Hello friends! Happy Friday. While our intrepid Week in Review leader Greg is enjoying paternity leave, I’m filling in and curating the latest on the tech news front. It was a rollercoaster of a week once again, as economic headwinds took a brutal and demoralizing toll, and chaos reigned on Elon Musk’s Twitter. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Boston Dynamics demoed an improved bipedal robot, Wikipedia launched a redesign, and major universities banned TikTok from their campus networks. Yes, a lot happened.
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Alphabet makes deep cuts: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced Friday that it will cut about 6% of its global workforce, or about 12,000 positions. Pablo reports. in a open letter Posted by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the narrative followed a similar trajectory to other companies that have downsized in recent months, noting that the company had “hired for a different economic reality” than the one it faces. today.
Twitter prohibits third-party clients from: After taking down prominent app makers like Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter quietly updated its developer terms to ban third-party Twitter clients entirely. The “restrictions” section of Twitter’s 5,000 words. developer agreement was updated with a clause that prohibits the “use or access [to] the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar product or service to the Twitter Applications,” a decision that seems unlikely to foster much goodwill at a time when Twitter is grappling with challenges in a number of fronts.
Beating a Hastings Withdrawal: Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings announced Thursday that he was stepping down after more than two decades with the company. Taylor writes While the news of his departure is a shock, Hastings noted in the advertisement that Netflix has planned its next era of leadership “for many years.” Netflix will maintain its co-CEO structure in Hastings’ absence, promoting COO Greg Peters to the tandem role with Ted Sarandos.
College students, there is no TikTok for you: Public universities in a growing swath of US states have banned TikTok in recent months, and two of the country’s largest universities followed suit earlier this week. What Taylor The University of Texas and Texas A&M University reportedly cracked down on the social app, owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, banning users of campus devices and networks from accessing TikTok. He flurry of recent bans it was inspired by executive orders issued by various state governors.
Wikipedia gets a makeover: This week, Wikipedia, a resource used by billions each month, received its first desktop makeover in more than a decade. Sarah writes The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia project, released an updated interface aimed at making the site more accessible and user-friendly, with additions such as improved search, a more prominent tool for switching between languages, an updated header offering access to links, and more.
Pour one for AmazonSmile: Just days after announcing a major round of layoffs, Amazon said that would kill AmazonSmile, their donation program that redirects 0.5% of the cost of all eligible products to charity. Amazon claimed that the program “had not grown to create the impact that [it] I had originally expected”, but as Roman notes, since 2013, Amazon has donated $400 million through AmazonSmile. Ending it seems more likely to be a move to cut costs.
Payday for data breach victims: If you were one of the nearly 77 million people affected by T-Mobile’s security breach last year, you may have a few bucks on the way. Devin reports that the firm will pay $350 million to be split between clients and attorneys, plus $150 million “for data security and related technology.” The breach apparently occurred early last year, after which collections of T-Mobile customer data were put up for sale on various criminal forums.
Robots that grab and throw: TechCrunch’s Intrepids matte burns writes about a demo video this week showing Hyundai-backed Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas equipped with grasping hands that can pick up and put down anything the robot can independently grasp. The claw-shaped gripper consists of a fixed finger and a movable finger; Boston Dynamics says the grippers were designed for heavy lifting tasks, like Atlas holding a barrel over his head during a Super Bowl commercial. Skilled.
Dungeons and Dragons: After weeks of backlash and fan protest, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro-owned Dungeons & Dragons publisher, Announced will now license the core mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons under the Creative Commons Recognition 4.0 International license. This gives the community “a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license” to publish and sell works based on Dungeons & Dragons – a big change of heart for the gaming giant, which was considering implementing a new license that would require certain Dungeons & Dragons content creators to begin paying a 25% royalty.
audio summary
Whether it’s to pass the time on the go or liven up your morning jog, TechCrunch likely has a podcast to suit your tastes. Start-up focused Equity this week, Natasha, maria anna Y Rebeca She jumped on the mic to discuss a diverse week of news, including deals from Sophia Amoruso’s new fund, Welcome Homes, and a look at praise-focused social media apps. foundMeanwhile, he introduced Mir Hwang, co-founder and CEO of GigFinesse, who talked about how his struggles booking music concerts as a teenager prompted him to launch the company that connects artists with venues for live performances.
TechCrunch+
TC+, TechCrunch’s premium channel for deep dives, polls, guest posts, and general analysis, was packed with content this week (as always). Here are some of the most popular posts:
In Twitter’s data leak response: carly writes about the alleged Twitter data breach that exposed the contact information of millions of users. in a unattributed blog postTwitter said it had conducted a “thorough investigation” and found “no evidence” that recent Twitter user data sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability in Twitter’s systems. But as she points out, it’s unclear whether Twitter has the technical means, such as logs, to determine whether user data was exfiltrated.
The last unicorns: Venture capitalists think that most unicorns are no longer worth a billion dollars. Rebeca looks at the current investment landscape and finds that many of the companies that achieved unicorn status last year are at risk of losing it as economic conditions worsen.
Sexism in the workplace: Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funding in 2022, a drop from 2021, Madori Sunday writes That percentage is a notable drop from the 2.4% that women’s teams raked in in 2021. The decline was expected, but was marked nonetheless. Outside of 2016, the last time all-female-led start-ups raised such a low percentage of funding was 2012, another period of declining funding caused by economic uncertainty and elections.
