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Elon Musk’s reign over Twitter — marked by chaos from his snap decisions, massive layoffs, and endless product u-turns — could be taking its most dramatic turn yet, if Twitter users have their say.

A poll put up by Musk on Sunday asking if he should step down as head of the company closed today with users voting resoundingly in favor of him leaving. Nearly 17.4 million people responded over 12 hours, and 57.5% of them voted “Yes” versus 42.5% of them voting “No” — a margin of 15% supporting him leaving. “I will abide by the results of this poll,” Musk noted in the poll.

We’re going to detail all the reasons here why this shouldn’t be taken too strictly as a directive to Elon. But first, the very distinct takeaways. People are still on Twitter; people care what happens; and those online — in the last 12 hours at least — do not, in the majority, really want more of Elon’s Antics. That there is a way of giving people a voice and that people speak out is important in and of itself.

But now for the main reason why you should not hold your breath or be too upset when nothing happens: Elon, at the end of the day, will do what he wants.

No, he’s not exactly good for his word, as we’ve seen many times over. (Just ask Tesla shareholders how his promises have worked out.) And no, we have no way of verifying poll results. And, yes, Musk could just decide to redo the poll until he gets whatever result he wants — whatever result he wants today, that is. Musk’s only predictable quality seems to be that he’s unpredictable.

And because of all of the above, do we really know what his actual motive was in putting up the poll?

Is he: Actually giving himself an exit option? FEeding potential investors hypothetical alternatives? Scrappily generating more rubbernecking traffic? The last one is a distinct possibility, given how Twitter — depleted of more than half the staff it had before Musk took over — has pretty much dropped the ball on all the set pieces it’s been building up over the years to generate audience and revenue.

Maybe he’ll poll that question next!

Musk has been in Qatar (errrr I think I can say that here on TC and not get banned on Twitter, yes?), ostensibly to watch the World Cup (but boy are there a lot of wealthy folks there looking to do ever more investing in the West). His tweets from the game have been some of the most watched on Twitter pertaining to the final yesterday.

Sure, his one-night takeover of the sports curation beat has been great, but at some point someone has to clean up the mess in the stadium.

Should Elon step down as head of Twitter? Users vote Yes by a margin of 15% by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Google has announced that it is bringing India’s online document storage service DigiLocker to the Files app on Android to let users access verified government-issued documents from the app.

At the annual Google for India conference on Monday, Google announced its partnership with the Indian government to roll out the DigiLocker integration within the Files app. The search giant also announced a machine learning-based model that will help identify and organize important files including official documents and government ID cards.

“We expect that DigiLocker’s integration and partnership on Android will drive smoother and ubiquitous access to digitized documents in a safe and secure manner for all our users,” Abhishek Singh said while announcing the partnership with Google. Singh acts as the President and CEO of NeGD, the MD & CEO of Digital India Corporation (DIC) and also the CEO Karmayogi Bharat.

Singh said that DigiLocker has over 137 million registered users. The service also has over 2,300 issuers who have issued more than 5.6 billion documents to date, he said.

Google didn’t disclose any exact timelines on when the integration will be available to users. It also didn’t reveal whether the experience will also available to iOS at some point in the future.

At the eighth edition of the annual conference, Google also announced AI-driven updates related to search and showcased an AI offering for Google Lens that will help users decode handwriting of doctors. Additionally, Google introduced Courses as a feature on YouTube to provide more monetization areas to creators developing educational content.

Google introduces India’s DigiLocker integration to Files app to access official documents by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said Monday that India is going through an important period of time as it drafts several key regulations and asserted that it stands to benefit from open and connected internet.

India, which legalized several amendments to the nation’s IT rules after contentious back and forth with many tech giants last year, is in the process of shaping and shipping several other key regulatory frameworks that seek to bring a series of major changes to how telecom services, on-demand video players and firms in other sectors operate and handle consumers’ data.

On Monday, the Google chief sat with India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw at the company’s annual India event to discuss a wide-range of subjects including regulations.

Vaishnaw said the government is working on a range of bills that reflect the country’s realities.

“Prime Minister has given us a clear target of creating a comprehensive legal regulatory framework. So we’re creating three horizontals: First we have the telecom bill that is for the carriers. Second is the digital protection bill, which is focused around enforcing citizens’ privacy rights. And this is, the Digital India bill that will look at practically everything else that is required to be seen,” he said, adding that all these bills should become law in within the next 14 to 16 months.

Tech giants including Google, Meta and Amazon have requested a series of changes to some of the proposed bills. In a recent meeting with Meta executives, the Indian government reportedly asked the firm to put in efforts so that content takedown orders issued by the authorities are processed within an hour, Indian news outlet MoneyControl reported earlier.

Asked what he makes of India’s proposed regulations, Pichai said:

“If you look at the scale at which tech is working and touching so many lives around the world, to me it makes sense that tech needs responsible regulation. I think it’s important for countries to think about how to best safeguard their citizens. We are engaging constructively.

India has a leadership role to play here. It’s important to make sure you’re balancing the safeguards you’re putting for people and creating innovative frameworks so that companies can innovate on top of certainty in the legal framework.

So I think it’s an important moment in time. But through it all, hopefully, India can also be a voice for … India will also be a big export economy and benefit from open and connected internet. Getting that balance right will be, I think, important.”

Important that India’s regulations provide legal and innovation certainty to firms, Google CEO says by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

For years, teachers have used YouTube to promote their lessons and persuade learners to join their classes off the platform. YouTube said on Monday it is taking broader steps to make the video service more appealing to educators and learners and also provide more monetization avenues to the creators.

At its annual India conference on Monday, Google unveiled Courses, a feature that will seek to bring structured learning experience on YouTube.

Teachers will be able to publish and organize their videos and provide text reading materials and questions right on the video app. They will be allowed to offer the content for free or charge a fee, the company said.

Courses will span academic subjects as well as vocational interests, the company said. Viewers who buy a Course will be able to watch the videos without ads.

The feature will roll out to users in India “soon,” and will represent a “new monetization option for our creators,” the company said.

Monday’s move represents Google’s growing push to make inroads in India’s education market, where over 300 million students go to schools. Meta and Amazon have also made deep investments in the space in recent years.

YouTube to launch Courses in edtech push in India by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Google said today that it’s bringing its multi-search feature — which allows users to search using both images and text — to India. The company said at its Google for India event on Monday that the feature will be available in English starting today and support Hindi at a later date.

The feature will allow users to use a photo of a clothing pattern, for instance, and add text like “dress” to look up dresses with that pattern. Multisearch was first announced in April, and the company made it available to US-based users in October.

The search giant separately said that it will also allow users to search within YouTube videos. This feature, which will be available on the Google Search app, will enable users to type a phrase after tapping on the “Search in the video.” You can search for a phrase and the results will show you occurrences of it in the video.

Google also said that it is improving speech detection for people who are looking up for voiced queries in the Hinglish language. For instance, if someone asked “Sparrow ko Hindi mai kya kehte hai” (what do you call a sparrow in Hindi), the earlier model didn’t detect this properly.

What’s more, Google already allows users in India to look at search result pages in both English and Hindi at the same time. Now, the company plans to extend this to Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, and Bengali languages next year.

The company said that it will make some of these options easily available through shortcuts in the Google app on iOS and extend them to Android at a later stage.

Google brings multi-search and in-video search features to India by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

A significant number of doctors write medicine prescriptions in haste, making it nearly impossible for their patients to understand what they scribbled. This problem has been around for decades and many tech firms have attempted to solve it with little to no success.

Now Google is having a go at translating those unfathomable texts.

The search giant announced at its annual conference in India Monday that it is working with pharmacists to work out the handwriting of doctors.

The feature, which will be rolled out on Google Lens, will allow users to either take a picture of the prescription or upload one from the photo library.

Once the image is processed, the app detects the medicines mentioned in the note, a Google executive showed in a demonstation.

The company didn’t immediately share when it plans to release the new capability to the masses. Google said India has the highest number of Google Lens users in the world.

Google for India is the company’s annual event in the South Asian market, where it showcases dozens of new developments. The company also said it is working on a single, unified model to cover over 100 Indian languages for both speech and text to empower the internet journey of the next millions of individuals in the South Asian market.

India is a key market for Google, which has amassed over half a billion users in the country. But it’s also been one of the toughest years for Google in the South Asian market, where it has been slapped twice by India’s antitrust regulator in recent months.

Google can now decode doctors’ bad handwriting by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

You’ve likely heard of pre-seed, seed, Series A, Series B and so on and so forth. These labels often aren’t super helpful because they aren’t clearly defined — we’ve seen very small Series A rounds and enormous pre-seed rounds. The defining characteristic of each round isn’t as much about how much money is changing hands as it is about how much risk is in the company.

On your startup’s journey, there are two dynamics at play at once. By deeply understanding them — and the connection between them — you’ll be able to make a lot more sense of your fundraising journey and how to think about each part of your startup pathway as you evolve and develop.

In general, in broad lines, the funding rounds tend to go as follows:

The 4 Fs: Founders, Friends, Family, Fools: This is the first money going into the company, usually just enough to start proving out some of the core tech or business dynamics. Here, the company is trying to build an MVP. In these rounds, you’ll often find angel investors of various degrees of sophistication.
Pre-seed: Confusingly, this is often the same as the above, except done by an institutional investor (i.e., a family office or a VC firm focusing on the earliest stages of companies). This is usually not a “priced round” — the company doesn’t have a formal valuation, but the money raised is on a convertible or SAFE note. At this stage, companies are typically not yet generating revenue.
Seed: This is usually institutional investors investing larger amounts of money into a company that has started proving some of its dynamics. The startup will have some aspect of its business up and running and may have some test customers, a beta product, a concierge MVP, etc. It won’t have a growth engine (in other words, it won’t yet have a repeatable way of attracting and retaining customers). The company is working on active product development and looking for product-market fit. Sometimes this round is priced (i.e., investors negotiate a valuation of the company), or it may be unpriced.
Series A: This is the first “growth round” a company raises. It will usually have a product in the market delivering value to customers and is on its way to having a reliable, predictable way of pouring money into customer acquisition. The company may be about to enter new markets, broaden its product offering or go after a new customer segment. A Series A round is almost always “priced,” giving the company a formal valuation.
Series B and beyond: At Series B, a company is usually off to the races in earnest. It has customers, revenue and a stable product or two. From Series B onward, you have Series C, D, E, etc. The rounds and the company get bigger. The final rounds are typically preparing a company for going into the black (being profitable), going public through an IPO or both.

For each of the rounds, a company becomes more and more valuable partially because it is getting an increasingly mature product and more revenue as it figures out its growth mechanics and business model. Along the way, the company evolves in another way, as well: The risk goes down.

That final piece is crucial in how you think about your fundraising journey. Your risk doesn’t go down as your company becomes more valuable. The company becomes more valuable as it reduces its risk. You can use this to your advantage by designing your fundraising rounds to explicitly de-risk the “scariest” things about your company.

Let’s take a closer look at where risk appears in a startup and what you can do as a founder to remove as much risk as possible at each stage of your company’s existence.

Where is the risk in your company?

Risk comes in many shapes and forms. When your company is at the idea stage, you may get together with some co-founders who have excellent founder-market fit. You have identified that there is a problem in the market. Your early potential customer interviews all agree that this is a problem worth solving and that someone is — in theory — willing to pay money to have this problem solved. The first question is: Is it even possible to solve this problem?

The fundraising stages are not about dollar values — they’re about risk by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

While people around the globe were watching a thrilling FIFA World Cup final, Twitter decided to drop a bombshell and banned links promoting other social networks. The list currently includes Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post. Plus, link-in-bio tools like Linktree and Lnk.Bio are also banned — these services are commonly used by both creators and businesses. Essentially, you can’t post links to your other social profiles or even type out your handle in a tweet.

The Elon Musk-owned company “no longer allows free promotion of certain social media platforms” on Twitter. The company said that it is removing all accounts “created solely for the purpose of promoting other social networks”. It also plans to remove links to content from above mentioned social platforms.

“We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter,” the social platform said on its policy page.

Twitter will ask you to delete tweets if you link out your handles and multiple violations of this policy will result in a temporary account lock. The company said if you have links to any of these platforms in your bio, it will temporarily suspend your account and ask you to change your bio.

What’s interesting here is that the Musk-led company will let you post your handle if you pay for the tweet’s promotion.

On Saturday night, Twitter suspended the account of Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz had recently deleted all of her tweets and only had three posts on her account: two promoting her other social media accounts, and one asking Musk for comment on a story she is working on with Drew Harwell, a fellow Post writer. Harwell, along with reporters like the New York Times’ Ryan Mac and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, was temporarily suspended after posting about how Mastodon’s Twitter was banned for linking to the Elon Jet Mastodon account. He and other journalists were reinstated after Musk posted a poll for users to vote on the journalists’ fate.

He and other journalists were reinstated after Musk posted a poll for users to vote on the journalists’ fate. When Lorenz posted her other social media handles, this policy did not yet exist. At the time of publication, her account appears to have been reinstated.

Twitter bans posting of handles and links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and more by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch