Daily Crunch: Cell network provider Google Fi confirms customer data breach

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As January is coming to a close, the TechCrunch team is firing on all cylinders (do we still say that, in a time of electric cars? What is a better expression these days?), with a wall of amazing content for you to download straight into your brain. We’ve picked the cream of the crop, even as we are further confused as to why there was cream on the crops in the first place. In summary, idiomatic English continues to confound even the biggest language nerds among us. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Who’s calling?: T-Mobile’s data breach last week seems to have spilled over into Google Fi, which now says hackers accessed customers’ information. Carly has more.
• Home sweet HomePod: Brian plugged in the 2023 Apple HomePod and shares what he likes and doesn’t like about it.
• More layoffs: Cloud data management giant NetApp will lay off 8%, or around 960, of its employees across multiple geographies, Ingrid reports. And yes, it’s citing the economic climate as the “why.”

Startups and VC

There are some people on the internet who don’t want to be found. That seems to be the case for the elusive, mysterious owner of Stripper Web, a 20-year-old forum for exotic dancers and sex workers. With just one week of advance notice, the forum’s unknown owner announced that the website will shut down on February 1, erasing the decades-long digital footprint of a community on the margins. Amanda’s feature story tries to get to the bottom of things and is fantastic — give it a read!

This January, Germany’s largest vaccine maker, BioNTech, announced that it had agreed to acquire Tunisian-born and London-headquartered AI startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million, including a performance-tied £200 million tranche investment. Tage argues that InstaDeep’s acquisition is a classic case of an African startup gone global.

Not enough to keep you busy? Well, here’s another handful:

• At your cervix: Teal unwraps $8.8 million to build out a telehealth platform for women — starting with cervical cancer screening, Natasha L reports.
• Insects gettin’ busy: Romain covers that Entocycle grabs $5 million for its insect breeding technology.
• Call me on my fair phone: Natasha L also covers that Fairphone nabs $53 million in growth capital for “sustainable” consumer electronics.
• Tele-sexual health: Haje reports that TBD Health is rolling out at-home sexual healthcare to all U.S. states, raising $4.4 million.
• Your brain in the fast lane: Precision Neuroscience is making brain implants safer, smarter and reversible, writes Devin.

When to build a freemium plan and how to get it right

Image Credits: Jonathan Knowles (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

SaaS pricing comes in three flavors: the classic sales-led model, free trials that eventually force users to make a decision, or freemium plans that hopefully deliver enough value to keep users coming back.

“Given the obvious differences between these models, choosing one should be fairly straightforward,” writes Konstantin Valiotti, product director of growth at PandaDoc. “However, current market conditions do not support having just a single model.”

In this TC+ article, he explains how to identify the right time to roll out a freemium plan and, equally importantly, when not to. He also includes a tactical framework for developing freemium products that includes use cases for limited and unlimited usage.

“Every strategy is unique and depends on the company’s idea of how it wants to proceed,” writes Valiotti. “Therefore, you should consider freemium as an extension of your strategy and see if it is right for you.”

When to build a freemium plan and how to get it right

Three more from the TC+ team:

• Teaming with good advice: Haje goes deep on the team slide, and why it is the most important slide in a startup pitch deck.
• Your bankruptcy crypto is probably gone: Jacquelyn writes that if you lost your crypto amid Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings, you’re probably not getting it back.
• Let’s roll that back a bit: Eldar Tuvey explains how you can cut your SaaS spending by 30% in 2023.

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.

Finally someone is turning tablets into something you can use other than surfing the internet or watching Netflix. Haje has your look at Plugable’s new dock that turns your tablet or phone into a workstation.

Meanwhile, Rita ponders what would happen if China-based Baidu developed an answer to ChatGPT. Would it make a difference? And what kind of limitations would it have?

Now here’s five more:

• Extra extra, read all about it…on a personalized news reader: Sarah writes that Instagram’s co-founders are connecting the past and present of news content with a new social app for news reading.
• General Motors — Raw: GM is reaching into its pocketbook to the tune of $650 million to lock down lithium supply for its electric vehicles, Kirsten reports.
• Big changes for Big Tech: Natasha L writes that changes are coming for GDPR enforcement on Big Tech in Europe.
• Clipping jobs: In a second round of job cuts, Groupon laid off another 500 employees, Ivan reports.
• Exposed!: Taiwan-based automotive giant Hotai Motor enabled thousands of iRent customer documents to be accessible via the internet. Zack and Rebecca have more on how this happened.

Daily Crunch: Cell network provider Google Fi confirms customer data breach by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

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OpenAI releases tool to detect AI-generated text, including from ChatGPT

After telegraphing the move in media appearances, OpenAI has launched a tool that attempts to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text — like the text produced by the company’s own ChatGPT and GPT-3 models. The classifier isn’t particularly accurate — its success rate is around 26%, OpenAI notes — but OpenAI argues that it, when used in tandem with other methods, could be useful in helping prevent AI text generators from being abused.

“The classifier aims to help mitigate false claims that AI-generated text was written by a human. However, it still has a number of limitations — so it should be used as a complement to other methods of determining the source of text instead of being the primary decision-making tool,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We’re making this initial classifier available to get feedback on whether tools like this are useful, and hope to share improved methods in the future.”

As the fervor around generative AI — particularly text-generating AI — grows, critics have called on the creators of these tools to take steps to mitigate their potentially harmful effects. Some of the U.S.’ largest school districts have banned ChatGPT on their networks and devices, fearing the impacts on student learning and the accuracy of the content that the tool produces. And sites including Stack Overflow have banned users from sharing content generated by ChatGPT, saying that the AI makes it too easy for users to flood discussion threads with dubious answers.

OpenAI’s classifier — aptly called OpenAI AI Text Classifier — is intriguing architecturally. It, like ChatGPT, is an AI language model trained on many, many examples of publicly available text from the web. But unlike ChatGPT, it’s fine-tuned to predict how likely it is that a piece of text was generated by AI — not just from ChatGPT, but any text-generating AI model.

More specifically, OpenAI trained the OpenAI AI Text Classifier on text from 34 text-generating systems from five different organizations, including OpenAI itself. This text was paired with similar (but not exactly similar) human-written text from Wikipedia, websites extracted from links shared on Reddit and a set of “human demonstrations” collected for a previous OpenAI text-generating system. (OpenAI admits in a support document, however, that it might’ve inadvertently misclassified some AI-written text as human-written “given the proliferation of AI-generated content on the internet.”)

The OpenAI Text Classifier won’t work on just any text, importantly. It needs a minimum of 1,000 characters, or about 150 to 250 words. It doesn’t detect plagiarism — an especially unfortunate limitation considering that text-generating AI has been shown to regurgitate the text on which it was trained. And OpenAI says that it’s more likely to get things wrong on text written by children or in a language other than English, owing to its English-forward data set.

The detector hedges its answer a bit when evaluating whether a given piece of text is AI-generated. Depending on its confidence level, it’ll label text as “very unlikely” AI-generated (less than a 10% chance), “unlikely” AI-generated (between a 10% and 45% chance), “unclear if it is” AI-generated (a 45% to 90% chance), “possibly” AI-generated (a 90% to 98% chance)  or “likely” AI-generated (an over 98% chance).

Out of curiosity, I fed some text through the classifier to see how it might manage. While it confidently, correctly predicted that several paragraphs from a TechCrunch article about Meta’s Horizon Worlds and a snippet from an OpenAI support page weren’t AI generated, the classifier had a tougher time with article-length text from ChatGPT, ultimately failing to classify it altogether. It did, however, successfully spot ChatGPT output from a Gizmodo piece about — what else? — ChatGPT.

According to OpenAI, the classifier incorrectly labels human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time. That mistake didn’t happen in my testing, but I chalk that up to the small sample size.

Image Credits: OpenAI

On a practical level, I found the classifier not particularly useful for evaluating shorter pieces of writing. 1,000 characters is a difficult threshold to reach in the realm of messages, for example emails (at least the ones I get on a regular basis). And the limitations give pause — OpenAI emphasizes that the classifier can be evaded by modifying some words or clauses in generated text.

That’s not to suggest the classifier is useless — far from it. But it certainly won’t stop committed fraudsters (or students, for that matter) in its current state.

The question is, will other tools? Something of a cottage industry has sprung up to meet the demand for AI-generated text detectors. ChatZero, developed by a Princeton University student, uses criteria including “perplexity” (the complexity of text) and “burstiness” (the variations of sentences) to detect whether text might be AI-written. Plagiarism detector Turnitin is developing its own AI-generated text detector. Beyond those, a Google search yields a least a half-dozen other apps that claim to be able to separate the AI-generated wheat from the human-generated chaff, to torture the metaphor.

It’ll likely become a cat-and-mouse game. As text-generating AI improves, so will the detectors — a never-ending back-and-forth similar to that between cybercriminals and security researchers. And as OpenAI writes, while the classifiers might help in certain circumstances, they’ll never be a reliable sole piece of evidence in deciding whether text was AI-generated.

That’s all to say that there’s no silver bullet to solve the problems AI-generated text poses. Quite likely, there never will be.

OpenAI releases tool to detect AI-generated text, including from ChatGPT by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Pastor Faces Felony Charges For Dealing Drugs, Money Laundering

A Skagit County, Washington pastor is in hot water after being arrested with nearly three pounds of methamphetamine, fentanyl, and cocaine. Steve Parker, 57, who admitted "he leads a double life," bragged that he was a good drug dealer. That's a strange flex.

His double life.

Parker led a business helping people that suffer from addiction get housing and jobs while simultaneously living as a high-level drug trafficker dealing Fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, and meth.

HeraldNet reports:

Online, Parker lists himself as an officer of both Nest Ministries and Omni-Mana Services, according to the charges filed on Jan. 20. State filings show "Rev Steve Parker" is the head of Omni-Mana. Nest Ministries is inactive.

"Omni Mana helps people who have had substance abuse or mental health issues find employment," an online resource to connect people with medical help reports. "Helps those with felonies as well."

Both nonprofits are reportedly run out of a building on Olympic Avenue in downtown Arlington. Calls to Nest Ministries and Omni Manna Services on Monday were not answered.

He even has two homes. He's a real piece of work.

Skagit County drug squad detectives learned Parker has two homes, one on Highway 530 between Arlington and Darrington and another in Tulalip. Sources told them he dealt drugs in Snohomish, Skagit, and Whatcom counties.

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Spotify’s test of a Friends tab on mobile hints at expanded social ambitions

Spotify’s success with its year-end review known as Wrapped, designed for social sharing, may be pushing the company toward building more social experiences directly into its mobile app. The company for many months has been testing different iterations of a “friends activity” tab on its mobile app, and investors have now taken notice. During the streamer’s Q4 earnings call earlier today, the company was asked to clarify some details about its social plans. Though Spotify CEO Daniel Ek declined to comment on the specific feature the investor asked about, he didn’t shoot down the idea of Spotify becoming a more social platform. Instead, he replied that social could become “a meaningful driver of creating an even stickier and more engaging experience” for the company.

The exec was answering an investor question about Spotify’s recent tests of a “Friends tab” which appears in the app’s bottom navigation bar for some subset of Spotify’s users. Though only an experiment at present, the test already has gained many positive reviews from members of the test group.

On Twitter, for example, Spotify users have been asking the company to please add them to the test group if they didn’t have access to the feature, or have been complaining when they were removed from the test group and their Friends tab disappeared. Others have been asking Spotify when the feature would roll out more broadly.

So far, Spotify has not made any public announcements about its plans to launch a Friends tab on mobile, nor has it responded to testers’ questions.

The company, however, had signaled its interest in an expanded set of social features last year when it began testing a Community tab on its app. This variation offered a dedicated place to view what music friends were streaming on the app as well as what playlists they’d recently updated. Spotify’s desktop app includes a similar feature, but it has limited users’ access to that same activity on mobile devices.

Spotify is developing ‘Community,’ a new place to see your friends’ activity in the mobile app

At the time, Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch it was in the early stages of testing the Community feature and provided no other information about its plans.

Those tests have since evolved and the experience has been given its own “Friends” button in a prominent place in the app’s main navigation. According to images posted by testers, the Friends tab includes a “weekly picks” section at the top, in a Story-like format, followed by a feed of friends’ listening activity, much like you’d see in Spotify’s desktop experience.

PUMPED about this new friends tab on Spotify
Imagine if there was the ability to share songs with friends in-app… pic.twitter.com/ftSRxtOWas

— Danny + Desatnik (@datkeed) January 22, 2023

This version still may not be the final concept, nor is there any guarantee that the feature will definitely launch.

On the investor call, Ek declined to comment on the Friends tab test specifically, saying the company runs a lot of experiments and “what you probably have seen is one of those experiments — and since we’re not committed to rolling that out, I don’t really have much of a sort of comment.” But he didn’t downplay the company’s interest in social overall, suggesting it remains an area of interest.

“We’re committed to creating the best audio experience for consumers and creators in the world. And obviously, social could be a meaningful driver of creating an even stickier and more engaging experience, the CEO clarified.

The company, no doubt, has seen the traction its personalized year-end review called Spotify Wrapped brings to its service and wants to know if baking in more social features that are accessible year-round would have a similar impact.

As the company noted during earnings, its eighth version of Wrapped broke new records, as 156 million monthly active users engaged with its content — a metric that was up 30% year-over-year. Wrapped also boosted other areas of Spotify’s business, it said. The company saw its highest-grossing merch sales week for artists to date during the week Wrapped was live. And it drove a 2.7x increase in visitors to artists’ tour pages, while also growing user engagement across all regions and demographics.

While Spotify’s Friends tab isn’t an introspective look at your own listening behavior, it would be another way to engage with friends in a social environment. One earlier version of the Friends tab even showed a way to follow other users directly in the app, in addition to tracking new songs friends added to playlists, and those which they had “on repeat.”

hey @Spotify @SpotifyUSA pls put me back in the friends tab a/b test, I am begging you pic.twitter.com/IjP6t0mKtJ

— Katherine Champagne (@keccers) December 28, 2022

Spotify needs to build out its own social experiences as the youngest generation of consumers is shifting away from using traditional social networks, where they build out a friend graph, to instead spend more time on entertainment apps, like TikTok — which has proven to have powerful influence over music charts.

Although Spotify hasn’t prioritized its Friend Activity features for years, it has maintained a close relationship with Meta for social integrations. Spotify users’ social graphs today continue to rely on Facebook, in fact — even though many Gen Z users don’t even have a Facebook account at all. The companies also worked together in prior years, including in 2021 when they partnered on a mini-player that would stream Spotify from the Facebook app. Facebook, however, competed with Spotify on podcasts for a brief period before discontinuing a series of audio projects to focus instead on its metaverse efforts.

Social is an area where Spotify may be hesitant to rock the boat, given Meta’s competitiveness with any company that tries to build its own social graph. But it’s an area that’s ripe for development, as Apple has repeatedly failed to build social products around music over the years. Plus, it’s clearly something many users want to see in the app and one that plays into Spotify’s overall goal of offering a personalized experience for music fans.

Spotify’s test of a Friends tab on mobile hints at expanded social ambitions by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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Study: Red States Have Higher Murder Rates Than Blue States

A new study conducted by Third Way found that the murder rates in states that voted for Trump eclipsed Blue states that voted for Biden.

Actually, Trump-voting red states had a 40% higher murder rate that Biden's voting bloc.

Wait, what?

Has Fox News been lying to us?

Axios reported that , " Third Way's report analyzed homicide data for all 50 states from 2000 through 2020, using CDC data."

"Four reliably-red states consistently made the top of the list — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri."

Has George Soros purchased the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri right under Sen. Marsha Blackburn's nose?

Third Way then looked at homicide rates from the year 2000, and guess what they found.

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Meta starts testing ‘members-only worlds’ in Horizon Worlds

Meta is starting to test closed spaces called “members-only worlds” in Horizon Worlds, its social VR experience. The company has begun a limited alpha test to give creators the ability to grow and moderate their own communities. Meta has selected a small group of creators to build and obtain feedback about members-only worlds.

In a blog post, Meta explained that creators can hand-select members and offer them exclusive experiences. During the alpha test, each members-only world can have up to 150 world members and 25 concurrent visitors at any given time. With members-only worlds, creators can launch a dedicated space to do things like host a book club, gather a gaming group, organize a support group or just hang out with friends and family without having to worry about uninvited guests.

Image Credits: Meta

“Every community develops its own norms, etiquette, and social rules over time as it fosters a unique culture,” Meta explained in its blog post. “To enable that, we’ll provide the tools that allow the creators of members-only worlds to set the rules for their communities and maintain those rules for their closed spaces. Creators can choose whether or not to share their moderation responsibilities with other trusted group members and decide if they’ll allow members to visit the world without a creator or moderator present.”

The idea of members-only worlds in Horizon Worlds is likely a welcome addition for users of the platform. It’s no secret that Horizon Worlds can sometimes create unsafe environments for users. After reports that women were being groped and sexually harassed in Horizon Worlds, the company rolled out a “Personal Boundary” feature that creates a bubble of space with a radius of two virtual feet around each avatar. The new members-only worlds could be seen as another way for Meta to address these issues.

The launch of the new test comes as Meta expanded the availability of “personal space” in Horizon Worlds in September. Personal space gives users a place where they can hang out, play mini-games, or invite friends over before heading to an event.

Meta said last year that Horizon Worlds will be available on the web and mobile in the future. Now, the company says the VR experience will be available on these platforms “soon.” By launching Horizon Worlds on more platforms, Meta will make it a lot more accessible, as it’s currently only available on the company’s own Quest VR headsets.

Meta adds voice controls for Horizon Worlds, which defaults to live chat with strangers

Meta starts testing ‘members-only worlds’ in Horizon Worlds by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

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Rewind’s new app lets you ‘time travel’ through music from decades past

A new app called Rewind wants to make it easier for music fans to explore the top songs of decades past. Hoping to cater to consumer demand for nostalgic music experiences, Rewind allows users to “time travel” through the music charts from 1960 through 2010 to learn about how older songs have influenced today’s hits.

The app was built by developer Ziad Al Halabi, whose day job involves mobile app development at music streaming service TIDAL. The developer says he enjoys working on music apps, having earlier launched an audio player for musicians, Backtrackit, which gained some 2 million installs.

With Rewind, which originally began as a weekend project, the goal is to offer a portal to explore the older tunes that once ruled the top charts.

“[What] would it be like  if you opened your favorite music app in 1991? Or 1965?,” the app’s description asks. “What are the biggest hits at the time? Who are the top artists or the rising new ones?”

Image Credits: Rewind

For older music fans, those questions may be easier to answer. But Gen Z brings a new group of users who are exploring music through apps like TikTok, where a song’s release date doesn’t necessarily matter. Already, TikTok has proved successful in introducing younger people to popular tracks from past generations, like Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” — both of which went viral on the video app, breaking into the top charts years after their original run. And they are not alone.

This interest in older music dovetails with other Gen Z “nostalgia” trends, like their embrace of flip phones, Y2K fashion, wired headphones, disposable cameras, 90s music (a preference spanning generations, in fact), and of course, vinyl.

“I’ve always been interested in how music has changed over time,” said Ziad. “Rewind is a capsule of all the music, artists, and major events in one place. The app offers a new way of discovering new old music which is based on historical eras with a little hint of nostalgia,” he continues. “It’s exciting to see momentum with thousands of listeners, Rewind is perfect for tastemakers and fans looking to discover new music from the good old days,” Ziad added.

Image Credits: Rewind

The app isn’t just a way to browse the charts from years past, however. It takes things a step further and even includes some modern twists.

For starters, users can explore the music from a given year by top albums and top music videos, in addition to growing the top Billboard charts. It also delves into relevant trends from a given time period. For instance, browsing the year 1991 offers a selection of “grunge-defining records,” like Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten, among others. Other sections present tracks that saw major radio airtime that year, highly anticipated releases and newly formed bands that emerged that year, and so on.

In addition, Rewind features a “news” section that includes major events and moments from the year in question. It also includes ads that give it a retro feel. For example, in 1965, listeners will see ads for the first distortion guitar pedal while users browsing the 1980s might see ads for new synth instruments which helped shape 80s sounds.

For a bit of fun, the app leveraged ChatGPT to write short reviews for music albums in its “Weekly Discovery” feature and used the AI technology to put together mixtapes for different years by asking ChatGPT questions like “can you make me a mixtape of 90’s best guitar riffs?”

Another feature offers a way to scroll through a TikTok-style music feed that accompanies each year. Here, you can listen to song clips from the time period in a vertical feed. This particular feature could be better developed to include “like” or “comment” buttons, but for now you can play or pause the track or open the song directly in TIDAL.

Image Credits: Rewind

Not surprisingly, given Ziad’s job, Rewind integrates more deeply with TIDAL, allowing subscribers to stream tracks in full.  Explains the developer, this is because his work at TIDAL allowed him to easily access the API and the TIDAL catalog. But if Rewind catches on, he would like to add support for other music apps. However, even without a TIDAL subscription, users can stream the 30-second previews and scroll through the app’s TikTok-like feed.

“The feedback I’m getting from users is that despite not having a TIDAL subscription, it is still a fun experience to browse the different years, get weekly discovery of albums, scroll through the TikTok style feed,” Ziad tells us.

Launched last month, the app gained a few thousand downloads on its debut weekend and is slowly growing. It’s available as a free download on both Android and iOS and doesn’t currently generate revenue.

 

 

Rewind’s new app lets you ‘time travel’ through music from decades past by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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If, and only if, McDonald’s had an appetite for acquisitions

Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I’m back, I’m drinking an iced Americano maybe because I miss Alex, maybe because I just feel different today, and I’m ready to start our week together.

Here’s what I got into on today’s Equity Monday:

• Big tech: Marqeta’s nine-figure acquisition of a two-year-old fintech, and which bucket of deals I think it falls into – complete with a comparison of this deal and a hypothetical McDonald’s acquisition. Plus, Stripe’s whole 12-month timeline thing and my edit for your incoming thought pieces. 
• Big idea: My latest Startups Weekly column is all about the latecomer advantage. I talk about the idea, and its nuance, in the context of building startup rivals.
• Big innovation: We end with a look at Atomos, which landed $16 million to tug vehicles through space, and a bright spot of an analysis, coming from the TC+ world, on Black Web3 founders. 

As always, thanks for listening. Let’s end our start to the year strong! You can support me by following me on Twitter and Instagram. The show also tweets from @equitypod, so follow us there!

Equity drops at 10:00 a.m. PT every Monday and at 7:00 a.m. PT on Wednesdays and Fridays, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together, and more!

If, and only if, McDonald’s had an appetite for acquisitions by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

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Sorare teams up with the Premier League for its NFT fantasy football game

French startup Sorare has signed a four-year licensing partnership with the Premier League. This is an important move for the company as the English football league is one of the most-watched sports league in the world.

Sorare is a fantasy sports gaming experience based on NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. In particular, Sorare has partnered with many football leagues so that it can create trading cards representing football players.

Each card is registered as a unique token on the Ethereum blockchain. Sorare players can buy and sell cards from other players. They can then put together a lineup of five players and earn points based on real-life performances. Sorare frequently issues new cards on the platforms that users can buy to add to their personal collections — that’s how the company generates revenue.

And the startup has been quite successful so far. It raised a gigantic $680 million Series B round and signed partnerships with many clubs and football organizations including Spain’s LaLiga, Germany’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A. The Premier League is a nice addition to this list of organizations.

With today’s new partnership with the Premier League, Sorare users will find all 20 clubs on the platform. There will also be league-specific competitions.

“The Premier League is a truly global competition and has been the home to so many iconic moments and players over the last 30 years. As football fans ourselves, this partnership is something we’ve dreamt of since we founded the business,” Sorare co-founder and CEO Nicolas Julia said in a statement.

“It’s a major milestone for us as we pursue our goal to build a compelling global sports community for fans and we’re extremely proud to have now partnered with three of the biggest sports leagues in the world: the Premier League, NBA and MLB. We’re incredibly excited and can’t wait to see fans play with Premier League cards in our tournaments.”

As for sports fans who don’t particularly enjoy football, Sorare also teamed up with the NBA and MLB over the past few months. While MLB season hasn’t started yet, Sorare’s NBA game is already live. It works more or less like the fantasy football game.

Sorare teams up with the Premier League for its NFT fantasy football game by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

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Walmart-backed PhonePe’s nine-month 2022 revenue surged to $234 million

PhonePe clocked a revenue of $234.3 million in the first nine months of 2022, the most valuable Indian fintech startup has disclosed in a filing.

The nine-month financials marks a jump from the $201.6 million revenue that the Bengaluru-headquartered generated in the 12-month financial year period ending in March last year.

PhonePe, which is valued at $12 billion, has projected a revenue of $325 million for the calendar year 2022 and $504 million for 2023, according to a valuation report prepared by the auditing firm KPMG and filed by PhonePe. The auditing firm’s estimates relied on information provided by the PhonePe management, the document said.

The startup, backed by Walmart, doesn’t expect to turn EBIDTA positive, a key profitability metric, until the calendar year 2025, KMPG wrote in its valuation report. PhonePe’s financials and metrics from the valuation report have not been previously reported.

Image credits: PhonePe regulatory filing

At a $12 billion valuation, PhonePe is India’s most valuable fintech startup. The startup competes with Google Pay and Paytm. Paytm, which expects to reach $1 billion revenue by March this year, is currently valued at $4.1 billion.

PhonePe, to be sure, is the clear leader in the mobile payments market on UPI, a network built by a coalition of retail banks in India. UPI has become the most popular way Indians transact online, and processes over 7 billion transactions a month. Seven-year-old PhonePe commands about 40% of all these transactions.

A concern for PhonePe’s growth was Indian regulators enforcing a market cap check on each player, but the deadline for the new guidelines was extended last month and now won’t come into effect until 2025, giving PhonePe another two years of fast-growth.

Walmart-backed PhonePe’s nine-month 2022 revenue surged to $234 million by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

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China smartphone market slumps to 10-year low in 2022

After a decade of frantic growth, China’s smartphone market is hitting a speed bump as COVID-19 roils the world’s second-largest economy.

The country’s smartphone shipments dropped 14% year-over-year in 2022, reaching a ten-year low, according to research firm Counterpoint. It was also the first time that China’s handset sales had slid below 300 million units in ten years, according to Canalys. Even in December, which has historically seen seasonal jumps in sales, China recorded a 5% quarter-to-quarter decline in smartphone shipments.

The three-year-long stringent “zero-COVID” policy that disrupted businesses and dampened consumer confidence, coupled with macroeconomic headwinds, spelled an end to China’s years of double-digit growth. Troubles mounted when the abrupt relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions in early December resulted in a surge in cases, further adding pressure to the waning economy. Last year, China’s GDP grew 3%, its lowest in decades other than 2020.

Alibaba’s annual shopping bonanza in November offered some clues to China’s weakening spending power. The event, which is often compared to Black Friday and seen as a bellwether for the country’s consumer appetite, did not disclose its final sales number in 2022 for the first time since its inception in 2009.

There was one winner in this gloomy time. Apple finished the year with an all-time high market share of 18% thanks to “its aggressive promotions” and “resilient” demand in the high-end segment in China, according to Canalys. Its ascent also coincides with Huawei’s fall from grace in the premium handset market since U.S. sanctions cut off its access to high-end chipsets.

Apple’s relationship with China remains a delicate one. The country is not only one of its biggest markets but has been the manufacturing backbone that created the world’s most valuable company today. In the past few years, however, COVID-related disruptions, such as a rare worker protest at a major Foxconn plant that delayed production, prompted the hardware juggernaut to rethink its supply chain strategy. The Wall Street Journal reported in early December that Apple was looking to relocate some of its supply chains out of China to other parts of Asia, including Vietnam and India.

India, in particular, is expected to play a bigger role in Apple’s supply chains as the firm plans to expand its manufacturing capacity in the country to produce 25% of all iPhones by 2025, according to JP Morgan analysts.

In Q4, the top smartphone brands in China by shipment were Apple, Vivo, Oppo, Honor (which was spun off from Huawei following U.S. sanctions on the parent firm), and Xiaomi.

Apple limits AirDrop ‘Everyone’ option to 10 minutes in China

China smartphone market slumps to 10-year low in 2022 by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

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Eazy Digital helps Southeast Asia’s small insurers digitize their operations

Founded by two insurance industry veterans, Eazy Digital wants to give small insurance companies in Southeast Asia the same advantage as their larger competitors. Its SaaS platform lets insurers digitize many parts of their operations, enabling them to scale up more efficiently.

The Bangkok-based startup announced today it has raised $850,000 in an oversubscribed seed round led by Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Wing Vasiksiri and Sasin Bangkok Venture Club.

Eazy Digital was founded last year by Haprem Doowa and Maethavee Sukul. Doowa was previously co-founder and CEO of Frank Insurance, an online digital broker in Thailand that was acquired by Bolttech in 2021. Sukul was head of operations at Frank, Bolttech Insurance Broker and digital health insurance broker Benix.

Eazy Digital co-founder Haprem Doowa

Doowa told TechCrunch that while working together at Frank, he and Sukul “both realized that the insurance industry was plagued with manual work and quick home-built solutions.” Many insurance companies in Thailand manage their agents using a combination of Excel, Line chats and phone calls.

While larger insurance companies have the money and team members to build their own software, their smaller competitors, which Doowa said make up over 90% of insurance companies, struggle to digitize their operations. Eazy Digital’s goal is to give them a platform that is affordable and helps solve their scalability issues. It enables insurers to manage agents, operations, user referrals and engagement.

Eazy Digital’s competitors include eBao, Appman and ZA Tech, which also build software for insurers. Doowa said Eazy Digital differentiates by focusing on distribution and the efficiency of agency sales and customer referrals. “Both are revenue-earning for the companies which makes it easier for insurance companies to say yes to working with us,” he added.

The startup’s new funding will be used for marketing, hiring and product development with an eye on expanding to other Southeast Asian markets.

Armed with experience, insurtech MGAs are paving the way for insurtech 2.0

Eazy Digital helps Southeast Asia’s small insurers digitize their operations by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

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Traitor Trump Bashes 'Disloyal' DeSantis

CNN captured video of Trump on his campaign plane discussing his biggest rival for the Republican nomination for president at this present time, claiming Gov. Ron DeSantis owes his political success to him.

"So, Ron would have not been governor if it wasn't for me and that's okay," Trump said.

"Number one, he wouldn't have got the nomination and number two, he would never have beaten his Democrat opponent," Trump continued.

And then Trump turned into Lou Costello.

"So, then when I hear he might run, I consider that's very disloyal, but it's not about loyalty, but to me it is, it's always about loyalty, but for a lot of people it's not."

Huh?

Trump is just signaling to his MAGA cult to attack DeSantis.

Traitor Trump, who tried to orchestrate the overthrow of the newly elected president in 2020 (Joe Biden) by inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol, is crying about loyalty from Ron DeSantis?

Trump has been disloyal to the US Constitution and US Democracy every single day he held office.

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Chuck Todd Schools Jim Jordan On 'Raid' Of Trump's Mar-a-Lago

NBC host Chuck Todd confronted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) after he suggested there is a two-tier justice system for Republicans and Democrats because a search warrant was used to search former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate after he refused to cooperate with the Justice Department.

"You keep talking about this raid on Donald Trump," Todd told Jordan during an interview on Sunday. "There was nine months between the initial action the archives made for a request of documents before they even turned it over to the Justice Department. The subpoena was issued 60 days before they actually executed the subpoena. And more importantly, the only time the public found out about it is because Donald Trump told the public about it."

"It was actually a year and a half of Donald Trump not complying with any of the requests from National Archives," he noted. "A year and a half! This is not some sort of proof that somehow they've weaponized and are playing politics [at the Justice Department]."

"They raided Trump's home; they haven't raided [President Joe Biden's]," Jordan replied.

"Because Biden didn't defy a subpoena!" Todd shot back.

Jordan argued that Trump's documents were protected by a locked room and the Secret Service while Biden's were not.

"You do not seem to ever see the same conspiratorial problems when it's a Republican," Todd concluded.

Watch the video clip below from NBC.

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VC funding to Black web3 founders popped last year, bucking trends

Much hope remains after the crypto winter almost froze the sector: the Luna crash, the bankruptcy of Celsius and the arrest of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for alleged fraud. Then there was the venture pullback amid an economic downturn.

In 2021, web3 startups globally raised a record $29.2 billion. By 2022, that number dipped to $21.5 billion — though that’s still much more than the total $4.8 billion and $4.2 billion such companies picked up in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

Black people who invested in crypto were hit disproportionately hard during the winter, though many Black founders and investors who spoke to TechCrunch remain optimistic about the sector’s potential for the community and society overall. If anything, last year’s economic correction was necessary, they told TechCrunch.

“Bubble had to pop,” People of Crypto co-founder Simone Berry said. “It wasn’t sustainable and economic correction was needed. The downturn removed the bad actors who only entered the space for fast dollars. It created an opportunity to exit the hype cycle, clearing the way for development that will ensure the growth of the ecosystem in a sustainable way, adding value.”

Pryce Adade-Yebesi, the co-founder of Utopia Labs, agreed. “This period of time was a rightful consequence for a period of rampant speculation and grift,” he told TechCrunch. “This will be a great time to focus. Getting back to the reality of solving pervasive problems in the world; it’s an important change of pace for the space.”

Funding for Black web3 founders has only increased, and the crypto winter proved the most fruitful year. Crunchbase data shows that U.S. Black web3 founders raised $60 million (out of the $11.9 billion total given to all U.S. web3 startups in 2022). That amount is substantially higher than the $16 million such founders received in 2021, during crypto’s record-breaking year (U.S. web3 startups received $16.5 billion that year).

In 2017, they raised $11 million out of $1.03 billion, and in 2018, they raised basically zero dollars out of around $2.8 billion; note the vanishingly thin red line in the chart below. In 2019 and 2020 Black web3 founders raised $2.5 million and $4.5 million out of $2.4 billion and $3.2 billion, respectively.

Fundraising last year was hard for many Black founders, and many were impacted by the downturn, though it’s quite telling that Black web3 founders were able to pick up record sums amid an overall dip in the web3 funding market. It appears that investors, too, are in some ways bullish on Black founders, a change of tune in how such entrepreneurs are usually considered.

Data visualization by Miranda Halpern, created with Flourish

VC funding to Black web3 founders popped last year, bucking trends by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch

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LNMC With Joe Pisapia

Throw a rock in Nashville and you’re likely to hit a world class musician. Joe Pisapia is one of them. I’ve known him since he moved to town with his stellar band Joe,Marc’s Brother in the late nineties and since then he’s gone on to produce folks like Guster, Ben Folds Five, and K.D. Lang. he’s also one of the best guitarists this town has seen. I saw him play live the other night and figure it would be good to share him tonight. What you got?

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Those Kitty Litter Liars Are Full Of You Know What

Republicans have been putting educators, doctors and staff at children's hospitals and other Americans in danger by repeating what we might call a rural myth --that kids are choosing to identify as cats, so schools are indulging them by putting kitty litter in classrooms to be used as bathrooms.

Except it's a debunked and nefarious lie to anger the GOP base (gotta keep them angry so they keep voting and donating the rent money!) and cause some of the more loony members of their coalition--which is to say, most of them--to issue threats or worse based upon this falsehood.

It's bad enough when some no-name state rep repeats this idiocy. But now we have Hall of Fame football coach and longtime wingnut Tony Dungy sharing this garbage on Twitter.

Dungy's gonna get people killed with this crap. He eventually apologized (probably after his PR rep called him and asked him if he was insane) and erased the tweet, but the Internet is forever and it's out there for lunatics to share.

The really sad thing? Many classrooms do actually have pails as toilets--they are there to be used if a child has to go to the bathroom while in lockdown because some madman with an assault rifle might be hunting them. That's America 2023. Thanks, GOP.

In any case, watch the video from the Blue Amp Channel up above on Dungy, the kitty litter lies and the danger posed when conspiracies like these are shared by people with big microphones.

Subscribe to the Blue Amp channel here.

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Ex-Biden Aide Collateral Damage In GOP Hunter Biden Frenzy

A Korean-American woman is being baselessly smeared as some kind of Chinese agent because it helps advance the right-wing fever dream of destroying the Bidens.

It’s all part of the MAGA effort to dishonestly insert Hunter Biden into the small number of classified documents found in President Biden’s home and office and turn it into some kind of national security scandal – and the hell with the facts. And never mind that Donald Trump deliberately took hundreds of classified materials, stashed them in his country club and, unlike Biden, refused to return them.

As HuffPost explained, Kathy Chung was an executive assistant to then-Vice President Joe Biden and is now deputy director of protocol at the Pentagon. But in 2017, she helped pack up Biden’s office. Her attorney has said she was unaware of any classified material in the boxes. But Rep. James Comer, the new Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, is helping to validate and amplify right-wing media’s evidence-free suggestions she’s a Chinese agent involved in some big Biden-family plot.

Comer repeated the talking points in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo Wednesday and attempted to link the story to the president’s son Hunter Biden, saying “there most certainly is a connection” between the documents and the younger Biden’s business dealings in China.

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Stripe eyes an exit, Dell bets on the cloud, and Shutterstock embraces generative AI

Hey, party people, it’s Kyle, continuing to step in for Greg to write Week in Review as he spends time with his newborn. Dunno about y’all, but it’s been a week. I’m dead tired and thankful it’s over. But because the news never sleeps, I’m rallying with the help of a fourth cup of coffee. Wish me luck.

I’ve talked your ears off about it at this point, but I’m under contractual obligation (not really, but still) to mention TechCrunch’s upcoming Early Stage 2023 event in Boston on April 20. The one-day summit on startups will include advice and takeaways from top experts, plus opportunities to meet fellow founders and share your own entrepreneurial experiences. Don’t miss it.

On the subject of travel, it’s not too early to start thinking about this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which will take place in late September in San Francisco. Tickets aren’t available just yet, but they will be in the near-ish future. Sign up here for updates.

With the call to actions out of the way (phew), here’s this week in tech news!

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Stripe eyes an exit: Mary Ann and Natasha write that fintech startup Stripe has set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuing a transaction on the private market. The payments giant was founded in 2010, so the fact that it’s exploring avenues for exit isn’t entirely surprising. But Stripe hasn’t been immune to the global downturn, recently laying off 14% of its staff (around 1,120 people) and slashing its internal valuation multiple times. In a twist, Stripe reportedly tried to raise at least $2 billion in capital recently, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Dell bets on the cloud: Ingrid reports that Dell is making an acquisition to beef up its cloud services business — specifically its offering in DevOps. The company is buying Cloudify, an Israeli startup that has built a platform for cloud orchestration and infrastructure automation, sources say for as much as $100 million. The purchase comes as DevOps startups continue to attract attention from investors, with venture funding in the sector reaching $4 billion in Q2 2021, according to PitchBook.

Shutterstock embraces generative AI: As part of a partnership with OpenAI, the AI startup that recently attracted a multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft, Shutterstock this week rolled out a tool that lets customers create images based on text prompts. Powered by OpenAI’s tech, specifically DALL-E 2, the tool creates images that are “ready for licensing” after they’re made. That’s significant given that one of Shutterstock’s biggest competitors, Getty Images, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against Stability AI — maker of another generative AI service called Stable Diffusion — over using its images to train its AI without permission from Getty or rights holders.

Bidet brand buys shower startup: Harri has the scoop on Brondell’s purchase of Nebia, the techy showerhead startup backed by Apple CEO Tim Cook and a host of other big names, including Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia. Nebia stood out when it launched with pricey nozzles that blasted users with a fine mist while conserving up to 70% of the water a typical showerhead sprays out. Co-founder Philip Winter told TechCrunch this week that Nebia’s products, including those it made with Moen, have reached more than 100,000 homes.

An AI maestro, unreleased: An impressive new AI system from Google can generate music in any genre given a text description. But the company, fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it. Called MusicLM, the system was trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music to learn to generate coherent songs for descriptions like “enchanting jazz song with a memorable saxophone solo and a solo singer” or “Berlin ’90s techno with a low bass and strong kick.” Its songs, remarkably, sound something like a human artist might compose, albeit not necessarily as inventive or musically cohesive.

No rest for Musk’s Twitter: Twitter owner and self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk is facing a legal challenge in Germany over how the platform is allegedly failing to enforce its own rules against antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany — which has strict laws prohibiting antisemitic hate speech — making the Berlin court a compelling arena to hear such a challenge. For his part, Musk has repeatedly claimed Twitter will respect all laws in the countries where it operates, including European speech laws, although he has yet to make any public comment on this specific lawsuit.

Text till you drop: Walmart recently introduced a new way to shop via chatbot. Sarah gave it a go and found that the experience leaves a lot to be desired. She writes: “It felt like the process of ordering a few basic things has become an ordeal and has taken a lot longer than the traditional method of searching in Walmart’s app and adding things to the cart. If conversational commerce like this is the future, I’d say this is very much still a work in progress.”

Flutter toward the future: Flutter, Google’s open source framework for building multiplatform apps for mobile, web and desktop, is coming along nicely. Frederic writes that at a recent conference, the tech giant highlighted the latest version of Flutter, which brings massively improved graphics performance, the ability to more easily embed Flutter code into existing web and mobile apps and support for new architectures like WebAssembly and RISC-V.

audio roundup

For your listening pleasure, TechCrunch has a crop of compelling new podcast episodes in the queue (as is the case weekly, might I add). Over at Equity, the crew took the mic to talk through deals of the week, All Raise’s CEO departure, what Google’s antitrust lawsuit means for startups, how the downturn impacted the way companies are hiring and why femtech stood out in 2022. On Found, Darrell and Becca were joined by Klarna’s co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski to talk about how the company is expanding beyond the buy now, pay later space to become a neobank. And TC’s crypto-focused Chain Reaction spotlighted Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of the layer-1 blockchain Aptos, which is building infrastructure for web3 apps and products.

TechCrunch+

TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already one. If you’re not, consider signing up. I doubt you’ll regret it. Just check out the highlights from this week:

Salesforce under siege: Salesforce finds itself under threat from activist investor Elliott Management, which announced it was taking a multibillion-dollar position in the CRM leader. Ron examines what could be next for Salesforce as the company looks to cut costs and potentially sell unprofitable pieces of the organization.

Energy transition is a winner with investors: Tim looks at investments in the energy transition, which took off last year. Businesses, financial institutions, governments and end users around the world sunk $1.11 trillion into low-carbon technologies, which was just over 30% more than 2021 and the second year in a row in which the growth rate exceeded that figure.

Increased scrutiny: Rebecca writes that startups should expect more scrutiny from VCs on their hiring plans. Startups went on a hiring spree in 2021 as VC cash flowed and the job market was hot. But many overindulged in the talent pool and then had to make large cuts and layoffs in 2022.

Stripe eyes an exit, Dell bets on the cloud, and Shutterstock embraces generative AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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