Author : zebethcontrol

Elon buys Twitter, new App Store rules, gambling ads backlash • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in app stores, Apple, Apps, developers, Google, Mobile, This Week In AppsNo Comments

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly ZebethMedia 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. 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: ZebethMedia 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. Spotify accuses Apple of anti-competitive behavior, this

Venture capital will soon be brimming with ghosts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in EC Newsletter, Startups, Startups WeeklyNo Comments

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. “There’s more dry powder powder than ever before.” “There’s never been a better time to start a startup.” “Discipline is the new scale.” (OK, OK, I made that last one up, but didn’t you kind of believe it?). The tech industry loves generalizations — and don’t worry, I enjoy my fair share too — but as the downturn continues to play out, it’s increasingly important to think about the structural changes that may be forming in the venture capital landscape. Venture firms, unlike unicorns, often don’t have hundreds of employees to cut. Instead, venture firms cut costs in quieter ways. At ZebethMedia Disrupt last week, General Catalyst’s Niko Bonatsos said that venture firms have to go through natural selection cycles and that it will be “survival of the fittest.” “It’s a very painful activity for anyone who has gone through that stuff,” Bonatsos said on stage with Coatue’s Caryn Marooney. He talked about how the hundreds of new VC firms will either decide to merge with each other to “build a more enduring franchise,” saying some will leave the VC profession and others will lose senior partners to retirement and have tp figure out what the future of their firms will look like. Tracking personnel activity in venture land offers a few examples. For example, Initialized Capital’s co-founder Garry Tan is leaving the firm to join Y Combinator as president. Tan’s exit is shaking up the firm he helped found. He held down the fort after the firm’s other co-founder, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, stepped away in 2020. Another team that has had its fair share of internal changes over the pandemic is Backstage Capital. The firm cut the majority of staff four months ago, impacting nine of the 12-person team. The layoff comes nearly three months after Backstage Capital narrowed its investment strategy to only participate in follow-on rounds of existing portfolios. This workforce reduction further underscores that the venture capital firm is struggling to grow, both externally due to its lack of dry powder and internally. Marooney, a GP at Coatue, says that firms “have to earn the right” to survive. “There was the path where you did some investments and made money. It’s like, no, you’ve got to earn the right and not everybody is going to earn that right … and I think that is healthy,” the investor said. I’ll end with a term we’ve been dancing around all through the intro, which is “quiet quitting.” Bloomberg Beta investor Roy E. Bahat posted a thread describing how seasoned venture capitalists may be quietly going into “easy mode,” aka, becoming a less active, minimum viable player of the team. Maybe their name helps the firm close new funds with LPs, and maybe their calendar doesn’t need to be busy with a ton of introduction calls, just annual investor meetings. If we combine quiet quitting with natural selection cycles and the difficulty of tracking just how active a venture capitalist is, we experience a confusing, fragmented landscape. No one is incentivized to say that they aren’t doing business as usual, which creates a landscape of extremes. Sure, there are natural career cycles, but I imagine it is getting harder to track who is doing what and how often in a remote world where a partner at a VC firm has been diluted to mean many, many things. Today, there are the investors doing the ghosting due to the sheer deal flow out there, and there are the investors who are becoming ghosts themselves. Ha. Just something to keep in mind. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about Clubhouse, the latest in tech layoffs and why $1 billion in capital can’t save AV tech. If you like this newsletter, do me a quick favor? Forward it to a friend, share it on Twitter, and follow my personal blog for more content. Clubhouse and the bird app One of my favorite interviews from ZebethMedia Disrupt last week was with Clubhouse CEO and co-founder Paul Davison. We jumped on the TC+ stage to talk about competition and, of course, what happens when the beginning of your company is defined by hype and celebrities. Here’s why it’s important: Davison addressed his competition, namely Twitter Spaces, and how Clubhouse views its differentiation long term. As you’ll read in the piece, he’s bullish on a more private version of social audio — a space he thinks will only be won by an app solely committed to the medium instead of committed to a suite of different services. The tide is shifting on tech’s layoff wave. Kind of. Over 780 companies cut a portion of their staff this year according to data tracker layoffs.fyi. The workforce reductions have impacted at least 92,558 known people. The real figure is likely higher given reporting delays. Here’s why it’s important: The same data source suggests that the tide is somewhat shifting on the cadence of tech layoffs. Nearly 70% of people who have been laid off this year lost their jobs during May, June, July and August. Since the summertime of sadness, staff cuts have decreased. September had half the number of layoff events than August, and in October, new layoff events slowed while people impacted slightly inched upward from August. Read more about how the tide is shifting in my latest for ZebethMedia. Argo AI says bye bye Transportation editor and one of my favorites Kirsten Korosec broke major news this week: Argo AI, backed by Ford and Volkswagen, is shutting down. The autonomous vehicle startup raised $1 billion after launching in 2017. Here’s why it’s important via Korosec: Commercializing AV tech has always been a capitally intensive game, meaning the barrier to entry is more like a wall than a speed bump. The winds have shifted over the past two years toward driver assistance

Should early-stage startups join in on the cloud marketplace fun? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in cloud marketplaces, Enterprise, enterprise software, Startups, TechCrunch Exchange newsletter, The ExchangeNo Comments

Welcome to The ZebethMedia Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily ZebethMedia+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. From the future of cloud management to cloud spend in the age of machine learning, our latest cloud investor survey has given me lots of food for thought. It once again came to mind when I read a new report on cloud marketplaces. These have consolidated as a new revenue avenue, but is it ever too early for startups to go that route? Let’s look into it. — Anna Where the money’s at The sky’s the limit for the cloud market. If Alphabet’s earnings missed expectations in Q3, it is certainly not because of Google Cloud, whose revenue grew 37.64% year on year last quarter, from $4.990 billion to $6.868 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s “Azure and other cloud services” grew 35%. One of the key factors that make cloud revenue resilient even in a more morose macroeconomic context is committed spend. This creates tailwinds not just for AWS and its competitors, but also for independent software vendors selling through their marketplaces.

What if your startup doesn’t take off overnight? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in babylist, Halogen Ventures, jesse draper, Startups, TechCrunch Live, techcrunch live announcementNo Comments

Natalie Gordon founded Babylist in 2011, and today it’s a leading marketplace for baby gift registries. But it didn’t take off at first. It took several years for Gordon to spin the startup into its current trajectory and several more for users to follow. This is normal! And we’re excited to have Jesse Draper join the conversation. She invested in Babylist as a General Partner at Halogen Ventures. This ZebethMedia Live event opens on November 2 at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT with networking. The interview begins at 12:00 p.m. PDT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 p.m. PDT. Apply for TCL Pitch Practice by completing this application. If you haven’t joined us before on Grip — our TCL online platform — click here to register for free and gain access to all ZebethMedia Live events, including ZebethMedia Live, City Spotlight, Startup Pitch Practice, Networking and other ZebethMedia community events, with just one registration. Already part of the ZebethMedia Live on Grip community? Click this link to add this session to your agenda! ZebethMedia Live records weekly on Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT. Join us!

Let’s check in on community-focused startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in chief, clubhouse, EC Media, On Deck, Social, StartupsNo Comments

Over the past few years, community has been a buzzword for tech startups looking to sell a product or service based on their definition of a useful network. The pandemic stress-tested these business models, with some companies seeing that consumers weren’t willing to pay fees in exchange for advice they could find on Twitter, while others realized that focusing on a target user was more important than finding the biggest total addressable market possible. It’s part of the reason I had so much fun interviewing founders from Clubhouse and Chief last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt. I spoke to the founders of these companies to understand how they’ve evolved to deal with a bewildering new normal, and while a social audio app and a private membership community for women in leadership are quite different in strategy, they shared the same vibe: Less is more. Clubhouse’s product-market fit Paul Davison, Clubhouse co-founder and CEO, was fast to address what others described as Clubhouse’s fall from grace. He said that the app’s early hype saw it grow 10x in users month over month, a boom that broke a lot of the underlying infrastructure of the app. For months, he said, people had a bad experience on the app because of tech issues and the inability to find a room that matched their interests.

it’s an “open field” • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in Robotics & AI, VentureNo Comments

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 and ’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. 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 point where our, the quality of its generation got to a point 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

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

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, General Motors, Social, Transportation, TwitterNo Comments

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. ZebethMedia 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 ZebethMedia. “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. “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.

Google’s Nest Wifi Pro is a dead simple way to bring Wi-Fi 6E home • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Google, Google Nest Wifi Pro, Hardware, nest wifi, Nest Wifi ProNo Comments

A quick caveat up top. This isn’t a review. ZebethMedia does reviews. This isn’t one. There are several reasons for this. First, last week was Disrupt — I was busy on the other side of the country. Second, this week is my COVID week (third round, otherwise self-explanatory w/r/t a limited output). Third, we very rarely review routers here, for a lot of reasons, including resources. Even so, the Nest Wifi Pro is available now, so I’m committing some of my initial impressions to the page, after setting it up and using it for a few days. I hope this is helpful if you’ve been eyeing one since its unveiling earlier month. If you need something a bit more substantial than my doughy brain can offer up at the moment, I completely get it. We’ve got plenty of big reviews planned over the horizon. Let’s start with what the Nest Wifi Pro is an isn’t. It’s “Pro” in the sense of where it fits in the broader Google Wifi line. It’s a home router, one that looks nice and is easy to set up. There are faster and more powerful routers out there. There are routers that are more customizable and flexible. If, however, you’re looking for a router with Wi-Fi 6E that works right out of the box, it’s hard to beat. Image Credits: Brian Heater That’s an important thing to note with products like this. At $199, this is a solid entry into Wi-Fi 6E territory. If you’re looking for a quick boost to your home internet, and the current dusty old router is starting to give up the ghost, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better “just works” system out of the box. I say this with the authority of someone who spent his own hours on the phone with terrible ISP customer support, because of some phantom ghost in the machine of the company routers. Amazing how often the fix is someone flipping a switch on their end. I was long overdue for a wireless upgrade myself, as someone who hosts a lot of podcasts and video livestreams. There are more embarrassing things that can happen to one on a live broadcast, but we won’t get into them here. Suffice it say that a strong and steady internet connection is an important part of doing my job. Another caveat I should mention before we go further is the one I often give while testing smart home-related tech: I live in New York City. That means, among other, better things, that I have a relatively small dwelling area. Specifically, I’m in a one-bedroom. Google clocks the Nest Wifi Pro’s coverage area as 2,200 square feet (4,400 for a two-pack, 6,600 for the three, etc.). One-bedrooms in NYC tend to range from around 600-800 square feet. Image Credits: Brian Heater With that in mind, a single device was plenty. Speeds can fluctuate during the day, but I found mine to be fairly consistent, regardless of how close I was to the router. If you’re on the fence about whether a single device is enough, it should be more than enough for anything below 1,000 square feet. As you push closer to 2,000 square feet, the bundle starts to make more sense. And the upshot to the UX is that it’s easy to add Google mesh routers down the road (though you won’t get those bundle savings). The setup process will prove familiar if you’ve ever set up most smart home products — Google/Nest stuff in particular, for obvious reasons. There’s not much to the device from the user’s perspective (again, this is intentional). The design is arguably even more minimal than its predecessor. It’s taller and slimmer, the matte color replaced with a shiny, plain job. Your mileage on that last bit will vary, but as with other Nest products, this one is designed — above all — to blend in with its surroundings. There are three ports: power and a pair of Ethernet — one for the modem, the other to hardwire a single device. That last bit is a potential limiter, of course, as is the 1Gbps upper limit on the built-in Ethernet (to help keep the system under $200, one imagines). That may or may not be an issue, depending on your specific plan. If you have fiber, for example, you’re going to get bottlenecked. Me, I’m stuck with Spectrum at the moment (I know, I know), so, um, no issue there. But obviously you don’t want a device that sits between you and the wall slowing down your internet speeds. Either way, the service you’re on will determine your ultimate speeds. Image Credits: Brian Heater Download the Google Home app to get started, and you’ll be walked through a straightforward setup process, sped up if you can snap a shot of the QR code on the product’s underside. The paper startup guide included in the box is three basic steps (plug in router, download app, follow on-screen instructions) and two images spread across two small pages. I’m not going to say that’s definitely all you need, but if you don’t run into any hiccups (always a consideration with networking devices), it should be plenty. Nest Wifi was a fine system, and honestly, if you bought one, you likely don’t need to rush out and upgrade. Its combined speed for Wi-Fi 5 topped out at a stated speed of 2.2Gbps versus the Wifi Pro’s 5.4Gbps. Keep in mind, those are both figured combined across the three bands. Let’s just say they are very optimistic figures. Here’s Wi-Fi Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa from 2020 about the upgrade from Wi-Fi 5: 6 GHz will help address the growing need for Wi-Fi spectrum capacity to ensure Wi-Fi users continue to receive the same great user experience with their devices. Wi-Fi Alliance is introducing Wi-Fi 6E now to ensure the industry aligns on common terminology, allowing Wi-Fi users to identify devices that support 6 GHz operation as the

With Musk’s purchase completed, NYSE will delist Twitter stock on Election Day • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Friday! Haje is enjoying some down time on the East Coast, so I am running solo. As you can see from the not-so-surprising move by Elon Musk last night and the sheer number of Twitter stories from our fabulous consumer tech team today, it has been all Twitter, all day. We promise to give you a little bit of that, of course, and a little of what else we’ve been working on. Let’s dive in, shall we? — Christine The ZebethMedia Top 3 Flying the public coop: Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, its days are numbered as a public company. In fact, Ivan writes, Twitter will be delisted on November 8 — voting day for the U.S. midterm elections. Caging the bird: Over to Europe, where just a few hours into actually owning Twitter, Musk already found himself on the wrong end of European Union officials, who corrected him after he tweeted about how free he thinks Twitter is now. Natasha L has more. Big Tweet Chief: Reports now say that Musk will take the CEO role for himself, Ivan writes, after he ousted Twitter’s four top executives, as reported by Amanda. For more news on the blue bird, head down to the Big Tech Inc. section, where we have you covered. Startups and VC Unfortunately, the hits keep coming for 54gene, an African genomics startup focused on providing more African genetic material to pharmaceutical research — there is just 3% now, Tage reports. After some months of layoffs and a CEO exit, the company confirmed that it not only made yet another round of layoffs — this time of 100 people — but it also slashed its valuation by over $100 million. And we have three more for you: Robot riot: Galen Robotics has a new robot that will assist with ear, nose and throat surgeries. Oh, and it secured $15 million in new funding, Andrew reports. Follow the yellow brick road: Game studio Hidden Door is using narrative AI to turn fiction into immersive role-playing experiences, and Rebecca writes it is testing out “The Wizard of Oz.” Does anyone else use this word?: I was delighted to see that there is a company named Skidattl. The company is using augmented reality to show users what people are doing around them, in what Rebecca writes is “like a Bat-Signal for fun.” 5 ways biotech startups can mitigate risk to grow sustainably in the long run Image Credits: jayk7 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Thanks to R&D and clinical trials, life science startups have long lead times before they can bring their capital-intensive products to market. “But,” asks Omar Khalil, a partner at Santé Ventures, “what happens when the funding suddenly dries up?” In a guest post for TC+, he shares five strategies for biotech startups that are trying to stay warm through the winter ahead. “It’s still too early to know whether this is a short-term correction, or if it’s a new normal that will be maintained for the foreseeable future.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ 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. As promised, we have even more Twitter news for you to enjoy. As I write this, several of my colleagues hopped on Twitter Spaces to talk about all this. One of the latest bits of news from Taylor was that Elon Musk was forming a content moderation “council” to make certain decisions — for example, about account reinstatements for, cough, Donald Trump. Here’s two more: Catching you up on more earnings reports: And we have four more for you:

Cruz Foam’s chitin-based packaging brings in $18M as industries scramble to go green • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in Climate, cruz foam, Hardware, StartupsNo Comments

The best way to remove plastics from the ecosystem is to make sure they never get there in the first place, and Cruz Foam is well on its way to replacing some of the worst ones out there with its naturally-derived and compostable alternative — and the company just landed an $18M series A to do it faster. Cruz Foam creates materials out of chitin, which is what makes up the shells of most crustaceans, like crabs, shrimp, lobsters and many land insects as well. It’s strong, stable, totally biodegradable, and boy is it plentiful: there are mountains of this stuff for the taking outside every seafood processing plant. The company, whose founder John Felts I met in Alaska during the Accelerator at Sea, has been scrappily humming along prototyping various ways to turn chitin and a few other natural ingredients into a material that can replace polystyrene foam (EPS, like Styrofoam) and other common plastic packaging. They got their first big break last year when Whirlpool tapped them to make a few pieces for their appliance boxes, and now, having proved out the idea, Cruz Foam is getting ready to break into half a dozen more industries. “A lot of what we’re focusing on is those two initial areas – packaging that replaces polyethylene and polystyrene foam. But demand is growing in other avenues: cold chain, CPG [consumer packaged goods], ecommerce, etc. People asking about construction, or how we can do injection molding. It’s exciting to see so much potential,” said Felts. The need to prototype and test these possibilities is one reason for the company raising such a considerably-sized round. They just bought a new extruder (foam like this is essentially printed using specialized equipment) and have been experimenting with all kinds of new form factors, driven by partners and potential partners across many industries. It helps that a number of laws and trends have steadily pushed companies towards eco-friendly alternatives to plastic or even cardboard. “Putting the ownership of waste and the collection back on the people that produce packages, you’re seeing a broad change in ESG goals,” he said. “It used to be, ‘OK, we’re going to be carbon neutral by 2030.’ Like, what does that mean? So we’re seeing real granularity in what that means now — is it packaging, is it energy use, what are the milestones, the two-year, three-year marks? That’s how you know they’re serious.” Cruz Foam enclosures for a piece of consumer electronics. Suddenly, it seems, everyone from goods manufacturers to the people who produce plastic foam are looking for full-stack alternatives, even if there isn’t cost parity. They see the writing on the wall, and the idea of being caught unprepared when a (say) ban on EPS kicks them out of west coast markets is a scary one. Felts said that the company is in talks with several of the largest manufacturers of packaging foam, working with them on a deal that would see them actually making chitin-based materials and sharing the glory with Cruz Foam. The truth there, though, is that neither party has much choice. The manufacturers need to prepare for a greener future, and Cruz Foam doesn’t have even a fraction of the machines it would need to meet demand. Felts said they never intended to actually do the manufacturing. “You literally can’t. Buying this extruder, it took 6 months,” he said, and even that was a miracle. “Can you imagine scaling a business if it took you two years to get one machine? You have to use the infrastructure that’s in place.” A ribbon of foam is extruded. Whoever makes it, you’ll probably be seeing more of their products soon. The company showed me some prototypes and new verticals it was working on, though it can’t announce any of its new partners or customers until the contracts or agreements are finalized, or in some cases until the requisite patents are filed. Suffice it so say that the company is going well beyond simply replacing a foam insert here and a molded shape there. The products Cruz Foam makes are generally compostable in the most broadly accepted sense, that you could just throw them in your yard and they’ll be gone in a month or two (and might even give your plants a boost). But because it’s being mated with cardboard and other materials, the company continues to face the challenge of how to make these things mesh with existing municipal waste systems. Is it recyclable according to Sacramento’s definition of the word? What about yard waste — does it technically break the rule there, and does anyone care? “The government needs to define standards for a new gen of compostable products – you’ve got to make it a no-brainer for customers,” Felts said. At least even if it goes in the wrong bin, it still degrades gracefully. The $18 million funding round was led by “global problem-solving organization” Helena, with participation from One Small Planet, Regeneration.VC, At One Ventures, and SoundWaves. The money will go towards expanding operations as well as R&D. “Out biggest focus is commercial production and revenue generation, until next year,” he said. “We’re filing tons of patents. A lot of growing the operational footprint of this company; we’re moving to new HQ, now up to 30 people.” With Cruz Foam focusing on the creative and sales work and working with existing manufacturers to actually make the stuff, 2023 could be the year the company goes from niche to mainstream. Watch your doorstep for the trademark CF (or as I prefer to see it, interlocking crustacean claws) on or in your delivery.