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We were able to make it to Friday. If you are looking for a good show on the internet, I highly recommend today's Equity, where the trio talk about FTX, SBF and NYE. Yesterday's newsletter was one of the top-read stories of the day, thanks to the DailyCrunchers. I hope today's news is equally fascinating. Christine, without further adieu...
The TechCrunch Top 3
Knock, knock, it’s guaranteed renters at the door: Property owners don’t always have peace of mind while renting out their spaces, but Doorstead believes its approach is solving that. Mary Ann reports on the company securing $21.5 million new funding to not only tell you how much in rent you can expect, but also to make sure you always have a tenant for your rental property.
Credit buzz: Indian fintech KreditBee’s business model of underwriting to help people get microloans attracted even more venture capital — $100 million, in fact — to boost the company’s valuation to nearly $700 million, Manish writes.
Seeing is believing: Haje reports on “Lumus’ bid to make AR glasses a little bit less cringe.”
TechCrunch @ CES
If you liked the item above on Lumus, you will love what else the team has for you today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. There are two more days left.
There's gadgets and gizmos.
Will record levels of dry powder trigger a delayed explosion of startup investment?
The image was created by Tim Robberts.
Tech investors have amassed $290 billion in dry powder, and there is a subtext for the waves of layoffs.
Some market participants believe we are in a strong investment cycle despite the downturn because of the strong cash supply.
The pair found that a crisis within the investment landscape has often been followed by years of systematic out performance of returns.
Will record levels of dry powder trigger a delayed explosion of startup investment?
There are three more people from the team.
The membership program helps startup teams get ahead of the game. This is where you can sign up. You can get a 15% discount on an annual subscription.
Big Tech Inc.
Say your goodbyes to the desktop camera if you use it to make video calls. The camera app will be shut down on January 25 to focus on the Camera Kit for Web feature, according to Ivan. He writes that the discontinuation of the snap camera app is not entirely surprising. It cut 20% of its staff last year and shut down its product months after it was launched.
We have more for you.
We’re slashing prices left and right: Matt reports that Tesla slashed pricing for its Model 3 and Model Y in China for the second time in three months.
Plagiarism in the world of AI: If you were in school in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you might remember your teacher telling you not to use the internet because it was full of misinformation. Well, technology has come a long way, and even longer now that ChatGPT is a thing. Amid news that New York City public schools are blocking ChatGPT, OpenAI says it’s working on “mitigations” to help spot ChatGPT-generated text, Kyle reports.
TikTok, it’s time to go to bed: We’ve heard of alarms to wake you up, but that phone screen was meant to keep you engaged when you should be sleeping. “No problem,” says TikTok, which is testing a “sleep reminder” feature that nudges you when it’s bedtime, Aisha writes. And that’s not all — she also reports that TikTok has video scrubbing thumbnails now to make it easier to find specific parts of videos.
It’s enough to make you Twitch: Website and app outages happen all the time, but when Amanda saw it happened to Twitch for the second time in a week, she decided to get to the bottom of it.
Samsung not singing a happy tune: Kate reports on Samsung’s preliminary estimates of its quarterly profit, which don’t look good. The memory chip and phone maker says quarterly profit hit an eight-year low amid weak demand for its products.
A sharp-eyed developer at Krita noticed recently that, in the settings for their Adobe Creative Cloud account, the company had opted them (and everyone else) into a “content analysis” p...HealthAtom is aiming to be the go-to cloud-based operations system for small and midsize healthcare companies across Latin America (LatAm). Although the company has been around since 2012, this is ...We’ve met with Mojo Vision for several CESes, watching the startup’s AR contact lenses develop, year by year. These sorts of things take a lot of time and money, of course — and these days it seems...The NFT marketplace SuperRare is cutting 30% of its staff, according to a Slack message from CEO John Crain. Crain posted a screenshot of the message on Twitter. I have some tough news to share: pi...Verizon last month introduced a new subscription service aggregator, +Play, into open beta, allowing its customers to purchase and manage subscriptions to over 20 services, including Netflix, Disne...Being driven around the gridlocked-streets of Las Vegas during CES can be nauseating — at the best of times. But doing so with a virtual reality headset blocking your view? Certainly, it’s a ...After surpassing 1.02 billion total hours viewed in the third week of its debut, Netflix’s “Wednesday” has been renewed for a second season, the company announced today. The series originally premi...Mastercard is launching a web3-focused incubator with Ethereum scaling layer-2 blockchain Polygon to help artists connect with fans.
Given Logan Paul’s dubious history on YouTube, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that his CryptoZoo NFT project has allegedly turned out to be a scam. Some investors ended up losin...TikTok users regularly complain of hours lost on the platform, especially at night. In an effort to address these concerns, the company is testing new sleep reminders that include the option to set...A definitive founder’s guide would have to include chapters like “So you’ve hired the wrong person” or “Five ways to tell if an investor is lying to you.”
In some ways, the prevalent negative market forces might actually serve as an accelerant for creativity.
In total, U.S. Black founders raised an estimated $2.254 billion out of the $215 billion in U.S. venture capital allocated last year in 2022.
Cloud computing giant Rackspace has confirmed hackers accessed customer data during last month’s ransomware attack. The attack, which Rackspace first confirmed on December 6, impacted the com...AR tech sounds pretty cool, but nobody wants to be a glasshole. Today at CES, we checked out Lumus‘ bid to make AR glasses a little bit less cringe. The company creates a series of glasses th...Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. To start off the year, we are welcoming Rebecca Szkutak as a...Victims of the MegaCortex ransomware can now recover their encrypted files for free, thanks to the release of a new file decryptor. The free decryptor was built by cybersecurity firm Bitdefender an...
