by European VC firm Atomico notes that startups in the region are on track to raise $45 million this year. While far from the 50% drop of 2023, the figure is still down by $2 billion compared to a year ago. (Note: Atomico originally projected $45 billion for 2023; it has since revised 2023 up to $47 billion.)Atomico has been producing these reports annually for the last decade so this latest edition makes a lot of noise about how much things have grown. Its undeniable that the tech ecosystem in Europe has blown up: Atomico says that there are now 35,000 tech companies in the region that could be classified as early stage, with a 3,400 late-stage companies and 358 valued at over $1 billion. Compare that to 2015, when there were a mere 7,800 early-stage startups, 450 late-stage startups and just 72 tech companies valued at over $1 billion. Yet there is a lot of sobering reading, too, about some of the challenges of the moment and signs of how geopolitical and economic unrest despite that shiny stories about the boom in AI continue to weigh down the market.Here are some of the breakout stats:Exits have fallen off a cliff. This is one of the more stark tables in the report that underscores some of the liquidity pressure that ultimately trickles down to earlier-stage tech companies. Put simply, M&As and IPOs are relatively non-existent right now in European tech. 2024, at the time of the report being published in mid-November, saw just $3 billion in IPO value and $10 billion in M&A, according to S&P Capital figures. Both of these a big drops on the overall trend, which had otherwise seen steady rises in both, consistently surpassing $50 billion per year threshold. (Granted, sometimes all it takes is one big deal to make a year. In 2023, for example, ARMs $65 billion IPO accounted for a full 92% of total IPO value, and clearly it didnt have the knock-on effect many had hoped for in kick-starting more activity.) Transaction volumes, Atomico notes, are at their lowest points in a decade.Debt on the rise. As you might expect, debt financing is filling in the funding gap especially for startups raising growth rounds. So far this year, debt financing made up a full 14% of all VC investments, totalling some $4.7 billion. Thats a big jump on last year, according to Dealrooms figures: in 2023, debt made up just $2.6 billion of financing, accounting for 5.5% of all VC investments.Average round sizes bounce back. Last year, the average size of every stage of funding from Series A to D all declined in Europe, with only seed stage rounds continuing to increase. However, amid an overall decline in number of funding rounds in the region, those startups that are managing to close deals are, on average, raising more. Series A is now $10.6 million (2023: $9.3 million), Series B $25.4 million (2023: $21.3 million), Series C $55 million (2023: $43 million). The U.S. continues to outpace Europe on round sizes overall.But dont expect rounds to be raised in quick successions. Atomico noted that the number of startups on average raising within a 24-month timeframe declined by 20%, and it has taken longer for a company to convert from A to B on what it calls compressed time frames of 15 months or less, with just 16% raising a Series B in that period in 2024.As you can see in the table below the number of rounds in this year is down on the year before.AI continues to lead the pack. As with 2023, Artificial intelligence continued to dominate conversations. Atomico spells this out with a graphic showing the burst of AI mentions in earnings calls:And that has carried through as a strong theme among private companies. Between companies like Wayve, Helsing, Mistral, Poolside, DeepL and many others, AI startups have led the pack when it comes to the biggest venture deals this year in Europe, raising $11 billion in all. Yet even so, Atomico points out, Europe has a long way to close the gap with the U.S. in terms of AI funding. Thanks to outsized rounds for companies like OpenAI, all told the U.S. shaping up to have invested $47 billion in AI companies this year thats right, $2 billion more than all startup investment in Europe, combined. The U.K. (thanks to Wayve) is currently the biggest market for AI funding in the region, it said.Valuations improving After startup valuations bottomed out in 2023, Atomico writes, they are now heading back up, a lagged result of the slow return of activity in the public markets. Some of that is likely also due to the outsized rounds raised by certain companies in certain fields like AI. More generally, the rule appears to be that founders are more open to dilution on larger rounds in earlier stages and that plays out as higher valuations. Then startups raising at later stages are picking up the pieces of that earlier exuberance and are raising down rounds, Atomico said. European startups continue to see valuations on average lower than those of their American counterparts, on average between 29% and 52% lower, Atomico notes.(In the graphic below, charting Series C, the average valuation for a U.S. startup is $218 million, compared to $155 million for startup in Europe.)But sentiment is not. If confidence is a strong indicator of the health of a market, there might be some work ahead for the motivators in out there. Atomico has been polling founders and investors annually asking how they feel about the state of the market compared to a year ago, and 2024 appears to a high watermark for low confidence. In a frank assessment of how founders and investors are viewing the market at the moment, a record proportion respectively 40% and 26% said they felt less confident than 12 months ago.

In BriefPosted:4:43 PM PST November 18, 2024Image Credits:Rodin Eckenroth/FilmMagic / Getty ImagesBen Affleck tells actors and writers not to worry about AIUnions representing Hollywood actors and writers went on strike last year to secure protections against AI systems taking their jobs. But Ben Affleck says that actors and screenwriters shouldnt worry about AI because its not capable of doing either job today, and likely wont for a long time.Movies will be one of the last things if everything gets replaced to be replaced by AI, said Affleck during an onstage interview with CNBC last week. AI can write you an excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan; it cannot write you Shakespeare.Affleck, who runs a movie studio with Matt Damon now, seems to have a decent grasp on how AI works, offering a barebones definition of transformer architectures at one point in the interview. Hes surprisingly optimistic regarding AIs impact on the film industry, saying it may actually create more work for actors and screenwriters. That said, Affleck notes that the visual effects business could be in trouble.Topics

U.S. space technology and satellite giant Maxar has confirmed a data breach involving the personal information of its employees, according to a filing with state regulators.The Colorado-headquartered Maxar operates imaging satellites and manufactures spacecraft, and claims to operate one of the largest commercial satellite constellations on orbit. Maxar has long been a significant provider of commercial satellite imagery to the U.S. government, which uses the imagery for mission-critical planning, intelligence gathering, and disaster response.In a required data breach notice filed with Californias attorney general last week, Maxar said a hacker using a Hong Kong-based IP address compromised its network on October 4 to access files containing employees personal data.Its not yet known if the alleged hacker is located in Hong Kong, or used a server in Hong Kong to hide their real location.Maxar said it discovered the breach a week later on October 11 and took immediate action to prevent further unauthorized access to the system. Nevertheless, according to our investigation, the hacker likely had access to the files on the system for approximately one week before this action was taken, Maxar said in the disclosure.The information contained within the compromised files includes employees names, gender, physical addresses, Social Security numbers, business contact information, employment status, employee number, and job information, according to Maxar.According to the companys website, Maxar has 2,600 employees more than half of which attained U.S. security clearances. These are required to perform classified work for the U.S. government, such as national security missions.Maxar, which last year completed its $6.4 billion sale to private equity giant Advent International, hasnt said how many of its employees were impacted by the breach.Maxar spokesperson Kristin Carringer didnt immediately respond to TechCrunchs questions.

High-quality data may be the key to high-quality AI. With studies finding that data set curation, rather than size, is what really affects an AI models performance, its unsurprising that theres a growing emphasis on data set management practices. According to some surveys, AI researchers today spend much of their time on data prep and organization tasks.Brothers Vahan Petrosyan and Tigran Petrosyan felt the pain of having to manage lots of data while training algorithms in college. Vahan went so far as to create a data management tool during his Ph.D. research on image segmentation. A few years later, Vahan realized that developers and even corporations would happily pay for similar tooling. So the brothers founded a company, SuperAnnotate, to build it.During the explosion of innovation in 2023 surrounding models and multimodal AI, the need for high-quality datasets became more stringent, with each organization having multiple use cases requiring specialized data, Vahan said in a statement. We saw an opportunity to build an easy-to-use, low-code platform, like a Swiss Army Knife for modern AI training data.SuperAnnotate, whose clients include Databricks and Canva, helps users create and keep track of large AI training data sets. The startup initially focused on labeling software, but now provides tools for fine-tuning, iterating and evaluating data sets.Image Credits:SuperAnnotateWith SuperAnnotates platform, users can connect data from local sources and the cloud to create data projects on which they can collaborate with teammates. From a dashboard, users can compare the performance of models by the data that was used to train them, and then deploy those models to various environments once theyre ready.SuperAnnotate also provides companies access to a marketplace of crowd-sourced workers for data annotation tasks. Annotations are usually pieces of text labeling the meaning or parts of data that models train on, and serve as guideposts for models, teaching them to distinguish things, places and ideas.To be frank, there are several Reddit threads about SuperAnnotates treatment of the data annotators it uses, and they arent flattering. Annotators complain about communication issues, unclear expectations, and low pay.For its part, SuperAnnotate claims it pays fair market rates and that its demands on annotators arent outside the norm for the industry. Weve asked the company to provide more detailed information about its practices and will update this piece if we hear back.There are several competitors in the AI data management space, including startups like Scale AI, Weka and Dataloop. San Francisco-based SuperAnnotate has managed to hold its own, however, recently raising $36 million in a Series B round led by Socium Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Databricks Ventures, Play Time Ventures and Defy.vc.The fresh capital, which brings SuperAnnotates total raised to just over $53 million, will be used for augmenting its current team of around 100, for product R&D, and for growing SuperAnnotates customer base of roughly 100 companies.We aim to build a platform capable of fully adapting to enterprises evolving needs and offering extensive customization in data fine-tuning, Vahan said.

Charles Hudson, managing partner of Precursor Ventures, told an audience at AfroTech the basics of knowing when to invest: A company should have product-market fit and some form of traction.But the next thing he said garnered some surprised looks from the audience: Founders should test investors with a small issue to see how they react to problems. Im on a board with someone who tends to blow up every time the founder brings them a problem, he said. As you can imagine, the founder has basically stopped bringing problems to them.And that, in itself, can be a problem both in investing and in life. When someone feels they cant trust you with little problems, odds are they will not trust you with big problems, either. Hudson said these little tests can help weed out the constructive problem solvers, and help to establish trust early on. There are people you would tell your deepest, darkest, secrets, and there are people that you would bring ordinary problems to.Hudson has a lot of experience in establishing trust with founders. His firm has invested in more than 400 companies, including the social networking apps why?! and Diem, as well as the diaper company Kudos. The firm has $250 million in assets under management, sitting on around $89 million in dry powder, according to PitchBook.He shared with the high-level executives in the audience what he looks for in a pitch deck (a balance of storytelling and data); a good team (to see whether the founder has good hiring judgment; and even founders previous startup experience. But what really stuck out was how he spoke about the importance of vulnerability and the skills needed to build trust, including how to have a conversation, and how to convey emotional intelligence.Its quite rare to hear an investor be so open about the importance of being so open. Not every investor that passes or gives you feedback is going to say the truth, he said. The moderator then asked if investors should tell the truth more, to which Hudson responded that this whole ecosystem would work better if people just told the truth.He and his team try to give a founder as much feedback as they want to hear. But they often aim to go deeper than that.I think its a beautiful thing when an investor and a founder can get to a place where they trust each other to be honest and open, he said. Vulnerability can go both ways.He said hes met a lot of investors who think they deserve a founders trust. But thats something that should be earned, he said. You wouldnt approach any other relationship in your life, expecting a stranger to tell you their deepest darkest secrets and trust you with them.He said he always tells founders that his goal is to get to a place where they can trust each other. That way, hard feedback can be taken as if it is coming from a place of care.For similar reasons, Hudson said he puts a lot of weight on emotional intelligence, because I do think it underpins a lot of the challenges youll have as a startup, he continued.Founders need to learn how to hire, evaluate, and influence people, a company, partners, and investors. There is a relationship between emotional intelligence and emotional well-being, he said. One of the things Im always testing for is, do I think this person is going to be able to manage the emotional ups and downs of startup life, he said. This is why he always looks for other challenging tasks a founder has taken on as a clue to see how they handle stress.That could be a hobby, that could be travel, that could be a startup, that could be a nonprofit, he said. I just want to see some evidence that a person has worked on something difficult and stuck with it. Because startups are a big bundle of challenges.

In BriefPosted:8:44 PM PST November 17, 2024Image Credits:Akio Kon / Bloomberg / Getty ImagesOyo founder seeks new investment at $3.8B valuationAn investment vehicle backed by Oyos founder, Ritesh Agarwal, has proposed to inject another $65.1 million into the Indian hospitality startup, according to notices to shareholders that were reviewed by TechCrunch.The investment, through Redsprig Innovation Partners, would value the SoftBank-backed company at $3.8 billion, according to terms shared in a notice to shareholders.While this represents a 38% premium to Oyos recent $2.3 billion valuation in June, the implied price tag remains significantly below the startups 2019 peak of $10 billion. Oyo has raised more than $3.4 billion in equity and debt since its inception, according to Tracxn.Redsprig invested about $100 million in the June funding round, in which Oyo raised $175 million.It remains unclear who else is backing Redsprig and whether Agarwal has settled the $2 billion loan he took in 2019 to repurchase Oyo shares from Peak XV and Lightspeed India.The hospitality group is preparing to file for the third time for an initial public offering within two months, according to a person familiar with the matter.Topics

Indian omni-channel nutrition startup HealthKart has raised $153 million in one of the countrys largest consumer startup transactions this year, valuing the business at about $500 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. The new investment was co-led by private equity firms ChrysCapital and Motilal Oswal, with Avendus Capital serving as financial advisor. A91 Partners and asset manager Neo Group also participated in the new investment. Some existing investors sold their shares to the new backers, according to people familiar with the matter. HealthKart counts Peak XV, Temasek, Sofina and wealth manager IIFL among its backers. Gurugram-based HealthKart reported revenue of $118.5 million for the year ending March 2024, cementing its position as Indias largest consumer nutrition platform. The startup sells protein supplements and health accessories.The 13-year-old startup, which spun out of online pharmacy startup 1MG, said it is also buying back shares worth $6.5 milion from employees. The startup was EBITDA profitable in the financial year ending March.The Indian sports nutrition market, currently underpenetrated, is expected to expand due to a rise in fitness awareness and the increasing importance of nutrition and protein, said Arpit Vinayak, VP at ChrysCapital, in a statement.This is a developing story. More to follow.

Bluesky is having a moment a moment thats already stretched on for nearly three months.Over the summer, the social media app saw a wave of new signups in Brazil after X (formerly Twitter) was temporarily banned there. And in the United States, unhappiness with changes at X, and with owner Elon Musks close relationship with President-Elect Donald Trump, seem to have dramatically accelerated Blueskys growth.According to SimilarWeb, Xs traffic and account deactivations both peaked the day after the presidential election. Bluesky, meanwhile, says its started adding a million new users every day; on Saturday, the company announced that it now has 18 million total users, and its currently the number one free app on Apples App Store.This has, unsurprisingly, caused some problems, with periods of slowness or where the app just doesnt load, as well as challenges for content moderation and safety. In an interview with The New York Times, CEO Jay Graber acknowledged that there are always some growing pains, but she said her 20-person full-time team takes pride in our ability to scale quickly.Alongside the technical issues, longtime users seem to be wrestling with what this rapid growth means for the Bluesky community. Yes, there have been triumphant posts about App Store rankings and the latest celebrity signups, but also self-deprecating discourse about the qualifications of being Bluesky elder, handwringing when the wrong kinds of users show up, and pleading/scolding reminders to dont engage, just block when dealing with trolls.Ive even noticed that own weird relationship with Bluesky is changing. While Ive spent more time there than on any other social media app in the past year, my follower count stalled at around 200 a fact that I found weirdly freeing, though it didnt motivated me to post more than once a month or so. This week, however, the numbers started to go up again and even though theyre still pretty low (I used to be big on other social networks, I swear), I immediately started worrying that someone might actually notice if I said something stupid.Despite my own Bluesky presence being negligible, I do feel protective about it. I suppose its a familiar story: Early fans are always complaining when something new and cool gets discovered by the mainstream. And no, Im not about to start posting Keep Bluesky weird! or declaring, Bluesky is over! But I worry that whats been fun and weird and even life-affirming about the Bluesky community could dissipate or disappear with the influx of new users.Put another way: Bluesky has always felt like the small, left-y alternative to X. What makes Bluesky Bluesky when its no longer the short king of social media? Seeing so many familiar names from Old Twitter, I wondered if were just going to recreate Twitter circa 2014. Which wouldnt be the worst thing, but cant we do better?At least Blueskys executives have signaled that they want to do things differently. Some of the distinctions, like the focus on decentralization, may be largely invisible to regular users, but many of their priorities seem baked into the product and the business. There are the aggressive blocking features, the reverse chronological (not algorithmic) feed, the pledge to not train AI on users posts, and a future business model focused on paid subscriptions rather than advertising.Graber is aware of a potential culture clash, describing it as an eternal September problem, where old-timers become unhappy when waves of newbies show up and inevitably change things. She said Bluesky is looking to address this by adding more features to allow users to customize their experience, and by improving its automated content moderation tools.Maybe the coming months and years will demonstrate that those decisions and features can actually protect and nourish healthy online communities. And maybe weve all learned something from seeing how other social networks wither with toxicity or sterility. I hope so. And if not? Well, one thing Ive learned from Twitter is that you should always be ready to move on to the next app.

In BriefPosted:2:26 PM PST November 17, 2024Image Credits:picture alliance / Getty ImagesWorld of Warcraft turns 20Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying games influences 20 years later.For one thing, while multiplayer games and early social networks such as MySpace already existed, WoW provided a real preview of a future where everyone would connect to friends and strangers online. For another, the game made billions of dollars with a business model combining monthly subscriptions with in-game purchases (including for pets and animals that players could ride), becoming a massive cash cow for Blizzard and pointing the way to future internet business models.The game also spawned immortal memes, attracted celebrity fans, and prompted epidemiologists to argue that an incident involving the uncontrolled spread of a fantasy disease could be studied for insights into real-world epidemics.Also, for the record, I thought the movie wasnt that bad.Topics

In the wake of the U.S. 2024 presidential election, one fact became clear: Disinformation proliferated online at a startling rate, shaping Americans views about each candidate as well as a diverse set of topics, including public health, climate change, and immigration.Generative AI with its ability to produce deepfakes in seconds and its propensity to hallucinate facts only stands to exacerbate the problem. Factiverse, a startup that participated in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 200 in October, is bracing itself for the onslaught. The company, which won best pitch in the Security, Privacy, and Social Networking category, has developed a business-to-business tool that provides live fact-checking of text, video, and audio. The companys pitch: to help businesses save hours of research and mitigate any reputational risk or legal liability.The Norwegian startup is still in its early stages; Factiverse has raised around $1.45 million in pre-seed money since launching in 2020. Yet it has already begun working with both media and financial partners, including one of the largest banks in Norway, according to Factiverse CEO and co-founder Maria Amelie.Factiverse even provided live fact-checking of the U.S. presidential debates that was used by several media partners, Amelie said.Were not an LLM (large language model). Weve built a different type of model based on information retrieval, Amelie told TechCrunch.As a former technology journalist and published author, Amelie has first-hand experience in the war against facts. She worked with Factiverse co-founder and CTO Vinay Setty, who is associate professor in machine learning at the University of Stavanger, to launch the startup with a B2B focus.Factiverses model is trained on high quality, well-curated, and credible data from reliable sources and fact-checkers around the world, according to Amelie, and not the junk food data that generative AI is trained on.We train our AI model to intuitively think like someone who has a lot of experience with researching information, Amelie said.The model, which is based on machine learning and natural language processing, is able to identify claims and search the web in real time everything from search engines like Google and Bing to AI search engines like You.com to academic papers.The most fun part is that were not showing you whatever comes up first on those search engines, Amelie said. Were actually proposing to you what sources are the most, or historically have been the most, credible on your topicWe actually look into the domain in correlation to the topic, and sometimes even who is being quoted in an article.As of today, Factiverse says it outperforms GPT-4, Mistral 7-b, and GPT-3 in its ability to identify fact-check worthy claims in 114 languages. The companys model also outperforms LLMs on determining the veracity of a claim. Amelie said Factiverses success rate is around 80% and the goal is to improve as the company onboards new customers around the world.We have enough funding to be the best, but we are here in the U.S. to become the fastest, Amelie told TechCrunch. She also noted the company wants to raise a seed round in 2025. We are looking for customers and investors who want to invest in trust and credibility, she said.

Only two companies currently provide cargo delivery to and from the International Space Station, and both are based in the United States. The Exploration Company, which operates out of Germany, France, and Italy, is looking to change that: It just closed a large funding round to further its mission of building Europes first reusable space capsule.The $160 million Series B round will fund the continued development of the Nyx spacecraft, which will be capable of carrying 3,000 kilograms of cargo to and from Earth. The company, which was founded three years ago by aerospace engineers Hlne Huby, Sebastien Reichstat, and Pierre Vine, is aiming to conduct Nyxs maiden flight to and from the ISS in 2028.We are the first company in the world where this is for the first time mainly funded by private investors, Huby said in a recent interview. This is in contrast to SpaceXs Dragon capsule, which she said was mainly funded by NASA.The new funding, which was led by Balderton Capital and Plural, brings the startups total funding to date to over $208 million. The Series B also included participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, NGP Capital, and two sovereign European funds, French Tech Souverainet and DeepTech & Climate Fonds.Weve been able to deliver on promises in the past three years, Huby said. Weve been able to meet our cash target ever quarter The investors, they could see that we basically can deliver on time, on cost, on quality.The startup has made traction with the European Space Agency (ESA), which has recognized the need to foster native space launch and transportation capabilities. The Exploration Company was awarded a study contract worth around 25 million ($27 million)to develop cargo return services earlier this year. That contract will run through 2026, with additional competitive contract opportunities expected to follow. ESAs aim is to have at least one capsule launching to the ISS in 2028.The structure of the contract, called the LEO Cargo Return Service Contract, resembles NASAs Commercial Orbital Return Transportation Services program that the agency launched in 2006. That program resulted in multibillion-dollar transportation contracts to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Northrop Grumman).Its a promising start, but equally promising is the traction The Exploration Company is seeing on the commercial side. Around 90% of the startups $770 million contract backlog has come from private station developers Vast, Axiom Space, and Starlab, according to recent reporting.The Exploration Companys first demonstrator vehicle launched on the maiden flight of Ariane 6 this summer, though it was not deployed due to an issue with the rockets upper stage. The second sub-scale demonstrator mission, called Mission Possible, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 next year.I highly respect what SpaceX has been able to achieve, Huby said. We are trying to learn as much as possible from that, we are inspired by what they have achieved. But we also believe the world needs more competition and we want, step by step, to build an alternative. We are very aware that we are late, that we are much smaller, etcetera, but we need to start.

Whats the best gift you can get someone? Why, the gift of travel, of course. The next best is something to enhance the travel experience. As fun and enlightening as seeing new places is, the whole part of getting there can detract from the overall experience, especially for those who find themselves traveling a lot for work.Thats a camp I fall into, and as such, Ive been curating a selection of gadgets that help make the process of getting from point A to point B a little less arduous. Everything included below is something I use myself and will happily recommend to anyone youre shopping for.Apple AirTag $29; 4 for $99Image Credits:James D. Morgan / Contributor / Getty ImagesAirTags and Find My have reprogrammed my brain to a degree that probably isnt healthy. Any time I misplace something now, my first thought is to reach for my phone. Sadly, the technology isnt quite that ubiquitous for now.Even so, these little watch-battery-powered accessories deliver a lot of peace of mind when it comes to keeping track of your valuables. Pop an AirTag on your luggage, and thats one less thing to worry about while traveling.Bose QuietComfort Ultra $429Image Credits:Brian HeaterThe latest (and priciest) entry in Boses perennial favorite travel headphone line look, feel, and sound great. As far as travel companions go for long trips, you cant beat the QuietComfort Ultra.Apple MacBook Air 13-inch M3 $1,099Image Credits:Brian HeaterIf you really want to treat someone this year, the current MacBook Air is a truly excellent travel companion. In fact, the Air is the best laptop Apple has ever made. My one hesitation in recommending it for the holidays is that Apple has yet to introduce an M4 version of the machine. The truth is, however, the M3 is more than enough for most. Heck, even the M2 version which starts at $999 is fully capable of running Apples new AI suite.Native Union Voyage 2 charger $100Image Credits:Brian HeaterThis versatile and extremely slim little charger can manage your iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch. For those who appreciate the freedom of checking in without checking luggage, accessories dont get much smaller than the Voyage 2. At $100, the price is perhaps a bit steep, but isnt the whole point of gift-giving getting something for someone they wouldnt get for themselves?Nintendo Switch Lite $199Image Credits:Brian HeaterWith Nintendo set to announce its latest console sometime next year, the 2024 holiday season may well bring some deep discounts on products getting a bit long in the tooth. In fact, the portable-only Switch Lite has already had around 10% of its price shaved off on places like Amazon.Ozlo Sleepbuds $299Image Credits:Brian HeaterI put these earbuds in last years guide, even though they hadnt actually come out yet. Hardware is hard, and the launch was pushed back several times. Now the Ozlo Sleepbuds are here, and Im happy to include them again. Im not the sleepy type, but these buds have me out like a light. I plan to take them on all future trips.Kindle Paperwhite $160Image Credits:AmazonThe Colorsoft is a fun novelty, but I currently cant recommend it over Amazons tried-and-true Paperwhite. Its the best-selling Kindle for good reason, and a recent upgrade brings faster page turns and more storage.

When Brynn Putnam sold her last company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million at the start of the pandemic, it looked to this editor like shed sold the smart fitness company too soon.Instead, the timing proved brilliant. The home fitness craze crashed nearly as abruptly as it peaked during that first year of lockdowns. Meanwhile, after a year as a general manager at Lululemon, Putnam had new operating insights, a big win under her belt, and a fresh idea that she has since turned into a new company that will launch publicly in 2025.The venture firm Lerer Hippeau has already participated in a highly competitive round for that stealthy startup the firm led Mirrors $3 million seed round years ago, too and on Wednesday night in New York, I sat down with both Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer and Putnam to talk about what she is building. We also talked about a broader rebound thats happening at long last for consumer tech some of it being led by founders who led the last wave of successful consumer startups.Following are excerpts from that chat, edited lightly for length. You can also watch the full interview below.Ben Lerer on writing that first check: When we invested [in Mirror], Brynn had a very convincing but totally janky demo, which was basically a sort of like a two-way mirror with a computer screen behind it to show you what a mirror would look like if she was able to raise tens of millions of dollars to actually produce such a thing. Really interestingly, she had designed a contraption that was proprietary to her [own line of boutique gyms at the time] . . . and when we saw it, it was just clear that Brynn was not just a clever business builder who had built a good gym brand for herself but was also an inventor. Brynn won us over very, very quickly, and maybe we looked crazy for a few years, but eventually less so.Brynn Putnam on selling Mirror just four years after founding it:We werent for sale. We werent looking for an acquirer. We had just really launched. But we had a longtime partnership with Lululemon. I had worked with them at my gyms for about a decade, and we had been spending a lot of time with them, making content and doing interesting events with them, and it just felt like the right fit for us to be able to really take Mirror into homes across the world with speed and certainty. We really just felt like it was this opportunity we couldnt pass on.As for whether Lerer weighed in with advice on that sale, he said:I did have an opinion on it. Look, venture is a funny business because of the power law and the idea that youre supposed to take these moonshots and youre going to have a bunch of losses but your big wins are going to change the whole world. I believe in the power law, but I also think sometimes venture loses sight of just really basic, good, sound business decision-making. And there are some general truths in business, like: sell when others are greedy, and buy when others are scared. You dont always have to continue to go back to the casino again and again and again. In this case, when Brynn came and said, Hey, I got this offer, Im really thinking about taking it, I said, Yeah, you should do this for you; this is amazing for us. And if youre getting pushback from other folks [like later-stage investors with a different cost basis], Im happy to try to be helpful, but youre frankly much more forceful and powerful than I am and youll take care of this. For a year or two after, I think Brynn probably got some people who second-guessed it, and now I think people see the arc of the entire category and realize it was just a totally brilliant move.Putnam on working afterward as an exec at Lululemon, which later threw in the towel on Mirror:An investor who I admire . . .told me at the time that I should be gracious and learn, that throughout the life of your company, youre selling your company. Youre selling it in small pieces, or youre selling it in bigger pieces, but youre always selling your company. And the best thing you can do once you have made the decision to sell, is to really learn as much as you can from this business that youve chosen to sell to and try to tackle something with purpose in this new role. And that is what I did. And I learned an incredible amount in the year that I was there, and it was incredibly interesting. But I think ultimately, when you go from being a founder and CEO to effectively the general manager of a division, its a very large change, and for some people, its a fit. And for me, it just was not. Im really a builder.Putnam on what led her to develop her new startup:When I left Lululemon, I was really just at a different stage of my life. I went from being pregnant to then having two children, and really, I just took stock of what was important to me at that point. Mirror was very much about me. It was my reflection, my performance, it was about making your own self better. At that next phase, my life was really just much more about my family and my friends and my relationships and those things that I was finding important. I was really struggling to find quality time with my loved ones the way that I had growing up you know, we would sit around the table and have a meal, play a board game, look each other in the face. For my kids who have grown up glued to iPads or smartphones, the experience of quality time was more challenging.So I really started to think about, how could I take what I learned at Mirror and apply those lessons to the category of play? How could I use tech to build better social relationships and connections? And thats what Im working on now. Its a new consumer hardware company, but in the gaming space rather than fitness, really geared towards how we spend time together face to face, where technology is not the experience but really an enabler to building better relationships.Asked if her new product is for children (or if it fits in ones pocket, or one wears it on their face), Putnam answered:Its for everyone. Its for friends and families spending time together. Its not a kids company, although we do hope youll participate with your kids. Its not an education company, although we do hope that people find it interesting and strategic and creative, but its really about using tech to connect people to each other. (Here Lerer declared he was sworn to secrecy by Putnam.)Putnam on the confluence of AI and hardware and software that seems very much top of mind for founders and investors suddenly:I think were about to enter a golden age of hardware. All the VCs here are going to be so excited to invest in hardware founders soon, hopefully [because a] few things are happening. The iPhone came out 17 years ago, and we havent really had a mainstream consumer hardware success story since Oculus. I think theres an opportunity on the market for something new. A lot of the core components of these technologies are becoming a lot more mature and therefore affordable, so being able to build, in our case, display technologies, is possible in a way now that it wasnt 10 years ago. And then obviously AI is opening the door for how we interact with our devices. So naturally, there will be new devices on the market. Were betting on this idea of not another personal computer but rather a new shared device in the home, which is what we did with Mirror and what were doing again here. This idea that there will be a piece of tech that helps bring your house and family together is where we think the future is headed.On not focusing too much on the technical specifications of hardware but focusing more on the overall experience being created, Putnam said:I learned recently about Nintendos design philosophy. They have this concept that they use withered technology with lateral thinking. So the idea is using mature, affordable, more readily available technologies but creating a really interesting experience around them, and that is what we did with Mirror. It was rather commodity hardware. It wasnt frontier tech. And [thats] what were doing again now.On bringing family and friends together as an investing theme (here, this editor brought up the new startup of Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn, Pie, which focuses on bringing people together offline), Lerer said:Im an investor [in Pie]! Look, I have young kids and I have the same challenges that all my friends have and everyone has: were all hopelessly addicted to these devices, and at a high level, were interested in alternatives to that addiction and new formats of entertainment or opportunities to get people off of screens or out in the world. We very recently did a [related] deal thats not yet announced in an application layer AI company in the travel space that Im really excited about. And we just announced a deal this past week in another application layer company in the aftermarket automotive space, which is actually the biggest hobbyist area by spend in the U.S.Finding ways to tap into peoples passions is always a good bet in the consumer space.On the feeling that consumer as a category is swinging back including thanks to a new $500 million fund announced this past week by the well-known consumer-focused firm Forerunner Ventures, Lerer said:As a fund, were founder first, but were also New York first, and [with] the first [founder] generations of New York in the early 2010s, there was a lot of consumer, a lot of media, a lot of direct to consumer commerce. And there were a few trends that really drove that. You had the rise of the iPhone and the App Store. You had social media exploding and the arbitrage ad ecosystem opportunity to go and grab customers faster than ever. Maybe the rise of Shopify as well created a great time to go build consumer businesses with a wide open imagination.Over the last four, five, six years, theres been very little in terms of big tech changes that inspire people to do anything that doesnt feel incremental. And I do think that AI is that catalyst right now. Were seeing a very high quality group of founders saying, Nows the time to get back in the pool. There are things that are possible today that werent possible six months ago or a year ago, and the slope is steep right now in terms of using your imagination. So Im more excited about consumer than Ive been in a long time, which is really exciting for me because thats my passion. I built a consumer business. I love investing in consumer founders, and its been pretty crappy the last few years, quite frankly.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, were breaking down Blueskys big surge in users, Elon Musk co-leading Trumps Department of Government Efficiency, and Mark Zuckerbergs latest foray in extreme wife-guy behavior. Lets go.Bluesky is seeing a major surge as X users unhappy with the platforms latest policy decisions make the move to the competitor social network. The decentralized social media platform has grown to more than 16 million users, including Swifties. If youre making the switch or at least wanting to see if the grass is greener (or bluer) on the other side weve put together a guide on how to get started.Teslas Cybertruck is facing its sixth recall in a year, affecting 2,431 units. A report from Tesla found that those trucks are or were equipped with a faulty drive inverter. Unlike Octobers Cybertruck recall, which could be solved with an over-the-air update, Tesla will need to physically replace the recalled drive inverters for this batch. The EV maker said it would do so free of charge.Elon Musk will co-lead President-elect Donald Trumps Department of Government Efficiency, the acronym of which references Musks favorite cryptocurrency. Musk will lead the department with biotech entrepreneur and former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy to help Trumps administration dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.This is TechCrunchs Week in Review, where we recap the weeks biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.NewsImage Credits:Album art for Mark Zuckerberg's cover of "Get Low" with T-PainMark Zuckerberg T-Pain: Mark Zuckerberg enlisted T-Pain to write and record an acoustic cover of Lil Jon & The East Side Boyzs Get LowRead moreStanding desks arent as healthy as you think: Sorry to standing desk users, but a new study found that standing for more than two hours a day doesnt protect against cardiovascular risks, and it actually heightens an individuals risk of circulatory problems. Read moreTalk Tuah dating coach: Social media star Haliey Welch has launched Pookie Tools, an AI-powered dating advice app for Gen Z singles. The apps chatbot helps write conversation starters, while another tool predicts if a potential match is lying about their height. Read moreWriter nabs $200M: The generative AI startup has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its platform. CEO May Habib says the new cash will be used for product development and cementing the companys leadership in the enterprise generative AI category. Read moreAmazon takes on Temu: Amazon has rolled out the Amazon Haul store, a storefront that offers discounted and mass-produced items, most of which ship from China, to better compete with highly popular competitors Temu and Shein. Read moreJust Eat sells off Grubhub: TheRead moreSBF is headed to the big screen: Lena Dunham is working with Apple and A24 to adapt Michael Lewis book Going Infinite, which chronicles the life of Sam Bankman-Fried and the implosion of FTX. Now to wonder who will be cast as SBF Read morePrepare to see more AI-video slop: InVideo is launching a generative AI-powered video creation feature that lets people use prompts to make videos in a variety of styles, including live-action, animated, or anime. Read moreApples wall-mounted tablet: Apple is reportedly planning to release a tablet that mounts to your wall, controls smart home appliances, and does video calls, as early as March 2025. Of course, the device will feature Apple Intelligence. Read moreAds are coming to Perplexity: The AI-powered search engine is experimenting with ads. The site will be showing ads in the U.S. to start, and theyll be formatted as sponsored follow-up questions from partners like Indeed, Whole Foods, Universal McCann, and PMG. Read moreYou can now play Hot Cross Buns on your phone: Artinoises latest product is reimagining the classic plastic recorder.Read more

Viewers have been talking about Friday evenings boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul but probably not for the reasons Netflix was hoping.Yes, the 27-year-old Paul (a YouTuber turned professional boxer) defeated the 58-year-old Tyson (a former heavyweight champion who came out of retirement for this match) in eight rounds, but the real headline was the glitchy experience for audiences watching live on Netflix, with freezing and buffering seemingly a common occurrence.The #NetflixCrash hashtag was trending on X, Downdetector said it received over 1 million reports of Netflix issues in 50 countries, including 530,000 reports in the United States, with the issues peaking at around 11pm Eastern.This is the biggest event, Paul declared after the match. Over 120 million people on Netflix. We crashed the site.Netflix has stumbled with live programming before last year, the broadcast of the Season 4 reunion of Love is Blind was delayed by more than an hour. Since then, the streamer has been ramping up its live lineup with exhibition golf and tennis matches, live talk shows, and awards ceremonies, without major issues.While the streamer only releases selective data about its viewership, Netflix says 60 million households watched the fight live, with viewership peaking at around 65 million concurrent streams so its probably safe to say that the Tyson/Paul match was the biggest test of Netflixs live infrastructure to date.The streamer now has a little over a month to make improvements before airing two NFL games on Christmas Day, followed by WWE Raw in January.

In BriefPosted:9:11 PM PST November 15, 2024AI Granny is happy to talk with phone scammers all dayOn Thursday, the UKs largest mobile network operator, O2, introduced a chatbot designed to frustrate phone scammers. Called dAIsy, it mimics an older woman with all kinds of time to chat about knitting, her cat Fluffy with the aim of keeping fraudsters endlessly engaged as they try obtaining her (fake) bank details.A press release about O2s AI Granny says it combines various AI models that transcribe the callers voice into text before generating a response through a custom large language model, then feeding it through a text-to-speech model to produce a voice answer. The AI was trained in part by Jim Browning, a scambait expert with a huge YouTube following.Its fun to see in practice. (O2 says the audio in the video below is real.) If it makes a dent, all the better. Last year, the FBI reported that people over age 60 were swindled out of $3.4 billion via telephone scams, up from $3.1 billion in 2022. With generative AI taking off and voice impersonation with it those numbers are poised to balloon.Topics

A lawsuit by the worlds wealthiest man against one of the fastest growing companies of all time is necessarily interesting stuff. But while the allegations are yet to be proven, the case has already exposed a batch of emails between Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others during OpenAIs early days. Here are a few of the more interesting snippets we found while perusing their correspondence.Bear in mind that these emails were exposed as part of an attempt to prove OpenAI is somehow breaking antitrust law (a frankly implausible allegation). Musk is also revealing to some extent his feeling of betrayal when OpenAI abandoned its original vision of being a nonprofit with the Tesla CEO as its leader.They do not tell the whole story, but they are still interesting in their own right.Perhaps the most interesting single email is former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever explaining the teams qualms with Musk as leader of the company:The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI [artificial general intelligence]. You stated that you dont want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, youve shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you.As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge, even though you also stated that you hate being CEO and would much rather not be CEO.Thus, we are concerned that as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI, you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary.The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis [Hassabis, at Google-owned DeepMind] could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.This isnt entirely about corporate control; Sutskever is worried about an existential AI threat being created with only one person in the way. Sutskever also voices worries about Altman, using words much like the board would later use while accusing him of not being consistently candid:We havent been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process, because we dont understand your cost function.We dont understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and its hard to really understand whats driving it.Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals?Given the way things have played out and Altmans steering of the company toward a much more traditional enterprise SaaS position, it seems like his goal was more business than philosophy.One interesting tidbit is that as early as 2017, OpenAI was seriously considering buying chipmaker Cerebras, or somehow merging with it, potentially using Teslas resources somehow. As Sutskever puts it:In the event we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong sense is that itll be done through Tesla.They ended up not going through with it, though the reason why is not in these emails.This, by the way, was back when Musk was angling to have OpenAI be just one of his many properties, and the leaders were open to that possibility. As OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy wrote:The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow. [] If we do this really well, the transportation industry is large enough that we could increase Teslas market cap to high O(~100K), and use that revenue to fund the AI work at the appropriate scale.Again, this didnt happen for a lot of reasons that seem clear in hindsight. Teslas market cap did in fact increase, but the self-driving side of things which Karpathy aimed to accelerate later when he took a job at Tesla proved harder than expected, and has not yet contributed meaningfully to Teslas revenue.As far as making money, Microsoft was in the mix from as early as 2016, offering OpenAI $60 million worth of compute on Azure in exchange for, among other things, the companies evangelizing one another. No one seemed into this kind of corporate back-scratching, and Musk wrote that it made him nauseous.They ultimately ended up paying far more but with no obligation on either side. Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsofts marketing bitch, wrote Musk.Lastly, a minor nugget mentioned by board member Shivon Zilis (who would later become mother to three of Musks children): Valve founder Gabe Newell was, in addition to being a donator to the project in the early days, on Altman and Greg Brockmans informal advisory board. Its unclear what role he had or has in the day-to-day there. Ive asked Newell for comment.

Xiaodi Hou, the co-founder and former CEO of self-driving trucking startup TuSimple, has urged a California district court to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the company from transferring its remaining U.S. assets to China, according to a recent court filing.Hou, who plans to apply for a temporary restraining order in December during the next scheduled court hearing, is hoping to keep TuSimple from moving tens of millions of dollars in cash to China.As of September, TuSimple had roughly $450 million in capital. Hou is also requesting expedited discovery of evidence to aid his requests for the motion.Hous declaration to the court, filed on Monday, is the latest escalation in the battle between TuSimple and some of its shareholders, over the companys attempts to use investor capital to fund a new AI-generated animation and video game business in China.This is the first time Hou who was ousted from his role as CEO in 2022 has publicly accused TuSimple and its leaders of funneling assets toward animation and gaming businesses owned by or with direct ties to Mo Chen, TuSimple co-founder and chairman of the board, under the guise of a business pivot. Hou also argued the company violated SEC regulations by neither informing nor gaining approval from shareholders before changing its business direction or transferring funds to China. Hou now heads a new autonomous trucking startup in TexasTuSimple, once valued at $8.5 billion after its 2021 IPO, faced setbacks that led to its U.S. shutdown and delisting in January 2024. The companys stated goal was to commercialize its AV technology in China. But as the year progressed, TuSimple slashed its workforce, ceased self-driving operations, and began hiring staff to handle jobs related to AI gaming and animation.Shareholders sent a letter to the board in August after learning TuSimple was putting resources toward AI gaming and animation. The board responded a couple weeks later by publicly announcing the new business unit.Hou this week urged the court to issue a temporary restraining order after noticing a filing by TuSimple China that signaled the company was about to transfer money (or already had) out of the United States. Two TuSimple China subsidiaries last week registered an increase in assets collectively worth $150 million, according to Hous declaration and information from public filings.These filings show a suspicious increase in registered assets between these two subsidiaries in one day as a precursor to large amount of cash transfer from U.S. to China, reads the declaration. The most likely scenario is that these filings in China were the preparatory steps before TuSimple U.S. transfers money to those subsidiaries in China.Hou added that such large cash transfers are beyond normal course of business and comparable to TuSimple Chinas heyday of operation when it was operating a large autonomous truck fleet in Shanghai and had around 700 employees on its payroll. As of September, TuSimple China had around 200 employees.The window of opportunity for shareholders like Hou to get what they want which is for TuSimple to liquidate so they can recuperate some of their losses is narrowing.TuSimple is in a gray area when it comes to enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission. While TuSimple delisted earlier this year, the company is still registered with the SEC and thus subject to U.S. scrutiny. Once the money goes to China, shareholders in the U.S. will have no recourse to claw back funds from their original investment.TechCrunch has reached out to the SEC to learn if the agency is investigating TuSimple in relation to shareholder complaints.TuSimple did not immediately respond to TechCrunchs request for comment.

In BriefPosted:3:56 PM PST November 14, 2024Image Credits:Chris Goodney/Bloomberg / Getty ImagesTech leaders recommend colleagues for Trumps cabinetSome tech investors and executives have been trying to influence the incoming Trump administration to appoint Silicon Valley insiders for cabinet positions, The New York Times reported.Given Elon Musks strong relationship with Donald Trump, a significant portion of tech leaders persuasion efforts have been directed towards him.Friends of Musk, like Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir and venture firm 8VC, have suggested names of potential cabinet heads.Several Silicon Valley executives recommended Emil Michael, ex-Uber COO, to head the Department of Transportation. Prior to joining Uber in 2011, Michael served in the Obama administration as a White House fellow and as a special assistant to Robert Gates at the Department of Defense. Michael was reportedly forced out of Uber in 2017, shortly before Ubers founder Travis Kalanick was pushed to resign from the company.Jim ONeill, who worked with Peter Thiel to establish the Thiel Fellowship, a program that wants young tech entrepreneurs to quit college, was suggested to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. ONeill was in the running to head the FDA during Trumps first administration, according to The New York Times.Although ONeill was considered, on Thursday, Trump chose vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health.Topics

Bob Wise, the CEO of Heroku, Salesforces cloud platform as a service, has left. A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed the news to TechCrunch in a statement via email. Bob Wise has left Salesforce for his next career move, the spokesperson said. We appreciate all that Bob has done for Salesforce and Heroku and we wish him well.Bob Wise joined Heroku as GM from Amazon Web Services, where he was Kubernetes GM and head of the open source program office. Wise was promoted to CEO of Heroku in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.Wises rise to CEO came over a decade after Salesforce acquired Heroku for $212 million in cash. The platform allows programmers to build, run, and scale apps across a number of programming languages, including Java, PHP, and Go.On its website, Heroku claims that its been used to develop more than 13 million apps to date.Under Salesforce and Wises management, Heroku has faced with a number of setbacks, including a security breach where attackers were able to obtain an access token for a Heroku account that was used for automation purposes.In August 2022, Heroku announced that its free plans would be discontinued, citing fraud and abuse as reasons for the change. Some users werent pleased, understandably and made their opinions known on social media.Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans, Wise said in a blog post at the time. We will continue to provide low-cost solutions for compute and data resources.The competition for platform as a service has grown fiercer in recent years, with startups likePorter,Railway,Render,Fly.io, andClever Cloudvying for a slice of Herokus business with compelling pricing and features. Wise made efforts to engage with the developer community, posting a public roadmap of Herokus features and soliciting suggestions. His departure is certain to have an impact on Herokus efforts to claw back market share. Relatedly, Heroku is still without a CPO after its previous CPO, Andy Fawcett, moved back to the U.K. to assume the role of VP of developer relations.

In BriefPosted:2:28 PM PST November 13, 2024Image Credits:JASON REDMOND/AFP / Getty ImagesOpenAIs take on AI agents could come in JanuaryOpenAI could release an AI agent tool as soon as January. Thats according to Bloomberg, which reports that OpenAI is close to launching software, code-named Operator, that can take direct actions on a persons computer. OpenAI is said to be planning to initially launch Operator as a research preview through its developer API.Operator would go up against Anthropics recently unveiled agent feature, Computer Use, and Googles rumored consumer-focused agent, among others. Its unclear whether OpenAIs will have any advantage; Bloomberg reports that it could take the form of a general-purpose tool that executes tasks in a web browser.The report on Operator arrived the same day as the release of OpenAIs policy paper with suggestions for the U.S. AI strategy. That paper reportedly proposes, among other things, that the federal government create AI-focused economic zones permitting work to build AI infrastructure, and the establishment of a bloc with U.S. allies to compete with China on AI.Topics