TikTok users, however, are not taking the changing political winds — and their consequences — sitting down.
TechCrunch spoke with several TikTok users that are incensed about, and fighting back against the potential ban of TikTok.
But while the talk of a possible ban is getting all the press, what about the potential of TikTok simply being divested from its parent company, Bytedance?
That would resolve the United States’ government’s issues, right?
So, the bill may have two tracks in it for TikTok, but it could really just be a single-issue law in practice.
TipTop, the new app from Postmates’ founder and CEO, now lets you buy devices with trade-ins and cashTipTop, the startup that offers instant cash for electronics, is launching TipTop Shop: a way for users to purchase and trade in devices.
TipTop Shop builds on the success of TipTop Cash, which was released late last year.
It lets people get instant payouts for electronic devices like smartphones, iPads, cameras, game systems and more.
People can buy new, open-box and refurbished devices through cash and trade-ins.
Unlike on platforms like eBay and Facebook Marketplace, consumers aren’t buying products on TipTop from other consumers, as the devices are owned by the startup itself.
“The trajectory of privacy and data protection is at a critical juncture, and it is imperative that all stakeholders, including tech giants like yours, uphold their responsibilities to safeguard these rights.
One of the signatories, Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer, summarizes Meta’s demand for a “privacy fee” as “economic coercion”.
noyb has subsequently filed another GDPR complaint against Meta’s model, focused on how easy/not is it for people to withdraw consent.
There are also a series of consumer protection complaints in the mix — which argue Meta’s approach breaches EU consumer protection rules.
Completing the circle, consumer right groups have filed as series of GDPR complaints against Meta’s ‘pay or okay’ model, too.
Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported.
DarwinAI had raised over $15 million in funding across various rounds from investors including BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures, and Inovia Capital.
BDC Capital and Obvious Venture didn’t comment on the story at the time of writing.
As Bloomberg noted in its report, apart from helping with manufacturing efficiency, DarwinAI uses techniques to make AI models smaller and faster.
This could be useful for on-device generative AI features Apple hopes to introduce in iOS 18 this year.
Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity.
But what sets Avalor apart is the ability to handle data from virtually any source in any format, and its unique set of vulnerability risk management and prioritization tools.
Prior to the Zscaler acquisition, Avalor managed to secure $30 million from investors including TCV, Salesforce Ventures, Jibe Ventures and Cyberstarts.
And Raz sees Zscaler taking the business — and its ~80-person team spread across the U.S. and Israel — further.
As Crunchbase’s Chris Metinko noted earlier today, Zscaler’s acquisition — along with others in the cybersecurity space — could help spark activity in a slow-to-stagnant cyber M&A market.
A bill threatening to ban an app beloved by half of the American population just rocketed through the House of Representatives in a week’s time.
TikTok the company and TikTok the chaotic community of creators and their followers are rightfully freaking out right now.
TikTok successfully fought back against a state-level ban on the app in Montana last year, arguing that the law was unconstitutional.
Missouri Republican Josh Hawley, who frequently sows concern about China, registered his support for a Senate version of the TikTok bill following the vote.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, another Senate Republican hawkish on China, also expressed her support for pushing a version of the House TikTok bill through.
This piece combines Ai video, Ai photo, 3D CGI, 2D VFX, Motion graphics, 35mm film, digital video and advances in Ai voiceover.
Every current Ai tool was explored and pushed to the maximum.” [I have left “AI” as “Ai” throughout.]
In an apparently now-deleted comment, Walker says that they did ask for access to Joshua, but “were rejected several times.
They didn’t need crew, they didn’t need locations, they didn’t need craft… Filmmakers have to stand together as we traverse this new AI landscape.
Perhaps they underestimated the passion of the creators whose decidedly analog and human-focused processes actually produce original and compelling content.
The secondary market allows for that now.”Stripe’s recent secondary sale is a clear example of this.
Leung said that Sapphire deployed roughly $500 million into the secondary market in 2023, and expects to deploy the same if not more into secondary stakes in 2024.
But given the maturation of the secondary market, it doesn’t need to thaw before the market is really ready.
The secondary market “is playing a huge role,” Leung said regarding companies waiting to go public.
[LPs] are not pressuring the GPs to push out their assets, which reduces the demand for the public market.”
When the open source streaming service, Apache Kafka, was created in 2011 at LinkedIn, it was a different world.
The way they do that is by taking advantage of today’s cloud environment to separate compute from storage using an object storage service like Amazon S3.
“When you interact and store data in cloud object storage you get to sidestep all these networking fees that plague these big data systems when they get lifted, shifted into the cloud,” he said.
“Based on our experience building the kind of storage system on top of object storage we had built at DataDog, we felt like streaming systems should work the same way.
The founders brought some of the folks who helped build Husky to build the new system, and today they have 9 employees.
ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced today that it raised $18.5 million.
To date, creators have earned “tens of millions in commissions” on the platform, the company tells TechCrunch.
“He observed a significant disconnect in the social media ecosystem: influencers struggled to monetize their product recommendations effectively, and their followers didn’t have an easy path to purchase.
Chris viewed ShopMy as the solution, a bridge that transformed how influencers share and monetize their product recommendations,” Rein explains.
Even Instagram has embraced creator marketing, launching a marketplace tool for paid partnerships in 2022.
