From the collapse and rebirth of Silicon Valley Bank to the indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried — it’s safe to say that this has been a long year. Emotionally, at least. That’s why the team here at TechCrunch thought it would be fun to have an end-of-year pub quiz testing you, dear reader, on how well you remember the wild ride that was 2023. Feel free to play this at home, with friends, at the park, … [Read more...]
Keep your business model simple
The perils of premature complexity are huge administrative overhead and technical debt Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours I’m getting pretty frustrated with startups making things way more complex than they need to be. You wouldn’t believe how often I see pitch decks from companies that have more pricing tiers and business models than their customers … [Read more...]
Google’s best Gemini demo was faked
Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked. A video called “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI” hit a million views over the last day, and it’s not hard to see why. The impressive demo … [Read more...]
Battery swapping is great for EV fleets, but can it work for consumers?
Battery swapping for electric vehicles might be a little like communism: good in theory, but so far the only place that it has really caught on is China. Unlike communism, though, battery swapping could usher in freedom for a wide range of people, allowing them to participate in the EV transition in ways that traditional built-in batteries do not. This is why the battery swapping model keeps being … [Read more...]
Amazon is piloting a new $9.99 monthly grocery subscription for Prime members in three cities
Source: techcrunch.com … [Read more...]
YouTube now lets you pause comments on videos
YouTube announced today a new comment moderation setting, “Pause,” letting creators and moderators prevent viewers from adding new comments yet keep existing comments on videos. Instead of turning off comments completely or holding comments to review them manually, you can temporarily pause comments until you have enough time to filter out trolls and negativity. The Pause option is located in the … [Read more...]
ContactMonkey lands $55M investment to grow its email software for internal comms
Email is quite profitable, as it turns out. Or rather, email communications software is. Today, Toronto-based ContactMonkey, a platform that lets companies create, send and track internal comms from Outlook and more, announced that it raised $55 million in a Series A round led by Updata Partners. It’s a sizeable round from a single VC, so what warranted the hearty vote of confidence? Perhaps … [Read more...]
Bitcoin continues climbing, Block releases hardware wallet, Robinhood expands to EU and VCs may see some relief soon
Welcome back to Chain Reaction. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important crypto stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It seems like there’s a pep in every crypto person’s step as bitcoin had another strong week, increasing over 15% to around $44,000, during a seven-day period, according to CoinMarketCap data. Ethereum, the second largest … [Read more...]
5 secondaries investors tell us what’s hot and what’s not heading into 2024
Since the market corrected in 2022, late-stage funding rounds have been few and far between. It’s been hard to predict what is still attractive to investors in the later stages of the venture market or what any of the existing “unicorns” are worth today. The secondary market therefore gives us some valuable context as to how investors are thinking about valuing companies. The secondary market … [Read more...]
The venture landscape may be on the ‘cusp’ of explosive growth after years of macro strain
The crypto venture landscape has fallen for the past six quarters in a row. But CoinFund’s managing partner and head of venture investments, David Pakman, thinks there might be a breakthrough soon for investors waiting on the sidelines to deploy funds and startups looking for capital. “It’s been a challenging couple of years” for all venture capitalists, Pakman said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction … [Read more...]
Tumblr tests ‘Communities,’ semi-private groups with their own moderators and feeds
After scaling back operations and reassigning staff to other projects, Tumblr owner Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company would hone in on the parts of Tumblr’s service that worked, and kill those that didn’t — as it did with the subscription offering, Post+ last month. Now, the company wants to focus on the former by launching a new feature that capitalizes on something Tumblr … [Read more...]
Everything you know about the podcast industry is a lie
It seems like the writing is on the soundproofed wall: The podcast boom is over, and this week’s news is evidence. Spotify laid off 17% of the company – its third round of layoffs this year – and canceled two highly acclaimed shows, including a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. But as a whole, the podcast industry didn’t fail. It’s just that Spotify took a billion dollar swing and … [Read more...]
Credit scoring firms face curbs after landmark EU data protection ruling
“The Court considers that it is contrary to the GDPR for private agencies to keep such data for longer than the public insolvency register,” it wrote in a press release on case C-634/21 (plus joined cases C-26/22 and C-64/22). “The discharge from remaining debts is intended to allow the data subject to re-enter economic life and is therefore of existential importance to that person. That … [Read more...]
US indicts alleged Russian hackers for years-long cyber espionage campaign against Western countries
U.S. authorities have indicted two hackers linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) for allegedly carrying out a years-long cyber espionage campaign targeting government officials. The Department of Justice alleged on Thursday that Ruslan Aleksandrovich Peretyatko, an officer with the FSB intelligence service, and IT worker Andrey Stanislavovich Korinets attempted to compromise the … [Read more...]
Amazon will no longer accept Venmo as a payment option starting next month
Amazon is dropping Venmo as a payment option next month, the PayPal owned mobile payment service announced on its website. The official announcement comes as Amazon notified users last night via email that Venmo will no longer be accepted on Amazon.com starting January 10, 2024. Amazon will still, however, accept Venmo debit and credit cards. “Due to recent changes, Venmo can no longer be added as … [Read more...]
Seattle biotech hub pursues ‘DNA typewriter’ tech with $75M from tech billionaires
A new Seattle biotech organization will be funded to the tune of $75 million to research “DNA typewriters,” self-monitoring cells that could upend our understanding of biology. The collaboration between the University of Washington, the Chan-Zuckerberg Institute, and the Allen Institute is already underway. Called the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the joint initiative will combine the … [Read more...]
WhatsApp adds support for disappearing voice messages
While today’s bigger news from the world of Meta’s messaging apps was the rollout of end-to-end encryption in Messenger, the company is also bringing another useful feature to its WhatsApp users: disappearing voice messages. The new feature will allow users to send a voice message that can only be listened to once before it disappears, similar to the “View Once” option for photos and videos … [Read more...]
Coinbase’s and Robinhood’s break belies good news for a host of fintech startups
Investors are betting that consumer trading of equity and crypto is rebounding and are consequently pushing the value of some former startups higher. For a great number of private fintech startups that operate businesses similar to companies like Coinbase and Robinhood, this is great news. Consumer trading platforms have historically generated much of their revenue from trading, and more trading … [Read more...]
Kenyan insurtech Lami’s bid to acquire Bluewave collapses
Kenyan insurtech Lami Technologies February last year announced its acquisition of Bluewave, another startup within the insurance space, to expand its product offerings and enable it to scale into new markets in Africa, but it has now emerged that the deal fell through months later. TechCrunch has exclusively learned that at the time Lami went public with the acquisition, only a two-year … [Read more...]
Is the Texas boom town of Austin losing its luster?
Texas has been historically known for its oil booms. Today the state is perhaps better known as a magnet for tech companies and tech talent, especially in its capital city of Austin. But with some startups pulling up stakes, and critical industry participants curtailing their activity in Austin, the Texas dream of taking on tech’s traditional home in California could be hitting some speed … [Read more...]
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