Layoffs are tough.
The silver lining is that with an Expo+ pass, you can engage with a vibrant tech startup community at TC Disrupt, boasting over 10,000 participants, for the entire three days.
Here’s the deal: If you’ve been through a layoff, in any industry, and from any country within one year of October 2024, you qualify for a discounted Expo+ pass.
At Disrupt, you’ll find a wealth of opportunities to explore, with access to startup founders, CEOs, service providers, and partner companies.
*Networking activations access is limited for Expo+ Passes and doesn’t include access to roundtables, small-group sessions, braindates or select receptions.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will examine the rise of AI technology across all fronts, said FTC Chair Lina Khan, speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
In fact, it’s already seeing an uptick in consumer complaint cases in some areas, like voice cloning fraud, Khan said.
Asked what areas of AI the FTC was watching, Khan explained that it was everything.
Of course, policing AI comes with its challenges, despite the number of technologists the FTC has hired to help in this area.
Another area of focus for the FTC is the focus on what openness really means in the AI context, Khan explained.
NeuBird founders Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman came from PortWorx, a cloud native storage solution they eventually sold to PureStorage in 2019 for $370 million.
When they went looking for their next startup challenge last year, they saw an opportunity to combine their cloud native knowledge, especially around IT operations, with the burgeoning area of generative AI.
Rao, the CEO, says that while the cloud native community has done a good job at solving a lot of difficult problems, it has created increasing levels of complexity along the way.
“We’ve done an incredible job as a community over the past 10 plus years building cloud native architectures with service oriented designs.
At the same time, large language models were beginning to mature, so the founders decided to put them to work on the problem.
Cendana, Kline Hill have a fresh $105M to buy stakes in seed VC funds from LPs looking to sellIf you ask investors to name the biggest challenge for venture capital today, you’ll likely get a near-unanimous answer: lack of liquidity.
Cash-hungry venture investors, whether VCs themselves or their limited partners are increasingly looking to sell their illiquid positions to secondary buyers.
“We simply passed the hat around to our existing LPS at Kline Hill and Cendana,” said Kim.
It then passes these opportunities to Kline Hill, which values, underwrites and negotiates the transaction price.
Traditional secondary investors, such as Lexington Partners and Blackstone, recently raised their largest secondary funds ever.
TikTok ban could harm Amazon sellers looking for alternatives The ban could prematurely end TikTok's e-commerce dream and hit sellers seeking new channelsIn March, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban in U.S. app stores.
Research from Jungle Scout, an Amazon data intelligence provider, provides some idea of TikTok’s e-commerce impact, however.
It found that 20% of Amazon sellers, brands, and businesses have plans to expand to TikTok Shop this year.
TikTok isn’t the only platform on the list for merchants looking for more channels beyond Amazon to expand their customer bases.
But if TikTok Shop’s strategy is mainly focused on bringing offline businesses online for the first time, that could be a very big move.
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.
The past couple of years have gone from a few select companies to seemingly everyone in and around warehouse robotics looking to tackle the problem.
And then there’s TruckBot.
Instead, TruckBot sat atop a conveyer belt.
In fact, TruckBot is actually part conveyer belt.
“TruckBot is a game-changer for warehouses looking to streamline their operations and reduce costs,” the company notes.” The dock door is the largest bottleneck in our supply chain and unloading trailers is back-breaking work.
The European Union has confirmed it’s looking into Apple’s decision to close Epic Games’ developer account — citing three separate regulations which may apply.
Yesterday the Fortnite maker revealed Apple had terminated the account, apparently reversing a decision to approve the developer account last month.
Epic had planned to launch its own app store, the Epic Games Stores, on iOS in Europe, as well as relaunching Fortnight on Apple’s platform.
And it accused Apple of breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) by killing its developer account.
The US court ruling Apple is citing to justify terminating Epic’s developer account is unlikely to have standing in the EU.
Twitch is looking at life beyond the livestream Livestreaming is a tough business.
“So the goal really is like, a lot more people seeing more Twitch content every time they’re in Instagram, every time they’re in TikTok, every time they’re in YouTube Shorts.
“… Live content is very different from offline content, and offline content has a somewhat easier ability to go viral.
Content on Twitch is extremely long form, with streamers regularly broadcasting gameplay or just chatting for many hours per session.
Unfortunately for Twitch, many compelling alternatives to broadcasting one’s life for hours on end exist, particularly in the form of YouTube.
A lot has changed at HTC in the decade since a small team broke off to form its mixed reality division.
These days, the mixed reality business comprises the “vast majority” of HTC’s global business, says Dan O’Brien.
Ultimately, however, the consumer business has shrunk dramatically relative to its enterprise offerings.
In recent years, Vive has expanded from a VR focus to mixed reality, utilizing passthrough technology similar to the kind found on the Vision Pro.
We’re not there yet, but we definitely see that helping to develop the virtual reality space.
