Hi again! Greg here again with Weekly Review. WiR is a newsletter where we take the most-read TechCrunch stories of the past seven days and summarize them in as few words as possible — no nonsense, no nonsense,* just a quick round-up of everything you can. want to know about this technology this week.
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Tips for Your Amazon Driver (on Amazon Coins): If you have an Alexa device at home, Amazon will pay an extra $5 to your delivery driver if you say, “Alexa, thank you my driver” after delivery. Of course, Amazon could simply pay more drivers to get started… but that, sadly, probably won’t be a move that would make Amazon one of the most read headlines. in Week.
Slack’s CEO leaves: Last week Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor step down; This week, Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack (owned by Salesforce), announced that he will also be stepping down next January. Ron Miller Shares His Insights On Inbound Slack CEOs Lidiane Jones and her decades of product experience.
“Twitter Files”: “Elon Musk reminded his followers on Friday that owning Twitter now means he controls every aspect of the company – including what company employees have to say. behind closed doors before he took over,” Taylor wrote when a piece of once-private Twitter internal communications was made public.
Lensa AI goes viral: Are all your social media friends suddenly having avatars that make them look like sci-fi gods and action heroes? Probably due to Lensa AI, a photo editing app that went viral this week after adding support for Stable Diffusion’s AI-generated art tools. However, fame doesn’t come without controversy — many continue to debate the ethics of selling something AI-generated based on real people’s work; meanwhile, others note that AI can be “tricked” into unauthorized NSFW image generation.
More tech layoffs: This week Airtable quits job about 20% of its employees — more than 250 people. striped also get fired 20%, for them up to 260 people. African fintech unicorn Chipper Cash drops 50 peopleand UK drag and drop e-commerce platform Primer skip 85 (about a third of companies).
Google combines Maps/Waze . groups: When Google acquired navigation app Waze for more than $1 billion in 2013, Google said it would separate the Waze and Google Maps team “for now.” It turns out that “currently” means about 9.5 years, but Google confirmed this week that the two groups will be merging. Google says it expects Waze to remain a standalone service.
Twitter Blue may be more expensive on iOS: Twitter’s $8 “Blue” subscription (with a blue “verified” check mark) is still on hold after a while a few false startsbut when it does come back, it will cost a few extra dollars if you subscribe via the iOS app to make up for Apple’s cut.
sound synthesis
Find — our podcast about founders and the companies they build — has a new co-host! Becca Szkutak takes on the role this week, joining Darrell Etherington in a conversation with Daye CEO Valentina Milanova. Meanwhile, the Equity team tried to make sense of 2022 in a way look back at the end of the yearand Taylor Hatmaker jumped up Podcasts TechCrunch to explore what the sudden explosion of AI-generated art means for real artists.
TechCrunch+
Here’s what subscribers read most on TechCrunch+:
Investors sound the alarm about possible private equity tech deals: “Who wants to sell when prices are low?” Ron Miller and Alex Willhelm asked.
Rootine’s $10 Million Offering Deck: “If you told me that a company that charges $70 per month for multivitamins could raise a $10 million round, I would ask to see the bill,” Haje wrote. With that in mind, he delves into the football field research that helped make that happen.
