Not many startups can claim Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as paying customers, but Confetti can.
How it worksCompanies use Confetti to bring team-building experiences to their remote teams, with support for hybrid too.
ComplexitiesIn a prior job, Rubin says she was tasked with organizing a team-building event, an endeavor that proved more difficult than she initially envisaged.
“When we started, we were solely focused on in-person events, helping companies organize events in the office,” Rubin said.
“We’re already providing companies with options to purchase Confetti Credits, which can be used to buy experiences on our platform,” Rubin said.
One Bay Area startup called Amber thinks it can help them navigate that minefield, starting with Tesla owners.
When owners file a claim, Amber works with qualified repair shops to find the right parts and fix what’s wrong, and will transport the vehicle.
AmberCare is the latest addition to a growing economy built around used EVs.
One group is anyone who is looking to buy a used EV but is scared away by the thought of expensive, time-consuming repairs.
There are other unexpected things to consider in the process of repairing an EV that Pak thinks AmberCare can help with, like transportation.
Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for GeminiIn a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant Wednesday (around $270 million at today’s exchange rate).
The competition authority has found fault with Google for failing to notify news publishers of this GenAI use of their copyrighted content.
But the competition authority quickly stepped in – finding its unilateral action an abuse of a dominant market position that risked harm to publishers.
But in 2021, Google was hit with a $592M fine after the competition authority found major breaches in its negotiations with local publishers and agencies.
Google has signed copyright agreements with hundreds of publishers in France – which fall under the remit of its agreement with the Autorité.
Documentation startup Mintlify says dozens of customers had GitHub tokens exposed in a data breach at the start of the month and publicly disclosed last week.
Mintlify helps developers create documentation for their software and source code by requesting access and tapping directly into the customer’s GitHub source code repositories.
These private tokens allow GitHub users to share their account access with third parties apps, including companies like Mintlify.
“The targets of this attack were GitHub tokens of our users,” Wang told TechCrunch by email.
We are currently working with GitHub and our customers to uncover if any of the other tokens were used by the attacker,” Wang said.
TechCrunch Minute: The TikTok ban, or at least the effort to force its sale, is gaining steamAnd some folks are pretty mad about it!
After a House subcommittee passed a bill that would force a sale of TikTok or ban the app from American app stores, debate reignited around the internet regrading whether or not the social service should face such harsh choices.
On the pro-TikTok side former President Donald Trump flipped his views, and Elon Musk has spoken against the possibility.
On the other hand, there’s a surprisingly united Congress, concerns about data safety, and fears that TikTok could be used to influence the American electorate.
This raises the question: Why not just divest the asset so that we can put the issue to bed?
TikTok is expanding its Effect Creator Rewards monetization program to more regions and lowering its payout threshold, the company announced today.
The program, which launched in May 2023, rewards creators for the effects they make through TikTok’s AR development platform, Effect House.
TikTok is also updating the program’s payout model, as creators will now only receive rewards for effects used in public videos.
Effect Creator Rewards is now available in a total of 53 regions.
Previously, creators needed an effect to have been used in 200,000 qualified videos within 90 days for the effect to start collecting rewards.
Earlier this week, the U.S. government announced sanctions against the founder of a controversial government spyware maker, Tal Dilian, and his business associate, Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou.
If the U.S. government thinks someone sold spyware to authoritarians and dictators, or their company’s spyware was used against the wrong targets, it will go directly after the people running those spyware companies.
And people who used to work in the government spyware industry expressed concern.
That’s big,” said a former head of a spyware maker that sold to governments, when TechCrunch shared the news of the sanctions with him.
According to a third person working in the spyware industry, the sanctions against Dilian and his business associate Hamou should make the whole market have a moment of reflection.
Here’s why most AI benchmarks tell us so littleOn Tuesday, startup Anthropic released a family of generative AI models that it claims achieve best-in-class performance.
The reason — or rather, the problem — lies with the benchmarks AI companies use to quantify a model’s strengths — and weaknesses.
“Many benchmarks used for evaluation are three-plus years old, from when AI systems were mostly just used for research and didn’t have many real users.
In addition, people use generative AI in many ways — they’re very creative.”It’s not that the most-used benchmarks are totally useless.
However, as generative AI models are increasingly positioned as mass market, “do-it-all” systems, old benchmarks are becoming less applicable.
Camshaft disclosed in court filings this week that some $533 million it managed for Byju’s Alpha, a U.S. unit of Indian edtech group Byju’s, was transferred to another 100% and U.S.-based subsidiary of Byju’s, thereby refuting allegations that the Indian firm used the wealth manager’s services to misappropriate money.
In the court filings, Camshaft said the capital was transferred to Inspilearn LLC, a Delaware-based subsidiary of Byju’s.
Camshaft also clarified that Byju’s or any of its entities are not limited partners in the hedge fund.
Camshaft Capital attracted media attention last year after lenders of Byju’s questioned the legitimacy of the wealth advisor as they claimed the $533 million was a collateral for a $1.2 billion they had lent to the Indian startup.
A select few estranged investors in Byju’s later used the allegation to discredit Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran’s credibility.
A U.S. government watchdog stole more than one gigabyte of seemingly sensitive personal data from the cloud systems of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The good news: The data was fake and part of a series of tests to check whether the Department’s cloud infrastructure was secure.
The experiment is detailed in a new report by the Department of the Interior’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), published last week.
The tests were conducted between March 2022 and June 2023, the OIG wrote in the report.
The Department of the Interior manages the country’s federal land, national parks and a budget of billions of dollars, and hosts a significant amount of data in the cloud.
