More than 1,100 signatories, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, have signed an open letter that calls on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” Says the letter:

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.

It continues on to argue that there is a “level of planning and management” that is “not happening” and that instead, in recent months, unnamed “AI labs” have been “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

The letter’s signers say the pause for which they are asking should be “public and verifiable, and include all key actors.” If said pause “cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” the letter continues.

We’re still digesting this one (while others are already tearing it to shreds). Certainly, it’s as interesting for the prominent people who have signed — which includes some engineers from Meta and Google and Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque — as who have not. (No one from OpenAI signed this letter. No one from Anthropic, whose team spun out of OpenAI to build a “safer” chatbot appear, either.)

In the meantime, you can read it in full here.

1,100+ notable signatories just signed an open letter asking “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months” by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

A consortium led by Lifelong Group has acquired the distressed firm GoMechanic months after the Sequoia India-backed startup admitted “grave errors” in financial reporting.

Lifelong Group, which serves several major players in the automotive industry including Hero and General Motors, said it won the bidding to acquire GoMechanic, whose investors scrambled for a sale earlier this year.

“This transaction will assist in preserving the ecosystem at large and also enable providing continued livelihood to the employees at GoMechanic,” Lifelong Group said in a statement.

The move caps an embarrassing episode in the Indian startup community after it became apparent that GoMechanic founders had misstated facts, inflated revenue figures, kept investors in the dark and attempted to raise new funding under false pretences.

High-profile backers including Tiger Global, SoftBank and Malaysia’s Khazanah evaluated an investment in GoMechanic last year but passed for various reasons. A probe into the startup, which offers auto-services such as repairing and carwashing, concluded that among other things many of its garages were fictitious, TechCrunch previously reported.

With no new funding in sight, GoMechanic scrambled to cut expenses and eliminated 70% of its workforce.

Distressed Indian startup GoMechanic acquired by Lifelong Group-led consortium by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Amazon now allows T-mobile customers to link their mobile numbers and make or receive hands-free Wi-Fi calls through Alexa-enabled devices like Echo Dot or Echo Show. This comes more than two years after the ecommerce giant partnered up with AT&T for a similar feature.

Customers will need to enable the T-Mobile with Alexa skill from the Skills store and link their number to get started. Once the setup is complete, they can speak “Alexa, call John” or “Alexa, dial XXX-XXX-XXX” to make a call. When receiving a call, they can say “Alexa, answer call” or “Alexa, dismiss call.” Users can also call 911 emergency services through Alexa by saying “Alexa, call 911.”

After the setup, calling will be available on all Alexa-enabled devices linked to your account. To disable calling on any of them, go to More>Settings>Communication in the Alexa app. Then tap on T-Mobile and unselect devices under the “Allow calling on” section.

“With this new Alexa Skill, you have the ability to integrate your mobile number with Alexa across all three major network carriers in the U.S.: T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. This benefit provides you with more choice and makes it easier to connect with family and friends who matter most, whenever you want and wherever you are,” Amazon said in a blog post.

T-Mobile’s support page suggests that prepaid, business, government, and Sprint accounts are not eligible for this service.

Amazon now lets T-mobile customers make and receive calls via an Alexa-enabled device by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Indian insurtech Acko is in late-stage discussions to secure $120 million in a funding round at a time when weak global market conditions have subdued large financing deliberations in the South Asian market.

General Atlantic is in talks to lead a $120 million round into Acko, the first tranche of which is about $100 million, a source familiar with the matter said. The round values the Indian startup at $1.5 billion, the source said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The round could close within weeks but there’s still possibility that terms of the deal may slightly change, the source said.

Acko, which became a unicorn in October 2021, has been in the market to raise new capital for at least eight months, people familiar with the matter said. TechCrunch reported earlier that General Atlantic was engaging with Acko to increase its stake in the insurtech firm.

The New York-headquartered growth equity investor — which has backed a number of Indian firms including Jio, BillDesk, Byju’s, PhonePe, Amagi, NoBroker and Unacademy over the past decade — plans to deploy at least $2 billion to $3 billion in India over the next five to seven years, according to people familiar with the matter.

Acko and General Atlantic declined to comment.

Acko — which counts Amazon, Lightspeed Venture Partners India and CPPIB as existing backers — is among a handful of startups that is attempting to take on the country’s antiquated insurance industry with a digital-first product.

It develops and sells bite-sized auto insurance products (aimed at drivers and others in transportation-related scenarios), healthcare protections to employers, as well as protection on gadgets.

The startup has distribution partnerships with a number of firms including Amazon, travel and hotel booking platform MakeMyTrip, ride-hailing firm Ola, insurance giant Bajaj Finance, Urban Company and fintech CRED.

Amazon-backed Acko nears $120 million in new funding by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Yesterday, the ride-sharing company Lyft said its two co-founders, John Zimmer and Logan Green, are stepping down from managing the company’s day-to-day operations, though they are retaining their board seats. According to a related regulatory filing, they actually need to hang around as “service providers” to receive their original equity award agreements. (If Lyft is sold or they’re fired from the board, they’ll see “100% acceleration” of these “time-based” vesting conditions.)

As with so many founders who’ve used multi-class voting structures in recent years to cement their control, their original awards were fairly generous. When Lyft when public in 2019, its dual-class share structure provided Green and Zimmer with super-voting shares that entitled them to 20 votes per share in perpetuity, meaning not just for life but for a period of nine to 18 months after the passing of the last living cofounder, during which time a trustee would retain control.

It all seemed a little extreme, even as such arrangements became more common in tech. Now, Jay Ritter, the University of Florida professor whose work tracking and analyzing IPOs has earned him the moniker Mr. IPO, suggests that if anything, Lyft’s trajectory might make shareholders even less nervous about dual-stock structures.

For one thing, with the possible exception of Google’s founders – who came up with an entirely new share class in 2012 to preserve their power – founders lose their stranglehold on power as they sell their shares, which then convert to a one-vote-per-one-share structure. Green, for example, still controls 20% of the shareholder voting rights at Lyft, while Zimmer now controls 12% of the company’s voting rights, he told the WSJ yesterday.

Further, says Ritter, even tech companies with dual-class shares are policed by shareholders who make it clear what they will or will not tolerate. Again, just look at Lyft, whose shares were trading at 86% below their offering price earlier today in a clear sign that investors have — at least for now — lost confidence in the outfit.

We talked with Ritter last night about why stakeholders aren’t likely to push too hard against super-voting shares, despite that now would seem the time to do it. Excerpts from that conversation, below, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Majority voting power for founders became widespread over the last dozen years or so, as VCs and even exchanges did what they could to appear founder-friendly. According to your own research, between 2012 and last year, the percentage of tech companies going public with dual-class shares shot from 15% to 46%. Should we expect this to reverse course now that the market has tightened and money isn’t flowing so freely to founders?

The bargaining power of founders versus VCs has changed in the last year, that’s true, and public market investors have never been enthusiastic about founders having super voting stock. But as long as things go well, there isn’t pressure on managers to give up super voting stock. One reason U.S. investors haven’t been overly concerned about dual-class structures is that, on average, companies with dual-class structures have delivered for shareholders. It’s only when stock prices decline that people start questioning: should we have this?

Isn’t that what we are seeing currently?

With a general downturn, even if a company is executing according to plan, shares have fallen in many cases.

So you expect that investors and public shareholders will remain complacent about this issue despite the market.

In recent years, there haven’t been a lot of examples where entrenched management is doing things wrong. There have been cases where an activist hedge fund is saying, ‘We don’t think you’re pursuing the right strategy.’ But one of the reasons for complacency is that there are checks and balances. It’s not the case where, as in Russia, a manager can loot the company and public shareholders can’t do anything about it. They can vote with their feet. There are also shareholder lawsuits. These can be abused, but the threat of them [keeps companies in check]. What’s also true, especially of tech companies where employees have so much equity-based compensation, is that CEOs are going to be happier when their stock goes up in price but they also know their employees will be happier when the stock is doing well.

Before WeWork’s original IPO plans famously imploded in the fall of 2019, Adam Neumann expected to have so much voting control over the company that he could pass it along to future generations of Neumanns.

But when the attempt to go public backfired — [with the market saying] just because SoftBank thinks it’s worth $47 billion doesn’t mean we think it’s worth that much —  he faced a trade-off. It was, ‘I can keep control or take a bunch of money and walk away’ and ‘Would I rather be poorer and in control or richer and move on?’ and he decided, ‘I’ll take the money.’

I think Lyft’s founders have the same tradeoff.

Meta is perhaps a better example of a company whose CEO’s super-voting power power has worried many, most recently as the company leaned into metaverse.

A number of years ago, when Facebook was still Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg proposed doing what Larry Page and Sergey Brin had done at Google but he got a lot of pushback and backed down instead of pushing it through. Now if he wants to sell off stock to diversify his portfolio, he gives up some votes. The way most of these companies with super voting stock are structured is that if they sell it, it automatically converts into one-share-one-stock sales, so someone who buys it doesn’t get extra votes.

A story in Bloomberg earlier today asked why there are so many family dynasties in media — the Murdochs, the Sulzbergers — but not in tech. What do you think?

The media industry is different from the tech industry. Forty years ago, there was analysis of dual-class companies and, at the time, a lot of the dual-class companies were media: the [Bancroft family, which previously owned the Wall Street Journal], the Sulzbergers with the New York Times. There were also a lot of dual-class structures associated with gambling and alcohol companies before tech firms began [taking companies public with this structure in place]. But family firms are non-existent in tech because the motivations are different; dual-class structures are [solely] meant to keep founders in control. Also tech companies come and go pretty rapidly. With tech, you can be successful for years and then a new competitor comes along and suddenly . . .

So the bottom line, in your view, is that dual-class shares aren’t going away, no matter that shareholders don’t like them. They don’t dislike them enough to do anything about them. Is that right?

If there was concern about entrenched management pursuing stupid policies for years, investors would be demanding bigger discounts. That might have been the case with Adam Neumann; his control wasn’t something that made investors enthusiastic about the company. But for most tech companies — of which I would not consider WeWork — because you have not only the founder but employees with equity-linked compensation, there is a lot of implicit, if not explicit, pressure on shareholder value maximization rather than kowtowing to the founder’s whims. I’d be surprised if they disappeared.

The market has changed, but super-voting shares are here to stay, says Mr. IPO by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

Building credit is hard when it’s difficult to even get credit.

And while it’s not impossible to get loans or credit cards, they are usually offered at high interest rates to the people who can least afford to pay them.

One Austin-based startup is out to help people build — or get — credit without taking on debt. And that startup, StellarFi, has just closed on a $15 million Series A round of funding to help it advance on that goal.

Lamine Zarrad started StellarFi in 2021 after selling another fintech company he’d started, banking app Joust, to ZenBusiness in 2020. Having faced his own struggles receiving credit as an immigrant, Zarrad was looking for a way to help others gain access to credit. 

He started StellarFi on the premise that people should be able to see benefits to their credit scores just by doing everyday things such as paying rent and bills on time. It does this by charging a subscription — either $4.99 or $9.99 — to manage members’ bills and recurring payments such as rent, subscriptions and utilities. Its goal is not only to help consolidate the payments, but to help ensure members pay on time. StellarFi then reports those on-time payments directly to the four main credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax, TransUnion and Innovis.

The company does not require a credit check or deposits and doesn’t charge any interest. It claims that members see an average increase of 26 points in the first month. The average credit score of users at signup is 580.

As a public benefit corporation, StellarFi’s mission is to help “financially disadvantaged” communities with support to build good credit. With its new capital, the company intends to build a marketplace to then link members to lenders.

Since launching its offering in late June, the company’s growth has exceeded expectations, according to Zarrad. StellarFi closed out the year with over $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — about double what it was projecting.

“In 134 days, we had hit $1 million in ARR,” he told TechCrunch. “I’ve built a unicorn before, but never seen this kind of growth.”

While Zarrad did not disclose the company’s new valuation after its latest raise, he shared that it was a significant “up round.” In total, StellarFi has raised $22.2 million in funding. Repeat backer Acrew Capital led its Series A, which included participation from Trust Ventures, ATX Venture Partners, Dream Ventures, Interplay, Accomplice Ventures, Vera Equity, FJ Labs, Fiat Ventures, Gaingels, Kelmhurst, Oyster Funds, Hilltop Ventures, Permit Ventures, Kindergarten Ventures, J2 Capital, Socially Financed and Kapital Ventures. 

“Every single seed investor participated in this round,” Zarrad said. “And we added new ones. Everyone is energized.”

StellarFi was set to close on $5 million in venture debt from Signature Bank for runway extension — a deal that fell through once that institution was forced to shutter earlier this month. It plans to still secure debt from another institution.  

Last September, Experian — perhaps in response to the increasing number of fintechs tackling this problem — released a new product called Experian Boost that, in its own words, lets people “get credit” for paying their rent on time. According to Zarrad, Experian Boost allows users to link their bank accounts via Finicity, then automatically identifies certain recurring bills like utilities and rent and extracts that data into their internal model designed to showcase alternative payment behaviors. This model resides only at Experian, Zarrad points out, as TransUnion, Equifax or Innovis don’t have access to it.

“More importantly, it’s not used by lenders in credit decisions,” he added. By contrast, as mentioned above, StellarFi operates as a bill-pay manager to help members continue to make on-time payments, and reports payments to all four credit bureaus, to impact all credit score models. 

“Unlike Boost, StellarFi does not report payment history derived from linked bank accounts. Instead, StellarFi actually pays the bills and then members pay us back,” Zarrad told TechCrunch. “Therefore, we’re able to create a credit relationship that we report to all bureaus that generate consumer reports used by lenders. In other words, our members are covered, no matter which credit report their lenders pull.”

The company has added affiliate partners and is investing in SEO and is seeing even faster growth this year, according to Zarrad.

“We’ve signed contracts with neobanks and other fintechs are sending us their customers,” he said. “We’re still onboarding lenders and financial institutions.” 

StellarFi has put a lot of eggs into the affiliate basket, Zarrad said, because he believes it creates trust and that conversions “are much higher” versus “going online and buying folks on social media.”

The company intends to build out more features and is still developing its mobile app.

“Our next goal is to conquer the mobile experience completely,” he said. “Once that’s done, members can not only get better credit, but also access to capital. We want to help them get that money through partners.”

Surprisingly thus far, Zarrad said that StellarFi has had “zero defaults” but has seen tons of fraud. “But we’ve built sophisticated algorithms to catch it upfront and quarantined attempted fraudsters.”

John Gardner of Acrew Capital said his firm first invested in StellarFi at the seed stage because it “held strong conviction” in Zarrad and his team’s ability “to scale another fintech business, considering their success building Joust.”

“Stellar’s approach is exciting because it meets consumers where they are – internet bills. We think this form factor is much easier for users to understand and link, helping them see quick and persistent boosts to their credit score in a fairly short time frame. Stellar also reports into a broader set of FICO models, meaning the score benefit is applicable to heftier loans, like auto or mortgage,” he wrote via email. “When it came time for the Series A, it became readily apparent that Stellar’s team could execute on their plans with a maniacal focus. They demonstrably improved credit scores within 30 days for members, scaled to over $1mm in ARR within a few months of launch and set up unique distribution partnerships to efficiently reach the right audiences. For consumer fintech, we get really excited by these growth characteristics, particularly when there is a clear line of sight to profitability.”

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Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we covered? We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at maryann@techcrunch.com. Or you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. Happy to respect anonymity requests.

StellarFi lands $15M to help people build credit by paying bills, rent on time by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

Covariant was founded in 2017 with a simple goal: helping robots learn how to better pick up objects. It’s a large need among those looking to automate warehouses, and one that is much more complex than it might appear. Most of the goods we encounter have traveled through a warehouse at some point. It’s an impossibly broad range of sizes, shapes, textures and colors.

The Bay Area firm has built an AI-based system that trains network robots to improve picks as they go. A demo on the floor at this year’s ProMat shows how quickly a connected arm is capable of identifying, picking and placing a broad range of different objects.

Co-founder and CEO Peter Chen sat down with TechCrunch at the show last week to discuss robotic learning, building foundational models and, naturally, ChatGPT.

TechCrunch: When you’re a startup, it makes sense to use as much off-the-shelf hardware as possible.

PC: Yeah. Covariant started from a very different place. We started with pure software and pure AI. The first hires for the company were all AI researchers. We had no mechanical engineers, no one in robotics. That allowed us to go much deeper into AI than anyone else. If you look at other robotic companies [at ProMat], they’re probably using some off-the-shelf model or open source model — things that have been used in academia.

Like ROS.

Yeah. ROS or open source computer vision libraries, which are great. But what we are doing is fundamentally different. We look at what academic AI models provide and it’s not quiet sufficient. Academic AI is built in a lab environment. They are not built to withstand the tests of the real world — especially the tests of many customers, millions of skills, millions of different types of items that need to be processed by the same AI.

A lot of researchers are taking a lot of different approaches to learning. What’s different about yours?

A lot of the founding team was from OpenAI — like three of the four co-founders. If you look at what OpenAI has done in the last three to four years to the language space, it’s basically taking a foundation model approach to language. Before the recent ChatGPT, there were a lot of natural language processing AIs out there. Search, translate, sentiment detection, spam detection — there were loads of natural language AIs out there. The approach before GPT is, for each use case, you train a specific AI to it, using a smaller subset of data. Look at the results now, and GPT basically abolishes the field of translation, and it’s not even trained to translation. The foundation model approach is basically, instead of using small amounts of data that’s specific to one situation or train a model that’s specific to one circumstance, let’s train a large foundation-generalized model on a lot more data, so the AI is more generalized.

You’re focused on picking and placing, but are you also laying the foundation for future applications?

Definitely. The grasping capability or pick and place capability is definitely the first general capability that we’re giving the robots. But if you look behind the scenes, there’s a lot of 3D understanding or object understanding. There are a lot of cognitive primitives that are generalizable to future robotic applications. That being said, grasping or picking is such a vast space we can work on this for a while.

You go after picking and placing first because there’s a clear need for it.

There’s clear need, and there’s also a clear lack of technology for it. The interesting thing is, if you came by this show 10 years ago, you would have been able to find picking robots. They just wouldn’t work. The industry has struggled with this for a very long time. People said this couldn’t work without AI, so people tried niche AI and off-the-shelf AI, and they didn’t work.

Your systems are feeding into a central database and every pick is informing machines how to pick in the future.

Yeah. The funny thing is that almost every item we touch passes through a warehouse at some point. It’s almost a central clearing place of everything in the physical world. When you start by building AI for warehouses, it’s a great foundation for AI that goes out of warehouses. Say you take an apple out of the field and bring it to an agricultural plant — it’s seen an apple before. It’s seen strawberries before.

That’s a one-to-one. I pick an apple in a fulfillment center, so I can pick an apple in a field. More abstractly, how can these learnings be applied to other facets of life?

If we want to take a step back from Covariant specifically, and think about where the technology trend is going, we’re seeing an interesting convergence of AI, software and mechatronics. Traditionally, these three fields are somewhat separate from each other. Mechatronics is what you’ll find when you come to this show. It’s about repeatable movement. If you talk to the salespeople, they tell you about reliability, how this machine can do the same thing over an over again.

The really amazing evolution we have seen from Silicon Valley in the last 15 to 20 years is on software. People have cracked the code on how to build really complex and highly intelligent looking software. All of these apps we’re using is really people harnessing the capabilities of software. Now we are at the front seat of AI, with all of the amazing advances. When you ask me what’s beyond warehouses, where I see this going is really going is the convergence of these three trends to build highly autonomous physical machines in the world. You need the convergence of all of the technologies.

You mentioned ChatGPT coming in and blindsiding people making translation software. That’s something that happens in technology. Are you afraid of a GPT coming in and effectively blindsiding the work that Covariant is doing?

That’s a good question for a lot of people, but I think we had an unfair advantage in that we started with pretty much the same belief that OpenAI had with building foundational models. General AI is a better approach than building niche AI. That’s what we have been doing for the last five years. I would say that we are in a very good position, and we are very glad OpenAI demonstrated that this philosophy works really well. We’re very excited to do that in the world of robotics.

Covariant’s CEO on building AI that helps robots learn by Brian Heater 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.

Happy Tuesday Crunch!

To meet the changing startup landscape, we’re refreshing and reimagining TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in a big way, with more of what you love and new ways to accelerate your growth — new stages, new content, and new opportunities. Panzer breaks down what you have to look forward to in his post today — don’t miss it! Oh, and if you were laid off recently, we are offering a free Expo+ pass to TC Disrupt 2023. Join us!

— Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• It was only a matter of time: Zoom doesn’t want you to stray far from its platform and has added new features, including email, assistant and calendar, so that it can go head-to-head with Slack, Calendly, Google and Microsoft, Ivan reports. That’s a lot of sparring. We hope Zoom is up to the task.
• RIP: Natasha L makes her case for why “Twitter is dying.” We won’t spoil it for you, but it involves a certain person taking it over. If you need any further evidence, only verified accounts will show up in the “For You” section starting April 15. Yes, the people who paid $8 for the blue check.
• More layoffs: Manish reports that GitHub laid off “virtually its entire engineering team in India as the Microsoft-owned firm cuts its expenses amid weakening global market conditions.”

Startups and VC

Gotta love some solid startup drama, and Brian covers it in his summary of Turntable and all its iterations over the years: Turntable LIVE raises $7 million ahead of public launch, after years of co-founder disagreements and music licensing challenges.

We’ve all seen “Jurassic Park,” so we conclude that there’s nothing that could possibly go wrong from taking mammoth DNA and vat-growing mammoth burger meat. That’s right, a cultured meat firm resurrects the woolly mammoth so you can get a whole new (well, old) sensory experience, Paul reports. Personally, we can’t wait for dino-burgers next. Next step: Triceratops tri-tip, Stegosaurus steak and Brachiosaurus burgers all around.

And we have five more stories for you, home grown in small artisanal batches by your friendly, local TechCrunch writers:

• Growing humans: Haje reports how Mate Fertility finds fertile ground with its seed funding round.
• Growing portfolios: Paul reports that under the “high conviction, low volume” investor thesis, Playfair launches a $70 million pre-seed fund for European startups.
• Growing communities: Substack opens up a $2 million community fundraising round, Aisha reports.
• Growth for cat food: Christine writes how fresh funding gives cat food brand Smalls an avenue into retail for the first time.
• Growth for women founders: Dominic-Madori reports how the Tory Burch Foundation launches a tool to help women founders find capital.

Q1 VC results tread water, but that’s cold comfort for SaaS unicorns

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman/TechCrunch

As Q1 2023 draws to a close, Alex Wilhelm reviewed early data from PitchBook to get a feel for key VC trend metrics like deal count and total capital invested.

“The picture forming from Q1 2023 venture data is one of measured decline compared to the end of 2022,” he found.

“And March brought with it something akin to a boomlet in domestic venture activity, which could become an even brighter spot if the last bits of first-quarter data further bolster the month’s totals.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

• More dollars for AI: Kyle writes how generative AI continues to be the hot thing and how it’s attracting stacks of VC dollars.
• More dollars for fusion: Tim reports that fusion startup Type One Energy gets $29 million seed round to fast-track its reactor designs.
• How many dollars for Turo?: Alex runs the thought experiment to find out what Turo is worth.

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.

If you’re a fan of listening to music without words while you work, as Christine does, then Apple has a treat for you. Apple Music Classical is now available for download and includes over 5 million tracks, Ivan and Sarah report. Tweet at Christine and let her know your favorite piece. Hers is “Isle of the Dead, Op.29” composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff. It’s a delightful 19 minutes.

Also in today’s Apple headlines is the launch of Apple Pay Later, which enables users to split the cost of an Apple Pay purchase into four equal payments over six weeks without interest or late fees. Kyle has more.

Meanwhile, it’s time to take a walk on Amazon’s Sidewalk, a low-bandwidth, long-range network that the delivery giant opened to developers. Sidewalk can be used to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices and “developers will be able to check their local signal strength on a map to get a better sense of whether their devices will be able to connect to the network before they start working on a product,” Frederic writes.

And we have five more for you:

• Breaking up is actually easy to do: E-commerce giant Alibaba is splitting into six business groups in what Rita writes is the company’s biggest overhaul in 24 years.
• Hits keep coming: Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has found himself in another kerfuffle. This time he is charged for allegedly bribing Chinese officials. Jacquelyn and Alex have more.
• In the dark: Meanwhile, Tesla also finds itself in a mess. Lorenzo reports that it was found that hackers could remotely turn off lights, honk, and even mess with Tesla’s infotainment system.
• Fighting back: Annie has the latest on Meta’s woes in Kenya, where the Facebook parent is disputing it can be sued there again.
• Buy local: India’s efforts to have more iPhones manufactured locally has paid off with shipments of the phones more than doubling, Jagmeet writes.

Daily Crunch: Zoom’s new AI-powered features include whiteboard generation and meeting summaries by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

One of Breath of the Wild’s best features is coming back in a big way. In a new preview of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, producer Eiji Aonuma shows off 10 minutes of gameplay from the eagerly anticipated (to put it lightly) sequel to 2017’s hit.

The video dips into a little bit of low-level combat and includes some running around, but mostly it goes over new systems designed to encourage the kind of emergent gameplay that made Breath of the Wild such a joy to discover for so many people.

In the first game, you could sail high on the updrafts created by grass on fire, get struck by lightning if you were wearing metal armor or cook a steak by throwing meat on the ground near a volcano. Many of the game’s environmental features were interactive and its shrine puzzles in particular nudged players to test out potential combinations of abilities, objects and their properties to come up with clever solutions.

Happily, all of that looks to be back and then some in the new game. Breath of the Wild introduced Stasis and Magnesis, two abilities that invited players to bend physics and move stuff around in dynamic ways. In Tears of the Kingdom, we’ll be getting at least two new brand new tricks like those, one called Fuse and another known as Ultra Hand.

First, some bad news. The new gameplay video confirms that Tears of the Kingdom will again give Link flimsy, destructible weapons that explode after giving enemies a few whacks. The good news is that players can create their own weapons from items in the game world — and hopefully at least a few of those combinations are more durable than last time around.

With the new Fuse ability, Link can splice together a giant makeshift hammer using a branch and a boulder or grab a long stick and combine it with a pitchfork for a really, reaaaally long pitchfork (if this is Zelda humor, we’re here for it). Other combos are less obvious: Merging a monster eyeball with an arrow creates a homing arrow that can track your quarry and shoot it out of the sky.

A similar ability called Ultra Hand will let Link pick up heavy items and arrange them into something new. In the demo, Aonuma shows this off by creating a wind-powered airboat out of some big fans that happened to be laying around Hyrule and some logs. The same ability will apparently let players create all kinds of vehicles, including cars and flying machines.

Aside from the two new core abilities, Link won’t have to spend so much time slogging his way up mountains this time around. Aonuma demonstrated a new mobility trick that lets Link swim up through any space with a ceiling, including buildings and apparently the giant caves within the game’s many peaks. The emphasis on verticality tracks with the sky islands and otherwise very high up environments we’ve seen before in prior previews.

The new Tears of the Kingdom video packs a lot of promise into a brief 10 minutes. If you loved the environmental puzzle solving and clever interactions in Breath of the Wild, the upcoming game — due out on May 12 — looks like it will offer an even bigger scope of possibilities.

New ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ video shows Zelda doubling down on an interactive world by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

Kia revealed Tuesday the next EV in its portfolio, a three-row flagship SUV called the EV9 that is packed with tech and a key product in the company’s mission to reach annual sales of 1.2 million battery electric vehicles by 2030.

The South Korean automaker didn’t disclose pricing, but it did provide numerous details on the SUV, which will go on sale in selected global markets in the second half of 2023. And more specs may come our way next week when the Kia EV9 makes its North American debut at the New York Auto Show.

While Kia hasn’t listed every market that the EV9 SUV will be sold, it is certainly one made for North America. Kia has already gained U.S. customers with its full-sized Telluride SUV. Now it’s betting that it can land even more customers with a large all-electric SUV that is likely more affordable than other similarly sized EVs on the market today such as the Mercedes EQS SUV and the Rivian R1S.

The stakes are certainly high for the company; Kia CEO Ho Sung Song went as far as to call the Kia EV9 a flagship of its brand.

“In many ways we consider the Kia EV9 to be the new flagship for our brand,” Kia CEO Ho Sung Song said in a livestream that aired Tuesday. “While the Kia EV6 played an important role in repositioning the Kia brand following the launch in 2021, the Kia EV9 moves us further forward.”

Here are the features and tech that stood out in the all-electric Kia EV9 SUV.

The basics

Image Credits: Kia/screenshot

The EV9 is a three-row SUV based on the company’s Electric Global Modular Platform (E-GMP) that has a 122-inch wheelbase and an overall length of 197 inches, putting it about in line with other full-size SUVs on the market today including the popular internal combustion engine-powered Kia Telluride. The E-GMP platform is shared with Hyundai and is the underlying foundation of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 compact crossover.

The EV9 will be offered in a standard trim as well as a GT-line model design that includes a digital pattern lighting grille and other exterior features that distinguish it from its base model counterpart. Buyers will be able to pick from different electric powertrain configurations, including a rear wheel drive standard model with a 76.1 kilowatt-hour battery and RWD and all-wheel drive variants with a 99.8-kWh battery.

The RWD long range vehicle has an estimated range of 541 kilometers (or 336 miles) under the WLTP metric. (WLTP is typically more generous than the EPA estimates). It also comes equipped with a 150 kW electric motor that allows it to accelerate from 0 to 100 km per hour (62 miles per hour) in 9.4 seconds, according to the company. The standard RWD version of the EV9 also comes with a more powerful 160 kW electric motor that can accelerate from 0-to-100 km/h in 8.2 seconds.

The EV9 is also equipped with an 800-volt electrical architecture that allows ultra fast charging of about 239 km (or 136 miles) added to the battery in 15 minutes..

Digital services

Image Credits: Kia/screenshot

Kia will launch a store its calling the Kia Connect Store, where customers can buy digital features and services on demand. For instance, a Kia EV9 owner might decide after their purchase that they do want that remote smart parking assist feature. Now, they’ll be able to open the Kia app and select that item to upgrade the vehicle via an over-the-air software update.

Owners will also be able to upgrade the performance and lighting features.

Lighting

Image Credits: Kia/screenshot

Speaking of lighting, Kia is using the EV9 to launch what it calls a “digital tiger face.”

No, there are not any tigers on, or in, this vehicle. Instead, its a playful name for a new lighting scheme on the front grille. Adjacent to the two vertical headlamps, are two clusters of small cube lamps that creates an animated lighting pattern. Owners will be able to change the design of the digital tiger face.

Interior

Image Credits: Kia

Inside the Kia EV9 is a curved digital screen that extends from the driver seat across the center point.

The Kia EV9 also comes with a few interior options, including a seven-seater or six-seater configuration and a variety of second-row seat options.

One neat feature is the ability for the second-row seats — if they are the special “swivel” ones — to pivot 180 degrees to allow passengers to face each other. This option is meant to be used while the SUV is charging. The vehicle is also equipped with charging points and cup holders, including in the third row.

Kia is also leaning into the sustainability angle for this vehicle. But it appears to be more than mere greenwashing. The company is phasing out the use of leather and increasing bio-based materials such as corn, sugar cane and natural oils in its aim to increase the proportion of recycled plastics it uses to 20% by 2030.

The company is using 70 PET bottles in each EV9 as well as recycled fishing nets for the floor mats.

Power source

The Kia EV9 will also have vehicle-to-load capabilities, which is a fancy way of saying it can act as a mobile power source. The EV9, like its EV6 sibling, will be able to supply up 3.68kW of power.  That’s enough to power to charge a smartphone or laptop or even camping equipment “for the ultimate driving adventure,” the company said.

By the way, that data points tied to the 3.68kW of power pertains specifically to the European market, where the standard voltage is 230V. Data on maximum power varies by market, according to Kia)

ADAS

Image Credits: Kia

Kia is targeting an advanced driver assistance system in the Kia EV9 GT-line that allows for unsupervised hands-free driving on highways in select markets. The system, called highway driving pilot, would provide so-called Level 3 automated driving, which would theoretically allow for a driver to be hands off and eyes off in certain conditions.

To allow for that, Kia is adding 15 sensors, including two lidar, radar and cameras for a full 360-degree field of view that lets the system detect and react to the road and other users to prevent potential collisions.

The highway driving pilot (HDP) system will only be available in certain markets, according to the company.

There will be a number of other active safety features in the vehicle, including a rear cross-traffic collision-avoidance assist to prevent collisions with oncoming vehicles when reversing. The ADAS will also keep the vehicle in its lane, maintain speed and distance from vehicles in front of it and a detection system to ensure drivers are engaged.

The EV9 is set to make its inaugural physical debut at the Seoul Mobility Show 2023 later this month. It will then be showcased at this year’s New York International Auto Show in early April.

All the tech and features in the all-electric Kia EV9 SUV by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Just when the U.S. government was getting more comfortable with the concept of cultivated meat, the Italian government put forth a bill banning the use of lab-grown food.

The process of making cultivated meat includes a method, like precision fermentation in a laboratory, that uses animal cells without slaughtering the animals.

Reuters reported that the bill “aims to safeguard the country’s agri-food heritage,” according to the country’s agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, who also said, “Laboratory products in our opinion do not guarantee quality, well-being and the protection of our culture, our tradition.”

The bill will now go in front of parliament, and if passed, any violation of the law in the future could result in fines of up to €60,000 or about $65,000.

In a response to the proposed ban, Cellular Agriculture Europe called it “bad public policy,” and that it would “reduce consumers’ ability to choose the food they want,” especially new products for those “who are concerned about animal welfare and the environmental impact of their food.”

Currently, Singapore is the only country allowing sales of cultivated chicken. Good Meat was the first company to get approval to sell its cultivated chicken product there and received a U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance last week, joining Upside Foods, as the only two companies to move to the next stage of commercializing their products in the U.S.

Dozens of companies, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, are not far behind in getting cultivated, or cell-cultured, meat products on the market. In the U.S., these companies have to receive approval from both the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture before commercializing their products in this country.

If you have a juicy tip or lead about happenings in the venture and food tech worlds, you can reach Christine Hall at chall.techcrunch@gmail.com or Signal at 832-862-1051. Anonymity requests will be respected.

Italy’s ban on cultivated meat could set the industry back by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Lucid Group, the U.S. automaker that produces the luxury all-electric Air sedan, is cutting its workforce by 18% as part of a restructuring, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing.

The layoffs, which will affect 1,300 employees, will be completed by the end of the second quarter. Lucid expects to incur about $24 million to $30 million in charges connected with its restructuring plan, namely due to severance payments, employee benefits and stock-based compensation. The layoffs will be across the organization and will include executive positions.

CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson said in an email to workers that the restructuring is the result of its “evolving business needs and productivity improvements.” He said the move is aligned with a cost-reduction announcement made in late February. While the company has reduced costs, it was not enough to avoid layoffs, according to the email.

“Consequently, we’ve made the painful but necessary decision to let some of our talented team members go,” Rawlinson wrote, adding that impacted employees will be offered a severance package that includes access to career resources, Lucid-paid healthcare coverage continuation and acceleration of equity.

“We are also taking continued steps to manage our costs by reviewing all non-critical spending at this time,” he wrote.

Rawlinson said the decisions are designed to position the company to be “more resilient and agile” and strengthen the company for the long-term. He also said that Lucid still intends to launch the Gravity SUV in 2024.

Last month, Lucid reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 earnings that missed Wall Street expectations. The company also lowered its 2023 annual production target to 10,000 to 14,000, roughly half of the 20,000 to 22,000 deliveries analysts had expected for the year.

That was the third time in a year that the company lowered its production goals. In August, Lucid Motors slashed its annual production guidance in half due to what Rawlinson described as “extraordinary supply chain and logistics challenges.” Lucid lowered its production guidance from 12,000 to 14,000 vehicles to 6,000 and 7,000 vehicles for 2022. That’s just a quarter of the 20,000 luxury Air sedans the company initially planned to produce 2022. In February 2022, Lucid adjusted that loftier goal down to 12,000 to 14,000 vehicles.

Lucid to lay off 1,300 employees in restructuring by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Lockheed Martin announced today the creation of a wholly owned subsidiary called Crescent Space Services that will focus on infrastructure for the moon, the latest sign that the aerospace and defense giant is bullish on the future of a lunar economy.

The new venture will focus initially on a communications and navigation network in cislunar orbit its calling Parsec. The Parsec network will be owned and operated by Crescent, with Lockheed designing and building the spacecraft. The first satellite is anticipated to launch in 2025, timed to arrive in cislunar orbit prior to NASA’s third Artemis mission, which will land humans on the moon.

Lockheed installed Joe Landon as the company’s new CEO. Landon previously served as Lockheed Martin Space’s VP of advanced programs development, where he led strategy and business development for the company’s commercial space projects. Prior to that, he served as CFO of asteroid mining venture Planetary Resources.

Crescent was born out of a shifting demand from customers, Landon explained to TechCrunch. Over the past decade, customers – primarily NASA – started to shift from buying objects, like spacecraft, to buying capabilities.

“That created a new opportunity for Lockheed where we needed to adapt,” he said. “Lockheed Martin traditionally is a technology developer and manufacturer of really great systems. But what we needed and what the market is really demanding is a service.”

While Crescent is starting with the Parsec network, the company intends to eventually expand into providing other infrastructure services, like power and mobility. These services will likely benefit from Lockheed’s existing programs, like its autonomous moon rover in development with General Motor, and its initiatives on in-space solar systems.

Interest in a lunar economy has skyrocketed in the past few years. NASA has been a major driver of this interest, handing out major contracts to companies like SpaceX, Astrobotic and others for services spanning launch to payload delivery on the lunar surface. But if government initiatives are leading the charge, the private markets are not far behind: in a report published last year, McKinsey & Co found that the share of private investment into the space economy that’s focused on “lunar and beyond” initiatives has steadily risen, accounting for 10-15% of overall private investment into space-related companies.

Crescent is trying to get out ahead of this burgeoning market, Landon said. Once all the elements of infrastructure are in place, the company may even think of in-space services beyond lunar orbit.

“Once we’re set up on the moon, we can go beyond the moon,” he said. “If the market goes to need communications around Mars, for instance, we’d be really set up to provide that as well.”

Lockheed doubles down on lunar economy bet with new subsidiary Crescent Space Services by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

Saildrone has quickly risen to the surface of the growing field of autonomous seagoing vehicles — a category you could be forgiven for not knowing about, but which is increasingly important across numerous industries. Its latest vessel, the Voyager, strikes a balance between its shorter Explorer and large-scale Surveyor, and they’re already making one a week.

The Voyager is a 33-foot uncrewed surface vehicle or USV, intended for near-shore maritime operations like coastal and lake mapping. In addition to the expected sonar equipment, each craft is equipped with traditional cameras, radar, and “sub-surface passive acoustics” to help build a picture of the sea or lake bed down to a depth of 900 feet. It also integrates other improvements, like more power and a more consistent data uplink.

You can imagine how useful it would be to send one of these things around every month to provide up-to-date metrics on your harbor or channel. In addition to the ordinary changes that come with tidal action and redistribution of silt and soil, it could identify illegal dumping sites, drifting trash like tangles of fishing equipment, and other unwelcome developments.

Naturally there are security applications as well: “illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing” is a huge problem, especially given the fragile state of marine ecosystems right now. And more traditional law enforcement operations like combating smuggling would also benefit from a bit of all-hours surveillance.

It doesn’t just have to be a floating cop, though. The data provided by autonomous platforms like Saildrone’s is useful for research purposes. The various sensors on board can detect wave action, salinity, water temperature, and lots of other metrics that oceanographers, meteorologists and the like can’t get enough of.

Image Credits: Saildrone

And as near-shore industries like seaweed farms and fisheries multiply in the new blue economy, this data contributes to a more accurate picture of the ever-changing ocean. Saildrone vessels don’t need people on them, of course, which means they can spend lots of time at sea or at inhospitable locations like polar waters.

The Voyager has been undergoing testing since February of last year when the first prototype went into the water, and has been revised several times since — the company said it is really always in development mode as new technologies and use cases become available.

Saildrone is now moving into full production mode. The company has built 100 of its smaller Explorer craft since it was founded years ago, but now is ready to pump out a Voyager a week. To do so it must outsource manufacturing of the wing, keel, and hull to partners Janicki Industries and Seemann Composites, though the final vessel will be assembled and serviced at Saildrone’s main space in Alameda, CA.

Saildrone takes the wraps off its Voyager autonomous research vessel by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

As U.S. lawmakers move forward with their plans for a TikTok ban or forced sale, the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance is driving another of its social platforms into the Top Charts of the U.S. App Store. ByteDance-owned app Lemon8, an Instagram rival that describes itself as a “lifestyle community,” jumped into the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts on Monday, becoming the No. 10 Overall app, across both apps and games. Today, it’s ranked No. 9 on the App Store’s Top Apps chart, excluding games.

This is a dramatic move for the little-known app and one that points to paid user acquisition efforts powering this surge. Prior to yesterday, the Lemon8 app had never before ranked in the Top 200 Overall Charts in the U.S., according to app store intelligence provided to TechCrunch by data.ai.

The firm confirms that such a fast move from being an unranked app to being No. 9 among the top free apps in the U.S. — ahead of YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Facebook — implies a “significant” and “recent” user acquisition push on the app publisher’s part. Unfortunately, because the app is so new to the App Store’s Top Charts, third-party app analytics firms don’t yet have precise data on Lemon8’s U.S. installs, or how those installs have recently changed over the past few days.

But given the app was launched globally back in March 2020, what’s most likely is that it was quietly released on the U.S. App Store, but only for testing purposes. Then, sometime over the past few days it was more “officially” launched, meaning it was accompanied by this clearly sizable spend on paid discovery or app install ads.

Image Credits: Lemon8

According to app intelligence provider Apptopia’s data, Lemon8 debuted on both iOS and Android in March 2020 and has since gained 16 million global downloads, with Japan as its top market, accounting for 38% of its total installs. While the firm also doesn’t have a figure for its U.S. installs, it was able to estimate the app currently has 4.25 million monthly active users.

Apptopia noted it didn’t yet see Lemon8 having spent on paid search on either the App Store or Google Play, but cautioned it may have paid install campaigns that just haven’t populated in its system yet or spend that’s on networks it doesn’t have insight into.

However, we believe ByteDance might simply be leveraging one of its own channels to drive app installs: TikTok.

Over on TikTok, we noticed a number of creators recently began posting about Lemon8, with many new videos appearing in just the past 24 hours. Concerningly, many of their reviews are extremely positive but are not marked as sponsored content.

For example, says one creator, Gabrielle Victor speaking to her 435.3K followers, “it’s so f***ing cute. Aesthetically pleasing. It’s like Pinterest and Instagram came together and had a baby.”

Another creator, Passion Willems (73.9K followers) recommends, “if you haven’t heard of it, I recommend you run over to the App Store and download it!”

Other creators, though, are more suspicious about the TikTok community’s sudden interest in the new app. Ponders Alexandrea Brumfield, “is it a conspiracy that I’ve seen so many of these [Lemon8] videos back to back to back with the TikTok ban being in the news right now?”

Her concerns may not be unfounded.

Last month, Insider reported that ByteDance was quietly rolling out Lemon8 in the U.S. and U.K. and had been paying creators to post on the app to seed its initial U.S. content. The influencers had shared with the news outlet the steps they needed to take to receive payment for their posts. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of these new, overly positive TikTok videos about Lemon8 were also a form of paid influencer marketing on ByteDance’s part.

What makes us think that — beyond the timing, of course —  has to do with the language the creators in the Insider story were using to describe Lemon8 — for example, calling it a mix of Pinterest and Instagram. Now, that exact same description is being regurgitated by the TikTok creators who are publishing these overly positive videos.

In addition to the example quoted above, a scroll through videos matching a Lemon8 keyword search on TikTok has creators repeating the phrase “Pinterest meets Instagram” or “like Instagram and Pinterest had a baby,” while describing the app as “sooo cute.”

None of the creators we found posting these positive reviews disclosed if they had been paid to publish their videos.

After searching for the keyword “Lemon8” and then filtering for videos published in the last 24 hours, we encountered over 350 videos that matched the search term. A large number of them were positive reviews that push users to download the app. In fact, some creators even said they’re getting the app in case TikTok gets banned.

Of course, Lemon8 may not be a viable backup plan for a TikTok ban, as lawmakers could consider a wide-ranging set of restrictions on Chinese tech, including on mobile applications far beyond TikTok alone. But ByteDance is not above leaning on creators to make its case — the company sent influencers to Washington ahead of last week’s Congressional hearing to lobby on behalf of TikTok. But even beyond efforts with its direct involvement, a number of creators are frustrated with the national ban proposed by U.S. lawmakers — not to mention the clear lack of technical understanding demonstrated by the House reps questioning TikTok’s CEO.

Currently, the Lemon8 hashtag has 2.3 billion views on TikTok, however, this includes a lot of non-U.S., non-English language content from over a larger period of time.

TikTok ban backup plan? ByteDance-owned Instagram rival Lemon8 hits the U.S. App Store’s Top 10 by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

The fallout from Fortra’s mass ransomware attack continues to widen as the hackers claim a new victim: a children’s virtual mental health care startup.

In a data breach disclosure filed with the Maine attorney general’s office, U.S. healthcare giant Blue Shield of California confirmed that one of its providers, Brightline, had data stolen from data stored in its GoAnywhere file transfer tool.

Brightline, which provides virtual coaching and therapy to children, was identified by TechCrunch last week as a likely victim of the mass breach.

The breach notification confirmed that hackers — presumably the Russia-linked Clop ransomware gang that claimed to have breached over a hundred organizations by using an undisclosed security flaw — accessed and potentially exfiltrated the personal data of more than 63,000 patients.

Clop’s dark web leak site, which the gang uses to publish the stolen files unless a ransom is paid, says that the gang will leak the data stolen from Brightline “soon.”

Brightline has yet to publicly acknowledge the breach, either on its website or social media channels. Brightline spokesperson John O’Conner declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions, but did not dispute that the breach affects 63,000 individuals. It’s unclear how many of Brightline’s child users are affected.

In its breach notification, Blue Shield said that the breach affected includes patient names, addresses, dates of birth, gender, Blue Shield subscriber ID numbers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, plan names and plan group numbers.

Brightline is said to be one of 130 organizations hit by the Clop group, but not the only healthcare company. US Wellness, which offers corporate health and wellness programs, also confirmed that hackers had accessed the personal data of its users, including names, addresses, dates of birth, and member ID numbers.

The impact of the Fortra vulnerability on healthcare organizations is so widespread that it prompted the U.S. government’s health sector cybersecurity coordination center — or HC3 —  to issue a warning in February to help safeguard against Clop’s attacks.

Outside of healthcare organizations, the group’s ever-growing list of known victims includes the City of Toronto, Canadian financing giant Investissement Québec and Virgin Red.

Jodie Burton, a spokesperson for Virgin Red, told TechCrunch that it learned that attackers had “illegally obtained some Virgin Red files via a cyber-attack on our supplier, GoAnywhere” after being contacted by Clop. TechCrunch has heard from other victims that they, too, only learned that data had been stolen after receiving a ransom demand — despite Fortra having assured them that their data was safe.

Fortra spokespeople Mike Devine and Rachel Woodford have repeatedly declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions.

Children’s data feared stolen in Fortra ransomware attack by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

It’s a confusing time to be a crypto company. The markets are volatile and trading activity is shaky right now, but the biggest problem for crypto firms seems to be that there’s no clarity at the moment around the laws they’re supposed to be in alignment with.

Take, for instance, what the U.S. Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) considers crypto to be: In its lawsuit against the crypto exchange Binance and its CEO, the CFTC alleged the firm violated trading and derivative rules, and referred to the two largest cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and ether, as commodities.

Per the CFTC’s filing against Binance, the regulator said certain digital assets, including bitcoin, ether, litecoin, and “at least two fiat-backed stablecoins,” tether and the Binance USD, “as well as other virtual currencies as alleged herein, are ‘commodities.’”

The complaint also alleged that Binance and the respective parties charged “solicited and accepted orders, accepted property to margin and operated a facility for the trading of futures, options, swaps and leveraged retail commodity transactions involving digital assets that are commodities.”

This stance is “a significant issue if the same company [and] exchange is sued by multiple agencies for the same tokens,” Yankun Guo, partner at Chicago-based law firm Ice Miller, told TechCrunch+. “This stand is also a stark contrast to the position taken by the SEC and possibly weakens the SEC’s argument that the tokens are securities.”

The CFTC’s viewpoint diverges from another major U.S. government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which views most crypto assets (aside from Bitcoin) as securities.

Earlier this month, SEC Chair Gary Gensler told Bloomberg that the crypto market, while smaller than capital markets, is “not necessarily compliant” compared to traditional finance.

At the SEC, there’s “one goal,” Gensler said: “For them to come into compliance. […] They can call themselves crypto exchanges or lending or staking-as-a-service or other intermediaries. [Our goal is for them] to come into compliance and ensure that they don’t mislead the public or commingle the funds or take the publics’ funds and do things we don’t allow in our financial markets.”

Gensler compared it to how the SEC doesn’t allow the New York Stock Exchange to play with customers’ funds, make markets, run hedge funds or be in the clearing business. “We separate out those conflicts,” he added.

The CFTC and SEC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

So are cryptocurrencies commodities or securities? Well, it depends on who you ask. As someone who’s been covering this space, I can empathize with firms offering crypto trading on this, as it feels wishy-washy. Almost like if your mom told you one thing, but your dad told you another. Who are you going to listen to?

Are cryptocurrencies commodities or securities? Depends on which US agency you ask by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Google is introducing new ways for users to verify information on Search, the company announced on Tuesday. The search giant is launching new features called “Perspectives” and “About this author,” while also expanding some of its current tools, including “About this result.”

The new Perspectives feature is a carousel that will appear below Top Stories and showcase insights from a range of journalists, experts, and other relevant voices on the topic you’re searching for. The idea behind the feature is to give users a variety of noteworthy voices on a news topic to broaden their understanding of the subject matter. The carousel will launch soon in English in the U.S. and will be available on desktop and mobile, Google says.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also launching a new feature called “About this author” that lets users easily learn more about the authors behind the content they are reading. With this new feature, users will be able to find more information about the background of the authors that Google surfaces on Search. The feature is launching on Search results in English globally and on the Perspectives carousel in the U.S. in English.

The “About this author” feature is an expansion of Google’s current “About this result” feature, which first rolled out in 2021 in English. The company announced that it’s now launching the “About this result” feature globally in all languages where Search is available in the coming days. Now, all users will see three dots next to most results on Google Search. Tapping those three dots gives users details about where the information is coming from and how Google’s systems determined it would be useful for the query.

Image Credits: Google

In addition, Google announced that it’s making it easier for users to access its “About this page” feature starting today.

“When you click on the three dots next to a result, you can learn more information about the source and topic of a particular page,” the company said in a blog post. “Now we’re making this information even easier to access. Say you’re searching for a rainforest protection organization. Starting today, you can type in the URL of the organization in Google Search and information from About this page will populate at the top of Search. You’ll be able to quickly see how the website describes itself, what others on the web have said about a site and any recent coverage of it. From there, you can evaluate whether you want to visit the website and learn more. This feature is now available globally in English.”

Last August, Google rolled out advisories in Search results that are triggered when its systems don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available. The company is now expanding these advisories to languages, including German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese in the coming months. The idea behind these advisories is to provide context about the whole set of results on the page. It’s worth noting that you can always see the results for your query, even when the advisory is present.

Google also gave an update on its $13.2 million grant to the International Fact-Checking Network to launch a new Global Fact Check Fund, which was initially announced last year. The company says the fund will open in the coming days and support more than 130 fact-checking organizations from 65 countries covering over 80 languages.

Google Search is adding new ‘Perspectives’ and ‘About this author’ features to help users verify info by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Apple released the tvOS 16.4 update to the public yesterday, bringing various improvements to the system, including a new “Dim Flashing Light” feature. The new accessibility option can detect flashes of light or strobe effects and then automatically dim the display of a video.

The “Dim Flashing Light” feature is notable since it will likely benefit Apple TV users with light sensitivity or, possibly, users with epileptic seizures. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, 2.7 million Americans have epilepsy, and approximately 3 to 5% of them are photosensitive. Photosensitive epilepsy is when seizures are triggered by flashing lights, patterns or color changes. Flashing lights can also cause headaches and migraines.

The tvOS update is available for the Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD. It can be installed manually by going to “Settings,” “System” and then “Software Update.” If your Apple TV is set to update automatically, then it should be downloaded already.

The other updates weren’t as significant but included some performance and stability improvements.

Apple rolled out the tvOS 16.4 update shortly after tvOS 16.3.3, which fixed a bug that caused some Siri remotes to randomly disconnect from the Apple TV. When Apple released a new version of the Apple TV 4K in November 2022, there were customers that reported connectivity issues with the Siri remote. According to a Reddit user, the remote would disconnect from the Apple TV without explanation and would only work again if they did a full restart of their TV.

Apple tvOS 16.4 update gives light sensitive users a ‘Dim Flashing Lights’ feature by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Here’s another edition of “Ask Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

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Dear Sophie,

After three tries, I was finally selected this year in the H-1B lottery! What do we do next?

— Wondering Winner

Dear Sophie,

I’m on STEM OPT. My employer put me in this year’s H-1B lottery for the third time, but I wasn’t selected again! What do I do?

— Lottery Loser

Dear Wondering and Lottery,

Thank you both for reaching out to me! Since your questions are on the minds of thousands of others who are in the same situation, I wanted to address them together. My colleague Nadia Zaidi and I offer some guidance on both of these questions in this podcast.

Yesterday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it received enough electronic lottery registrations to reach the maximum total number of H-1Bs that can be allocated in the new fiscal year. All employers have been notified if their candidates were selected and the attorney and employer can download the PDF confirmation through the USCIS portal.

The selection notices started trickling in over the weekend, including on Saturday and Sunday, well before the end of the month. We don’t yet know how many H-1Bs were submitted in this year’s lottery, but based on the selection percentages, many experts are estimating that there could have even been more than last year’s record-breaking number of 483,927 for the 85,000 available spots, because selection rates for the master’s cap and regular cap both seem to have decreased for many colleagues in the field.

Let me dive into Wondering’s question first in a little more detail and provide some insight on what employers and beneficiaries need to do now for individuals who are selected. Keep in mind — this is only a stepping stone to having an H-1B, and getting selected means that you have the chance to apply, so you need to continue to pay careful attention to this process.

What do I do now that my H-1B registration was selected?

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

First of all, congratulations to you and your employer! This is a significant milestone for both of you. If you were an international student in the U.S., this amazing step might provide you with a little more ease, especially if you have gone through the lottery for multiple successive years.

You and your employer should familiarize yourself with the process and upcoming deadlines. Your employer will have at least 90 days, likely until June 30, 2023, to submit an H-1B application on your behalf to USCIS. This requires that you first get U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) approval of a Labor Condition Agreement (LCA) to include with the H-1B application. For the LCA, your employer agrees to pay you the prevailing wage based on your position and geographical location to ensure you are compensated fairly. Your employer also attests that hiring you will not have a negative impact on the wages and working conditions of American workers.

You’ll need to confirm key details, and I always recommend that all employers work with experienced immigration attorneys to file their H-1Bs — they are high-stakes and getting the details right matters. Some of the factors to pay attention to include where you are in the world and your international travel plans, how long you are maintaining status if you are in the U.S., whether you’re applying for a change of status or consular processing, and if you plan to work from home or have multiple worksites.

The earliest you can begin working on an approved H-1B is Oct. 1, 2023, the beginning of the federal government’s fiscal year. If you are an F-1 student on Optional Practical Training (OPT) or STEM OPT, which is the two-year OPT extension for STEM graduates, and your final year of eligible work authorization is scheduled to end before Oct. 1, you’ll be ok!

Ask Sophie: What to do if selected/not selected in H-1B lottery? by Jenna Routenberg originally published on TechCrunch