Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Welcome to TC PM! Today we are learning of a second round of layoffs at the Mozilla Foundation this year; we dig into Waymo's latest valuation; and we hit "print preview" on the merger of two Latvian printing companies. To the polls!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Luliia Serova / Getty Images

😟 More layoffs at Mozilla: The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser company, confirmed that it held its second round of layoffs this year. This time the company laid off 30% of its workers amid a "relentless onslaught of change." Read more

🚙 Whoa, Waymo: Alphabet's self-driving car unit Waymo recently raised a monster $5.6 billion funding round last week. Now we know how much investors think it is worth: The company now has a $45 billion valuation. Read more

📝 Two printing companies ink a merger: Latvian printing companies Printful and Printly announced today that they are merging. Deal terms were not disclosed, and the two startups will continue to operate separately — for now. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc / Getty Images

😬 Elon "misinformation" Musk: Elon Musk has been very vocal about today's U.S. election on his platform, X. Too bad a lot of what he's saying is misinformation that a research report confirmed has been viewed at least 2 billion times. Yikes. Read more

🛢️ Google goes for oil: Google is opening an AI hub in Saudi Arabia that will research Arab language AI models. While that makes sense on paper, how does this move impact Google's climate goals? Read more

🐣 Funds for family planning: Gestational surrogacy is an option for prospective parents who can't carry a pregnancy. But the process is opaque, takes a long time, and is incredibly expensive. Nodal wants to fix that. Read more

📧 Substack sends free subscriptions: Newsletter platform Substack wants more users to download its app, so it's offering free subscriptions for users if they do so. Public reaction to this campaign is mixed, but it has led to a spike in app downloads. Read more

📲 Wicked widget: The U.S. elections today have a lot of us doomscrolling on our phones. Apple somehow created another way to panic about the results: You can now download a widget that will send election updates directly to your home screen or lock screen. Read more

🎙️ Cybersecurity and the Chainsmokers: The Chainsmokers have been beefing up their B2B investing. This week on a special episode of Found, we sat down with Dan Lorenc, the CEO of Chainguard, who talks about building his company and working with the EDM duo. Listen here

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Around the web

😎 Everything is cool and fine: The FBI issued a warning today that fake bomb threat emails are being sent to polling sites in the U.S. from emails that "appear to originate from Russian email domains." Thankfully, none of these threats have proven credible. Read more

🛍️ Walmart wants to try something: Walmart is trying to figure out a way to use locked cases to prevent theft, but without hindering sales. It's now trying tech that would unlock these cases with a cellphone. If successful, it could be a feature for Walmart+ members. Read more