Epic Games, Spotify, others say down with Apple’s DMA rules

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Friday, March 01, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM! It's Friday yet again and the team has been busy. First up, we were in Los Angeles just last night for our latest StrictlyVC event. Signal President Meredith Whittaker, Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, rabbit CEO and Co-Founder Jesse Lyu, Founders Fund Partner Trae Stephens and Lightspeed Ventures partner Faraz Fatemi joined us to discuss a wide range of topics, from the reasons AI could unseat entrenched companies, Waymo’s ascent, what it’s like for rabbit to ride the r1’s hype following its CES 2024 reveal. Don’t miss us next time for StrictlyVC London in May. Today, several companies tell the European Commission how unhappy they are with Apple's DMA rules, and Threads says it will make its API available to more developers this summer. Plus, Ivanti hackers keep coming back, a better clean when you have to go, advances in pesticide control, new funding and a way to see what the weather is like inside the ocean. — Christine Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Join START Summit 2024! Sponsored by START Summit Join us on March 21-22 for START Summit 2024 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, the premier early-stage startup and tech conference with 6,000+ attendees, 150+ speakers, and 900+ investors from top firms like Sequoia, b2venture, La Famiglia, EQT, and Index Ventures. Use code TECHCRUNCH20 to save 20% on tickets. Register Now

TechCrunch PM Top 3 Spotify, Epic Games and others have something to say about Apple: Apple's new DMA rules have already been widely criticized by developers and tech companies, and now a few others are piling on. Epic Games, Spotify, Proton, 37signals and other developers have formalized their complaints in a letter to the European Commission. They collectively argue that Apple has made a mockery of the new law and urge the EC to take "swift, timely, and decisive action against Apple" in order to protect developers. Groq has got it going on: Groq, the AI chip startup, is not only forming a new business unit, but has also acquired Definitive Intelligence to boost its AI offerings. Threads hearts developers: Meta's X rival Threads says its API should be more broadly available to developers by June, along with some new features. Image Credits: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg / Getty Images

More top reads More on Ivanti: Hackers continue to exploit flaws in Ivanti's widely used enterprise VPN appliance and are now targeting organizations across the U.S. defense sector. Apple walks back its decision to block web apps: Who says Apple can't be nice? After making a decision last month to block web apps in the European Union, the consumer electronics giant said it will reinstate the functionality in the next public release of iOS 17.4. A new clean where the sun don’t shine: Fohm rebrands to Saintly and gives you — and the environment — a better way to wipe your bottom. Thoma Bravo takes Everbridge private: We've got an update for you on this deal that has Everbridge, a critical event management software company, going private in what is now a $1.8 billion all-cash deal by private equity giant Thoma Bravo. Meta's now on the EU chopping block: Meta's controversial "subscribe for no ads" option for users in the European Union is facing questions from the European Commission. Pitch Deck Teardown: See what Haje liked and didn't like about CommandBar's seed deck. AgZen wants to keep pesticides where they belong: The company's approach uses AI so that instead of spraying too much, plants get sprayed just enough. A conundrum only Shakespeare would understand: Five deep tech investors decided to put differences aside and work together. This one time, at Upfront Summit: Read all about the rants, the talk of AI and what else went on at this week's Upfront Summit that took place in Los Angeles. Weather from down under … water: Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that acts like a mobile weather station for the sea and is ready to emerge from stealth to enable precise, real-time monitoring of the oceans. Money, money, money: TravelJoy, a tool for travel entrepreneurs and travel business operators, raised $10 million and is leveraging AI for its next phase of business. Rec emerges from stealth with $6.2 million to modernize parks and recreation management and bookings. And Karma3 Labs, now with $4.5 million, aims to solve the trust and safety issues going on in cryptocurrency. Image Credits: Patrick Semansky / AP

Before you go MWC 2024: Just because Mobile World Congress is over doesn't mean the stories stop. Instagram now has the "Friend Map" feature; maybe you were yearning for a midday cup of joe and were hoping one of your friends could join you. Swayy wants to go one step further than just saying where you are at the moment and has an iPhone app that enables you to share where you plan to go in a couple of hours or even a month from now. And, if you don’t know what haptics are, you will by the end of this article. Brian Heater spoke with Ultraleap co-founder and CEO Tom Carter about adapting the technology for use in automotive and virtual reality. However, that’s not all the company can do with it. Catch up on all the MWC coverage here. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

On the pods On today's Equity, Mary Ann Azevedo and Alex Wilhelm dug into the most critical stories and themes from the week, including Stripe's valuation recovering, Fervo Energy's $221 million round, why VCs are investing in companies that shut down companies, and AI and the law. Listen here. Check back next week when the Equity team will have an interview with Nubank's CEO. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Systems Administrator II at City of Newport (Newport, Oregon, USA) Product Manager at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA) Senior Cloud Engineer at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA) Engineering Manager at Murmuration (USA) Consultant - Workday Implementation Project Manager at Central Park Conservancy (non-profit organization) (New York, NY, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $349 per month.

View this email online in your browser Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe © 2024 Yahoo. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Musk sues OpenAI

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Alex Wilhelm Friday, March 01, 2024

Good morning! Today in TechCrunch AM we have news for AI founders (Nvidia is writing a lot of checks), a new lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI over its mission, social media updates for the media types amongst us, and new developer-OS drama, this time in India. Happy Friday everyone, let's get into it! – Alex

Join START Summit 2024! Sponsored by START Summit Join us on March 21-22 for START Summit 2024 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, the premier early-stage startup and tech conference with 6,000+ attendees, 150+ speakers, and 900+ investors from top firms like Sequoia, b2venture, La Famiglia, EQT, and Index Ventures. Use code TECHCRUNCH20 to save 20% on tickets. Register Now

TechCrunch Top 3 Nvidia's startup investments soared last year: Venture capital investments might be slowing around the world, but Nvidia's been quite busy through its own corporate investing arm. Last year, the chip giant participated in around 46 deals, which was 280% more than its 2022 pace. TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers dug into how those figures stack up compared to corporate venture capital activity from other chipmakers like Intel, Arm, and AMD. Musk sues OpenAI: Musk was a critical backer of OpenAI earlier in its life, but now the billionaire is taking the company to court over its structure, backing and focus. Remember when OpenAI went through a leadership crisis last year? The venture capital industry reacted as one to call for the exile of its former board and return Sam Altman to the company. They won. Now, Musk is kicking that very hornet's nest. I'm betting on the side of the argument with more money, and that's not Musk. Intuitive Machines' lunar lander broke more ground than you thought: For fans of space tech, Intuitive Machines landing its hardware on the Moon was a triumph. TechCrunch reports that the company's lunar jaunt actually broke ground in another way: through an innovative fuel choice that could open more doors for space work in the future. Image Credits: Yutthana Gaetgeaw / Getty Images

Don't miss these How to survive a DTC boom and bust: Home goods DTC company Parachute made it through the direct-to-consumer boom and bust, when many companies of its ilk expanded quickly only to later deflate. Parachute is now moving into the brick-and-mortar world, so we had founder Ariel Kaye on Found to talk about how the company sourced materials, learned logistics and more. Google removes some Indian apps over fee dispute: If you want to run a business via Android, Google wants you to hand over a chunk of your revenue. There are nuances to that point, but Google's recent move to yank some apps from the Play Store in India for not complying with its billing policies is an indication of what major mobile OS companies think of third-party developers. In feudal terms, Google thinks that it is a lord, and developers are pesky peasants who aren't turning over enough of their grain. Indian developers are incensed, as you can imagine. Meta's news retreat continues: Social giant Meta intends to remove the News tab from Facebook in the United States and Australia this year. The company had deprecated the feature in several European countries last year. News has been a fading priority for Meta for some time –– the move will likely reduce traffic to news publishers, but may also limit Facebook's conflicts with countries and publishers alike. Don't leak 2FA codes: The internet is not a series of tubes; it's a series of leaky tubes taped together with the hopes that the duct tape will prevent leaks. It's no surprise then that the system often fails. One good, recent example of that fact is YX International, which provides SMS routing services. The company left a database of two-factor authentication codes exposed to the internet without a password that would have allowed "anyone to access the sensitive data inside using only a web browser, just with knowledge of the database's public IP address," TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker reports. Not good! The troubles of Electric Car Land: EV company Fisker is cutting staff to preserve cash. The company intends to lay off about 15% of its staff, and says that it doesn't have the funds it needs to make it for the next 12 months. Still, things could be worse: Lordstown Motors has been charged by the SEC for "misleading investors about the sales prospects of its Endurance electric pickup truck." Also, NFX's James Currier will break down MVPs at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024! Image Credits: Viaframe / Getty Images

Before you go All hail the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp: With some of Disney's IPs entering the public domain this year, there's a race afoot to put the newly-unlocked intellectual property into use. Enter the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, the Triple-A affiliate of the Miami Marlins, an MLB team. They have jersey's coming up that employs Van Gogh's Starry Night and Disney's Steamboat Willie presentation of Mickey Mouse in a uniform collage that it is a lovely combination of cringe and flippancy. Image Credits: Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Systems Administrator II at City of Newport (Newport, Oregon, USA) Product Manager at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA) Senior Cloud Engineer at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA) Engineering Manager at Murmuration (USA) Consultant - Workday Implementation Project Manager at Central Park Conservancy (non-profit organization) (New York, NY, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $349 per month.

View this email online in your browser Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe © 2024 Yahoo. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

UnitedHealth confirms ransomware attack

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall Thursday, February 29, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome back to TechCrunch PM! UnitedHealth confirms one of its subsidiaries was hacked and gives names. Meanwhile, a U.S. government watchdog was able to "steal" some sensitive data of its own. We've also got a conversation with Brain.ai's CEO about the future of smartphones, and we discuss Figure's giant funding round, figuring out Reddit's IPO price, Venus Williams' new gig and a big new fund. — Christine Image Credits: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty Images

TechCrunch PM Top 3 UnitedHealth knows who hacked its subsidiary: UnitedHealth Group has confirmed a ransomware attack on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare and says "a cybercrime threat actor who has represented itself to us as ALPHV/Blackcat" is behind the hack. The Russia-based group is claiming it is behind it and stole personal information from millions of patients. This is just a test: A U.S. government watchdog was able to steal one gigabyte of seemingly sensitive personal data from the cloud systems of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The good news? It was just a test to see if the department's cloud infrastructure was safe. Spotify becomes a Song Psychic: The new feature plays on Wrapped, Spotify's year-end review of all the things you liked. Except instead of going back, you can ask Spotify the kinds of questions you might ask a psychic or a Magic 8 Ball for fun and get a musical answer. Image Credits: Hisham Ibrahim / Getty Images

More top reads This is your smartphone on generative AI. Any questions?: While at Mobile World Congress this week, Brian Heater met with Brain.ai founder and CEO Jerry Yue, and what resulted is a delightful chronicle of how generative AI might be foundational to the next generation of devices. Figure is now valued at $2.6 billion: Humanoid robots are having a moment, and in Figure's case, a giant, whopping funding moment. The company raised a $675 million Series B round from a group of investors, including Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia and Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. All things Google: The search engine giant is partnering with Stack Overflow to use its data to enrich Gemini for Google Cloud and provide validated Stack Overflow answers in the Google Cloud console. Meanwhile, Google is making some improvements so that search suggestions in Chrome are more helpful. Speaking of smarter: Microsoft is making Windows 11 Copilot smarter with a list of plugins and skills that include settings being changed, new AI editing integrations and improvements to widgets. A faster composter: Mill's new bin design turns a big pile of your food waste into something you can feed plants or chickens in a few hours rather than having to wait a whole day. Reddit's IPO price: Secondary investors tell us that Reddit is likely to have a successful IPO if it prices itself at $5 billion or less. We go into why, as well as why some of its more recent investors might not like the sound of that. More Brave AI: Brave is launching its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all Android users, who can ask it questions, use it to translate or summarize pages and create content. iOS devices will get this soon. It's all about the money, money, money: Inspired Capital, which has backed companies like Habi, Teamshares and Rho, closed on its third fund with $330 million in capital commitments. Adtech startup Vibe raised $22.5 million to help small companies buy video ads on streaming services. And Particle.news grabbed $4.4 million to develop an AI-powered news reader. Set, point, design: Tennis icon-turned-entrepreneur Venus Williams launches Palazzo, an AI-powered interior design platform. One of its features is an "Aesthetic DNA" test where you can select room designs you like, and the results are turned into the prompts for the AI to generate renderings. MacPaw first to adopt Apple's new DMA rules in the EU: MacPaw offers Setapp, a subscription-based platform of curated apps, to iOS and Mac users. The move is notable because Apple has received a lot of pushback for how it’s complying with the EU regulation. Image Credits: Brian Heater

On the pods For this week's Chain Reaction, we're resharing a conversation Jacquelyn had in June 2023 with Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden. Looking back on this conversation, we decided this episode was a great addition to the NFT series to add some context for what a crazy year it has been and how much things have changed (and some things stayed the same), especially for people building in the NFT space. They discussed why the NFT marketplace expanded its support to other blockchains, its BRC-20 token support and how the company plans on staying competitive in the constantly changing market. Listen here. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Systems Administrator II at City of Newport (Newport, Oregon, USA) Product Manager at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA) Senior Cloud Engineer at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA) Engineering Manager at Murmuration (USA) Consultant - Workday Implementation Project Manager at Central Park Conservancy (non-profit organization) (New York, NY, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $349 per month.

View this email online in your browser Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe © 2024 Yahoo. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103