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April 25, 2022, is the day. We spent most of the day keeping an eye on him, but it seems that the deed is done. The lucky owner of a bird-watching app is the sparky-space-sausage and battery-powered-car guy. If you've lost track of the intersection of ornithology and billionaire drama, you're in for a rude awakening.
Christine and Haje.
The TechCrunch Top 3
Elon Musk sealed the deal with Twitter: That’s a wrap, folks — after intimately following this for the past week, we will now have to find something else to obsess over. Musk and Twitter came to an agreement at $54.20 per share, valuing the social media giant at $44 billion. Musk continued to talk of “free speech,” which has us wondering if a certain former president’s account will be reinstated.
Meta has a store, a real-life one: For a company trying to sell us on the metaverse, it’s interesting to find out that Meta’s way of doing this is to get us in a store so we can try out all their gadgets and gizmos a-plenty. Though maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. I assume their target audience is one that likes to scrutinize things from every angle. Well played!
Zenda is digitizing school pay in Africa: As someone preparing to send my oldest to college in two short years, I was intrigued by Annie’s coverage of how UAE-based Zenda is helping parents on the other side of the world, with its sights now set on Africa, pay school fees online rather than having to provide bank deposit slips as proof of payment. The company is also looking into some financial wellness products, which, let’s face it, we all need more of.
Startups and VC
Kyle's article takes a look at how some Swiss researchers are using big data sets to model and predict future markets.
I have been pretty grumpy over the last couple of days. I wrote about the dumbest photography product I've reviewed in many years, and over the weekend, a feature about how scam artists use expired domains to trick search engines went up on our subscription site.
More? Yes, of course.
Not enough humans? Make up some fake ones: You’d think that 8 billion humans would be quite enough, but tech disagrees, apparently. Mike explores why we’re going to be seeing a lot of artificial humans turn up in virtually every corner of the internet, very soon indeed.
Pay me whenever, I guess: More than $15 billion worth of rent is paid late in the U.S. every month, which causes all sorts of stress. Circa wants to put an end to that and raised $2 million to figure things out for landlords that have between 1,000 and 10,000 renters.
Fintech trading platform: Rooser created a seafood trading platform and raised $23 million bones or clams, or whatever you call them, to continue its journey.
From Sea to sparkling Sea: Presumably singing sea-shaNFTys all the way, OpenSea bought Gem, soon after one of the latter’s co-founders was thrown overboard for allegedly acting like absolute human garbage.
You may have missed a few stories.
Submit your questions for a TechCrunch+ Twitter Space with immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn
On Tuesday, April 26, at 2:30 p.m. 4:30 p.m. The immigration law attorney and author of the DearSophie column, who is based in Silicon Valley, is going to be in a space on the social networking site.
H-1B visas, pathways for international student founders and her advice for members of the Ukrainian IT community are some of the issues she will discuss.
This space is open to everyone, so if you have immigration-related questions, you can submit them through the chat.
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Submit your questions for a TechCrunch+ Twitter Space with immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn
Big Tech Inc.
You can’t write about Chevy’s Corvette without a little Prince in the background. So while that’s going, the new EV model at first glance will bring you back to the days of Michael Keaton in “Batman,” the soundtrack for which, you’ll recall, largely featured Price. Anyway, the video is absolute car porn, but the technology behind it may also have you purring. General Motors’ new battery technology taps into the car’s own heat to improve range, acceleration and efficiency. My husband’s been asking me what kind of car I want next, and I may have just found it.
Lots of streaming news today: It looks like Apple’s App Store and Apple Music were still having issues as we went to press. Amazon Prime is now on TikTok with a little help from Jason Derulo. Lauren laid out a good argument for why Netflix should get into live sports (we’re talking big money, big, huge) and Spotify started a fund to support independent open source projects and help developers keep them going.
It now looks like the Google Pixel Watch will be a thing. As Brian points out, it has been “a long, rocky road” for this watch, but I’m excited to show off some new frosting to my iPhone friends.
Investors are getting in on “feature stores” and I am glad Kyle is here to explain all about what those are and why they are attractive.
Rocket engines are tough pieces of hardware to build, but it’s possible that 3D printing them could be the next big thing. Relativity certainly thinks so, and has raised about a billion dolla...Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Happy to have you with us and happy belated Earth Day. In this issue: No more ASAT operations for the U.S. NASA gives nearly $300 million in awards to satcom provid...New Twitter owner Elon Musk has emphasized his belief that “free speech” is critical to Twitter’s future, even noting in the press release announcing the deal today that “fr...Twitter, the platform that once helped fuel The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street is now owned by the richest man in the world, and you have to wonder what impact it’s going to have. There a...Elon Musk’s quest to buy Twitter came to a close today with a win for the technology mogul. Regardless of what we might have thought when Twitter was busy circling its wagons with a poison-pi...Former President Donald Trump said on Monday that he will not be returning to Twitter if his account is reinstated, according to a statement he provided to Fox News. Trump’s comments about Tw...In addition to being chief product officer at Klaviyo, I now also have the honor of getting to speak to a lot of new and hopeful founders. Here are the three pieces of advice I start with.
TC Sessions: Mobility is back and raring to go big — returning live and in-person — for year number four. It’s a two-day deep dive featuring the best, brightest and most intriguing founders, engine...Reddit is investing $1 million in its Community Funds program, the company announced on Monday. The company has been experimenting with its Community Funds program for the past six months and provi...Tesla CEO Elon Musk is infamous for using Twitter to tease and tease out various ideas he has about his business interests, cryptocurrency, politics and life in general, but today it looks like he&...Synthetically generated versions of real people that can be can be programmed to say anything sounds like a scenario from the latest episode of “Black Mirror.” But in fact, production-g...Elon Musk’s tunnel startup The Boring Company plans to begin “full-scale” testing of hyperloop, a still theoretical transportation system that sends passengers in autonomous elect...If uncertainty is the only true certainty in this global economy, how does an early-stage startup gird itself?
While web3, the metaverse and virtual HQs feel like the loudest features of the “future of work” startup category, WorkLife Ventures founder Brianne Kimmel has a more down-to-earth defi...It’s official: a fully electric Chevy Corvette is coming — with new battery technology to boost its range, acceleration and efficiency. When it arrives, the battery-electric sports car will b...There’s a lot of work that needs to be done when building a startup, legally and professionally. And startup lawyers specializing in niche documents and processes can be useful resources.
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, acquired NFT aggregator Gem.xyz (Gem) to “better serve” its more experienced users, the company said in a blog post. The deal, which comes a few mo...
