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Hello, and welcome to your Friday. Did the week get long or go by fast for you? Or maybe you had the day off. No matter, I’m here to bring you all the tech goodness of today. Today’s lesson: “Never leak data.”
Oh, and support our colleagues in the Chain reaction and Found podcasts: were nominated for a Webbyso please support them with a vote for April 20. — christina
TechCrunch Top 3
- That’s a spicy app: ByteDance’s latest hit, Lemon8, which some describe as a cross between Instagram, Pinterest and Amazon, is now in the top 10 apps in the US. However, rita says Lemon8 is more like another app called Xiaohongshu and discusses why ByteDance may have taken another page from the China playbook.
- Prepare your unicorn horn: You’re going to need a TechCrunch+ subscription to read the next one, but I promise you it’s worth it. Alex went on the hunt for unicorn IPOs and came back with a list of names, saying, “The first batch of potential unicorn IPOs is shaping up well.”
- In a galaxy far, far away: If you are a fan of Star Wars, Disney + will premiere a new series called “The Acolyte” in 2024. Aisha writes that this story takes place at the end of the High Republic era before the events of the main Star Wars films.
Startups and VCs
Everyone needs a good competition to get the creativity flowing. KyleDevin and manish came together to discuss Anthropic’s $5 billion four-year plan to take on OpenAI. Going through the company’s pitch deck, the trio outlines the business model that will get Anthropic there and the investors behind it.
Closing out the week, as mentioned yesterday, was a group of us watching Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 Demo Day. Artificial intelligence and open source were the big buzzwords on Day 1, while Day 2 had us wondering if crypto is back and why accountants are suddenly getting so much love.
VC to remarket startups: Let’s pop some labels
Image Credits: Kinga Krzeminska (Opens in a new window) / Fake Images
Thanks in large part to Gen Z’s interest in sustainable shopping, e-commerce is rocketing to new heights, and venture capitalists are looking to make it happen.
Since Etsy went public in 2015, companies like Poshmark, The RealReal, and thredUP have followed suit, drawing even more investors into the industry. Last year, VCs flowed roughly $6 billion to reselling platforms, writes Brian Schwarzbach, an investor at Cathay Innovation.
In a post for TC+, he explores three areas of re-trade attracting VC funds and shares “some food for thought for founders building startups in this (re)emerging space.”
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big tech inc
Sometimes things don’t go as planned. In India, its central bank has decided to pause plans it had for a rival to the nation’s dominant payment system, Unified Payments Interface. manish he writes that the project, called the New Umbrella Entity, had seen some traction, attracting interest from large companies and financial institutions, and inviting bids in 2021 for licenses to operate new retail payment and settlement systems across India. However, the project simply failed to have that sizzle and pop that the Reserve Bank of India was looking for.
Catch a dropped iPod and put it in your pocket…harry reports on Apple’s patent application for what appears to be a tiny iPod that can do it all – music, videos and books – without the need for a smartphone or smartwatch. Although I’m not sure how you can read into something so small. I guess we’ll see.
And we have five more for you:
