Netflix reported its Q4 2022 financial results yesterday, topping 230 million global subscribers, up from 223.09 million, thanks to the addition of 7.7 million subs. During the earnings call, Netflix co-CEO Sarandos said the company is “keeping an eye” on a free ad-supported TV (FAST) option, a move that many media companies are considering as … Read more
Even as VC funding dries up across the world, development finance institutions (DFIs) from Europe are looking to African startups to deploy their dry powder. British International Investment (BII), a DFI from the UK, told TechCrunch recently that it will deploy $500 million into startups by the end of 2026, and half of that amount … Read more
Due to a phenomenon called semantic satiation, if you repeat a word or phrase too frequently, it can sometimes lose all meaning. That’s what happened to “unicorn:” We wore it out like a pair of sneakers that leak in the rain but are too comfortable to part with. In fact, most of the startups in … Read more
While the bulk of commercial space launch activity is happening just south of its border, Canada is tired of watching from the sidelines and wants in on the action: The country’s federal transport ministry announced that it intends to support commercial space launches in the near future. The plan is for Canada to hose commercial … Read more
Starting on February 21, Amazon’s Music Unlimited streaming service will increase by $1/£1 in the U.S. and the U.K. The Amazon Music Unlimited Individual Plan is increasing from $9.99 (£9.99) to $10.99 (£10.99) per month, whereas the student plan is changing from $4.99 (£4.99) to $5.99 (£5.99) per month. The company noted the price changes … Read more
European startups have always suffered from the perennial startup problem: how to exit? However, in Europe the problem has always been particularly acute. How many large European industrial or corporate giants acquire or acqu-hire? Not that many and not nearly enough. It’s part of the reason so many European startups end up heading to the … Read more
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week, Natasha Mascarenhas, Mary Ann Azevedo and Rebecca Szkutak jumped on the mic to talk through a diverse news week. Shoutout to our producer, Theresa Loconsolo, for putting together a script, and TC’s Andrew Mendez for … Read more
It has been nearly four months since Brett Harrison stepped down as president of FTX US, the American division of the now-bankrupt crypto exchange. Now, he has raised $5 million for his own startup, Architect, which aims to make trading infrastructure for large crypto investors. “It’s a software company aiming to build institutional-grade infrastructure to … Read more
Merriam-Webster, the Encyclopædia Britannica subsidiary best known for its online dictionary, has acquired a popular Wordle clone called Quordle. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Little fanfare has been made around the acquisition, but the Quordle website now redirects to its own space on the Merriam-Website website, while Quordle creator Freddie Meyer quietly … Read more
Veronica Torres Contributor Share on Twitter Veronica Torres is the worldwide privacy and regulatory counsel for Jumio, where she provides strategic legal counsel regarding business processes, applications and technologies to ensure compliance with privacy laws. It’s true there has been progress around data protection in the U.S. thanks to the passing of several laws, such … Read more
Carrying cash used to be a thing, but now with credit cards, and more recently digital wallets, having more than a couple of dollars in your physical wallet is hard to come by. Unfortunately, that also leaves many of us ill prepared to show gratitude, especially when traveling, to give a cash tip to the … Read more
Cookie consent banners that use blatant design tricks to try to manipulate web users into agreeing to hand over their data for behavioral advertising, instead of giving people a free and fair choice to refuse this kind of creepy tracking, are facing a coordinated pushback from the European Union’s data protection regulators. A taskforce of … Read more
Shadow is making its first acquisition as it announced that it would snatch Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. Shadow is better known for its cloud computing service that works particularly well for cloud gaming. It also offers a cloud storage service based on Nextcloud. As for Genymobile, the French startup has been around for more … Read more
Alphabet, parent holding company of Google, has announced that it’s cutting around 6% of its global workforce. 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 … Read more
After promising a feature that lets you easily bookmark tweets, Twitter is now rolling it out on iOS. The new design displays the bookmark button under the expanded tweet view. Making it easier to add a post to your bookmarks. Before today’s change, you had to tap on the share button to open the sharing … Read more
As the market of social media influencers is getting bigger in India, the South Asian nation has introduced endorsement guidelines to limit unfair trade practices and misleading promotions on the web. On Friday, the Department of Consumer Affairs held a press conference to announce new guidelines to make it mandatory for social media influencers to … Read more
Entertainment company Fandom has laid off an unspecified number of employees across multiple properties including Giant Bomb, GameSpot and Metacritic. These properties are mainly focused on publishing content around gaming and TV shows. According to a report by Variety, the company employs around 500 people, and the layoffs have affected roughly 10% of its staff … Read more
Public universities across a widening swath of U.S. states have banned TikTok in recent months, and two of the country’s largest colleges just followed suit. The University of Texas and Texas A&M University are two of the latest colleges to take action against the social app, which is owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance. The … Read more
Swiggy plans to lay off 380 jobs and shut down its meat marketplace as the Prosus Venture and SoftBank-backed Indian food delivery giant looks to navigate the market downturn that has forced firms to become leaner and more disciplined. In an email to employees on Friday, Swiggy co-founder and chief executive Sriharsha Majety said the … Read more
Finding a product-market fit isn’t always easy, but when you are the end-user experiencing a real pain point, the solution might be more obvious. That’s the case for newly-funded Share Creators, a platform that helps game developers manage and store large media assets as remote work becomes increasingly common in the industry. Based in the … Read more
Twitterrific, one of the most iconic third-party Twitter clients, said today that it has removed the iOS and Mac apps from the App Store. Iconfactory, the company that made Twitterrific, said in a blog post that under Elon Musk’s management, the social media network has become “a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy … Read more
Genesis Global Trading, a subsidiary of the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) court late Thursday night. Genesis Global Holdco and two of its lending business subsidiaries Genesis Global Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific filed voluntary petitions under the bankruptcy code for … Read more
Google will continue to challenge the Indian antitrust watchdog’s ruling but will cooperate with the authorities “on the way forward,” it said Friday, responding to a high-profile decision by the top Indian court this week that is cornering the Android-maker into making a series of changes that could topple how it conducts business in the … Read more
A $32 million seed round may seem like a throwback to frothier times like . . .2021. But that’s how much PLAI Labs just raised in a deal led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). It a lot of moolah in a volatile market, even coming as it does from two separate a16z funds: the firm’s $600 … Read more
After cutting off prominent app makers like Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter today quietly updated its developer terms to ban third-party clients altogether. Spotted by Engadget, the “restrictions” section of Twitter’s 5,000-some-word developer agreement was updated with a clause prohibiting “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar … Read more
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Thursday! This week has just flown by, and we’re still reeling from the excitement that a company is leaning into compliments. Compliments? In this day and age? Is there actually hope for … Read more
In a financial filing on Thursday, T-Mobile revealed that a hacker accessed a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers. The telecom giant said that the “bad actor” started stealing the data, which includes “name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of … Read more
Copilot, a platform aimed at helping companies including marketing agencies, accounting firms and law firms run and grow their businesses, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by YC Continuity and Lachy Groom at a $100 million post-money valuation. Co-founder and CEO Marlon Misra said that the funds … Read more
It looks like Dungeons & Dragons just succeeded on a death-saving throw. After weeks of backlash and protests from fans and content creators, Wizards of the Coast — the Hasbro-owned publisher of Dungeons & Dragons — announced that it will now license the tabletop role-playing game’s core mechanics under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International … Read more
Tesla CEO Elon Musk oversaw a 2016 video that overstated the capabilities of the automaker’s driver assistance system, Autopilot, according to internal emails viewed by Bloomberg. The emails show that Musk even dictated the opening tagline of the video that claimed the car drove itself. Earlier this week, a deposition from a senior engineer revealed … Read more