We second that Notion

Waymo drops its waitlist and AI music misses a beat

View this email online in your browser By Christine Hall Tuesday, June 25, 2024 Welcome to TechCrunch PM! Today we bring you news about Notion adding some new features, San Franciscans having a new way to ride around town, a lawsuit against generative AI startups, Stability AI bringing in some help from heavy hitters and Google's Gemini for email is here. Let's dig in! TechCrunch Top 3 Image Credits: Tetra Images / Getty Images Notion puts Notion Sites in motion: Popular productivity tool Notion has long allowed its users to make any of their pages public. Now the company is expanding on this with the launch of Notion Sites, which adds several new features to its existing publishing tools. For the most part, these are pretty straightforward, but together, they do make for a more polished publishing experience. Read more Waymo steps on the gas of its San Francisco plans: Waymo said that anyone can download the app and then immediately hail one of its robotaxis in San Francisco. The announcement comes just a couple of weeks after Waymo voluntarily issued a software recall to all 672 of its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis after one of them collided with a telephone pole. Read more Internet disruption in Kenya: London-based internet rights monitoring group NetBlocks has reported a major internet disruption in Kenya following a wave of demonstrations across the country. Police violently cracked down on citizens taking to the streets to protest a government bill to hike taxes despite tough economic times and widespread corruption. Read more A MESSAGE FROM HSBC Your Partner in Innovation  You can rely on HSBC for stability and sector expertise. Through partnership and a strong global network, HSBC Innovation Banking is here to support tech, life science and healthcare companies at every stage of growth.  Learn More Afternoon must-reads 🗞 Fearless Fund co-founder steps down: Ayana Parsons said she was leaving her position as chief operating officer of the venture capital firm. Read more The day the AI music died: Like many AI companies, Udio and Suno relied on large-scale theft to create their generative AI models. This they have as much as admitted, even before the music industry's new lawsuits against them have gone before a judge. Read more Stability gets some capital but won't say how much: Stability AI, the beleaguered generative AI startup behind Stable Diffusion, is making changes. Among them, Napster founder and ex-Facebook exec Sean Parker, who is part of the investor group, is now executive board chairman. Read more Gemini wants to help with email: Google is rolling out its new Gemini AI side panel in Gmail that can help you write emails and summarize email threads. With the new integration, you can use Gemini in Gmail to get help drafting an email or receive suggested responses to an email. Read more Threads in the fediverse: Instagram's Threads expands further into the fediverse and is now opening its beta for sharing to users who are 18 and up and who are using Threads with a public account in global markets. Read more Circular and Oura settle: As part of a settlement agreement in an ongoing patent suit, Circular has agreed to a multi-year agreement with Oura where the French company will license the market leader's intellectual property for devices sold in the U.S. Read more iPhone looks in the mirror: iPhone Mirroring, one of the more notable features arriving in Apple's upcoming operating systems, is now available to developers testing the beta versions of iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. Read more Boeing's Wisk Aero buys Verocel: Verocel is a software verification and validation company that's been serving the aerospace industry for 25 years. Read more Finding a job in the U.S. is no picnic if you're an immigrant: Luckily, Jobright has created an AI agent that acts just like a headhunter tailored to your skills. Read more MONEY, MONEY, MONEY 💰 Payabli is building payment management tools for software startups. Read more Tengo untangles the messy world of public sector procurement with AI. Read more Smashing, from Goodreads' co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations. Read more Backed by David Sacks, Garry Tan and Walter Isaacson, Created by Humans helps people license their creative work to AI models. Read more Coder nabs new funds to move dev environments to the cloud. Read more k-ID wins $45 million to help game devs speedrun the child safety compliance puzzle. Read more A MESSAGE FROM NORTHERN DATA GROUP Applications open: AI Accelerator Do you want to scale your AI innovation from a proof-of-concept? Apply to Northern Data Group's AI Accelerator for complimentary access to NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, powered by sustainable energy. Plus, benefit from mentoring and workshops with industry leaders including HPE, Supermicro, Deloitte, and more. Learn More TechCrunch Minute 🕒 X still can't handle its bot problem: Not really a shocker, right? I mean, they let anyone pay for the verified checkmark. It came to a head last summer when X admitted it had a problem with users getting too much spam from verified accounts. And now some of the bots are powered by AI. So why is X failing so supremely at controlling spam? Didn't Musk buy the platform in part due to his frustrations with bots? Hit play and let's chat! Around the web 🌐 2021 VC funds didn't age like the fine wine they were supposed to: The Wall Street Journal reports that the venture capital industry was great in 2021, but many of the funds starting in that year are underperforming. Read more That didn't take long: Don't look for a deal between Apple and Meta to happen anytime soon, according to Business Insider. Read more Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. 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Are 30 engineers enough to secure Telegram?

Is Telegram truly as secure as it says?

View this email online in your browser By Rebecca Bellan Tuesday, June 25, 2024 Welcome to TechCrunch AM! We've got a lot to cover this morning, but top of mind are security concerns over Telegram's supposed staffing, fresh funds for alternative chipmakers, and Amazon's ChatGPT competitor. We also have notes on why Apple isn't going to use Meta's AI, the importance of using AI for pharma, and a new chip that can only do one thing. Let's jump in! — Rebecca TechCrunch Top 3 Image Credits: Lam Yik/Bloomberg / Getty Images 1. Is Telegram actually that secure? Telegram founder Pavel Durov is apparently proud that he runs a lean ship of only 30 engineers. That may be great for efficiency, but security experts say that's actually a red flag: Telegram chats aren't end-to-end encrypted by default, and it's also a social media platform, so there probably aren't enough people helping safeguard all that user data. Read More 2. Tech companies have short memories: Back in 2004, Microsoft was forced to unbundle Windows Media Player from its operating system in the EU on anti-competitive grounds. Microsoft seems to have forgotten that: The European Commission is now angry at the company, saying it hasn't done enough to address concerns that Teams being bundled with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 is hurting competition in the market for real-time communication apps for enterprises. Read More 3. VCs throw money at chipmakers that aren't Nvidia: The success of generative AI vendors hinges on the whims of dominant chipmakers (read: Nvidia), but that means there's demand for promising upstarts who want to challenge the status quo. Etched just raised a $120 million Series A to develop a chip that can run a single type of AI model: transformers. Transformers underpin pretty much all of the genAI tech today, so it's a good place to focus on. Read More A MESSAGE FROM DELINEA Enhance Multi-Cloud Security with CIEM Every API, service account, bot, and container in your cloud is a new identity and potential threat. CIEM helps secure identities by understanding permissions and mapping attack paths. Learn more in this whitepaper. Download the Whitepaper Morning Must Reads Image Credits: NicoElNino / Getty Images AI for novel proteins: EvolutionaryScale has raised a massive $142 million seed for its AI model, ESM3, which can create proteins to enable entirely new classes of drugs, tools and therapeutics. Designing proteins in the lab is costly, and the company says ESM3, trained on a dataset of 2.78 billion proteins, can "reason over" protein sequences, structures and functions to generate new proteins for much cheaper. Read More Save the plants, save the world: Not very long ago, everyone made fun of tree-huggers, but as we can all see now, they were right to protect trees. Foray Bioscience agrees, and has raised $3 million to use biomanufacturing to grow harvest-free plant-based materials, seeds and molecules. The startup uses a database approach to provide predictive insights and experimental direction to speed up R&D for plant species. Read More Improving on the ghost kitchen model: General Catalyst has led a $40 million investment in Local Kitchens, a multi-brand restaurant concept that operates like a cloud or ghost kitchen. The cloud kitchen model is hard to run, but the winning difference here is Local Kitchens employs the people cooking the food, and works with partner restaurants and chefs to train its staff on their recipes. It also offers dining room service, and its digital format helps it manage orders for multiple brands from a single kitchen. Read More TechWolf takes AI-sized bite out of internal recruiting: Tech talent is hard to come by, and that shortage is prompting companies to focus on how their talent is managed. Enter TechWolf, a Belgian startup whose AI engine can ingest data from internal workflows and spit out judgements about employees' work ethics and skill sets. TechWolf already works with big names like HSBC and Booking.com, and has just raised almost $43 million to expand its business. Read More Apple shelves Meta AI partnership over privacy concerns, reports Bloomberg. That's not surprising at all, since Apple and Meta have long differed over their approach to privacy. When iOS updates made it difficult for apps and advertisers to track user activity, Facebook complained loudly that the move would hurt small businesses, when it was probably concerned about its own advertising revenue. Read More Shipping containers can be interesting, too: The COVID-19 pandemic might be over, but the need to quickly and securely send valuable, fragile medicines endures. That's why Swiss startup SkyCell just closed a $116 million Series D at a $635 million valuation. The startup builds "smart containers" that use software to maintain strict temperatures, humidity levels and levels of vibration, as well as a logistics system to transport the drugs around the globe on behalf of its pharma customers. Read More Yelp updates accessibility features: Apparently Yelp has seen a 40% rise in searches for "wheelchair accessible" places between 2020 and 2023. So the company is updating its app to add attributes to businesses around mobility, hearing and vision to help people find accessible places. The update also brings AI-powered alt-text for images. Read More Snapchat makes it easier to block creeps: Snapchat is introducing a new suite of safety features to make it harder to get creeped on. You can now see when someone you've blocked has created a new account on the same device, and the app will block new friend requests from someone if you'd already blocked them on a different account. Another feature reminds users who they're advertising their location to on Snap Map, and recommends that users only share that info with close friends. Read More From TikTok famous to acquisition: Swipewipe, a photo management app that gamifies the process of clearing out unwanted photos from your camera roll, recently got super popular with Gen Z on TikTok. And such was its fame that French mobile app publisher and developer, MWM, decided to acquire it. The deal gives Swipewipe's founder access to life-changing money today and continued revenue-sharing in the future. Read More A MESSAGE FROM NORTHERN DATA GROUP Scaling a startup is not easy... But it's much easier with the support of Northern Data Group's AI Accelerator. Apply now for access to NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, mentoring from industry leaders and partners, including HPE and Supermicro, and dedicated access to NVIDIA's Deep Learning Institute. Applications close July 28. Learn More Around the Web You, too, can run a full news site for $350: 404 Media apparently paid a freelancer on Fiverr about 350 bucks to set up an autonomous, ChatGPT-powered tech news site that steals other people's original reporting. What reporter Emanuel Maiberg learned is that it's now super easy and cheap to flood the internet with an infinite amount of pseudo-journalism, particularly since the infrastructure already exists (WordPress, Fiverr, Google) to convert clicks to dollars. Read More Femtech has privacy problems: Femtech startups are finally getting the attention they deserve from investors, but some VCs are wary about which startups they invest in, avoiding ones with a lack of transparency on data privacy, reports The Financial Times. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to overturn women's constitutional right to abortion, privacy concerns are front and center among some venture investors. Read More Amazon is working on a ChatGPT killer: Amazon is working on an AI chatbot to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to Business Insider. The secret internal project is code-named "Metis," and it's powered by an AI model called Olympus, in keeping with the company's Greek mythology theme. The chatbot can apparently converse with text and images, link to the sources of its responses, suggest follow up queries and more. Read More Before You Go Image Credits: Getty Images Prepare to shamelessly engage in capitalism: It's time for Amazon's annual Prime Day sales, when you can throw your environmental concerns and contempt for Jeff Bezos to the wind and get in on them insane deals. Sales kick off at 12:01 a.m. PT on July 16 in the U.S. citizens and will continue throughout the next day. Read More Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. 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