Hello friends, you have reached the end of the week. Congratulations. That’s an achievement worth celebrating, I’d say. And what better way to ring in the weekend than to wrap up the week with a tech line. This is Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s weekly roundup of news, where we highlight the most important, impactful, and otherwise notable stories of the past few days. We get it, you’re busy. Hence, a recap highlighting all the major events.
Before we get to the good stuff, a reminder that on May 17 TechCrunch Live, TC’s virtual speaker series, will feature Intel Capital’s Mark Rostick and Garima Kapoor, founder of MinIO, an enterprise-grade but open-source startup. , object storage solution. Next on the horizon will be TC City Spotlight on June 7th. Atlanta, which will host a pitch competition, a discussion on investing in the Atlanta ecosystem, and more. Last but not least is Disrupt in San Francisco (September 19-21), a conference full of expert-led sessions and interviews with the movers and shakers in the tech space. Mark the dates.
Now that that’s out of the way, here are the top headlines.
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Google I/O, recap: During the main day of Google I/O, the search and internet advertising giant released a rapid stream of announcements during its developer conference, including many revelations of the latest AI-related things it has been working on. If you didn’t have time to watch the two-hour presentation, the TechCrunch team took it and presented the story on new products and features, plus quick hits of the biggest news in an easy-to-digest way. – thin list.
Cleaning continues. Twitter is purging inactive accounts on its platform, which could free up long-coveted usernames, owner Elon Musk said in a recent tweet. While Twitter has promised for years to put more usernames back into rotation, it has yet to make any large-scale efforts to do so, despite inactive account policy on the site, which prompts Twitter users to log in at least every 30 days to avoid having their accounts permanently deleted.
Twitter’s new executive director. In other Twitter news, Elon Musk says he has found a new Twitter CEO. Musk did not initially specify who would fill the role, though The Wall Street Journal now reports that NBCUniversal head of advertising Linda Yaccarino is actively “in talks” for the role. In tweetMusk has announced that he will move from the company’s CEO role to its executive chairman and chief technology officer. A new CEO is expected to start in six weeks, according to Musk.
Leakage of health documents. NextGen Healthcare, a US-based electronic health record software provider, has admitted that hackers breached its systems and stole the personal information of more than 1 million patients. In a data breach notification filed with the Maine Attorney General’s Office, NextGen Healthcare confirmed that hackers accessed the personal information of 1.05 million patients, including approximately 4,000 Maine residents.
Employees who are quickly dismissed. Rapid, formerly RapidAPI, a startup that created a $1 billion API marketplace last year, has laid off 70 more employees, less than two weeks after it laid off 50% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned the An affected employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told TC that only 42 people remained at the company, down from 230 in April, reflecting an 82% drop in staff.
Meta contractors complain. Content moderators under Meta’s content review subcontractor Sama in Africa picketed the company’s headquarters in Kenya earlier this week demanding their April salaries. The 184 moderators are suing Sama for allegedly wrongfully firing them after Meta disbanded its content review team in March and Majorell, the social media giant’s new partner based in Africa, for blacklisting Meta- by order of
From Pokemon to Peridot. From the creators of Pokémon Go comes another mobile game that brings tiny creatures to our fingertips. Peridot. Like the Tamagotchi toy from the 90s, Peridot is an animal simulator, but it takes place entirely indoors augmented reality. You can feed, play, walk, breed, and interact with your Peridots, but don’t worry; if you take a break from the game, your creatures will not bake all over your screen and/or die.
Message, but different. “The medium is the message” is a popular saying, but entrepreneur Alexis Traina believes that the messages themselves, text messages to be precise, deserve attention as well. Traina is the CEO and co-founder of HiNOTE, an app that helps people create messages to put on a personalized background for anything from a wine glass to a branded letterhead notebook page. In an interview with TechCrunch, he said the idea is that he didn’t get up every day and wear green, blue, and gray, so why do our text messages stick to those colors?
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Need a hearing aid for your workday commute, or a shower, for that matter? TechCrunch has you covered. At Equity, the staff dove into Mayfield’s new funds, as well as how Wellthy is helping trustees feel less overwhelmed and the slowdown in tech company growth. The team at Found spoke to the co-founders of Juliet, who are redefining boxed wine. The Chain Reaction team released a bonus episode from a conversation with Nadya Tolokonnikova, creator of the protest art collective Pussy Riot, at NFT NYC in April 2023. The TechCrunch Podcast covered Google I/O, including tech, take part in talks and demos. . To top it all off, TechCrunch Live spoke about developing anti-aging therapeutics with Cambrian BioPharma co-founder James Payer and Future Ventures co-founder and partner Marianna Saenko.
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TC+ subscribers get access to the in-depth commentary, analysis, and polls you already know if you’re a subscriber. If you haven’t, consider signing up. Here are some highlights of this week.
Visions of a colorful future. How far has the psychoactive drug industry come in the past 12 months? Well, it depends on where you look. A recent survey shows that instead of just looking for attractive opportunities, investors and founders are increasingly setting their sights on building the foundations of an industry that can harness the power of psychedelics to transform lives.
AI search for food. News from Google’s AI-powered developer event this week makes it clear that we’re on the cusp of a new era in search. After Microsoft’s OpenAI technology builds on Bing, Google is experimenting with its own AI technology and opening up new ways to use search. It’s clear that we’re about to see the first major overhauls of how to find information on the Internet hit the market in a really long time.
Salesforce embraces generative AI. Salesforce is increasingly investing in generative AI as it becomes clear that the technology has the potential to change how we interact with software, allowing us to describe what we want instead of clicking or clicking.
Get your TechCrunch fix IRL! Join us at Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco this September to immerse yourself in it all. From keynote interviews to intimate roundtables to a packed startup expo floor, Disrupt has something for everyone. Save up to $800 when you buy your coupon now through May 15th, and save an extra 15% with promo code WIR. Learn more.
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