The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is focusing its efforts on going after Big Tech, according to FTC Chair Lina Khan, who spoke at TechCrunch’s Strictly VC event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
Khan said the agency is focused on going after the players that are doing the biggest harm, as opposed to just increasing the number of cases that it brings forward.
“One thing that’s been important for me is to make sure that we’re actually looking at where we see the biggest harm,” Khan said.
The FTC and the Department of Justice have struck a deal to investigate Microsoft, Open AI and Nvidia over potential antitrust violations, according to The New York Times.
The types of cases that the FTC selects can act as a deterrent, she said, noting that the FTC is already seeing that happen.
The company Wednesday issued an email requesting customers discontinue use of its egg-shaped charging case.
The company says it launched an investigation following a “single complaint” of a charging issue from a customer.
Humane is far from the first consumer electronics company to ship products with potentially hazardous batteries.
According to the note, the Charge Case is the only Humane product affected by this news.
Neither its Battery Boost or Charging Pad have been singled out by the company.
For Informatica investors, it was the opposite: The price was too low to warrant selling — they wanted more, more, more — and their stock also dropped, down a similar amount over the same period.
The biggest by far of that bunch was the $28 billion deal to buy Slack at the end of 2020.
Informatica is also far smaller than Salesforce, making its potential revenue bump to Marc Benioff’s company modest.
The ace up Informatica’s sleeve is that while its total revenue growth is slow, one important segment of its revenues is expanding quickly.
If we were to compare Informatica cloud net-new ARR that it expects this year instead, the percentage becomes even smaller.
There’s a big difference between a “solution” and a “product” slide.
The biggest problem with the Xpanceo deck isn’t what is in there, but rather what isn’t.
The market sizing fallacyWhen assessing the potential market size for Xpanceo’s contact lenses, it’s crucial to differentiate the nature of the product from traditional contact lenses.
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Meta has announced it’s testing new features on Instagram intended to help safeguard young people from unwanted nudity or sextortion scams.
This includes a feature called Nudity Protection in DMs, which automatically blurs images detected as containing nudity.
Nudity screensNudity Protection in DMs aims to protect teen Instagram users from cyberflashing by putting nude images behind a safety screen.
But Meta is taking a further step of not showing the “Message” button on a teen’s profile to potential sextortion accounts, i.e.
For example, in July 2021 Meta switched to defaulting young people’s Instagram accounts to private just ahead of the UK compliance deadline.
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.
The negotiations between Fisker and a large automaker — reported to be Nissan — over a potential investment and collaboration have been terminated, a development that puts a separate near-term rescue funding effort in danger.
Fisker revealed in a Monday morning regulatory filing that the automaker terminated the negotiations on March 22.
Fisker said in the filing that it will ask the unnamed investor to waive the closing condition.
In February, Fisker laid of 15% of its staff (around 200 people) and last week reported having just $121 million in the bank.
Fisker had held talks with other automakers, including Mazda, but only Nissan recently remained at the table.
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.
Agility’s Digit wasn’t the only humanoid holding court at Modex in Atlanta this week.
On the opposite end of the Georgia World Congress Center, Reflex Robotics, a younger and smaller startup, was drawing its own crowd.
Passersby requested something from the Reflex robot, and it spring into action, grabbing the item off the shelf (it didn’t hurt that the company was giving out free food and beverage).
The system has a wheeled base, which is perfectly effective for navigating these kinds of layouts.
He adds that the current timeline involves having 10 to 20 Reflex robots in the world, followed by “hundreds” next year.
Lordstown Motors charged with misleading investors about the sales potential of its EV pickupThe Securities and Exchange Commission has charged bankrupt Lordstown Motors with misleading investors about the sales prospects of its Endurance electric pickup truck.
Lordstown has agreed to pay $25.5 million as a result — money that the SEC says will go towards settling a number of pending class action lawsuits against the company.
“We allege that, in a highly competitive race to deliver the first mass-produced electric pickup truck to the U.S. market, Lordstown oversold true demand for the Endurance,” Mark Cave, Associate Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement said in a statement.
“Exaggerations that misrepresent a public company’s competitive advantages distort the capital markets and foil investors’ ability to make informed decisions about where to put their money.”The SEC says its investigation into Lordstown Motors is ongoing.
This story is developing…
