With board’s dissolution, Elon is ‘sole director’ of Twitter

Elon Musk is now lord of the manor over at Twitter after the board of directors was dissolved as part of the merger agreement. While the state of affairs likely isn’t permanent, it does mean that as owner, director, and “Chief Twit,” he has what amounts to ultimate power to hire, fire, and change the social media platform.

In an SEC filing, the company detailed some of the many changes having to do with the controversial purchase of the platform by Musk:

[A]s a result of the consummation of the Merger, Mr. Musk became the sole director of Twitter. In accordance with the terms of the Merger Agreement, effective as of the effective time of the Merger, the following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the Merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou.

You may recognize some or all of those names, and certainly the Twitter board was quite a who’s-who of Silicon Valley. But their watch is finished and the deal they squabbled over is complete.

This is not some unprecedented move in a private takeover of a public company, just a part of the process. The board of directors represented the former shareholders and now those shares are owned by someone else. It’s not rare for a board to be cleared this way, and new ones installed as a decision-making and advisory body adjacent to company leadership. That said, because examples of private takeovers at this scale are so few, let alone examples with comparable context, it’s difficult to say with any confidence what would be “normal.”

The result, at all events, is that right now Twitter has what amounts to a dictator, and that dictator is reportedly using that power to enact sweeping changes like company-wide cuts and charging for verification.

Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

How Musk intends to structure leadership at Twitter is still something of a mystery, probably as much to him as anyone else, but as sole director it’s pretty much his prerogative. It may be that part of the complex and risky financing of the deal entails the installation of certain persons (or indeed kingdoms) in positions of real power and responsibility.

Of course Musk is not doing all this alone — he has reportedly surrounded himself with various cronies and operators who, though lacking any actual power as yet, are no doubt doing their utmost to influence the sole director.

With board’s dissolution, Elon is ‘sole director’ of Twitter by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

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Google gets into the Halloween spirit with a ghostly multiplayer interactive Doodle

If you want to take a break from work or the never-ending news cycle, Google is here to give you an escape. The search giant has launched a new Halloween-themed playable Doodle that opens up to a Snake-like game that you can play with your friends or random players from around the world.

The goal of the game is to collect as many wandering spirit flames as you can in two minutes and return them to their homebase. After time’s up, the team that has collected the most spirit flames wins. Here’s the catch: opponents can intercept spirits from one another as they bring them back to homebase. Ghosts that collect the most spirit flames will also unlock special powers, such as speed boosts and night vision.

You can host a game and invite up to seven friends to play with you via a custom invitation link or choose to play with randomized players. Google says the team that developed the Doodle build several systems to enable this multiplayer gaming, all running on the Google Cloud Platform. The team utilized Open Match, which is an open source matchmaking framework cofounded by Google Cloud and Unity.

Google often uses its Doodles to commemorate historical dates and figures, but sometimes uses the feature to add a bit of fun when it comes to holidays. The new multiplayer Doodle is the sequel to Google’s “Great Ghoul Duel Doodle” from 2018. The 2022 version includes new characters, game maps, special power-ups and more.

Google gets into the Halloween spirit with a ghostly multiplayer interactive Doodle by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

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How to effectively manage a remote team during wartime

Alex Fedorov Contributor

Alex Fedorov is CEO and founder at OBRIO, an IT company with Ukrainian roots that develops products in mobile applications, web products and SaaS.

Business owners always say that each company has to live through a real crisis before it becomes a real business. All big companies we know have experienced a few big crises during their lifetimes, and they are still in the game. There are a lot of studies about crisis management on the web, but none of them tell us how to manage a company during times of war.

Our company had never seen a real crisis before February 2022. However, even before we did, I always told my team: “Every company has its time in the sun and a time of crisis.”

When the Russo-Ukrainian War began on February 24, all Ukrainian businesses faced a crisis. I’ll use our example to explain how we dealt with it.

Here are six tips for effectively managing a team during a war.

Establish an emergency communication channel

In such times of upheaval, people will require a lot of up-to-date information about what is happening. When people don’t know what’s happening, there arises a vacuum that can be filled with rumors or distorted news.

To avoid this, you must establish a special communication channel that’s active around the clock. Slack notifications, for example, can be automatically turned off outside of working hours, so make sure you utilize a channel that your team uses most often so they are less likely to miss important notifications.

This might seem like an easy and pretty obvious step, but it is the most efficient way to help your team when they’re feeling lost or disoriented, which is only natural when there’s a war raging around them.

Communicate with your team twice as often

Training to manage stress, anxiety and personal finance will help your employees build the needed knowledge and respond to tough situations.

Great leaders communicate with their people, and we must all remember that “overcommunication is good communication.”

For us, this saying has never been more correct. Communicate as frequently as there are updates on the issue but not less than twice a day. Additionally, follow your usual rules for team communication: Be honest, empathetic and humane.

Finally, when there’s a serious crisis, most people’s critical thinking faculties can be hindered. In such situations, you may have to over-explain things to your team more than usual. Do not shirk this responsibility. If your team needs its hand held, be there to hold it. It’ll pay off in the long term and help you stay in control from the early days of the crisis until things calm down.

Stop investing in R&D and get people back to work ASAP

As a leader, you must save your business, as it is something people rely on in times of uncertainty. The first thing to do here is to save as much cash as you can in order to stay in business as long as you can. That often means cutting back on non-essential spending. This can be a tough decision, but it is a sacrifice you may have to make.

After our team was in safe locations, the best way forward was to get them back to work and help them calm down. It sounds strange, but this is the best way to direct the anxieties and nervous energy of war. At work, where everything is known, prescribed and straightforward, people find calmness and a continued sense of purpose.

In my experience, the first wave of crisis is the most difficult because of the high levels of uncertainty. However, once you get over that phase, there will be fewer variables, which is when you return to investing activities if they are still feasible.

Use your standard remote-work policy

When the war broke out, it was very difficult to manage the team and reestablish our business processes. So we waited to do it after our team was evacuated and relocated safely.

Proven remote policies were a lifesaver when our employees were not in their usual environments. Nobody discounts the value of team spirit, so invest in it more since people will need each other’s support at a much greater degree during times of great strife. Among online team building activities, AR activities proved to be an amazing mood enhancer.

Conduct special training to support your team

Crises, thankfully, are rare, but that also means people often do not have enough knowledge to handle the loads of unusual information they’re bombarded with in such situations.

In such situations, you should:

• Educate people by conducting special training with the help of experts. Training to manage stress, anxiety and personal finance will help your employees build the needed knowledge and respond to tough situations. The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications has created a guide titled “Psychological support during the war,” explaining how to spot and assist with mental health problems.
• Invite successful and respected people to share positive thoughts on the situation and perhaps explain how they’ve faced especially tough times. Authority bias is real and it works as a morale booster when a team needs direction and a sense that things will turn out to be fine.
• Share relevant positive news to cheer up your team and create a vision of a better future.

Tie business goals to social initiatives

When war broke out, people wanted to help. This was good, but we realized it can affect focus on work and could eventually lead the business to an even more profound crisis. In such times, put your over-explanation tool from Step 1 to work and educate people on how your company’s success benefits society.

As a result of what your team accomplishes at work, your company can invest more resources in charity initiatives when growth or profitability is maintained or improved. As a consequence, your team can do more and have more resources to do something significant for society.

This should have no effect on your existing OKR system because your company’s goals will stay the same. However, the team perks have changed — instead of a nice barbecue, you will now invest saved money in something beneficial to the wider society. Statistics show that when a company leads with purpose, 76% of respondents are more likely to trust that company.

Volunteering has become an essential component of our team’s operations. For instance, we arranged contributions, looked for equipment, supplied soldiers and helped secure supplies for people in disaster zones.

Each company will face a crisis caused by a unique combination of factors. Still, the tips I have provided here are applicable to almost any problematic situation. Do not forget to maintain a strong leadership position and stay empathetic with your team.

How to effectively manage a remote team during wartime by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

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Money Fellows, an Egyptian fintech digitizing money circles, raises $31M funding

Egyptian fintech Money Fellows has raised $31 million in what it describes as the first close of its Series B investment. The round, which the startup expects to top up in the coming months, was led by CommerzVentures, Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP) and Arzan Venture Capital.

Other participating investors include Partech, Sawari Ventures, Invenfin, National Investment Company (NIC), 4DX Ventures and P1Ventures. Money Fellows has raised $37 million in total funding since its inception.

Money Fellows’ premise is the digitization of money circles or what’s commonly known as the Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCAs), a system where a group of people agree to contribute money for a specific period, thereby saving and borrowing together.

ROSCAs, which Money Fellows CEO Ahmed Wadi says is a $700 billion opportunity globally, are quite popular in over 90 emerging and developing markets with several names: Esusu or ajo in Nigeria, Kameti or chit fund in India and Gameya in Egypt. But it wasn’t in either of these countries that Wadi first tested Money Fellows, it was in Germany, where he lived at the time. There, Wadi found it difficult to access financial services because he lacked a credit history. He thought by replicating the gameya system in the European nation, he could provide an alternative financing system for people like him. However, adoption wasn’t significant there nor in the U.K. which was his next stop.

“Germany didn’t have this culture and at some point, it felt like it made sense to go to the U.K. where they have Asians, Africans, and Arab communities that traditionally use this model,” said Wadi. “But we found out people didn’t need it because they had an advanced financial system.”

On the other hand, Egypt has a functioning ROSCA system, and Wadi, being from the country, chose it as his third try in 2017. He launched the platform a year later.

Here’s how ROSCAs work. Let’s say 10 people come together and agree to pay $1,000 monthly for ten months. At the end of each month, a member gets $10,000 and it keeps rotating until everyone receives their payout. This system works best with a tight-knit of friends or family because it can be risky when strangers are involved. However, this limits offline ROSCAs in that participants may find it difficult to access more capital. But with Money Fellows, people have a broader pool of participants — each passing through a credit assessment process — around Egypt so that they can form and join ROSCA groups through its app. Similar players globally include Pakistani fintech Oraan and U.K.-based StepLadder.

Oraan raises $3M to increase financial inclusion among Pakistani women

Money Fellows classifies its users as borrowers, savers, or planners depending on where their position is in a ROSCA cycle and when they receive a payout. It charges a one-time service fee of about 6% to users who choose its early spots; the percentage decreases down the line and turns to incentivized interest paid to users at the end of the cycle.

“People looking to borrow can find slots on our platform. People are looking to save too. So if you are a slot number one, you’re a pure borrower, so we charge a fee. If you’re a slot number two, we charge you slightly less. It decreases the more you’re willing to wait until the end of that ROSCA, where we incentivize the users with one of the most attractive saving incentives in the country.”

Any fintech business that involves lending in one form or another has to deal with defaults. Money Fellows doesn’t have it differently. Its conscious design also factors in such cases and has made provisioning and reserve requirements to ensure that customers keep getting paid even when other participants miss their targets. According to the chief executive, Money Fellows sets aside reserves for every new ROSCA launched and, complying with a provisioning schedule, covers any defaults from those funds.

“The good thing with ROSCAs versus consumer finance is that not everyone has equal credit exposure. So if your slot number five, for instance, when you get $10,000, you only need to repay $5000 because you historically paid $500 in the past five months,” he said. “That’s why we’re more conservative. We don’t limit people to only amounts. We also restrict them to specific slots because we know which slots carry more or less risk. That’s another beauty and how we control defaults using Rosco as the financial Engine versus the typical consumer and microfinance model.”

Image Credits: Money Fellows

The fintech also includes a B2B play where it partners with various merchants in Egypt to sell their products within the app so its customers can get discounts. The fintech generates a commission from markup on these products in addition to charging fees in its ROSCAs. It plans to offer more financial services such as buy now pay later, pension, and cards, where the four-year-old fintech plan to make interchange fees.

Money Fellows has over 4.5. million registered users on its platform; however, only 7% are monthly active users. The average payout ticket per user is around 23,000 EGPU ($1,100). The company, which regards itself as “one of the favorite financial apps for Egyptians,” claims to have experienced an 8x year-over-year growth.

Wadi said Money Fellows’ plan with the funding is to accelerate growth by diversifying its portfolio of services and expanding its product offerings across the B2C & B2B segments, as well as its geographical expansion across Africa and Asia. “To be honest, this model has yet to be cracked globally. It took so much time to develop our product and technology to ensure ROSCAs were fully completed while onboarding the right mix of borrowers, savers and planners, the CEO stated. “This was our key focus over the past couple of years, so now it’s the time to grow, and so a big chunk of what we’re raising is to aggressively grow or scale a lot faster than what we have done and then hopefully try to replicate this in other markets.”

Hangwi Muambadzi, a venture partner at CommerzVentures, speaking on the investment, said: “Rotating Savings and Credit Associations have been deeply embedded in emerging markets across the world for centuries. It is brilliant to see this new digital ROSCA-driven model [Money Fellows] emerge from Africa, creating a trusted model of delivering financial solutions and setting a new standard on using localized solutions to solve for global opportunities.”

Money Fellows, an Egyptian fintech digitizing money circles, raises $31M funding by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

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Zebra Labs raises $5M to help Chinese celebrities enter the metaverse

In June, Chinese pop-punk singer Wowkie Zhang released a music video where he encounters a virtual character in a hyper-colored, animated world that is reminiscent of Pixar films. The avatar, sporting Gen-Z-styled silver hair, a yellow and black oversize sweat, and baggy pants, makes hip-hop moves to Zhang’s catchy, light-hearted tune.

The virtual character isn’t a one-off creation; instead, Zebra Labs, which produced the video, is turning him into a piece of reusable intellectual property that can be bought as NFTs on marketplaces and appear in other virtual occasions like video games. The startup is waiting for the bull market to return to launch the NFT project, Scarlett Li, founder and CEO of Zebra Labs, tells TechCrunch.

The aim of Zebra Labs is to “create intellectual property that’s deeply integrated with content” and “run virtual idols like celebrities,” says Li. Some of the avatars it creates are based on real-life stars, while others are original characters. To generate revenues, Zebra Labs cultivates an audience for its idols through short films, images, and social posts and in turn monetizes the fan base. It also licenses its virtual idols to partners for a fee.

Here’s Zebra Labs trying to build a fan base for Zookie, who makes a cameo in Wowkie Zhang’s music video, by churning out Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese version) clips of the character:

Zookie teaches you how to quickly become a guitarist.#NFT pic.twitter.com/4segAs1RKK

— ZebraLabsNFT (@ZebraLabsNFT) October 27, 2022

NFT, which is already being widely used in authenticating IP rights, can be used to better engage fans, reckons Li, who previously helped organize some of China’s largest music festivals. “When you reach 30 years old, you lose interest to explore music, so a virtual environment can jumpstart visualization [of music] again.”

NFTs also give emerging musicians a more direct avenue for income. In China, music distribution is in the grip of music streaming giants owned by Tencent and NetEase. These platforms tend to allocate user traffic to musicians already with a lot of fans, “so to live well as a musician, you need to have a million followers,” says Li. “NFTs can change that.”

As a veteran of music festivals, Li is excited about the prospect of online concerts. She’s benchmarking against Ariana Grande’s Fornite concert, in which the singer descends into a colorful island in her virtual manifestation with a shimmering silver dress and a glowing white ponytail. Zebra Labs is in talks with several gaming firms to launch virtual concerts for Chinese artists inside a Minecraft-like game and a metaverse platform by 2023, Li says.

Zebra Labs recently raised $5 million to advance its metaverse vision. The funding came from the Chinese gaming firm NetDragon and the Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo. Onboarding a Japanese investor, according to Li, can help the startup learn from the country’s long history of IP management, which is exemplified by the success of virtual idols like Hatsune Miku. The company is also backed by SOSV, the VC firm known for its network of accelerators.

Following its collaboration with Wowkie Zhang’s music video, which has garnered some 40 million clicks across an array of online channels, Zebra Labs has five other artists in the pipeline. It’s also planning to release a digital twin of Zhang by the first quarter of 2023.

Metaverse app BUD raises another $37M, plans to launch NFTs

Zebra Labs raises $5M to help Chinese celebrities enter the metaverse by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

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Elon Musk refutes Twitter layoff timing to affect year-end compensation

Elon Musk, Chief Twit, has refuted claims from a New York Times report this weekend that states he plans to lay off employees before Tuesday, November 1, thus cutting staff off from receiving stock grants as part of their compensation.

In response to a tweet from Eric Umansky, deputy managing editor of ProPublica, that said Musk was “making sure to fire people at Twitter before part of their year-end compensation kicks in on Tuesday,” Musk said: “This is false.” He didn’t provide any clarification about what, specifically, was false.

This is false

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2022

Umansky’s tweet included a screenshot of a highlighted portion of the NYT story that also noted stock grants make up a significant portion of an employee’s pay, and by laying off workers before that date, Musk may avoid paying the grants.

Musk did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for clarification on whether the layoffs will affect stock compensation. He may very well have been refuting the entire NYT article, which stated Musk is said to have ordered job cuts across the company, citing “four people with knowledge of the matter.” But that seems unlikely, given the layoffs that are already underway.

Previous reports said Musk would layoff 75% of Twitter’s staff, but last week when the executive visited Twitter headquarters, he said those numbers weren’t correct. Still, reports have been surfacing about various layoffs at the social media company, including of top Twitter executives like CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde.

Musk’s $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter went through late on Thursday last week. The New York Stock Exchange stopped trading Twitter’s stock on Friday morning, where it had been listed since 2013. Twitter will officially be delisted from the stock exchange on November 8.

Current shareholders will be paid $54.20, Musks’s buying price, per share. It’s not clear how Twitter’s now-private status will affect current employees with stock grants.

Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

Elon Musk refutes Twitter layoff timing to affect year-end compensation by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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Remote work is here to stay. Here’s how to manage your staff from afar

Over the last two and a half years, remote and hybrid working has become the norm — a majority of employed Americans have the option of working from home for all or part of the week, and 87% of workers who were offered remote work embraced the opportunity heartily.

While some companies are pushing for a return to the office, today’s strapped labor market is giving employees more power to push back for remote, or at least flexible, jobs. This isn’t just a pandemic response anymore — it’s a way of life, and it has the potential to make some businesses better. People who work from home have been reporting an uptick in their productivity levels without the distractions that come with an office — Oh, it’s Beth’s birthday. Cupcakes in the kitchen! 

But both employers and employees have reported some downsides to remote work. Isolation can make people feel lonely and disconnected, leading to mental health issues. Learning and collaboration have taken a hit without the human element of being in the same room. And it can be difficult to create and maintain a company culture remotely.

Luckily, some seriously smart people have thought hard about how to address these challenges and make it work. We put a few of them onstage last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, and while you can watch the whole video, here are some of their best insights.

Be hyper-intentional when coming together IRL

Two and a half years into the pandemic, people are “actually clamoring to spend more time together,” said Adriana Roche, chief people officer at Mural, during a panel discussion at Disrupt.

Ironically, one of the main solutions to the woes of remote work is finding ways to bring staff together IRL. That might mean a couple of times per week in the office if everyone lives in the same city, but if the team is fully remote, companies have to be more intentional with how they plan monthly or quarterly off-sites.

Remote work is here to stay. Here’s how to manage your staff from afar by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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3 founders discuss how to navigate the nuances of early-stage fundraising

Fundraising isn’t a monolithic event but rather a series of meetings and pleasantries, each with their own vibe and nuance. Yet many pieces of fundraising advice to founders paint the process with a broad brush.

We heard from three founders at TechCrunch Disrupt last week: Amanda DoAmaral, co-founder and CEO of Fiveable; Arman Hezarkhani, founder of Parthean; and Sarah Du, co-founder of Alloy Automation, each of whom has raised in the extreme highs and lows of last 18 months. They spoke about navigating the process, what worked (and what didn’t) and how to customize your pitch to navigate the many subtleties of fundraising.

For DoAmaral, it was important to spend time researching which investors may actually back her company. She said she’s had investors take meetings with her due to a warm intro despite having no actual intention to invest.

“My co-founder and I got in a car and drove down to Tennessee thinking we’re gonna get this check. And this guy didn’t even trust me to like, be an attendee at this event. They’re not writing the check,” DoAmaral recalled. “People are not going to take me seriously if they’re not going to see me as someone that is their equal at all.”

Du added that performing due diligence on potential backers beforehand is helpful, not only to find out whether they might actually invest in the company, but also if they will be good to work with. This is especially true for founders raising at the early stages who are looking at a long relationship ahead.

3 founders discuss how to navigate the nuances of early-stage fundraising by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

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Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase, Meta’s in trouble and it’s time to admit self-driving cars ain’t gonna happen

Hey, folks, welcome back to another edition of TechCrunch Week in Review, the place where we point you to the hottest stories of the past sevenish days. I’m stepping in front of the laptop for Greg Kumparak this week, but don’t fret, he will be back soon.

If you want this goodness in your inbox every Saturday, head on over here to sign up. Now, let’s get to it.

most read (Elon edition, somewhat)

Elon did it: He bought Twitter. The $44 billion acquisition closed this week and on day 1, the platform’s new owner “cleaned house,” Taylor and Amanda write, firing CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde. The purchase capped off months of ups and downs, and this week was no different. Darrell rounded up some highlights.

Elon’s layoff about-face: While Elon Musk immediately fired some folks at the top, earlier this week in a reversal from his layoff declaration last week, he said he won’t actually lay off 75% of Twitter’s staff — or 5,600 people — writes Rebecca, citing a Bloomberg report.

Apple’s Elon problem: Darrell’s headline says it all, really: “Twitter’s Elon problem could soon become Apple’s Elon problem, too.” At issue is that Apple updated its developer guidelines this week, one of which “seeks rent on revenue made by social networks around promoted posts.”

Argo AI shutdown: Autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI, flush at launch in 2017 with $1 billion, has shut down. Its parts, writes Kirsten Korosec, are “being absorbed into its two main backers: Ford and VW.”

Speaking of autonomous vehicles: After the Argo AI news hit, Darrell took to the site to explore the fact that, no, autonomous vehicles just aren’t going to happen.

MrBeast’s worth: Amanda asks if MrBeast, or 24-year-old YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, is worth the $1.5 billion he’s valuing his business at.

Meta is in trouble: That’s the headline. Meta reported its third-quarter results this week and they weren’t great. As Taylor writes: “With the Instagram portion of the business not looking so hot lately, Meta has quintupled down on the metaverse without examining if it even knows what users want at all these days. And after changing the name of the company while ruining a perfectly fine word in the process, there are no easy take-backs.” Meta really was a perfectly fine word.

Google Pixel 7’s “dumb” flaw: Haje took a picture through an airplane window and noticed a reflection caused by the reflective chrome surrounding the phone’s camera lens. “It’s a pretty common use case for most photography applications, which makes it all the harder to grok why Google went out of its way to make that experience worse.”

audio roundup

• On Equity this week, we share with you one of Natasha Mascarenhas’s Disrupt panels. She talked to Chief co-founders Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers about the future of their private membership club for women in leadership positions.
• This week on Found, Darrell and Jordan sat down with Shanthi Rajan from construction management software company Linarc to discuss breaking into a slow-changing industry, building a team with talent across the globe and working with customers to build the most useful product possible.
• And on Chain Reaction, Anita and Jacquelyn chat about Apple’s new App Store guidelines, Reddit’s foray into the NFT space and whether the U.K.’s new prime minister will live up to the hype he’s received from the crypto community.

techcrunch+

5 tips for launching in a crowded web3 gaming market. Contributor Corey Wilton explains the steps that will set you apart when looking for capital.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Palau Project. Haje usually passes on tearing down pre-seed rounds, but he went for it this week with the Palau Project, which was founded by professional kite-surfer Jerome Cloetens, who is taking on climate change.

Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase, Meta’s in trouble and it’s time to admit self-driving cars ain’t gonna happen by Henry Pickavet originally published on TechCrunch

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This Week in Apps: Elon buys Twitter, new App Store rules, gambling ads backlash

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters.

Top Stories

Musk buys Twitter

It’s official, Elon Musk now owns Twitter. In typical Musk fashion, the transition has been nothing but chaotic, with the deal closing just ahead of the deadline set by the Delaware Chancery Court — the court where Musk was planning to try to exit the deal by claiming Twitter had misled him about the number of bots on the platform. (He was really looking to get the price down, of course!) In any event, the Telsa and SpaceX exec now has a new toy and everyone is waiting to see what comes next. Earlier, Musk had hinted at layoffs, then later retracted his statements, saying he wouldn’t fire 75% after all. However, he did immediately clear out the C-suite, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde — a sign that he’s planning to fill out Twitter’s top ranks with execs who will do his own bidding and not fight for the Twitter of days past.

Still, Musk’s talk about a Twitter that’s more permissive of “free speech” doesn’t quite align with his message to advertisers posted shortly after the deal’s close: He promised marketers that Twitter can’t turn into a “free-for-all hellscape.” That’s clearly a tacit acknowledgment on Musk’s part that advertisers don’t want to post their content next to hate speech-filled tweets. And despite Musk’s plans to grow Twitter’s subscription business, around 90% of Twitter’s revenue today comes from advertising. Given what he had to pay to own Twitter, Musk probably doesn’t want to have to pay to keep it running, too.

App Store Review Guidelines now give Apple a cut of NFTs, in-app advertising

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Along with the launch of iOS 16.1, Apple also introduced new App Store Review Guidelines. Among the major changes were two new rules designed to give Apple a bigger slice of the NFT market and Meta’s core advertising business.

The company said apps will be allowed to list, mint, transfer and let users view their own NFTs, but clarified that owning an NFT could not be a shortcut to unlocking any more features in an app. In other words, the ownership of an NFT shouldn’t be a way to route around Apple’s in-app purchases. In addition, Apple said NFT apps can’t display external links or other calls-to-action to purchase NFTs — that can only take place through Apple’s own in-app purchases system, as well.

This change is not all that surprising. As the web3 market grows, Apple wanted to find a way to stake its claim on the revenue and transactions that are occuring inside these new apps. Plus, it’s a better consumer experience for NFT marketplace apps to not just function as a showcase for users’ purchases, but as a place where users can actually transact.

The other big rule adjustment, however, is a bit more startling. In a bold move, Apple essentially said it deserves a cut of Meta’s ads business as well as any other social app. The new rule around social media apps now states that purchases of “boosts” have to flow through Apple’s in-app purchase system.

This could impact any app that sells the ability to boost a post to a wider audience, like Meta (Facebook, Instagram), TikTok, Twitter, dating apps and others. Meta, of course, took significant issue with this change, saying that Apple’s policy undercuts others in the digital economy after Apple had previously said it wouldn’t take a share of developer ad revenue. While Meta isn’t exactly a sympathetic player here, it’s concerning that Apple has decided it can now tax advertising inside iOS apps at the same time it runs its own expanding ads business. That seems like a move regulators will need to look into asap.

App Store gambling ads backlash

Speaking of Apple’s ads business…The company’s App Store ads platform expanded this week to include new ad slots like the main Today tab and a “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of individual app listings. The slots are available in all countries as of October 25, except China. The ads have a blue background and an “Ad” label to differentiate them from other listings.

Developers, however, were immediately disturbed by the instant deluge of gambling ads that appeared marketed alongside their own, including against kids’ applications and, in at least one case, a gambling addiction recovery app. This was a poor look for Apple. After all, the gambling category itself is already controversial — many developers would rather not share an app marketplace with these often predatory apps in the first place, much less have them advertised alongside their own.

Apple at least moved quickly to respond to the backlash by “pausing” gambling ads and a few other categories on App Store product pages, but the company didn’t say how long this pause would last or what it planned to do about the situation in the long term.

Apple pauses gambling ads on App Store product pages after developer outcry

Spotify accuses Apple of anti-competitive behavior, this time around audiobooks

Just ahead of its Q3 earnings, Spotify published a blog post that again accused Apple of anti-competitive behavior with regard to its launch of audiobooks in the U.S. On an accompanying website, Spotify noted that its app update to include the audiobook expansion was rejected three times without “clear direction” as to what needed to be changed to come into compliance. The site details Spotify’s criticisms of Apple’s platform, explaining how Apple requires audiobook purchases to use Apple’s own in-app purchases — or, if selling elsewhere, prevents Spotify from telling users why, where or how to make those purchases outside of iOS.

Because Spotify wants to avoid the 30% IAP commission, it doesn’t let users buy audiobooks in its app. Instead, users select the book they want to purchase and are emailed a link that points to a website where they can complete the transaction.

“The Audiobooks purchase flow that Apple’s rules force us to provide consumers today is far too complicated and confusing — confusing because they change the rules arbitrarily, making them impossible to interpret,” Spotify’s blog post stated.

The company has regularly battled with Apple over its App Store policies but is sometimes seen as an unsympathetic victim due to its size, revenues and its role in moving the music industry to streaming, which artists say doesn’t pay.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Image Credits: TechCrunch

• Apple released iOS 16.1, iPadOS 16.1, macOS Ventura and watchOS 9.1. The updated software delivers new features like iCloud Shared Photo Library, Continuity Camera, Stage Manager for the Mac and iPad, Live Activities, Apple Fitness+ for iPhone and more.
• Apple expanded its App Store ads platform to include the main Today tab and a “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of individual app listings in all countries on October 25, except China. The ads have a blue background and an “Ad” label to differentiate them from other listings.
• SKAdNetwork 4.0, which lets advertisers measure ads’ success, became available in iOS 16.1 and iPadOS 16.1 this week.
• Apple also released the first betas of macOS Ventura 13.1, iOS 16.2, and iPadOS 16.2 which included the new Freeform app, announced at WWDC. The app is a whiteboard app that lets you create sketches notes, files, documents and more, which can be accessed across devices.
• Apple reported its Q4 earnings with iPhone revenue up 9.67% YoY to $42.63 billion, Mac up 25.4% to $11.51 billion, but iPad revenue down 13.06% to $7.17 billion. Wall Street was expecting iPhone revenue of $43.21 billion, sending the stock down in late trading. Other products were $9.65 billion (up 9.95%) and the Services division, which includes the App Store, was up 4.98%.

Platforms: Google

• Google filed a brief opposing Epic and Match’s recent motion to amend and expand their antitrust claims in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit against the Android maker. In it, Google disputes that its incentive program for developers to publish to the Play Store would prohibit developers from creating competing app stores, as alleged. It also noted the motion from Epic and Match comes too late, after the December 3, 2021 amendment deadline.
• Google hosted its Android Developer Summit where it announced the first stable release of Compose Material 3, the library that allows developers to build Jetpack Compose UIs with Material Design 3.
• The company also announced updates across three main areas of Jetpack: architecture libraries and guidance, application performance and user interface libraries and guidance. It noted that 90% of the top 1,000 apps use Android Jetpack.
• Google introduced a Gradle Bill of Materials (BOM) specifying the stable version of each Compose library. The first BOM release, Compose October 22, contains Material Design 3 components, lazy staggered grids, variable fonts, pull to refresh, snapping in lazy lists, draw text in canvas, URL annotations in text, hyphenation and LookAheadLayout. And it launched the first alpha of Compose for Android TV.
• Android Studio got updates, too, including updated templates for Wear OS. And Google launched a stable Android R emulator system image for Wear OS.

E-commerce & Food Delivery

• The FTC sanctioned Uber-owned Drizly, an alcohol delivery service, and its CEO Jason Rellas for data security abuses that saw the personal information of the company’s 2.5 million customers exposed. Drizly will have to implement a security program, destroy unnecessary data, implement new security controls and train employees and cybersecurity.
• Amazon began letting select U.S. customers pay with Venmo on its website and in its mobile app, with plans to roll out the support to all U.S. customers by Black Friday.

Blockchain

• Twitter began testing a blockchain-agnostic tool that allows users to display their NFTs in tweets in partnership with Dapper Labs, Magic Eden, Rarible and Jump.trade. The feature is only available to select users at this time.

Fintech

• PayPal added support for Apple Passkeys on iOS, iPadOS and macOS, with more platforms to come. Passkeys are a new industry standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium — in partnership with Apple, Google and Microsoft — that are designed to replace passwords.

Social

• New analysis indicates India’s homegrown TikTok clones, like Moj and Josh, haven’t been able to replicate TikTok’s success in the country following its ban, leaving Instagram and YouTube to take over the short-form video market locally.
• Meta added Reels to Facebook Groups, noting that most Facebook users are members of at least 15 active groups and that there are 100 million-plus group joins every day.
• Snap reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth ever in the third quarter. The social app maker missed analyst expectations with $1.13 billion in revenue, versus $1.14 billion expected, leading the stock to drop from $11 to $8 in late trading on the day of the earnings announcement. DAUs, however, were up 19% YoY (up 53 million) to 363 million in Q3. The company said it also plans to close its San Francisco office, which was only lightly used due to remote work policies.
• The Snapchat app rolled out Director Mode, a feature offering TikTok-like tools including a green screen, quick edit and camera speed features, as well as a BeReal-like dual camera mode.
• Pinterest reported its Q3 revenue was up 8% YoY to $684.6 million, above estimates of $666.7 million. However, global MAUs remained flat YoY at 445 million, above estimates of 437.4 million. The stock jumped 11% on the news.
• Meta announced its Q3 earnings with revenue down 4% YoY to $27.7 billion, net income down 52% YoY to $4.4 billion, DAUs across its apps up 4% YoY to 2.93 billion. The stock dropped 25% on the revenue decline as investors voiced concerns about how much Meta is spending on its metaverse ambitions.

Meta is in trouble

Dating

Image Credits: Bumble

• Bumble open sourced its AI, Private Detector, which the app uses to detect unsolicited nude images. (Get it?) The app gives the user the choice as to whether or not to open the image when a potentially lewd photo is detected. Now other apps can access the same technology.
• Match-owned dating app Hinge will add a profile verification feature in November that will ask users to take a video selfie in the app as part of a crackdown on scammers.

Messaging

• Telegram said it plans to auction usernames via the TON blockchain, a move inspired by an auction for wallet usernames that saw some selling for as high as $200,000. Founder Pavel Durov suggested other elements of the Telegram ecosystem could become a part of this marketplace in the future, including channels, stickers or emoji.
• Apple’s communication platforms, iMessage and FaceTime, went down on Tuesday afternoon, following an earlier more than two-hour outage from WhatsApp, making it a pretty bad day for trying to text and call.
• WhatsApp now has 2+ billion DAUs, Meta announced during its Q3 earnings.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Apple

• Apple raised prices for Apple Music, Apple TV+ and its Apple One bundle in the U.S. Apple TV+, which is getting its first price hike, will increase by $2 monthly and $10 annually. Subscribers will be charged $6.99 per month or $69 per year. Apple Music is getting a price increase of $1 for individual subscribers and $2 for families. The individual plan will now be $10.99 per month and the family plan will be $16.99 per month. And the Apple One bundle will cost $16.95/month, $22.95/month and $32.95/month, respectively, for the individual plan, family plan and Premier plan.
• YouTube is raising the rates for its Premium Subscription for families across several countries, including the U.S., U.K., Canada and Argentina, effective November 21. In the U.S., the price is going up from $17.99 to $22.99. The plan allows up to five family members to watch ad-free videos, download videos for offline access and play videos in the background.
• Deezer also bumped its monthly premium price to $10.99 in the U.S.
• Given the competitors’ increases, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek noted on the earnings call that the company is considering a price hike as well. Spotify’s revenue in Q3 was up 21% YoY to €3.04 billion, MAUs were up 20% YoY to 456 million, and Premium subscriptions were up 13% YoY to 195 million. But Spotify’s stock dropped 6% after earnings due to a miss on advertising growth.
• YouTube’s mobile app on iOS and Android got a makeover that includes a new look, precise seeking, new buttons, ambient mode, darker dark mode and a “pinch to zoom” feature to see more details in a video. Later, the company rolled out an update across platforms that separated long-form, Shorts and Live videos into their own tabs on channel pages.

Gaming

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that more than 20 million people have now streamed games through Xbox Cloud Gaming, up from 10 million in April 2022. The gaming subscription service allows consumers to stream games to their phone via a web browser. This year, Microsoft brought the popular game Fortnite to the platform.
• TikTok is expanding further into games, according to the FT, which said the app would add a dedicated gaming tab by November 2, which would feature ad-supported mobile games and in-app purchases.

Government & Policy

• The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority said it plans to investigate Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta’s moves into retail financial services over competition and consumer harm concerns, the FT reported.
• Turkey’s competition authority fined Meta 346.72 million lira ($18.6 million) for combining user data across Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
• India’s antitrust watchdog, the Competition Commission of India, fined Google $113 million for abusing the dominant position of its Google Play Store. It ordered the company to let app developers use third-party payments for in-app purchases or for purchasing apps and to drop any anti-steering guidelines. Google has three months to comply.

India fines Google yet again, orders to allow third-party payments

Security & Privacy

• Square parent company Block was reported to be selling access to customers’ email addresses used to receive receipts. While not illegal, privacy experts argue this means of selling marketing information is “walking a fine line,” per Protocol’s report.
• Apple patched a bug in iOS 16.1 and macOS Ventura that could have allowed apps with Bluetooth access to record users’ conversations with Siri without requiring microphone access.
• TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker offered an inside look into TheTruthSpy, the stalkerware operation that’s spying on thousands of people worldwide, including in the U.S., via Android apps planted by someone with physical access to a person’s device. Leaked data from the operation includes call logs, texts, location data and other personal info.

Inside TheTruthSpy, the stalkerware network spying on thousands

Funding and M&A

Free banking app Crowded raised $6 million in seed funding led by Garage, with participation from Deel co-founder Philippe Bouaziz, Innoventure Partners’ Michael Marks and a group of former bank executives. The app targets member-based nonprofits, like fraternities, sororities and booster clubs.

Onward, an app designed to help co-parents navigate and managed their shared expenses, raised $9.7 million in Series A funding led by Atlanta-based TTV Capital.

Joro, an app that helps people track and reduce their carbon footprints, raised a $10 million Series A led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Amasia. Also participating were Norrsken, Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ Incite, Jay-Z’s Arrive and Mike Einziger, the lead guitarist of Incubus.

Downloads

Duolingo Math

Image Credits: Duolingo

Language-learning company Duolingo officially launched its math app to the public this week, following beta trials. The app represents the first expansion beyond language learning and literacy for the company. The app allows users to choose between an elementary version that focuses on basic concepts like multiplication and division and an adult version that’s more optimized for “brain training” exercises that put skills into practice. A future version may even expand into higher-level math, like linear algebra or college-level math. The app is remaining free to use for the time being.

Pixel Pals

With my new Pixel Pals app, you can finally have adorable pets in the new Dynamic Island 24/7, *everywhere*, fully animated and cute as heck. they're freeeeeeeee! pic.twitter.com/3hPL8FaUiY

— Christian Selig (@ChristianSelig) October 24, 2022

Apollo developer Christian Selig thought he’d have a little fun with the new iOS 16 feature, Dynamic Island, so he added a feature to his popular Reddit client called “Pixel Pals” that let users collect and care for small, animated pets that run atop the black bar at the top of the screen. The feature took off as people adopted their pixelated pets, fed them and played with them to earn their love.

Taking a cue from users’ interest, Selig launched a standalone app for Pixel Pals, which now allows pet owners to do more with their animated friends, including pinning them to the Home Screen as transparent widgets, adding them to the Lock Screen as animated widgets and enjoying them through iOS 16’s Live Activities, among other things. If anything, the app works to demonstrate iOS 16’s new features in a clever and entertaining way. Users seem to enjoy the new experience, too — as Selig noted this week, the app hit the top 3 in the Graphics & Design category on the App Store.

This Week in Apps: Elon buys Twitter, new App Store rules, gambling ads backlash by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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Why “generative AI” is suddenly on everyone’s lips: it’s an “open field”

If you’ve been closely following the progress of Open AI, the company run by Sam Altman whose neural nets can now write original text and create original pictures with astonishing ease and speed, you might just skip this piece.

If, on the other hand, you’ve only been vaguely paying attention to the company’s progress and the increasing traction that other so-called “generative” AI companies are suddenly gaining and want to better understand why, you might benefit from this interview with James Currier, a five-time founder and now venture investor who cofounded the firm NFX five years ago with several of his serial founder friends.

Currier falls into the camp of people following the progress closely — so closely that NFX has made numerous related investments in “generative tech” as he describes it, and it’s garnering more of the team’s attention every month. In fact, Currier doesn’t think the buzz about this new wrinkle on AI isn’t hype so much as a realization that the broader startup world is suddenly facing a very big opportunity for the first time in a long time. “Every 14 years,” says Currier, “we get one of these Cambrian explosions. We had one around the internet in ’94. We had one around mobile phones in 2008. Now we’re having another one in 2022.”

In retrospect, this editor wishes she’d asked better questions, but I’m learning here, too. Excerpts from our chat follow, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to our longer conversation here.

TC: There’s a lot of confusion about generative AI, including how new exactly it is, or whether it’s just become the latest buzzword.

JC: I think what happened to the AI world in general is that we had a sense that we could have deterministic AI, which would help us identify the truth of something. For example, is that a broken piece on the manufacturing line? Is that an appropriate meeting to have? It’s where you’re determining something using AI in the same way that a human determines something. That’s largely what AI has been for the last 10 to 15 years.

The other sets of algorithms in AI were more these diffusion algorithms, which were intended to look at huge corpuses of content and then generate something new from them, saying, ‘Here are 10,000 examples. Can we create the 10,001st example that is similar?’

Those were pretty fragile, pretty brittle, up until about a year and a half ago. [Now] the algorithms have gotten better. But more importantly, the corpuses of content we’ve been looking at have gotten bigger because we just have more processing power. So what’s happened is, these algorithms are riding Moore’s law — [with vastly improved] storage, bandwidth, speed of computation — and have suddenly become able to produce something that looks very much like what a human would produce. That means the face value of the text that it will write, and the face value of the drawing it will draw, looks very similar to what a human will do. And that’s all taken place in the last two years. So it’s not a new idea, but it’s newly at that threshold. That’s why everyone looks at this and says, ‘Wow, that’s magic.’

So it was compute power that suddenly changed the game, not some previously missing piece of tech infrastructure?

It didn’t change suddenly, it just changed gradually until the quality of its generation got to where it was meaningful for us. So the answer is generally no, the algorithms have been very similar. In these diffusion algorithms, they have gotten somewhat better. But really, it’s about the processing power. Then, about two years ago, the [powerful language model] GPT  came out, which was an on-premise type of calculation, then GPT3 came out where [the AI company Open AI] would do [the calculation] for you in the cloud; because the data models were so much bigger, they needed to do it on their own servers. You just can’t afford to do it [on your own]. And at that point, things really took a jump up.

We know because we invested in a company doing AI-based generative games, including “AI Dungeon,” and I think the vast majority of all GPT-3’s computation was coming through “AI Dungeon” at one point.

Does “AI Dungeon” then require a smaller team than another game-maker might? 

That’s one of the big advantages, absolutely. They don’t have to spend all that money to house all that data, and they can, with a small group of people, produce tens of gaming experiences that all take advantage of that. [In fact] the idea is that you’re going to add generative AI to old games, so your non-player characters can actually say something more interesting than they do today, though you’re going to get fundamentally different gaming experiences coming out of AI into gaming, versus adding AI into the existing games.

So a big change is in the quality? Will this technology plateau at some point?

No, it will always be incrementally better. It’s just that the differences of the increments will be will be smaller over time because they’re already getting pretty good,

But the other big change is that Open AI wasn’t really open. They generated this amazing thing, but then it wasn’t open and was very expensive. So groups got together like Stability AI and other folks, and they said, ‘Let’s just make open source versions of this.’ And at that point, the cost dropped by 100x, just in the last two or three months.

These are not offshoots of Open AI.

All this generative tech is not going to be built just on the Open AI GPT-3 model; that was just the first one. The open source community has now replicated a lot of their work, and they’re probably eight months behind, six months behind, in terms of quality. But it’s going to get there. And because the open source versions are a third or a fifth or a twentieth the cost of Open AI, you’re going to see a lot of price competition, and you’re going to see a proliferation of these models that compete with Open AI. And you’re probably going to end up with five, or six, or eight, or maybe, maybe 100 of them.

Then on top of those will be built unique AI models. So you might have an AI model that really looks at making poetry, or AI models that really look at how you make visual images of dogs and dog hair, or you’ll have one that’s really specialized in writing sales emails. You’re going to have a whole layer of these specialized AI models that will then be purpose built. Then on top of those, you’ll have all the generative tech, which will be: how do you get people using the product? How do you get people paying for the product? How do you get people to sign in? How do you get people to share it? How do you create network effects?

Who makes money here?

The application layer where people are going to go after the distribution and the network effects is where you’re going to make the money.

What about large companies that will be able to incorporate this technology into their networks. Won’t it be very hard for a company that doesn’t have that advantage to come out of nowhere and make money?

I think what you’re looking for is something like a Twitch where YouTube could have integrated that into its model, but they didn’t. And Twitch created a new platform and a valuable new part of culture and value for the investors and the founders, even though it was hard. So you’re going to have great founders who are going to use this technology to give them an advantage. And that will create a seam in the market. And while the big guys are doing other things, they’ll be able to build billion dollar companies.

The New York Times ran a piece recently featuring a handful of creatives who said the generative AI apps that they’re using in their respective fields are tools in a broader toolbox. Are people being naive here? Are they at risk of being replaced by this technology? As you mentioned,  the team working on “AI Dungeon”is smaller. That’s good for the company but potentially bad for developers who might have worked on the game otherwise.

I think with most technologies, there is sort of an uncomfortableness that people have of [for example] robots replacing a job at an auto factory. When the internet came along, a lot of the people who were doing direct mail felt threatened that companies would be able to sell direct and not use their paper-based advertising services. But [after] they embraced digital marketing, or digital communication through email, they probably had tremendous bumps in their careers, their productivity went up there, the speed and efficiency went up. The same thing happened with credit cards online. We didn’t feel comfortable putting credit cards online until maybe 2002. But those who embraced [this wave in] 2000 to 2003 did better.

I think that what’s happening now. The writers and designers and architects who are thinking forward and embracing these tools to give themselves a 2x or 3x or 5x productivity lift are going to do incredibly well. I think the whole world is going to end up over the next 10 years seeing a productivity lift. It’s a huge opportunity for 90% of people to just do more, be more, make more, connect more.

Do you think it was a misstep on the part of Open AI not to [open source] what it was building, given what’s sprung up around it?

The leader ends up behaving differently than the followers. I don’t know, I’m not inside the company, I can’t really tell. What I do know is there’s going to be a big ecosystem of AI models, and it’s not clear to me how an AI model stays differentiated as they all asymptote toward the same quality and it just becomes a price game. It seems to me that the people who win are Google Cloud and AWS because we’re all just going to be generating stuff like crazy.

It might be that Open AI ends up moving up or moving down. Maybe they become like an AWS themselves, or maybe they start making specialized AIs that they sell to certain verticals. I think everyone in this space is going to have an opportunity to do well if they navigate properly; they’re just going to have to smart about it.

NFX has much more on its site about generative AI that’s worth reading, by the way; you can find that here.

Why “generative AI” is suddenly on everyone’s lips: it’s an “open field” by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

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GM pauses paid advertising on Twitter as Chief Twit Elon Musk takes ownership

General Motors has temporarily paused paid advertising on Twitter, one day after billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk finalized a $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform.

CNBC was the first to report GM’s decision. TechCrunch confirmed the U.S. automaker’s decision.

“We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership,” the company said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “As is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform, we have temporarily paused our paid advertising. Our customer care interactions on Twitter will continue.”

It’s unclear what percentage of GM’s total advertising budget is dedicated to Twitter.

Most, if not all, automakers have a presence on Twitter. Although not all of them opt for paid advertising.

Ford, GM, Stellantis, Porsche, VW and Volvo are just a handful of the established automakers along with newer companies like Rivian that have social media accounts on the platform. Fisker is still on Twitter even after its founder and CEO Henrik Fisker deleted his personal account in April following the announcement of the Musk-Twitter deal.

Musk tried to quell advertisers’ fear earlier this week with a note posted on his personal Twitter account about his intended approach to running the social media platform.

Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

“There has been much speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I think about advertising,” Musk wrote. “Most of it has been wrong.” He went on to write that he believes Twitter has the potential to be a “common digital town square,” and that the platform cannot be “a free-for-all hellscape.”

Musk’s promises might not be enough for GM as it seeks to compete and even surpass Tesla in EV sales.

GM pauses paid advertising on Twitter as Chief Twit Elon Musk takes ownership by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

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