Welcome back, climate tech readers! Like last week, we’ve got a full slate once more, from food waste to wastewater and more. Let’s dive in.

Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ new startup is trash

After selling Nest to Google for $3.2 billion, Matt Rogers is no stranger to scaling fast. But unlike last time, Rogers isn’t interested in selling so quickly. “This is the next 20 years of my life. This is not like, build the company in four or five years and sell to Google. This is a big, long journey,” he told TechCrunch.

Rogers is on a quest to end food waste, which accounts for 6% to 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and his tool to accomplish that is the humble kitchen trash can. Mill Industries’ bin is sleek and tech-enabled, dehydrating and grinding food until it resembles dried coffee grounds. Then, when it’s full, it automatically requests a box to mail the dried food scraps to one of Mill’s facilities, where it’s turned into chicken feed. How does it get there? That part surprised Rogers the most.

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Wastewater recycler Membrion makes light work of removing heavy metals

Industrial facilities from semiconductor plants to automotive factories use surprising amounts of water. What comes out the other end can be challenging to treat and even more challenging to reuse. Which is why Membrion has developed a ceramic membrane that can filter out heavy metals like lead, arsenic and lithium. The startup is $7 million into a Series B round that it hopes will bring in another $3 million.

Britishvolt’s bankruptcy is the death knell for the UK’s battery industry

Britishvolt was always a bit of a long shot, but the battery manufacturing startup appears to have missed its target completely. This week, it announced it was declaring bankruptcy, having made little headway on its planned $4.7 billion gigafactory.

The company’s fall echoes what happened here in the U.S. just over a decade ago when A123 Systems stumbled and entered bankruptcy itself. But the British version of the story may not have a happy ending. With A123, the U.S. had time to cover. With global battery supply chains solidifying, the U.K.’s domestic battery industry might never catch up.

Noon Energy brings Mars tech down to Earth with carbon-oxygen battery system

Space programs pride themselves on developing far-out technologies that end up proving their worth here on Earth. Apollo helped catapult computing, and the Space Shuttle did wonders for avionics and materials science. Now, it’s Mars rover Perseverance’s turn.

The MOXIE experiment was built to prove that carbon dioxide can be turned into oxygen on Mars. Chris Graves, who worked on the instrument, thought it could help make use of carbon dioxide on Earth, so he started Noon Energy. The company’s carbon-oxygen battery promises to store electricity for long periods of time at fairly low cost. The startup announced a $28 million Series A this week.

Sealed buys sensor startup InfiSense to fuel energy-saving services

Heat pumps and home energy retrofits have been getting a lot of attention as a result of incentives contained within the Inflation Reduction Act. That makes it a good time to be Sealed. The company predicts how much energy a retrofit will save and converts the up-front installation costs, billing homeowners based on the savings.

For a company that depends so heavily on data, Sealed’s acquisition of Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense makes, well, sense. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal. Sealed plans on offering, though not requiring, InfiSense’s sensors to customers to monitor both energy use and indoor air quality.

Climate tech roundup: Food waste, wastewater, and the UK’s troubled battery industry by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. — Mary Ann

Last week, I dug into CB Insights’ State of Fintech 2022 report. We’ve already discussed ad nauseam that fintech funding is not just down, but also way down.

And I’m not foolish enough to try and make any real predictions about the state of fintech in 2023.

Instead, I’m going to highlight some specific findings of that report that stood out to me and that I didn’t already write about.

Digital lending funding was down 53% to $11.5 billion in 2022. Dollars raised and deal volume in the fourth quarter dropped to their lowest levels since 2020 — with $1.6 billion raised across 121 deals. That’s a big drop even from just the first quarter of 2022, in which we saw $5.3 billion raised across 198 deals.

It’s not too difficult to surmise why this was the case. In 2022, we saw inflation and interest rates climb and startups with loose underwriting standards are no doubt paying the price with increased delinquencies and defaults. So when investors are thinking about where next to put their money, it’s unlikely that digital lending startups are going to be high on their lists, to be honest.

But guess where we saw an even bigger drop in funding? Banking. Globally, banking funding slid by 63%, or nearly two-thirds, according to CB Insights. Oof. In all of 2022, banking startups raised $9.4 billion across 299 deals. That compares to $25.3 billion raised across 447 deals in 2021.

There were so many challenger banks born in recent years, it is not surprising that that segment became oversaturated. My guess is that we’ll see a real survival of the fittest in 2023 and beyond. Heck, even decacorn Chime has struggled, as evidenced by its round of layoffs in the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, payments remain the darling of the fintech space, with the segment leading in total funding and deals in the fourth quarter of 2022. About $3.4 billion was raised across 188 deals in the payments space in Q4 — nearly double the $1.8 billion raised across 62 deals by banking startups in the same three-month period. With more businesses and consumers opting to pay for things digitally, even in a post-pandemic world, this is hardly surprising.

And lastly, wealth tech made an impressive showing in terms of investor interest. Wealth tech companies brought in $1.7 billion across 164 deals in the fourth quarter. I think this reflects increased effort on the part of all generations to think ahead when it comes to their money, and not just live for short-term gratification.

Anisha Kothapa, CB Insights’ lead fintech analyst, believes that last year’s funding numbers reflected more of a correction than a bubble.

While of course I still believe fintech is in its early innings, I do also think that people went a little too crazy, too fast in 2021 and a lot of companies that probably shouldn’t have gotten funded did. So whether it’s a correction or a bubble is hard to say really. Either way, let’s hope 2023 brings with it greater due diligence, less ego and more viable business models.

We certainly don’t need a repeat of last year.

Weekly News

Beleaguered fintech startup Bolt revealed a new brand last week that involved the launch of a multimedia campaign featuring this commercial that will stream on Hulu, Peacock, ESPN, ABC, NBC, and other networks, as well as a meme generator “for any internet user to play around with to discover their own shoppergänger,” a company spokesperson told me via email. The company will soon be “rolling out an influencer campaign where creators will dive into #dolltok by building narratives around their #shoppergangers (dolls customized to their own unique shopper personas) in their miniature worlds,” according to the spokesperson. AdAge speculates that the fintech startup is using memes in an effort to “connect with Gen Z.”

From Axios: “Retail trading platform Robinhood is launching an independent media brand called Sherwood that will be led by veteran tech editor and media entrepreneur Joshua Topolsky. The entity will build on the success of Robinhood’s popular daily markets newsletter, Snacks, and will serve as a branding and customer acquisition tool. Sherwood Media has been set up as an independent LLC that will exist as a subsidiary of Robinhood, in part to ensure that the content produced within Sherwood remains editorially independent.”

Snafus can happen even when incumbents and fintechs partner. Reports The Charlotte Observer: “Bank of America experienced delays in online transactions conducted via Zelle for much of the day Wednesday (Jan. 18), but those problems were resolved by the afternoon, the bank said. On outage tracker DownDetector.com, irate customers reported missing funds and unexpected negative balances due to problems with the digital payment network.”

How can fintech startups outlast the VC winter? Peter Hazlehurst, co-founder and CEO of BaaS startup Synctera, shares his thoughts in this TC+ article here.

Reports CFO Dive: “Wilmington N.C.-based nCino announced CFO David Rudow will be leaving the cloud banking provider effective Jan. 31 as the company will lay off about 7% of its workforce, or 117 employees, according to Wednesday press release and a company spokesperson. Chief corporate development and strategy officer Greg Orenstein will move into its CFO seat.”

Nihar Bobba has “dipped” out of Wharton to join fintech-focused venture firm Better Tomorrow Ventures as a principal, according to this tweet. He had been a venture partner there since last March, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Anyone who has tried to buy a new car recently will appreciate this. Publicly traded Upstart, an artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, has added two new applications to its Auto Retail platform — digital finance and online sales — to offer dealerships “a seamless online to in-store car-buying experience, from search to signing.” To hear more rant on this topic and other fun stuff, listen to this week’s Equity Podcast.

A recent panel discussion among VCs Mercedes Bent of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Victoria Treyger of Felicis Ventures and Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures hosted by TC editor and StrictlyVC founder Connie Loizos touched on a number of hot topics in the world of fintech. As Connie writes: “If you’re a fintech founder, investor or regulator, you might want to catch the full conversation — which also touches on regulation, talent in the industry and crypto” in the video linked here.

Very talented tech journalist Eric Newcomer is still “marveling at JPMorgan’s decision to go public and sue the founder of the student loan company Frank” after purchasing the startup for $175 million and then accusing CEO Charlie Javice “of helping to fake millions of customers in order to induce the bank to buy her company.” (We’re still marveling too!) I 100% agree with him here: “While I applaud JPMorgan for holding an alleged fraudster accountable, the bank certainly looks pretty foolish for failing to notice before buying the company that so many of Frank’s customers had apparently been brazenly faked.” All this leads Eric to ask: “With JP Morgan suing a startup founder, will 2023 be the year of accountability?”

Wholesale marketplace Faire announced last week that it has built what it describes as an “app for brands” to give independent brands a way to manage their businesses — “all from their phones.” So what’s the fintech tie? A spokesperson told me via email: “With this new brand app, customers can manage orders from anywhere at anytime — meaning they will never miss an order resulting in more money being earned.”

Reports Fintech Finance News: Turkish fintech company “Papara . . . [announced] the launch of its insurance arm. Currently live are mobile and pet insurance products, with more to come in the first half of the year….This is the first expansion of Papara’s product suite outside of its core banking and money management products since launching six years ago. It marks the next step in Papara’s mission to become one of Europe’s leading financial SuperApps, providing users with all the accessible and affordable financial services they need in one place.” More here.

The relationship between incumbents and upstarts has long been a complicated one. Cartoonist Ian Foley illustrates the start of the consolidation and M&A process that the fintech market is starting in earnest here.

Spotlight on Africa, by Tage Kene-Okafor

QED-backed Nigerian fintech TeamApt has made a rebrand by adopting the name of its flagship product, Moniepoint, piloted in 2019 as an agency banking platform that uses POS devices to meet the financial needs of underbanked and unbanked customers in Nigeria.

However, the platform has since metamorphosed into a full business banking solution. While maintaining its agency banking core, Moniepoint began providing small businesses, who still act as agents, with banking and operational tools like working capital, business expansion loans, expense management (business payments cards), accounting and bookkeeping solutions and insurance.

Moniepoint’s interfacing nature between thousands of small businesses and millions of individual customers made it TeamApt’s most well-known brand, among others, that included a white-labeled digital banking product for banks and enterprise software for small business management.

“When we started out in 2015, we were primarily providing back office payment infrastructure for banks and needed an apt team, hence the name TeamApt. Since then, we have evolved significantly and our flagship business banking solution, Moniepoint, has become our core focus and where we see the future,” CEO Tosin Eniolorunda, Moniepoint co-founder and CEO said of the rebrand.

The Moniepoint brand also made the fintech the most money. It currently processes most of the POS transactions in Nigeria with an annualized total payments volume (TPV) of over $170 billion and a customer base of over 600,000 businesses, enabling it to more than double its annual revenues in 2022. The platform also launched a credit offering in 2022, which has already disbursed over $1.4 billion in working capital loans.

Considering all this, it’s easy to see the rebrand as fitting. Moniepoint, now a London-based company, claims to be profitable (it says since 2020). It became QED’s first African investment last July when the U.S. fintech-focused firm led a $50 million+ pre-Series C round that saw Moniepoint’s valuation jump into soonicorn range.

Fundings and M&A

Seen on TechCrunch

Kenyan fintech Kwara raises $3M seed extension, signs deal to reach over 4,000 credit unions

Link raises $30M to help merchants accept direct bank payments 

P2P lending platform PeopleFund raises $20M Series C extension led by Bain Capital

Grazzy wants to stop letting people use ‘no cash’ as an excuse to avoid tipping

And elsewhere

Splitero raises $12M to expand home equity investment operations

Insurtech iLife Technologies raises $17M

Sneak peek: Dayforward, a digital-only, full-stack life insurance startup, will announce this week that it has closed on $25 million in funding led by AXA Venture Partners with participation from existing investors HSCM Ventures, Juxtapose, and Munich Re Ventures. It also has acquired Commercial Travelers Life Insurance in an effort to expand its own life insurance offering nationwide. Founded in 2021, the company touts that its term life insurance offering “guarantees the policyholder’s family will continue to receive their income in the event that the policyholder passes away.” The company’s latest funding round brings its aggregate amount of capital raised to $45 million. The money will go toward scaling its business nationwide, developing new insurance products and “continuing to launch its proprietary solutions through strategic partners.”

That’s it for this week. Thanks, once again, for reading and sharing this. See you next time! xoxo, Mary Ann

We certainly don’t need a repeat of last year by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

AltspaceVR has had a few close calls over the years, but the company that built virtual social spaces well before “metaverse” was a household word is shuttering for good this time.

After announcing that it would close up shop in 2017, Microsoft intervened and the company came under the tech giant’s wing. Now, Microsoft is sunsetting AltspaceVR’s virtual reality platform, a web of immersive social spaces that invited people to hang out with friends or colleagues as 3D avatars.

AltspaceVR will be no more as of March 10, and Microsoft says it will direct more resources toward its mixed reality platform Microsoft Mesh.

“We look forward to what is to come, including our launch of Microsoft Mesh, a new platform for connection and collaboration, starting by enabling workplaces around the world,” the announcement reads.

“In the near-term, we are focusing our VR efforts on workplace experiences, learning from and alongside our early customers and partners, and ensuring we deliver a foundation that enables security, trust and compliance.”

Outside of gaming, Microsoft has built many of its products with an enterprise-first mindset, and VR and mixed reality is no different. The company notes that it plans to “extend” its VR plans to consumers once they are established for the workplace.

AltspaceVR may have never built a formidable user base — a difficult task in VR, given the bespoke hardware required — but the company was very early to social applications of virtual reality.

By 2015, AltspaceVR had created a robust social VR platform where users could mill around wood-paneled rooms with serene views, watch Taylor Swift music videos together or surf the web via a virtual browser. Spatial audio made the experience more immersive, replicating the way that humans perceive sound in real-life environments and laying the groundwork for virtual events.

At the time, most resources and attention in VR were being directed toward cutting edge gaming applications — not virtual hangout spaces. Meta launched Horizon Worlds, an AltspaceVR-like experience with its own inoffensive neutral interiors and not-too-lifelike avatars a full six years later.

It’s not clear if Microsoft plans to roll the product into its other VR efforts or abandon the project outright. Given the timing, AltspaceVR’s fate is likely linked to Microsoft’s dramatic company-wide consolidation, detailed this week. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for additional information about what happens to AltspaceVR’s team and tech in light of the news.

Amidst deep tech industry layoffs, Microsoft announced will reduce 5 percent of its workforce, impacting 10,000 employees. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pointed to economic uncertainty and the comedown from the early pandemic’s tech boomtimes as the rationale behind the substantial cuts.

“We will continue to invest in strategic areas for our future, meaning we are allocating both our capital and talent to areas of secular growth and long-term competitiveness for the company, while divesting in other areas,” Nadella said.

It’s not clear if Microsoft is tabling some of its metaverse plans or if AltspaceVR is just a casualty of broad, company-wide cuts. It was only a year and change ago that Facebook boldly rebranded itself as “Meta,” plunging the industry into a buzzy hype cycle around a more immersive, possibly VR-powered vision for social networking.

A year later, the metaverse discourse has already rapid-cycled through the backlash phase, leaving the future of avatar-driven virtual social spaces hazy. It’s possible that the metaverse never needed special hardware at all — non-VR online worlds continue to thrive in 2023 — but it’s worth remembering a company that was well into exploring those possibilities years before tech’s lumbering giants showed up.

Microsoft is sunsetting social VR pioneer AltspaceVR by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

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: After cutting 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 bans was 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 alleged data breach that exposed the contact information of millions of users. In an unattributed 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-Madori writes. 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 October by adding new antitrust counts to their case. Google in October asked the court to 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 from Law360.

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 to protect teens’ privacy and reduce unwanted adult contact, limit ad targeting, restrict teens’ access to mature content and others to help parents monitor and manage their teens’ Instagram use through parental 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’s Executive 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