Tesla drops prices, Meta confirms Llama 3 release, and Apple allows emulators in the App StoreHeya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech.
Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event.
Lorenzo wrote about how hackers stole over ~340,000 Social Security numbers from government consulting firm Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA).
Elsewhere, Sarah had the story on Spotify’s personalized AI playlists, which lets users create a playlist based on written prompts.
Emulators in the store: Apple updated its App Store rules to globally allow emulators for retro console games an option for downloading titles.
Currently invite-only, Airchat is already ranked #27 in social networking on Apple’s App Store.
The difference is that the posts and replies are audio recordings, which the app then transcribes.
When you open Airchat, messages automatically start playing, and you quickly cycle through them by swiping up and down.
After joining Airchat this morning, most of the posts I saw were about the app itself, with Ravikant and Norgard answering questions and soliciting feedback.
“Humans are all meant to get along with other humans, it just requires the natural voice,” Ravikant said.
Tesla has slashed the price of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software subscription to $99 per month, down from $199 per month, as the electric vehicle maker aims to boost adoption of its advanced driver assistance system ahead of first-quarter earnings.
The price cut comes a couple of weeks after Tesla launched a free one-month trial of FSD for every customer in the U.S. with a compatible Tesla.
The FSD price cut comes the same week that Tesla released more tweaks to its latest V12 version of the software to certain users.
More drivers with FSD doesn’t only mean more money for Tesla.
Tesla might also be angling for more training data so it can meet CEO Elon Musk’s promise to unveil a Tesla robotaxi in August.
On the panel, Megan Thee Stallion said she loved the app because it allows her to curate exactly what she wants to see and listed topics ranging from puppies to makeup and workout videos.
Megan Thee Stallion talking about her favorite app being Pinterest during ADWeek’s Social Media Week event.
pic.twitter.com/mQ1l5jbaJm — Stallion Stats (@MegansStats) April 10, 2024Megan thee Stallion did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Megan Thee Stallion has a vested interest in Pinterest, having previously worked with the company.
It’s true many of them have brand profiles, but it’s likely they also have their own private accounts, like Megan Thee Stallion insinuated during her panel.
Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg ultimately blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the failure of his short-form video app, but maybe it was just too soon.
In the first quarter of 2024, 66 short drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox pulled in record revenue of $146 million in global consumer spending.
In March 2024 alone, consumers spent $65 million on short drama apps, a 10,500% increase from the $619,000 spent in March 2023.
In Q1 2024, short drama apps were installed nearly 37 million times, up 992% from 3.4 million in Q1 2023.
Short drama apps claimed a 6.7% share of the total across all three categories combined, up from 0.15% a year ago.
Lyrak to take on X by combining the best of Twitter with fediverse integrationThreads.
Once live, Lyrak users will be able to see posts from Mastodon users and vice versa.
Founded by London-based web designer and marketer Rishi Siva, Lyrak is named form a lead character in the TV show “His Dark Materials,” Lyra.
Lyrak says it will focus initially on getting journalists to join the network, to help it with becoming a real-time social app.
“The advantage of being a startup building a social app is that we have a fresh perspective on things.
TikTok is working towards launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent bid to rival Instagram, a service best known for its static-photo sharing feature.
Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and stories itself, taking pieces of other services and incorporating them into its own product.
As is nearly every social service you can imagine.
If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some manner at some point — probably sooner rather than later.
Expanding a feature set can bolster engaged time, and therefore how much revenue a social media service can earn.
On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its fediverse integrations to 400 more Flipboard creators and introducing fediverse notifications in the Flipboard app itself.
In total, Flipboard says there are now over 11,000 curated Flipboard magazines available to federated social networking users.
In addition to the newly federated magazines, Flipboard is also bringing a more integrated fediverse experience to its own app.
4.3.25), Flipboard users will be able to see their new followers from the fediverse in their Flipboard Following tab, while their Flipboard notifications will now include fediverse reactions and conversations.
The company had already begun curating content for fediverse users across a handful of “news desks” (dedicated fediverse accounts) that directed users to interesting articles and links across topics.
A new app called Buffet is aiming to address the loneliness epidemic by helping users meet new people by quickly matching them with a person and a place to meet up (Think Tinder + OpenTable).
Buffet aims to help users meet likeminded individuals, whether they’re looking for a new friend, romantic partner or gym buddy.
So we put one foot in front of the other and stared building Buffet.”To get started with Buffet, users enter five of their interests, such as motorcycles, horseback riding or reading.
Buffet encourages people to go beyond a chatbox and digital communication and actually meet up in the real world.
Hacking believes that if Buffet can win over the average 25-year-old female professional, it can win over anyone.
It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans.
For a while now, Collaborative Robotics founder Brad Porter has eschewed robots that look like people.
As the two-year-old startup’s name implies, Collaborative Robotics (Cobot for short) is interested in the ways in which humans and robots will collaborate, moving forward.
When his run with the company ended in summer 2020, he was leading the retail giant’s industrial robotics team.
AI will, naturally, be foundational to the company’s promise of “human problem solving,” while the move away from the humanoid form factor is a bid, in part, to reduce the cost of entry for deploying these systems.
