The once popular third-party podcast app Castro has seemingly shut down, after earlier saying that it was “actively seeking a new home” for its product.
Concerns over Castro’s future, and the fate of the indie podcast app industry as a whole, have broadened in recent years as Spotify entered the market to compete with Apple Podcasts.
That move influenced the exits of other smaller podcast apps, which included the sale of Pocket Casts to a collective of radio broadcasters, including NPR and BBC Studios.
Satellite radio provider and Pandora owner SiriusXM also bought the podcast app Stitcher in 2020 for $325 million.
Another request for comment from Casto owner Tiny was not returned as of the time of writing, but we’ll update if more information is provided.
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech that was.
In this edition of WiR, we spotlight Brian’s CES 2024 preview, 23andMe blaming victims for its data breach, GitHub making Copilot Chat generally available and Frontdesk laying off its entire staff.
But first, a reminder to sign up here to receive WiR in your inbox every Saturday if you haven’t already done so.
Most readCES 2024: Brian has a thorough roundup of what to expect at CES 2024, including — but not limited to — generative AI, robotics, TVs, cars, smartphones, and health tech.
Frontdesk CEO Jesse DePinto said that Frontdesk would be filing for a state receivership, an alternative to bankruptcy, according to TechCrunch’s sources.
CES 2024: Follow along with TechCrunch’s coverage from Las Vegas TechCrunch will be on the ground at CES 2024 in Las Vegas for innovations in hardware, transportation, AI and everything in betweenCES 2024 is almost upon us, and a team of TechCrunch reporters and experts will be on the ground in Las Vegas to give you the biggest news out of the consumer electronics show.
To help you keep tabs on those, we’ve put together all the ways to watch live on press day here.
Here’s how to follow along with TechCrunch reporters at this year’s conference.
Hardware Editor Brian Heater will cover up and coming hardware startups, in addition to innovations in robotics, hardware and AI.
And if you’re really old-school in your news consumption, you can bookmark our CES 2024 page so you don’t miss out on every update.
If you’re someone who loves an internet hype cycle, good news: There’s a new group of scientists who claim to have discovered a near-room-temperature superconductor.
(It should be noted that most of these people do not appear to be scientists let alone condensed-matter physicists.)
The one that grabbed the most headlines — LK-99 — dominated the internet for a few weeks over the summer before succumbing to the scientific method.
Another one, detailed in a paper co-authored by Ranga Dias and others, made a splash in March only to be subject to a retraction in September.
This new material picks up where LK-99 left off, which isn’t really an auspicious starting point.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, suffered an outage globally earlier Thursday that lasted for more than an hour.
X Pro, formerly known as TweetDeck, also faced the outage.
This was not Twitter’s first outage – the abrupt workforce cuts earlier exposed the site to more vulnerabilities and reliability issues.
The last major outage on the platform, which was still called Twitter at that time, occurred in early July.
Users encountered “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets” errors.
Even though the economy is signaling a bit of a bounce-back, 2024 might not be much better than 2023 when it comes to startups sharing a piece of the budget pie.
If startups want a chance of making it through yet another bumpy year, they need to prove their worth now more than ever.
Investors told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller and Rebecca Szkutak that they’re still expecting some pockets of growth.
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For example, 70% of respondents said they plan to hire next year and none are looking to downsize.
Elon Musk’s X marks the spot of the first confirmed investigation opened by the European Union under its rebooted digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Its earlier actions were focused on concerns about the spread of illegal content and disinformation related to the Israel-Hamas war.
So the Commission’s official scrutiny of X could have real world implications for how the platform operates sooner rather than later.
However the Commission obviously has doubts X has gone far enough on the transparency front to meet the DSA’s bar.
The investigation may also test Musk’s mettle for what could be an expensive head-on clash with EU regulators.
Businesses are working hard to conform to traditional heuristics like Rule of 40 (i.e., the idea that the sum of revenue growth and profit margin should equal 40%+, a metric that Bessemer helped popularize).
The world has over-rotated into an FCF margin mindset over a growth mindset, which is backward for growing efficient businesses.
Long-term models show that even in tight markets, growth should be valued at least ~2x to 3x more than FCF margin.
While a margin increase has a linear impact on value, a growth rate increase can have a compounding impact on value.
We show the detailed math below, and it’s confirmed by public market valuation correlations when you backtest the relative importance of growth versus FCF margin.
More importantly for Mastodon, Meta committed to integrating Threads with ActivityPub, meaning users would be able to find and follow both Mastodon and Threads users across both services.
While many expected that integration wouldn’t arrive until early 2024, Meta surprised everyone by announcing yesterday that it would begin testing ActivityPub integration.
I’m pretty optimistic about this,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post on Threads.
Threads users’ profiles on Mastodon weren’t backfilled with their older posts before the integration went live.
With Threads’ integration into Mastodon’s ecosystem, users will have more choice in how they want to engage with Threads users and content, including by accessing those accounts from an app of their choosing.
Hackers compromised the code behind a crypto protocol used by multiple web3 applications and services, the software maker Ledger said on Thursday.
The company says it has sold six million units of its hardware wallet, and Ledger Live, its software equivalent, is used by 1.5 million users.
That would allow the hackers to drain the crypto inside users’ wallets — so long as the users accepted the push to connect their wallets to the malicious Ledger version.
ZachXBT, a well-known independent crypto researcher, wrote on X that one victim had more than $600,000 in crypto drained from their account.
Several blockchain security researchers, as well as people who work in the web3 industry, warned users on social media of the supply chain hack against Ledger.
