If you haven’t been seeing much political content on Instagram lately, there’s a reason for that.
Since March, Instagram and Threads have instituted a new default setting that limits political content you see from people you’re not following.
Hundreds of creators, convened by GLAAD and Accountable Tech, have signed an open letter demanding that Instagram make the political content limit an opt-in feature, rather than on by default.
Instagram’s definition of political content leaves a lot of room for interpretation, which stokes further concern among these creators.
“Removing political recommendations as a default setting, and consequently stopping people from seeing suggested political content poses a serious threat to political engagement, education, and activism,” the letter says.
As the election cycle heats up, Instagram and Threads will be cooling down the amount of political content entering many users’ feeds.
These changes, which limit the reach of political content from accounts users don’t already follow, are enacted by default.
If you’re already wondering how to get that kind of content back into your feed, you can follow our guide on changing Instagram’s political settings here.
Threads will host, but not “amplify” news, per remarks from its head Adam Mosseri’s last year.
And what posts and topics will Instagram actually deem to be political?
Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days.
While lacking the brand name recognition of some of these other players, it boasts the largest open source model API with over 12,000 users, per the company.
That kind of open source traction tends to attract investor attention, and the company has raised $25 million so far.
“It can be either off the shelf, open source models or the models we tune or the models our customer can tune by themselves.
Being an API, developers can plug it into their application, bring their model of choice trained on their data, and add generative AI capabilities like asking questions very quickly.
The “State of Subscription Apps” report offers a bird’s-eye view into the subscription app universe, as RevenueCat has nearly 30,000 apps using its platform’s tools to manage their monetization.
Outside of Apple and Google, that makes RevenueCat the largest collection of subscription app developers on one platform.
For instance, 59% of the apps that reach $1,000 will go on to reach $2,500 and 60% of the apps that reach $2,500 will make it to $5,000.
The report highlights other aspects of the race to subscription app monetization, as well, including that North America-based apps have 4x the monetization of the global average.
The larger report gets into more specifics that will be useful to subscription app developers, including details about subscription packages, pricing, trial strategies, conversion, refund rates, retention, growth, and more.
Well, if you ask Garrett Hamilton, they should give Reach Security a whirl.
Instead of serving as just another layer in a company’s cybersecurity stack, Reach connects to a company’s existing IT and security products, collecting data on attacks and recommending ways to combat them using security tools that the company already owns.
They’re wrong.”Prior to Reach, Hamilton worked at Palo Alto Networks, where he was director of product management.
A survey from security posture management vendor Panaseer found that organizations manage on average between 64 to 76 security tools (as of 2022).
Reach also auto-tunes security tool configurations to try to prevent attacks, prioritizing actions based on how the attacks are being carried out.
How strongly a technology good or service resonates with potential customers is often called “product-market fit,” or PMF.
Jess Lee is coming to TechCrunch Early Stage in Boston this year to help founders looking to reach, or refine, their current PMF guide their upstart tech companies in the right direction.
Early Stage is shaping up to be possibly our best-ever shindig for early-stage founders, with NFX’s James Currier, Underscore’s Lily Lyman, and of course Lee herself coming ’round to talk shop.
As with all Early Stage events, audience Q&A will be a critical component of every session, so bring your notebook, several pens, and I’ll see you on April 25!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024?
Will we reach AGI before Stripe goes public?
This is our Friday episode, when we dig back through the most critical stories and themes from the week.
Here’s what Mary Ann and Alex got into:Stripe’s valuation recovers: As part of a tender offer, Stripe is now worth $65 billion.
As part of a tender offer, Stripe is now worth $65 billion.
AI and the law: Microsoft’s move to invest in French AI company Mistral is not a bad way to spread its bets.
Deal Dive: Tier and Dott’s merger is not a sign of what’s to come in M&A this year Consolidation can be complicatedEarlier this week, European micromobility companies Tier and Dott said they had agreed to merge.
The companies hope they can become profitable if they work together, my colleague Romain reported.
This seems like a solid outcome for the two startups, since they likely weren’t going to reach IPO scale on their own.
After all, if the companies weren’t going to survive as solo entities, it makes sense to at least try another direction.
Last year I came up with a hypothesis about M&A in 2024; I was inspired by Getir acquiring FreshDirect to fill a gap it needed to potentially reach profitability.
D-Orbit, an Italian startup that provides an array of logistics services for companies operating satellites and other services in space, has raised €100 million ($110 million) in a Series C round of equity funding.
The Milan-based company said another $50 million will be added to the Series C in the first half of this year.
D-Orbit today provides last-mile satellite delivery and related logistics services, mission control as a service to manage already-launched spacecraft and hardware, and space waste management services, all aimed at launches that are orbiting the Earth.
Others in the area of space services include Planet Labs, Privateer, Zenno Astronautics, Astroscale, and a variety of others just getting started.
“D-Orbit represents an excellence that in these years has positioned itself as a category leader in the in-orbit transportation segment globally, becoming the first B-Corp certified space company in the world.”
Alteryx, an Irvine, California-based software company developing data science and analytics products, today announced that it’s agreed to be acquired by private equity firms Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners in a deal worth $4.4 billion.
Clearlake and Insight reportedly beat out Symphony Technology Group, another private equity firm, which Reuters reported several days ago had been vying for Alteryx.
The Clearlake-Insight deal, which includes debt, values Alteryx’s equity at around $3.46 billion, reports Reuters — a 29.1% premium over the company’s closing share price on Friday.
After raising tens of millions of dollars from VC firms including Toba Capital, Insight, Sapphire Ventures, ICONIQ Capital and Meritech Capital Partners, Alteryx went public on the NYSE in 2017.
Today, Alteryx stands out as an industry leader with a differentiated platform that scales data democratization in a governed manner,” Stoecker said.
