TechCrunch+

Chicago-based medical giant CommonSpirit Health has confirmed that an October ransomware attack exposed the personal data of more than 620,000 patients.

CommonSpirit Health, which operates more than 700 care sites and 142 hospitals in 21 states, first confirmed an “IT security issue” on October 5. At the time, the company declined to comment on the nature of the incident, which interrupted access to electronic health records and delayed patient care in multiple regions, and refused to say whether patient information or health data was compromised.

In a December update, CommonSpirit confirmed that the incident was a ransomware attack. The organization said that threat actors gained access to portions of its network between September 16 and October 3 and, during that time, “may have gained access to certain files, including files that contained personal information” belonging to patients who received care or family members of those who received care at Franciscan Health, a 12-hospital affiliate of CommonSpirit Health.

CommonSpirit notes that while its investigation is ongoing, this data includes names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and unique ID numbers used internally by the organization. The company said that attackers did not access medical record numbers of insurance IDs, and says it has seen no evidence that any personal information has been misused as a result of the attack.

The update doesn’t say how many users were impacted by the data breach. However, as first spotted by Bleeping Computer, the U.S. Department of Health data breach portal – where healthcare organizations are legally obligated to report data breaches impacting over 500 individuals –confirms that threat actors accessed the personal data of 623,774 patients during the CommonSpirit ransomware attack.

“Upon discovering the ransomware attack, CommonSpirit quickly mobilized to protect its systems, contain the incident, begin an investigation, and maintain continuity of care,” the company’s updated notice states. “CommonSpirit notified law enforcement and is supporting their ongoing investigation. Once secured, systems were returned to the network with additional security and monitoring tools.”

The company has not yet attributed the attack to a particular ransomware group, and CommonSpirit spokesperson Chad Burns did not immediately respond to our request for comment. TechCrunch has checked the dark leak websites of several major ransomware groups, but none appear to have yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

At least 15 U.S. health systems operating 61 hospitals across the country have been impacted by ransomware so far in 2022, according to Brett Callow, threat analyst at Emsisoft. In at least 12 of these incidents, sensitive data, including personal health information was compromised.

CommonSpirit Health says patient data was stolen during ransomware attack by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Historically, Twitter has had a tumultuous relationship with the third-party developer community. But in the last few years, the company has tried to appease the developer community with projects like a new API release and the ‘Twitter Toolbox’ collection to highlight some of the projects.

However, under Elon Musk’s management, some of these programs are closing down — starting with Twitter Toolbox. According to multiple developers in the know, Twitter sent an email earlier this week saying the Toolbox program is shutting down next week — a copy of which has been seen by TechCrunch.

“Thank you for being part of the Twitter Toolbox pilot program. We’ve made a difficult decision to sunset Twitter Toolbox, effective 12/15/2022,” the email reads.

Twitter debuted the program earlier this year to promote certain apps directly on users’ feeds at a relevant moment. These apps included scheduling and thread maker/reader apps like Typefully, Chirr App, Thread Reader and Buffer; safety tools like Blockparty and Bodyguard; and measurement and analytics tools like silo,Blackmagic.so,Direcon Inc.,FollowerwonkandTweepsmap.

Amir Shevat, Twitter’s head of Product for its developer platform at that time, also told TechCrunch that the social network was also contemplating building an app store for third-party apps.

Twitter tiles pilot shutdown

In August, Twitter announced a test for ’tiles’ — the new version of Twitter cards — that allowed publishers and developers to include customized formats with a tweet. The idea was that when someone posted a URL, a format like an image, text, a video or a button will render automatically — just like Twitter cards.

The company is pausing that project as well. According to an email sent to a developer, Twitter might consider revisiting the concept next year.

“We’ve concluded the best path at this time is to pull back from this pilot and pause broader experimentation efforts related to Tweet Tiles. We still believe this product concept can offer value to our users and developers like you. We’ll continue to consider this work as we undergo 2023 planning and may opt to revisit it next year,” the company said in an email.

Twitter Developer Insider program

Last year, Twitter introduced the Developer Insider program last year to gather direct feedback about products and APIs. While the program is not deprecated yet, folks who are part of it haven’t heard from Twitter for a while.

Terence Eden, a developer who was part of the program, said that insiders worked on many projects including labeling useful bots and testing out conversation APIs. He said that the dev team was working on improving the search and expanding OAuth scopes so developers can get better access to certain parts of Twitter.

Eden and another developer, Somraj Saha, told TechCrunch that after Musk took over, activity inside the Developer Insider Slack group slumped as program managers started to leave the company. Saha said the group hasn’t seen updates from Twitter folks since the third week of November. So while there’s no official announcement from Twitter, the program is good as dead in its current avatar.

Future of APIs and developer relations

Days after Musk took over, Twitter canceled its much-anticipated Chirp conference, which was scheduled to take place after almost a decade.

After that, devs have heard nothing or little from the Twitter team. Many tools built around Twitter are already expanding their support for different platforms like LinkedIn and Mastodon. Developers of third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Aviary are developing Mastodon clients to cater to the growing popularity of the network.

Typefully, a Twitter thread-making app backed by Ev Williams, told TechCrunch that it is planning to extend LinkedIn support to its users. The company recently debuted an AI-powered bot that helps you write better threads. It is also planning to improve the bot so that it can make LinkedIn posts better.

Chirr App, another scheduler, recently mentioned that it plans to continue support for Twitter and add features along the way. But it is open to adding connections to more platforms and it’s already working on a Mastodon integration. Bodyguard, a content moderation tool, said that they are looking to add integrations to TikTok and Discord soon. Charles Cohen, the company’s co-founder, also told TechCrunch, that it’s considering scaling back Twitter-related development.

Developers TechCrunch talked with had varied opinions and concerns about Twitter’s developer relations and the future of its API. Most of them — including the ones on Twitter’s developer forum — are currently worried about not having a clear roadmap about the company’s programs related to third-party developers. A lot of them told us that it’s become hard to contact Twitter about development-related queries as the developer relation team has lost a lot of members.

While Musk has emphasized on an engineering-led approach for Twitter, he has been mostly silent about the developer ecosystem. It would be a shame if the company’s work over the past few years to repair the relationship with developers goes to waste.

You can contact this reporter on Signal and WhatsApp at +91 816-951-8403 orim@ivanmehta.comby email.

Amid growing concerns from third-party developers, Twitter shuts down Toolbox and other projects by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Ubie, a Tokyo-based startup providing an AI-powered symptom checker app and hospital SaaS products, has closed a $19 million extension to its previous Series C round. This brings the health tech startup’s total funding to $45.2 million in Series C.

The extension round consists of 90% equity and 10% debt financing, according to the co-founder and CEO of Ubie Kota Kuto. With this round, Ubie has raised a total of $76 million since its inception in 2017.

The startup declined to comment on its company valuation, but a source familiar with the situation, who wished to remain anonymous, told TechCrunch its valuation is now estimated at $250 million. Investors in the latest funding include Sogo Medical, AAIC Investment, Japan Impact Investment, Rakuten Capital, Shoko Chukin Bank, Japan Finance Corporation and Mizuho Bank.

Ubie plans to use the proceeds to scale up its healthcare platform and ramp up its penetration into the U.S. after entering Singapore in August. The startup launched its symptom checker app earlier this year in the U.S. and opened a U.S. subsidiary in October. Kuto told TechCrunch that Singapore’s medical system is similar to Japan’s, given its geographical and cultural background, so the company decided Singapore would be “an appropriate first step for global expansion.”

The outlet is in discussions with pharma companies to increase partnerships, many of which have offices on the East Coast, Kuto explained. It expects to finalize and announce a handful of partnership deals early next year, Kuto added.

Ubie isn’t the only health tech company developing an AI-enabled symptom checker for users. A Boston-based startup, Buoy Health, built a symptom check app using AI; berline-based Ada Health also developed an AI-driven symptom assessment app; and IBM’s Mediktor helps people with symptom assessment. Kuto pointed out, as a differentiator, that Ubie offers a B2B product called Ubie for Hospital, also known as AI Monshin, and a B2C app for individual users. The Ubie for hospitals, allowing doctors to reduce their time for taking notes of patients’ histories, is a medical questionnaire software for patients to have a preliminary interview via a tablet while waiting before meeting doctors.

“Based on data extracted from about 50,000 medical research papers [created by more than 50 physicisans], AI Monshin [automatically] selects and asks around 20 questions from 3,500 types of question data,” Kota said.

Co-founded by medical doctor Yoshinori Abe and engineer Kubo, Ubie claims that more than 1,100 medical institutions in Japan use Ubie’s AI Monshin. The company also has more than 7 million monthly active users (MAUs) of its symptom checker app. Ubie employs approximately 200 people.

Japan’s health-tech Ubie wants to fuel its U.S expansion with $19M Series C extension by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

Artificial intelligence is taking over almost every industry. The investment and finance industry is no exception. In Deloitte’s 2019 report, the firm reveals that AI is transforming the financial ecosystem to reduce costs and make operations more efficient by providing automated insights and alternative data, analysis and risk management.

Technology such as AI has digitized the finance sector, ranging from payments and remittances to lending. However, asset management is still in the nascent stage of digitization, according to the chief strategy officer and co-founder of Akros Technologies, Jin Chung.

Akros Technologies wants to disrupt the current asset management industry via its AI-driven asset management software platform that mines market data for stocks. Akros just raised $2.3 million from Z Venture Capital, the corporate venture capital wholly owned by Z Holdings, which also owns the Japanese messaging app Line and internet portal Yahoo Japan.

Akros intends to strengthen strategic ties with Z Holdings via strategic investment, the startup said. The latest funding, which brings Akros’s total amount raised to $6.1 million since its 2021 inception, will help Akros to scale its software platform and asset management products and ramp up its users, including local and global financial institutions and fintech companies.

The outfit is already in discussions with potential partners to expand its AI-powered product called portfolio management as a service, or PMaaS, an all-in-one operating system for portfolio management. Chung explained to TechCrunch that PMaaS “enables B2B clients such as financial institutions, fintech startups and robot-advisors to launch their own exchange-traded funds (ETFs) without having to set up ETF teams and infrastructure.”

He added that it expects to secure more than five B2B clients in the first quarter of 2023.

The startup claims that its AI-powered portfolio management platform can reduce “the overall cost structure [of] the traditional fund development,” including management fees and unnecessary fees involved in the investment process, by more than 80%. The outfit aims to maximize the finance management performance of data-driven ETFs and offer a portfolio management solution via the PMaaS for Akros’s users to help them compete with global ETF institutions like Vanguard or JPMorgan.

In August, Contents Technologies launched Korean pop music, also known as K-pop, and Korea Entertainment ETF, on the NYSE Arca Exchange under the ticker KPOP, using Akros’s PMaaS solution to develop the ETFs. In addition, Akros listed an AI-driven target income ETF, called Akros Monthly Payout ETF (ticker: MPAY), on the NYSE in May with monthly distributions at an annualized target rate of 7%, according to the startup.

To build a slew of investment strategies that lower the cost of portfolio modeling and generate scores of investment portfolios, Akros applies a generative AI model based on a decision transformer, which predicts future actions through the sequencing model, Chung said, adding the company also employs GPT-3 natural language processing (NLP) to analyze unstructured language data.

Akros plans continuously to enhance its engineering technology by bolstering its business to disrupt the asset management market and attract new partners across the globe, including Japan, Singapore and the U.S., co-founder and chief executive officer Kyle Moon said in a statement.

Founded by CEO Moon, CSO Jin and chief marketing officer Justin Gim, Akros employs seven people.

Moon previously worked for Qraft Technologies as head of AI research and CSO and had experience listing four ETFs on NYSE. Before co-founding Akros, Gim had more than nine years of experience in the asset management industry; Chung did research work for Bayesian deep learning in autonomous driving cars at Oxford Robotics Institute.

In March, Akros raised $3.75 million in funding from PeopleFund, a South Korean peer-to-peer lending platform. The company declined to provide its valuation when asked.

Akros Technologies, an AI-powered asset management platform, raises funding from Z Holdings by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello, Happy Thursday. There is a lot of news today, much of it posting as I write this — for example, the Federal Trade Commission is now suing to block Microsoft from buying Activision. So less chatter, more banter. — Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

Let’s give ’em something to talk about: Given all of the ChatGPT popularity in the news lately, it is no surprise that a related company would be top news today. Instead of taking screen grabs, Ivan writes, ShareGPT creates a link to your ChatGPT conversations that you can grab instead.
Get your Frappuccino with a side of NFTs: Starbucks opened its blockchain-based loyalty program and NFT community to its first set of beta testers, Sarah reports. “Journey Stamps” will unlock new experiences beyond the free drinks and food that frequent drinkers can get from Stars.
Flying the friendly skies of capital: Something’s in the air up there. TripActions secured $400 million in credit facilities from Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank in a move that comes less than two months after the travel expense management company announced a $9.2 billion valuation. Mary Ann has more.

Startups and VC

Moving, starting a new job and getting married in a short span of time is the trifecta of stress for anyone (I know from personal experience). In the startup world, that trifecta might be what happened to marketing technology startup Banzai. Ingrid writes that the company acquired Hyros, raised $100 million and went public via SPAC. Congrats?

Meanwhile, France is having a good venture capital run. Mike reports on a few new funds, including IRIS Capital, which had a first close of €110 million as it works to reach a target of €150 million for its new venture fund.

Want more? Here’s five more:

Creating for creators: Lauren writes about Komi, a landing page tool for content creators, which raised $5 million.
Tools for school admins: Kenya-based edtech startup Zeraki is the latest to grab some funding to provide digital tools to help school administrators manage payments and paperwork. Annie has more.
An extra set of “eyes”: WeWalk secured a small raise to develop computer vision for a smart cane used by visually impaired people, Paul writes.
A car that can monitor your health: Renault China is looking at making super-premium EVs that will tell you if your blood pressure is high, Rita reports. No doubt from that person who just cut you off.
Domain name drag: Picking the right domain name can be just as difficult as creating a password no one will guess. Enter Smartynames, which Haje writes uses AI to find you the perfect domain name.

To prepare for a downturn, build a three-case model

Startups that develop case models are better equipped to deal with potential setbacks. Visualizing exactly how potential market shifts can impact your business is a great way to prepare for the unexpected.

A three-case model attempts to predict best-case, down-case and base-case scenarios, writes Matt Barbieri, partner-in-charge at accounting firm Wiss & Co.

“Typically, the base-case scenario falls between the extremes. For example, in financial modeling, you might say that Peloton experienced both its ‘best case’ and ‘down case’ scenarios within a year.”

Four more from the TC+ team:

Energy boost: Haje takes a look at Rootine’s $10 million Series A deck in his latest Pitch Deck Teardown.
Finally some good news in VC: Women are rising through the ranks at VC firms, according to a new survey that caught Dominic-Madori’s eye.
Scooting ahead: Duffl’s David Lin talks to Christine about why his company has been able to buck traditional rapid grocery delivery woes.
What’s in store for the ad market?: Alex pours through some numbers to forecast what the Q1 ad market is shaping up to be.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

All of the tech layoffs prompted Airtable to put out a memo earlier this week promoting its tools for job seekers. Now it is Airtable’s own employees who might need to use them. Natasha M reports that the company, which was last valued at $11 billion for its no-code software, laid off over 250. And not only that, but it seems that the move also included some executive departures, including the chief revenue officer, chief people officer and chief product officer.

And here’s another five for you:

Know where you’re going: Rebecca writes that Google combines Maps and Waze teams as pressures mount to cut costs.
Know when to fold ’em: Twitter and Apple have not been playing nice, so now it seems if you pay for a Twitter Blue subscription via iOS, get ready to pay $11 to offset App Store fees, Ivan writes.
Know when to put on the brakes: Safety capabilities are the reason for Tesla’s new plans to add radar to its vehicles…again, Rebecca reports.
Know when to bundle: It has arrived… Disney+ now has its ad-supported tier meant to compete with Netflix, Lauren writes.
Know how to move on: Manish writes that Foxconn invested another $500 million into its India business, where Apple plans to have more iPhone production over the next three years.

Daily Crunch: Airtable lays off 250+ as CEO cites importance of ‘being a lean organization’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Virgin Orbit is retargeting a launch that was supposed to take place as soon as next week from Cornwall, England — and that was to be the first spaceflight to depart from British soil — due to additional technical to-dos and remaining regulatory hurdles.

In a statement, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said the company would retarget launch for “the coming weeks.” In addition to remaining technical work and outstanding launch licenses, Hart said the limited two-day launch window also moved Virgin to delay the mission. He did not elaborate on what technical work is needed for flight readiness.

Just a few hours after the announcement broke, the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the regulatory body that licenses launch, released its own statement to rebuke Virgin’s claim that remaining regulatory issues were in part the reason for the mission delay.

“The UK space regulation process is not a barrier to a UK space launch,” Tim Johnson, CAA’s director for space regulation, said. “Virgin Orbit has said in its statement this morning that there are some technical issues that will need to be resolved before launch. These in no way relate to the timing of when a licence will be issued by the Civil Aviation Authority.”

Virgin Orbit was due to launch from Spaceport Cornwall on December 14. LauncherOne, Virgin’s launch system, is composed of a Boeing 747 and a rocket. The aircraft carries the rocket to high altitude before releasing it on its journey to space, so while this isn’t due to be the first vertical launch from U.K. soil, it will be the first spaceflight mission.

The news came as something of a surprise; as late as Tuesday, Virgin representatives were telling the news media that the mission would be a “go” upon regulatory approval.

UK regulator says it’s not to blame for Virgin Orbit mission delay by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

For some reason, Niantic added a feature to Pokémon Go in which sometimes Pokémon can be HUGE and sometimes they’re tiny. This feels like a relatively useless feature that doesn’t really change gameplay at all, but I mean, sure, I will take a tiny Poochyena, please and thank you!

Rolling out now, the Pokémon Poochyena, Mightyena and Mawile can appear in size XXS or XXL. Why those three Pokémon only? I don’t know, ask Professor Willow. In reality, it is probably to create a sense of excitement that they can draw out as they slowly roll out, uh, small Pikachu and big Eevee. Or, as they appear in-game, Pokémon that’s far from camera and Pokémon that’s close to camera.

We’ve already had sizes of Pokémon since the game first came out in 2016 — usually this was used for horrible Reddit jokes in which people would nickname their Pokémon after certain body parts, then screenshot the appraisal screen, in which the Professor would say, “Your [body part] is huge!” if the Pokémon was of a larger size. You know what I mean. You can’t nickname Pokémon with that language anymore, but as a consolation, now there is a feature in the Pokédex that shows you the size ranges of Pokémon that you have caught. When you catch a new smallest or largest Pokémon for each species in your Pokédex, you will get a fun little pop-up congratulating you.

You’ll know if you’ve come across a superbig or supersmall guy in the wild because, uh, their sizes will be different. And there will be little animations that tell you this. Personally, I think these animations are a bit similar to those that appear when you find a shiny Pokémon in the wild, and a large Mawile simply is not as exciting as a shiny one, but hey, I didn’t design the game. If I did, I would have a shiny Mawile.

In Pokémon Go, you can now capture superbig or supersmall friends by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

GitHub Copilot, GitHub’s service that intelligently suggests lines of code, is now available in a plan for enterprises months after launching for individual users and educators.

Called GitHub Copilot for business, the new plan, which costs $19 per user per month, comes with all the features in the single-license Copilot tier along with corporate licensing and policy controls. That includes a toggle that lets IT admins prevent suggested code that matches public code on GitHub from being shown to developers, a likely response to the intellectual property controversies brewing around Copilot.

Available as a downloadable extension for development environments including Microsoft Visual Studio, Noevim and JetBrains, Copilot is powered by an AI model called Codex, developed by OpenAI, that’s trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code. Copilot — which had over 400,000 subscribers as of August — can surface a programming approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g., “Say hello world”), drawing on its knowledge base and the current context.

At least a portion of the code on which Codex was trained is copyrighted or under a restrictive license, an issue with which some advocacy groups have taken issue. Users have been able to prompt Copilot to generate code from Quake, code snippets in personal codebases and example code from books like “Mastering JS” and “Think JavaScript”; GitHub itself admits that, about 1% of the time, Copilot suggestions contain code snippets longer than ~150 characters that match the training data.

GitHub claims that fair use, or the doctrine in U.S. law that permits the use of copyrighted material without first having to obtain permission from the rightsholder, protects it in the event that Copilot was knowingly or unknowingly developed against copyrighted code. But not everyone agrees. The Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit to advocate for the free software movement, has called Copilot “unacceptable and unjust.” And Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are being suedin a class action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot to regurgitate sections of licensed code without providing credit.

GitHub’s liability aside, some legal experts have argued that Copilot could put companies at risk if they were to unwittingly incorporate copyrighted suggestions from the tool into their production software. As Elain Atwell notes in a piece on Kolide’s corporate blog, because Copilot strips code of its licenses, it’s difficult to tell which code is permissible to deploy and which might have incompatible terms of use.

GitHub’s attempt at rectifying this is a filter, first introduced to the Copilot platform in June, that checks code suggestions with their surrounding code of about 150 characters against public GitHub code and hides suggestions if there’s a match or “near match.” But it’s an imperfect measure. Tim Davis, a computer science professor at Texas A&M University, found that enabling the filter caused Copilot to emit large chunks of his copyrighted code including all attribution and license text.

GitHub plans to introduce additional features in 2023 aimed at helping developers make informed decisions about whether to use Copilot’s suggestions, including the ability to identify strings matching public code with a reference to those repositories. And for GitHub Copilot for business customers, GitHub claims it won’t retain code snippets for training or share code, regardless if the data comes from public repositories, private repositories, non-GitHub repositories or local files.

But it’s unclear whether those steps will be enough to allay companies’ fears over legal challenges.

GitHub launches Copilot for business plan as legal questions remain unresolved by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

You know what I miss about working in an office? Literally nothing, apart from having access to a fancy coffee machine. It turns out that the magic of the liquid black gold is within reach even for work-from-home keyboard warriors. You don’t even need to spend ridiculous amounts of money for a tasty hot beverage to have you jittering your way through the day.

Got any caffeine-fiends or coffee lovers in your life who might want to up their coffee game? Here’s our top six gift ideas, from super affordable to… not.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

1 – Start with the beans

It’s pretty rare that a great holiday gift comes at a reasonable price, but in the coffee category, you’re in luck. Go to a specialty coffee store near you, and you can get a great, high-end holiday gift in the $12-25 range. High-quality, freshly roasted beans is the first step to making amazing coffee at home, provided that your recipient has a grinder. If they don’t, you can buy pre-ground coffee, but be aware that it goes stale far faster.

I’m a sucker for coffee subscriptions that focus on variety, and most third-wave coffee roasters have a subscription plan you can gift. Atlas Coffee Club is one of my favorites; the bags are only for subscription, so they don’t have to worry about how the bags look on the shelf. The upshot of that is that they always have some fresh and funky designs.

Each pack they ship comes with a postcard with tasting notes. The company charges $109 for six months worth of gift subscriptions, including shipping. If Atlas doesn’t do it for you, Trade has a broader selection of choices, or if that seems too overwhelming and adventurous, the stalwarts of the industry such as Blue Bottle, Peets and Equator all have giftable subscription plans too.

Price:Varies depending on brand and subscription type

2 – Cheap is great: the AeroPress

Launched back in 2005, designed by a guy better known for inventing the Aerobie frisbee, the AeroPress continues to be one of the best devices for coffee making at home. It makes a rich, smooth coffee that tastes somewhere between an espresso, a french press, and a drip coffee. At just $40, it’s It’s by far the cheapest way to make a respectable cup of coffee. It’s almost indestructible (I’ve owned mine for more than 10 years, and it’s still going strong), and can make great coffee wherever you can get water up to a certain temperature. The trick is to use cooler water than you’d expect (175˚ F/80˚ C), which requires a kettle with good temperature control, but overall, it’s hard to screw up a cup of AeroPress. Get some good beans and grind them a tiny bit more coarsely than you would for espresso. If you buy pre-ground beans, espresso grind works just fine.

Price:$40 from AeroPress

3 – From beans to powder: Ode Brew Grinder 2

This might come as a surprise, but for great coffee at home, your first upgrade probably shouldn’t be your machine, but your grinder. Or rather: Make sure you buy fresh, high-quality beans, and then grind them with as much precision as you can: An uniform grind is what you’re looking for. Fellow is perhaps best known for its high-precision EKG electric kettle, which has more or less become the industry standard for high-end baristas making pour-over.

In this guide, however, I wanted to give the Ode Brew Grinder a bit of love. At $345, it is astonishingly expensive, but it is one of the best grinders money can buy.

The original version was well reviewed, and the Gen 2 improves on a winning formula: It has anti-static technology which means less of a mess. It has a cup that goes under the grinder that is held in place magnetically. You grind just enough beans for however much coffee you are going to make, and the grinder stops automatically once your beans are shredded to the appropriate size. The major difference is that the grinding burrs have been completely redesigned; the Gen 2 brew burrs are capable of grinding as fine as 250 microns, while the Standard brew burrs that come stock in the original Ode Brew Grinder can grind as fine as 500 microns. If you love espresso drinks, Fellow warns that this isn’t the grinder for you, but if you’re more of a pour-over person, you can’t go wrong.

Price: $345 from Fellow

4 – Bringing the science: Acaia Pearl coffee scale

Is it sane to pay $150 for Acaia’s specialized set of Pearl digital coffee scales, when Amazon will sell you a just-as-accurate scale for a tenth that? Well, the Acaia scale does more than just measuring the coffee grinds itself; it can also show you the pour rate you are using for your pour-over brews, helping you fine-adjust and make your brews more repeatable.

Accurately measuring the amount of coffee you put into espresso is a crucial part of fine-tuning your coffee recipes: A double shot of espresso, called a doppio, requires 14 to 18 grams of coffee and produces 60 ml (two fluid ounces) of coffee. From there, you esperiment with the pressure your espresso machine is calibrated to, your tamping, the coarseness of your grind, and… Oh dear, my coffee nerdery is showing, isn’t it?

All I’m saying that if your coffee-loving gift recipient doesn’t use scales to make espresso, they either don’t really care about coffee, or they haven’t figured out how important it is for consistency. Whether you pick up the $150 Acaia, the $50 Timemore, or the $17 KitchenTour scale, a precision set of scales is a crucial step toward coffee nirvana.

Price:$150 from Acaia

5 – For the tinkerers: Gaggia Classic

If you love espresso drinks and are an epic coffee nerd, you eventually fall deep enough into the coffee hole that you start learning to make your own espresso drinks from scratch. That means getting a grinder, some scales, and a good machine. The Gaggia Classic wouldn’t stand up to the intense requirements of a busy cafe, but for home use, at under $500, it is a remarkably affordable machine for anyone wanting to make coffee-shop quality espresso.

The machine has the most important features that baristas look for: it cranks out up to 12 bars of pressure, and it’s been around for 30 years. Spare parts are easily and readily available, and YouTube is overflowing with guides for how to take it apart and repair it if something should go wrong with it. The steam wand means that you can steam milk to create more creative espresso drinks; lattes, flat whites, macchiatos; they are all some experimentation and an internet tutorial away.

Price: $425 from Amazon

6 – Just make the coffee for me already: Breville Oracle Touch

If the thought of measuring your grinds to the nearest milligram makes you twitch, and fine-adjusting the coarseness of the grind fills you with a sense of dread, there are luckily fully automatic solutions too. Keurig’s K-cups and Nespresso pods are a good option if you want minimum hassle and don’t care about having some coffee cred. For the lazy aficionado, however, there’s the $2,800 Breville Oracle Touch. Yes, it is eye-wateringly expensive, but it’s capable of making any coffee drink you can imagine. If you’re the kind of person who’s utterly malfunctioning before you have your first cup of coffee, the Oracle Touch makes it as fool proof as it gets: Pour in some beans, water, and milk, then use the touch screen to look for the picture of the drink you want. No hassle, no mess, no skill required. The machine grinds, doses, stamps, heats, pumps, and steams. Sure, there are cheaper bean-to-cup machines out there, but that’s not what we are optimizing for here: This is all about ease of use and a jolt of caffeine while involving as few brain cells as possible.

Price: $2,800 from Breville

6 gifts for coffee lovers looking to up their game by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to Chain Reaction.

It’s still a pretty busy time in the wild, wild world of crypto. But it felt somewhat more tame than the whirlwind the industry has experienced in the past few weeks, and for that, I thank the crypto gods (for now.)

If you’re keeping up with the news cycle, then you know FTX’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has gone on quite a bit of a media campaign.

He’s done a number of interviews with organizations, ranging from Good Morning America to The Block, in the past week, and even jumped on a handful of less formal Twitter spaces (with thousands of listeners) for impromptu conversations. While he has rambled his thoughts and circumnavigated questions, he’s caught the attention of regulators — who want to hear from him now, too.

In a back-and-forth tweet exchange, the Chairwoman of the House of Financial Services Committee Maxine Waters invited SBF to join their hearing on December 13, to which, SBF basically replied “not right now.”

That didn’t bode well with the chairwoman and she came back swinging and said, “Based on your role as CEO and your media interviews over the past few weeks, it’s clear to us that the information you have thus far is sufficient for testimony.” In a separate tweet, Waters also said a subpoena is “definitely on the table.”

With a couple days until the hearing, we’ll see if SBF saddles up and testifies, by choice or by order. But the former seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, an excel spreadsheet showed Alameda’s private equity portfolio with some FTX positions included. It was a doozy of a document, which had our team wondering how they had time to do anything other than invest given the massive number of deals recorded across a handful of sectors. More deets below.

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this week in web3

Here are some of the biggest crypto stories TechCrunch has covered this week.

FTX and Alameda’s massive investments will take a long time to unwind from crypto industry (TC+)

FTX and its sister company (or parent company, depending on how you look at it) Alameda had their hands in a bunch of different startups. The depth of its roster wasn’t very transparent until now. A spreadsheet with Alameda’s private equity portfolio and some FTX positions includes just shy of 500 investments across 10 holding companies for a total of $5.276 billion. This spreadsheet, dated from early November, raises a number of concerns surrounding the extent to which FTX and Alameda — and their affiliated companies — invested in the crypto industry.

Thoughts on the demise of Circle’s SPAC deal (TC+)

Circle Internet Financial (Circle), the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, called off its merger with a blank check company, ending its SPAC-led run toward going public. Circle’s SPAC deal made news when announced last year and earlier this year when it was repriced. Last we heard, Circle had renegotiated its SPAC transaction, boosting its enterprise value from $4.5 billion to $9 billion. So what happened between then and now to get us from a new, higher deal price to a termination?

Seoul court rejects warrants for former Terraform Labs employees and investors over Luna collapse

A Seoul court rejected a request from prosecutors for warrants to detain eight people related to Terraform Labs, including the co-founder of Terraform Labs, Daniel Shin, early investors and former engineers. The court dismissed the warrants, saying the eight people need to have rights to defend their cases against accusations. Shin is being charged with taking illegal profits worth about $105 million by selling Luna tokens when it was near its all-time high without disclosing this move to investors, prior to the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna earlier this year.

Mastercard director sees FTX collapse as chance for the crypto market to reset

Even though one of the largest crypto exchanges, FTX, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy, some market participants aren’t worried about whether the meltdown will alter institutional interest in crypto. “I feel like once you get the momentum for an institution up and running, it’s hard to get them to turn their head and pivot,” Grace Berkery, director of startup engagement at Mastercard, said at an event on Wednesday. “So if they’re going to enter, they’re going to stay in the space.”

Ledger’s latest crypto wallet taps iPod designer in bid to boost accessibility

Ledger, a security-focused firm that sells crypto hardware wallets, has partnered with the designer behind the iPod, Tony Fadell, in hopes of creating an easier, more accessible way for users to secure their crypto assets. The new credit card-sized crypto wallet can manage NFT collections as well as over 500 coins and digital assets.

the latest pod

As a friendly reminder, Chain Reaction’s first season ended last week and we’ll be bringing new content back in the New Year.

ICYMI: Last week, in Chain Reaction’s Tuesday episode, Alchemy’s CEO Nikil Viswanathan had a lot to say about how the industry and developer’s focus on infrastructure has shifted, what will drive the next wave of consumer interest and which blockchains he’s seeing the most developer activity on.

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

follow the money

Tea, an open source package manager for developers, raises $8.9 million in seed funding
NFT-focused startup Metagood raises $5 million toward “social good” impact
Uniswap-based protocol Panoptic raises $4.5 million for decentralized perpetual options
Crypto accounting-focused Bitwave raises $15 million in a Series A round led by Hack VC and Blockchain Capital
Perennial, a DeFi protocol for derivative trading, raises $12 million in a seed round co-led by Polychain Capital and Variant

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.

Will SBF saddle up for a testimony after his media tour? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch