Howdy, folks! Happy Friday. While our fearless Week in Review leader Greg enjoys parental leave, I’m filling in, curating the latest on the tech news front. It was a roller coaster of a week once again as economic headwinds took a brutal, demoralizing toll, and as chaos reigned at Elon Musk’s Twitter. Somewhere in the midst of all that, Boston Dynamics demoed an improved bipedal robot, Wikipedia launched a redesign and major universities banned TikTok from their campus networks. Yeah — a lot happened.

Before we get down to business, a friendly reminder that TechCrunch Early Stage 2023 is on April 20 in Boston. It’s a one-day summit for founders who are in the first stages of growing their companies, who have built a product but don’t know how to monetize, and who have an idea but aren’t sure where to find the resources to turn it into a viable business. At Early Stage, experts will share advice on protecting intellectual property, structuring cap tables, developing target customer personas and more. You won’t want to miss it.

most read

Alphabet makes deep cuts: Alphabet, the parent holding company of Google, announced on Friday that it’s cutting around 6% of its global workforce, or roughly 12,000 roles, Paul reports. In an open letter published by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the narrative followed a similar trajectory to that of other companies that have downsized in recent months, noting that the company had “hired for a different economic reality” than what it’s up against today.

Twitter bans third-party clients: Aftercutting off prominent app makers like Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter quietly updated its developer terms to ban third-party Twitter clients altogether. The “restrictions” section of Twitter’s 5,000-some-word developer agreement was updated with a clause prohibiting “use or access [to] the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications,” a decision that seems unlikely to foster much goodwill at a time when Twitter faces challenges on a number of fronts.

Beating a Hastings retreat: Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings announced Thursday that he would step down after more than two decades at the company, Taylor writes. While news of his departure comes as a shock, Hastings noted in the announcement that Netflix has planned its next era of leadership “for many years.” Netflix will maintain its co-CEO structure in Hastings’ absence, promoting COO Greg Peters to the tandem role with Ted Sarandos.

College students, no TikTok for you: Public universities across a widening swath of U.S. states have banned TikTok in recent months, and two of the country’s largest colleges followed suit earlier this week. As Taylor reports, the University of Texas and Texas A&M University took action against the social app, which is owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance — prohibiting campus network and device users from accessing TikTok. The flurry of recent banswas inspired by executive orders issued by a number of state governors.

Wikipedia gets a makeover: This week, Wikipedia, a resource used by billions every month, got its first makeover on the desktop in over a decade, Sarah writes. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia project, launched an updated interface aimed at making the site more accessible and easier to use, with additions like improved search, a more prominently located tool for switching between languages, an updated header offering access to commonly used links, and more.

Pour one out for AmazonSmile: Just a few days after announcing a significant round of layoffs, Amazon said that it would end AmazonSmile, its donation program that redirects 0.5% of the cost of all eligible products toward charities. Amazon claimed that the program had “not grown to create the impact that [it] had originally hoped,” but as Romain notes, since 2013, Amazon has donated $400 million through AmazonSmile. Ending it is seems more likely a move to cut costs.

Payday for data breach victims: If you were one of the nearly 77 million people affected by last year’s T-Mobile breach, you may have a few bucks coming your way. Devin reports that the company will pay $350 million to be split up by customers and lawyers, plus $150 million “for data security and related technology.” The breach apparently occurred sometime early last year, after which collections of T-Mobile customer data were put up for sale on various criminal forums.

Robots that grab as well as throw: TechCrunch’s intrepid Matt Burns writes about a demo video this week showing Hyundai-backed Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, Atlas, equipped with gripper hands that can pick up and drop off anything the robot can grab independently. The claw-like gripper consists of one fixed finger and one moving finger; Boston Dynamics says that the grippers were designed for heavy-lifting tasks, like Atlas holding a keg over its head during a Super Bowl commercial. Nifty.

Dungeons & Dragons:After weeks of backlash and protests from fans, Wizards of the Coast — the Hasbro-owned publisher of Dungeons & Dragons — announced it will now license Dungeons & Dragons’ core mechanics under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This gives the community “a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license” to publish and sell works based on Dungeons & Dragons — a massive change of heart for the gaming giant, which was considering implementing a new license that would require certain Dungeons & Dragons content creators to start paying a 25% royalty.

audio roundup

Whether it’s to pass the time while commuting or to liven up the morning jog, TechCrunch likely has a podcast to suit your fancy. On startup-focused Equity this week, Natasha, Mary Ann and Rebecca jumped on the mic to talk through a diverse news week, including deals from Sophia Amoruso’s new fund, Welcome Homes, and a look at compliment-focused social media apps. Found, meanwhile, featured Mir Hwang, the co-founder and CEO of GigFinesse, who talked about how his struggles to book music gigs as a teenager pushed him to launch the company that connects artists with venues for live shows.

TechCrunch+

TC+, TechCrunch’s premium channel for deep dives, surveys, guest posts and general analysis, was jam-packed with content this week (as always). Here’s some of the most popular posts:

On Twitter’s data leak response: Carly writes about Twitter’s allegeddata breach that exposed the contact information of millions of users. In anunattributed blog post, Twitter said it had conducted a “thorough investigation” and found “no evidence” that recent Twitter user data sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter’s systems. But as she notes, it’s unclear if Twitter has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if any user data was exfiltrated.

The last unicorns: VCs think a majority of unicorns aren’t worth $1 billion anymore. Rebecca takes a look at the current investment landscape, finding that many of the companies that reached unicorn status last year are in danger of losing it as economic conditions worsen.

Sexism in the workplace: Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, a drop from 2021, Dominic-Madoriwrites. That percentage is a notable drop from the 2.4% all-women teams raised in 2021. The decline was expected, but stark nonetheless. Aside from 2016, the last time all-women-led startups raised such a low percentage of funds was in 2012, another period of funding decline caused by economic uncertainty and an election.

Alphabet makes cuts, Twitter bans third-party clients, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings steps down by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Detailed tactical plans for imminent police raids, confidential police reports with descriptions of alleged crimes and suspects, and a forensic extraction report detailing the contents of a suspect’s phone. These are some of the files in a huge cache of data taken from the internal servers of ODIN Intelligence, a tech company that provides apps and services to police departments, following a hack and defacement of its website over the weekend.

The group behind the breach said in message left on ODIN’s website that it hacked the company after its founder and chief executive Erik McCauley dismissed a report by Wired, which discovered the company’s flagship app SweepWizard, used by police to coordinate and plan multi-agency raids, was insecure and spilling sensitive data about upcoming police operations to the open web.

The hackers also published the company’s Amazon Web Services private keys for accessing its cloud-stored data and claimed to have “shredded” the company’s data and backups but not before exfiltrating gigabytes of data from ODIN’s systems.

ODIN develops and provides apps, like SweepWizard, to police departments across the United States. The company also builds technologies that allow authorities to remotely monitor convicted sex offenders. But ODIN also drew criticism last year for offering authorities a facial recognition system for identifying homeless people and using degrading language in its marketing.

ODIN’s McCauley did not respond to several emails requesting comment prior to publication but confirmed the hack in a data breach disclosure filed with the California attorney general’s office.

The breach not only exposes vast amounts of ODIN’s own internal data but also gigabytes of confidential law enforcement data uploaded by ODIN’s police department customers. The breach raises questions about ODIN’s cybersecurity but also the security and privacy of the thousands of people — including victims of crime and suspects not charged with any offense — whose personal information was exposed.

The cache of hacked ODIN data was provided to DDoSecrets, a nonprofit transparency collective that indexes leaked datasets in the public interest, such as caches from police departments, government agencies, law firms and militia groups. DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best told TechCrunch that the collective has limited the distribution of the cache to journalists and researchers given the vast amount of personally identifiable data in the ODIN cache.

Little is known about the hack or the intruders responsible for the breach. Best told TechCrunch that the source of the breach is a group called “All Cyber-Cops Are Bastards,” a phrase it referenced in the defacement message.

TechCrunch reviewed the data, which not only includes the company’s source code and internal database but also thousands of police files. None of the data appears encrypted.

The data included dozens of folders with full tactical plans of upcoming raids, alongside suspect mugshots, their fingerprints and biometric descriptions and other personal information, including intelligence on individuals who might be present at the time of the raid, like children, cohabitants and roommates, some of whom described as having “no crim[inal] history.” Many of the documents were labeled as “confidential law enforcement only” and “controlled document” not for disclosure outside of the police department.

Some of the files were labeled as test documents and used fake officer names like “Superman” and “Captain America.” But ODIN also used real world identities, like Hollywood actors, who are unlikely to have consented to their names being used. One document titled “Fresno House Search” bore no markings to suggest the document was a test of ODIN’s front-facing systems but stated the raid’s objective was to “find a house to live in.”

The leaked cache of ODIN data also contained its system for monitoring sex offenders, which allows police and parole officers to register, supervise and monitor convicted criminals. The cache contained more than a thousand documents relating to convicted sex offenders who are required to register with the state of California, including their names, home addresses (if not incarcerated) and other personal information.

The data also contains a large amount of personal information about individuals, including the surveillance techniques that police use to identify or track them. TechCrunch found several screenshots showing people’s faces matched against a facial recognition engine called AFR Engine, a company that provides face-matching technology to police departments. One photo appears to show an officer forcibly holding a person’s head in front of another officer’s phone camera.

Other files show police using automatic license plate readers, known as ANPR, which can identify where a suspect drove in recent days. Another document contained the full contents — including text messages and photos — of a convicted offender’s phone, whose contents were extracted by a forensic extraction tool during a compliance check while the offender was on probation. One folder contained audio recordings of police interactions, some where officers are heard using force.

TechCrunch contacted several U.S. police departments whose files were found in the stolen data. None responded to our requests for comment.

ODIN’s website, which went offline a short time after it was defaced, remains inaccessible as of Thursday.

If you know more about the ODIN Intelligence breach, get in touch with the security desk on Signal and WhatsApp at +1 646-755-8849 or zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com by email.

A hack at ODIN Intelligence exposes a huge trove of police raid files by Zack Whittaker originally published on TechCrunch

Elon Musk continues to change things at a breakneck pace at Twitter, and on Saturday the still-CEO (I guess he hasn’t found anyone willing to take over yet?) seemed to address user complaints that ads are getting worse on the platform. Musk said that the social network would be “taking steps” to address what he acknowledged was too much frequency for ads displayed on Twitter, and also the ads themselves taking up too much space. Finally, Musk reiterated that there will also be a new, higher-priced subscription tier coming that will entirely remove ads.

An option to pay to get rid of ads altogether has been something Twitter users have been expressing a desire for since at least the introduction of the original Twitter paid subscription, which provided a number of features to users but did nothing to change the rate at which they saw ads on the site. Musk previously tipped that there would be a fully ad-free higher tier subscription coming in 2023 in mid-December last year. At the time, Musk also said Blue subcribers at the existing rate would see half the ads of free users.

Musk’s acknowledgement of the sorry state of ads on Twitter comes just after he oversaw the death of the network’s support for third-party clients. Twitter cut off API access for those clients beginning last week, starting by suddenly revoking access for the largest clients, including Tweetbot and Twitterific, and then updated its developer guidelines earlier this week to fully cut off access for all such clients.

Elon Musk admits Twitter has too many ads, says fix is coming by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time using mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

The end of the Twitter app era

It’s incredible how third-party Twitter clients had been able to survive Twitter’s ups and downs over the years, including its various API changes and constantly fluctuating business objectives and policies, only to be unceremoniously killed in 2023 by the whims of a billionaire. This week, in what has been one of the more depressing moments in tech history, longtime Twitter apps like IconFactory’s Twitterific, Tapbot’s Tweetbot and others like Birdie, Fenix, Echofon and many more were unceremoniously cut off from being able to access Twitter’s API and serve their customer base.

Instead of warning developers that Twitter’s policies were changing and giving them time to wind down their operations and communicate with their longtime users and subscribers, Twitter quietly, callously and deliberately revoked their API access. They “fixed the glitch,” so to speak.

Users and developers found out about the change as the apps stopped working, but not because of any official communication from Twitter itself. As backlash and outrage grew, Twitter then made matters worse by trying to gaslight its community about the situation. The company tweeted it was only enforcing its “long-standing” rules, then rushed to update its documentation to reflect what those rules actually were.

Of course, there was a time when Twitter tried to shut down the Twitter app ecosystem: you know, 12 years ago. Following its acquisition of Tweetie, which became Twitter’s own native app, the company in 2011 told developers they should stop trying to compete with Twitter on clients and instead focus on other API use cases, like data and verticals. It was the sort of classic, misguided move Twitter always seemed to make. The company never quite got a grip on the power Twitter had as a platform, and how an ecosystem of tools and apps that worked with Twitter was a better investment of its resources than spending eons trying to do things like tweak the structure of a thread or adding other bells and whistles that users didn’t really care about.

At the time of the proposed shutdown over a decade ago, those Twitter apps had been responsible for 42% of tweets on the platform. While slightly down from the 55% of tweets made in 2009 (or as high as 60% in 2010, another analysis found), the apps still served a large audience of power users that Twitter wanted to simply cut off and walk away from.

As entrepreneur Nova Spivack warned Twitter back then, its failure to incorporate its API into its future plans could ultimately hamper its potential as a company:

I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win. If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that could not only force a large part of their ecosystem to go elsewhere, but it could deprive them of a much larger potential infrastructure revenue opportunity, and could even end up costing them the company. After all, Silicon Valley is littered with the burned out wreckage of once-great media companies that failed create and keep third-party app ecosystems: AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo – to name a few. It’s very hard to maintain leadership as an online media company without an ecosystem of outside apps increasing reach, innovation, and stickiness.

He was right. Twitter over the years struggled to grow its daily active user base, even making up its own metrics, and trying to convince Wall Street that its business should be evaluated by something besides user growth. It didn’t work.

Twitter historically often ignored the innovation emerging from its ecosystem of apps, even as those apps contributed meaningfully to what Twitter would become. Twitterific coined the word “tweet,” was the first to use the bird icon and delivered the first native Mac and iOS apps, among other things. Tweetie introduced the pull-to-refresh gesture. Brizzly made it possible to tweet photos, long before Twitter did. And all, arguably, demonstrated the market for premium apps (Tweetbot for Mac was $20 in 2012!) and app subscriptions, despite arriving at a time when Twitter’s focus was on cramming ads into its timeline — something that was once dubbed its #dickbar feature.

The company could have found an altogether different trajectory if it had embraced the innovation taking place in the broader app ecosystem, instead of constantly trying to squash it. Twitter users for years had no choice but to sit back and watch as their favorite third-party apps were slowly pruned. Long before TikTok, an app that began as a “video Twitter,” Seesmic, had to exit back in 2012. Favstar, a popular app for tracking top tweets, closed up shop in 2018. Twitter acquired TweetDeck, then abandoned it, despite surveys that indicated users would be willing to pay for premium features and subscriptions. Twitter almost seemed to revel in destroying various parts of its ecosystem. It bought Vine (a TikTok precursor) and Periscope (an early livestreamer), and killed them. (And when Twitter managed to come up with creative ideas of its own — like a music discovery app called #Music — it would give up on them, too. Now music discovery takes place on TikTok.)

Despite its fumbling, third-party Twitter clients managed to survive and even thrive, thanks to dedicated user bases, all while the company kept tweaking its API to make them less useful. In 2018, for example, the app makers told their customers they would have to disable or degrade certain features. And yet, the apps’ customers remained.

Now, at a perilous time in Twitter’s history — when analysts are predicting it will lose some 32 million users by 2024 — Twitter is removing access to some of its most beloved entry points to its ecosystem. And while these clients may not be the powerhouses of a decade ago, they deserved the opportunity to close up shop in a dignified manner that reflected the impact they had on Twitter’s own history and community.

What’s ironic here is that Twitter in more recent years almost seemed as if it was trying to right the ship. It was revamping its API and bringing back its developer conference. Its head of product for the developer platform, Amir Shevat, understood the potential. The company was beginning to spin up in-Twitter apps users could interact with and was even toying with ideas around a Twitter app store. But his team was cut from 100 people to two amid the Twitter layoffs, signaling the end of Twitter’s platform ambitions. And, we should have realized then, the end of the Twitter ecosystem of apps, too.

As Shevat warned in December: “Let this be my personal notice to Twitter developers: The team is gone; the investment has been undone. Love does not live here anymore.”

Trial set in Epic & Match’s antitrust case against Google

A date has been set for a trial by jury in a significant antitrust case against Google involving its alleged abuses of power in the Android app market. Fortnite maker Epic Games and dating app giant Match Group, joined by more than three dozen state attorneys general, have accused Google of unfairly leveraging its market dominance and harming competition through its Google Play Store terms and practices. In particular, the plaintiffs take issue with the commissions Google requires on app sales and in-app purchases as well as the control Google has over Android app distribution in general. The case will now proceed to a jury trial on November 6, 2023, a judge in the Northern District of California has ruled.

Epic and Match filed to amend their complaint in Octoberby adding new antitrust counts to their case. Google in Octoberasked the courtto disallow these requests, saying, among other things, the claims were filed too late. (The court granted the motion to amend the complaint in November.)

The Android ecosystem antitrust case is a bit different from the Epic-Apple battle because Google allows Android apps to be sideloaded. The app makers will instead aim to prove other ways the company leveraged its market power — like paying developers to not leave the Play Store, for instance.

In a more recent hearing related to this case, a California federal judge criticized Google for not preserving evidence from employee chats, after learning internal communications were taking place in Google Chat, where messages were automatically deleted after 24 hours. Though employees can change the auto-delete setting, Google apparently did not enforce this setting to be turned on. The U.S. District Judge James Donato asked the parties how many of the 260 Google employees who received a litigation hold notice had chosen not to preserve their chats, according to a report fromLaw360.

The judge also threatened Google with a “substantial, trial-related penalty” if the court found evidence related to the trial was destroyed. This should be an interesting trial to watch, it seems.

Instagram adds a “Quiet Mode”

Instagram announced this week it’s expanding its selection of time management tools with the launch of a new feature called “Quiet Mode.” The feature aims to reduce users’ anxiety about taking time off from the app by silencing incoming notifications, auto-replying to DMs and setting your status to “In Quiet Mode” to inform friends that you’re not active on the app at present. The company said it will prompt teen users to enable the feature if they’re using the app late at night.

With the new Quiet Mode feature, the app is aiming to address the real-world impacts that accompany trying to step away for a bit from an app that you regularly use — and one where others expect you to be available.

The launches come as Instagram works to make its app less of a target for regulators and lawmakers who have been concerned with social media’s potential harms, particularly for teenage users. To date, Instagram has added several teen safety features, including those toprotect teens’ privacyandreduce unwanted adult contact,limit ad targeting,restrict teens’ access to mature content and others to help parents monitorand manage their teens’ Instagram use throughparental controls.

The update is one of several changes that rolled out, which also included tweaking its parental control tools and adding other tools to manage recommendations. For example, you’ll now be able to remove things from your Explore page and block terms from influencing your recommended content, too.

Weekly News

Android Updates

Google fixed the issue that led to missing app changelogs on the Play Store’s website.
Google’s clock app for Android now lets you record your own alarm sound. That could be fun. (Also ripe for pranks).

Apple News

Apple seeded the release candidates (RCs) for iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, tvOS 16.3 and watchOS 9.3.The release signals the public version is now likely days away.
The iOS 16.3 public release will bring the new iCloud Advanced Data Protection feature to users worldwide.The opt-in feature offers end-to-end encryption for nearly all iCloud data, including messages, photos, device backups and more.
Apple commemorated Black History Month with exclusive content, including a special-edition Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop, a new matching watch face and iPhone wallpaper.
Apple is reportedly working on an iPad-bases smart display with smart home controls, FaceTime and video support. It’s also developing a faster Apple TV, reported Bloomberg.

Gaming

Roblox’s estimated bookings grew 17-20% year-over-year, to $430 million-$439 million and daily actives jumped 18% to 61.5 million,Roblox said in its December 2022 metrics report.
Google officially shut down its cloud gaming service Stadia this week,only two months shy of its third birthday. Though Stadia users were disappointed, Google did do some things right by offering both hardware and software refunds, save game transfers and more.
45% of game developers said they don’t believe in the promise of the metaverse, a new industry survey shows.
Nintendo is increasing production of its six-year-old Switch console starting in April 2023, as consumer demand remains strong.

Entertainment

Netflix made waves with the news that its founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings would step down after two decades of running the company. The news came on the heels of solid earnings, where the company reported adding 7.66 million subscribers,jumping to 230.75 million globally, and revenue of $7.85 billion, in line with estimates.
Netflix also gave its iPhone app a makeover. The revamp included a new billboard layout, new card transitions, new animation for both the launch and profile screens, updated haptics and more.
Wattpad Webtoon Studios signed with talent agency UTA for worldwide representation. The deal aims to help the global entertainment and publishing arm of Webtoon and Wattpad as it further expands into TV, movies, animation and more.
YouTube TV refreshed its Live Guide and Library with a new design and the addition of recommendations on what to watch.
Audio chat room app Clubhouse brought its “House Lounges” to the web. The always-on feature allows users to catch up, message and hang out with friends in private rooms. The feature first launched on mobile.
TikTok expanded the reach of its “state-controlled media” label to more than 40 additional countries,to alert users when videos they’re seeing on the app are being published by entities whose “editorial output or decision-making process” is subject to influence by a government.
Spotify, Deezer, Proton, Basecamp and others wrote a letter to the EU’s antitrust regulator’sExecutive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, urging the Commission to take action against Apple over antitrust practices. The Commission has been investigating the claims for years, following Spotify’s filing of an antitrust complaint in 2019.
Amazon is increasing its Amazon Music Unlimited’s monthly prices by $1 and £1 to $10.99 and £10.99 in the U.S. and U.K. on February 21. The new prices will match the increase Apple Music implemented last fall.

Security & Privacy

Period tracker Flo added an “anonymous mode” that lets users track their period without providing their name, email or other identifiers. Period tracker privacy has become a hot-button topic following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, as app users are worried how their private data could be used against them.

Twitter Drama

Twitter launched an annual subscription for Twitter Blue that costs $84 per year, but is only available on the web.The subscription saves users 12% over a monthly web subscription or 36% over an iOS subscription, where the price is jacked up to cover App Store fees.
The next day, it launched Blue for Android users, at the same pricey $11 per month it charges iOS users.The subscription is $3 per month cheaper on the web.
Twitter killed off third-party clients, claiming it was only enforcing its long-standing API rules. But internal messages showed Twitter targeted the clients specifically, impacting classic apps like Tweetbot, Twitterific and others.
A reverse engineer claims Twitter could be working on a video chat feature,based on findings in the app’s code.
An ad industry leak indicated that Twitter’s fourth-quarter revenue had fallen 35% year-over-year to $1.025 billion, or 72% of its Q4 goal. It expects to earn $732 million in the first quarter this year, which would be down by 39% year-over-year.
Twitter’s referral traffic to 12 major news outlets fell 12%, on average, from November to December 2022, per Similarweb data. The only two outlets that gained during this time were Fox News and NY Post.

Etc.

Fintech Robinhood tapped tech editor Josh Topolsky to run Sherwood Media,an independent brand that will serve as the home to Robinhood’s Snacks newsletter.
Dating app Hinge is testing a $50-60 per month premium tier, its equivalent of Tinder Platinum.

Layoffs

Music app SoundHound laid off around 200 people, or nearly 50% of staff, with two weeks of severance that will only be paid if the company raises more money.
Fandom laid off staff across its properties, including GameSpot, Metacritic and Giant Bomb.Most of Fandom’s properties are websites, but it also runs a Fandom News app for mobile devices.
In addition to the Big Tech layoffs this week impacting Google (12,000 people), Amazon (18,000 people) and Microsoft (10,000 people), Amazon-owned comics publisher and distributor ComiXology laid off around 50% of staff, as well. The company offers an app that allows users to experience 23,000 comics, manga and graphic novels on mobile devices.
Indian food delivery service Swiggy is cutting 380 jobs after raising $700 million in January 2022. The company has around 6,000 people employed.

Government & Policy

The U.K. Online Safety bill was amended to make senior execs criminally liable for their companies’ failure to protect minors from harmful content.
India’s Supreme Court declined to block an antitrust order that would require Google to change its Android business model, in a major setback for the tech giant. The Competition Commission of India ruled in October that Google exploited its market power by forcing device makers to pre-install Google’s apps. It had also fined Google $161 million. Google said it will challenge the ruling but will cooperate with the authorities “on the way forward.”
Meta’s WhatsApp has been fined €5.5 million (just under $6 million) for failing to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules around data processing.
Brazil’s antitrust regulator, CADE, is now investigating a complaint against Apple over alleged App Store antitrust issues, similar to investigations by other antitrust authorities in other markets.
More TikTok bans cropped up in the U.S. Following crackdowns by numerous state governments, the video app has been banned on some college campuses, including Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Arkansas State University, the University System of Georgia’s dozens of universities and colleges, the Montana University System and Boise State University, NBC reported. Some experts believe the bans, which now reach more than two dozen U.S. states, are an overreaction.
China’s government gave Didi the right to republish its apps on app stores after more than a year in regulatory limbo.

Funding and M&A

Discord bought teen compliments app Gas for an undisclosed sum.Gas is an anonymous app that sent teens compliments purportedly from their peers. Founder Nikita Bier previously sold his app tbh to Facebook.
Another teen compliments app, Slay — this one based in Germany — raised a $2.63 million (€2.5 million) pre-seed funding round led by Accel. Other investors included 20VC, Supercell co-founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen, Behance founder Scott Belsky, football star Mario Götze, Kevin Weil (Scribble Ventures) and musician Alex Pall (The Chainsmokers).
Chinese fast fashion shopping app Shein is said to be raising up to $3 billion from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, Sequoia and PE firm General Atlantic, at a $64 billion valuation, the FT reported. That would be down from its $100 billion valuation as of its last funding round in April.
Walmart-backed Indian payments app PhonePe raised $350 million from General Atlantic at a $12 billion+ valuation, and plans to raise as much as $1 billion in tranches.
Zitti, an app offering food costs and other insights for restauranteurs, raised $3.5 million in a seed round from Oceans Ventures, Serena Ventures and Crossbeam. In total, the company has raised $7.5 million to date.
Cloud services provider Shadow made its first acquisition with a deal for French Android emulation startup Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.
Share Creators, a platform that helps game developers store and manage large media assets, raised $5 million in funding, including $3 million from China’s 5Y Capital and $2 million from PDF reader Foxit.

Downloads

Smores

This week, TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta took a look at a new iOS app, Smores, that allows users to discover new music through a TikTok-like feed. The app lets you listen to a short clip of a song, recommended based on your own listening history. You can then swipe through the vertical feed to skip to the next song clip, or like the current song with the heart button, which saves the like to your Spotify account. The liked tracks will appear in a new playlist called “Smores Discovery,” or you can add the track to another pre-existing playlist if you choose. The team says they may later bring the app to Apple Music or Android users.

Ice Cubes

This new Mastodon client for iPad, iPhone and Mac was oddly rejected from the App Store numerous times on its path to launching, as Daring Fireball highlighted, but the SwiftUI app from developer Thomas Ricouard looks like a solid addition to the Mastodon app ecosystem, which includes several new apps built by former Twitter app makers, including apps like Ivory from Tapbots and Mammoth from Aviary’s app developer. (Both are still in TestFlight.)

Ice Cubes, however, promises to bring a fast and reliable Mastodon experience to the desktop, allowing users to browse their timelines, interact with posts (“toots”) and even quote toot — a feature Twitter expats have been missing. You can also access more advanced functions like lists, filters, an explore tab and more.

This Week in Apps: Twitter kills third-party apps, Instagram adds Quiet Mode, Google’s antitrust trial gets a date by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

It kind of feels like tech forgot its umbrella. Like, it remembered to pack its water bottle, wear the right shoes and layer up, but when it came time to officially go outside — and say, face the year ahead — it realized that a waterproof hoodie wasn’t enough. It needs an industrial umbrella.

You know what I mean?

Here’s what I’m dancing, or, erm, writing, around. It feels like the macroeconomic environment has been reasonably volatile for the past year; and we’re still seeing entrepreneurs react to the market as if it just happened to knock on their door, trip them over and proceed to steal all their belongings. I’m not saying that founders and investors should have perfectly predicted what Q1 of this year should look like; I’m just wondering how long we’re going to get “the economy” as a catalyst for hard decisions.

What finally gets a CEO to step down? What finally gets a company to conduct its third round of layoffs? Is it the economy, or is it a uniquely human decision that comes just months after you were told to grow at all costs? When we’re talking about pivots and layoffs, I think it’s important to talk about the realities of shifting to deal with the new normal. Abstractions such as the economy just fall flat now that it’s been more than a few months since the markets have been grey.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can probably leave your house during a drizzle and end up at the grocery store just a little damp. If you forget your umbrella during a downpour, well, now you’re soaking wet and no one feels that bad for you. Don’t forget them, and better yet, sport them proudly.

Can you tell it’s been raining on the East Coast? Follow me on Twitter or Instagram for other subpar metaphors and thoughts. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about a fresh new venture fund that isn’t afraid to talk about privilege or honesty,

G on G

I spoke to Sophia Amoruso, the founder of Nasty Gal and Girlboss, about her new venture fund for founders, Trust Fund.

It is launching with a $5 million target, targeting a check size between $50,000 to $150,000. She’s already landed checks from the who’s who in tech. Prominent investors include a slew of a16z partners such as Marc Andreessen, Andrew Chen and Chris Dixon, as well as entrepreneur Ev Williams, icon Paris Hilton and support from investors Ryan Hoover and Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst.

Here’s why this is important: It’s her high-profile and rocky experience in Silicon Valley’s spotlight that has finally given Amoruso the operating experience needed to launch her own venture firm. While she is opening up a $5 million allocation to accredited investors outside her network, she said from a portfolio construction standpoint: she’s not necessarily looking for “diamonds in the rough” or a specific diversity quota.

“I plan to invest in men and women and everything in between. And if anything, like why not invest in the privilege and ride the coattails of a dude?” Amoruso said. “As a woman, why wouldn’t I want to invest in the advantage that a man has, like, feel free to publish that — it’s true.”

Sequoia injects $195 million into an ever-eager seed environment
Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, a drop from 2021

Gas

Discord has acquired Gas, a compliments-based social media app for teens. Reports Amanda Silberling:

On Gas, users sign up with their school, add friends and answer polls about their classmates. But the questions in the polls are intended to boost users’ confidence rather than damage it. Teens might be asked to choose which of four friends is the best DJ or has the best smile. Then the person who was chosen will get an anonymous message with their compliment, sent from a vague “boy in 10th grade” or “girl in 11th grade.”

Here’s why it’s important: When Clubhouse first rose to fame, investors and founders alike were abuzz with energy around the opportunity for innovation in the consumer social space. Since, Clubhouse has been through its share of struggles — listen to my Equity episode with the CEO here — but so has Twitter. I think Gas’ early exit and the slew of similar apps already on site, may bring some needed optimism to the conversation.

Losing the horn: VCs think majority of unicorns aren’t worth $1 billion anymore
A peek into the future as Sam Altman sees it

The follow-up

I’ve covered Clearco, formerly known as Clearbanc, for years. Like many, the Toronto-based fintech had a particularly volatile past 12 months. But this week truly marked the end of an era, with co-founder Michele Romanow stepping down from her position as chief executive of the tech unicorn.

Here’s why it’s important: Clearco has undergone numerous rounds of layoffs over the pandemic, including a cut that impacted 25% of staff. Additionally, in 2022, the Toronto-based fintech saw its other co-founder, Andrew D’Souza, step down from his CEO role to be replaced by Romanow. Now, both the co-founders will assume executive chairman positions.

“We don’t ever lie, we are under the same pressures as every other company to become a profitable business. And so we’ve just continued to make the hard decisions … and continue to be ahead of the curve,” Romanow said in an interview with TechCrunch, explaining the shift.

A lot of fintechs ‘have to fix their business models,’ say VCs who invest in fintech
Netflix founder Reed Hastings steps down as co-CEO
Shein valuation reportedly plummets by a third as it seeks $3B

Etc., etc.

Moritz Baier-Lentz joined Lightspeed Ventures as head of gaming, and Nihar Bobba joined Better Tomorrow Ventures as a new principal.
Amazing advice for anyone who is a student or just … new.
The latest from Helena Price Hambrecht, founder of Haus, in her new newsletter, Founder Things.
Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital raised $2.1 Billion, reports Bloomberg.
Funding for web3 startups plummeted 74% in Q4 2022, reports Crunchbase News.
If you missed my most recent Startups Weekly, read it here: “The slow-burn standardization of venture capital.”
TechCrunch is coming to Boston on April 20. I’ll be there with my favorite colleagues to interview top experts at a one-day founder summit. Book your pass ASAP!

Seen on TechCrunch

Musk stands to lose billions in trial over ‘funding secured’ tweet

Boston Dynamics’ latest Atlas video demos a robot that can run, jump and now grab and throw

Microsoft announces 10,000 job cuts, nearly 5% of its global workforce

What’s next for the entrepreneur behind Layoffs.FYI

Seen on TechCrunch+

Pitch Deck Teardown: Scrintal’s $1M seed deck

Dear Sophie: What are some fast options for hiring someone on an expiring grace period?

Build a company, not a feature

7 space tech predictions for 2023

With that, I’m off to enjoy a weekend in Philadelphia with some new and old friends. Is anyone else tired of my East Coast tour? No? Just me? I’ll be back in San Francisco, and your inboxes, soon.

Take care,

N

Tech forgot its umbrella by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

W

elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Buy now, pay later is an alluring option for consumers, perhaps even more so in a recession. But with rising debt and inflation, perhaps the focus should be on companies that help protect borrowers from digging themselves into a hole. — Anna

The enduring appeal of buy now, pay later

I thought that tougher economic times would create immediate headwinds for the buy now, pay later trend. I was wrong.

“BNPL is a form of credit that allows a consumer to split a retail transaction into smaller, interest-free installments and repay over time,” and it is “in the midst of rapid growth,” a September Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report stated.

More recently, the Financial Times reported that “demand for BNPL boomed during the pandemic and has continued to grow, according to data from U.K. open banking fintech Snoop.”

This isn’t just a Gen Z trend, the FT added: Demand “has surged among all age groups in the U.K., including older people, who find themselves squeezed by the cost of living crisis and in need of short-term credit.”

Protect me from what I want by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

TikTok goes a little overboard when it comes to categorizing every last aesthetic into its own microtrend. You notice it when Spotify Wrapped calls your music taste goblincore, or when you strangely end up at a charity gala in San Francisco and a tech exec asks you if he should be concerned that his teen daughter is obsessed with cottagecore (yes, this happened to me). Take any noun, add the suffix “core,” and you’re good to go.

There is no more natural terminus to this phenomenon than “corecore,” a meta aesthetic from “nichetok” that uses nihilistic video clips to create something so absurd and meaningless that somehow, it comes back around and makes you feel something. It leans into our impulse to mask all of our emotions in twelve layers of irony, but in the process, gets so earnest that it might not be ironic after all.

Take a look at arguably the most popular corecore video, which tallied up 2.2 million likes. It begins with a clip from a salary transparency account, in which people ask strangers what they do and how much money they make. A child says that when he grows up, he wants to be a doctor, and when the host asks him how much he wants to make, he says, “I’m gonna make… people feel okay.” Then, you’re immediately exposed to fast-cycling clips: a timelapse of a busy street; a guy screaming; elderly people playing slot machines in a casino; a TikToker talking about a chicken that lives in the metaverse; and people rushing out of a garage in crisis.

Some corecore videos look like they could come out of an overwrought documentary that tells us really obvious truths about how social media makes us lonely; others make little sense at all. But most of these videos are tied together by a general malaise — a concern that life has no meaning and technology is alienating us from one another. Within corecore, we see clips of robots at CES talking about how people are afraid of them, demos of new VR headsets, and clips from Elon Musk’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. This lack of faith in corporate tech innovation is the exact opposite of the ubiquitous “day a lifeas a tech employee” trend, which shockingly isn’t a top-down corporate propaganda psyop (… or is it).

Corecore has been popular on TikTok since late 2020, but the techno-futurism-doom vibes feel especially appropriate now, as we watch Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and Salesforce all wage massive layoffs within weeks. These nichetok posters are probably not reacting to the state of tech employment, but something bigger that encompasses it: how we are all subject to the whims of a few billionaire tech guys who can just decide to buy Twitter or make “metaverse” a word that normal people think about. And of course, there’s the added layer of irony that corecore is, too, part of that ecosystem — that people are making TikTok accounts dedicated to creating their own corecore compilations, promising things like “face reveals” once they reach 10,000 followers, using an anti-capitalist, lonely aesthetic to attain social capital.

Corecore is not the first meme of its kind. In any given moment in internet culture, there’s usually some sort of absurdist meme in circulation, whether it’s corecore, deep-fried memes, weird Facebook, bad animated videos, or the iterations on loss.jpg. That’s because it’s very normal, almost cliché at this point, to make nonsensical art in response to a world that doesn’t seem to make any sense. As anyone who’s taken an introductory art history class knows, this is how Dadaist artists reacted to the tragedies of World War I — and now, it’s how contemporary meme-makers respond to the horrifying realization that we are all addicted to scrolling through short form videos. And it’s how the greatest minds of the weird internet will react again, the next time the world feels a bit too dystopian.

In the end, the only thing that really makes sense about corecore is the fact that it exists.

TikTok’s ‘corecore’ is the latest iteration of absurdist meme art by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

The Indian government has ordered YouTube and Twitter to take down videos and tweets about a BBC documentary that is critical of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued the directions “for blocking multiple YouTube videos” and “over 50 tweets” linked to the videos of the first episode of the BBC documentary, Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the ministry, said Saturday.

The ministry issued the directions under the IT Rules, 2021 that gives the ministry the authority to take down posts that it deems undermines the sovereignty and integrity of India, and has “potential to adversely impact India’s friendly relations with foreign countries as also public order within the country,” Gupta said. Both YouTube and Twitter complied with the directions, he said.

Gupta called the BBC documentary a “hateful propaganda.” Multiple ministries, including MEA, MHA and MIB, examined BBC’s “malicious documentary” and found it “casting aspersions on the authority and credibility of Supreme Court of India, sowing divisions among various Indian communities, and making unsubstantiated allegations,” he wrote in a Twitter thread.

The BBC has not broadcasted the documentary in India.

BBC aired the first episode of the two-part documentary, “India: The Modi Question” on January 17. The series addresses the 2002 communal riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where Modi was the Chief Minister at the time. Nearly 800 Muslims and over 250 Hindus died in the riots, according to official figures.

The violence erupted after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire.

A Special Investigation Team appointed by India’s apex court a decade later said Modi had taken the steps to control the riots. Another petition questioning Modi’s exoneration was dismissed last year.

The BBC series says Modi’s governance has been “dogged by persistent allegations about the attitude of his government towards India’s Muslim population,” according to the description on its website.

“This series investigates the truth behind these allegations and examines Modi’s backstory to explore other questions about his politics when it comes to India’s largest religious minority.”

Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson for the Indian foreign ministry, said this week that the documentary is a “propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative. The bias, the lack of objectivity, and frankly a continuing colonial mindset, is blatantly visible.”

“If anything, this film or documentary is a reflection on the agency and individuals that are peddling this narrative again. It makes us wonder about the purpose of this exercise and the agenda behind it and frankly we do not wish to dignify such efforts.”

BBC said in a statement that the documentary examines the tensions between India’s Hindi majority and Muslim minority and explores the politics of India’s PM Modi in relation to those tensions.

“The documentary was rigorously researched according to highest editorial standards. A wide range of voices, witnesses and experts were approached, and we have featured a range of opinions – this includes responses from people in the BJP [India’s ruling party]. We offered the Indian Government a right to reply to the matters raised in the series – it declined to respond,” a BBC spokesperson said.

This isn’t the first time a documentary on Modi has stirred debate. Disney-owned Hotstar, India’s largest on-demand video streaming service with more than 300 million users, blocked an episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” that was critical of Modi. An uncensored version of that episode aired on YouTube in India.

India blocks YouTube videos and Twitter posts on BBC Modi documentary by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch