Some Airbnb hosts won’t like the new labels

Good afternoon. In today’s TechCrunch PM, we’ve got new listing labels from Airbnb, more on Apple’s fine, some big startup valuations, a new smartphone and how to speak at Disrupt.

— Christine

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TechCrunch PM Top 3

Airbnb labels top and bottom listings: Pictures say a thousand words, but with the way you can change any image to be what you want it to be, Airbnb is helping potential renters suss out what’s what. It now has new labels to indicate which listings are top properties and which are not.

Anthropic slaps OpenAI with a glove: Anthropic claims its new AI chatbot models beat OpenAI’s GPT-4. It’s a bold claim, yes, and doesn’t exactly apply to everything, as you will read.

Mews is a unicorn: Travel is back, baby! Mews, a startup building tools to help hotels manage their IT better, closed on a growth round of $110 million to capture more business beyond hospitality. The funding puts the company at a $1.2 billion valuation post-money.

More top reads

Take a bite out of that Apple: This morning we brought you news about Apple’s nearly €2 billion fine from the European Commission. Now read about Apple’s plans to appeal this ruling (of course it is) and who else is telling Apple to basically suck it up. Here’s another take on where all of this might be headed. I guess Apple picked a good day to announce new MacBook Air models.

The future of e-commerce aggregators is consolidation: Berlin’s Razor Group acquired U.S.-based Perch and secured just over $100 million in a round led by Presight Capital. The news comes just days after e-commerce aggregator giant Thrasio filed for bankruptcy. This industry has not been without its challenges, and consolidation is likely how we’ll see it reorganize.

Picture it: Google has a new set of Pixel-related features for phones, tablets and watches. There’s a 10-bit video support for Instagram, expansion of the Circle to Search feature, automatic workout detection and selective app screening for multiple Pixel devices.

Social media roundup: I don’t think I have texted a full sentence without some sort of autocorrect thing happening. Instagram apparently heard our collective crying and rolled out the ability to edit direct messages for up to 15 minutes after sending. Meanwhile, TikTok is introducing a data portability API to help it comply with new European regulations designed to rein in Big Tech’s market dominance through various obligations and restrictions. More here and here.

Should we ban ransom payments? You’ve probably already answered, but Carly Page tells us why this is being brought up, and why not paying the ransom isn’t as easy as we may think.

Everything you want to know about Punkt’s new smartphone: The Swiss company is putting its minimalist style to work in its first smartphone that positions itself at the crossroads of utility, privacy and minimalism.

Today in venture capital: Topsort, developing retail media technology for small businesses, raised $20 million in Series A capital to boost its valuation to $150 million. And Qatar has a $100 million fund for startups.

Before you go

Want to speak at Disrupt? This year’s event is taking place in San Francisco from October 28–30. Here’s how you can sign up to be a speaker for a breakout session or roundtable. More here.

On the pods

On today’s Equity, Alex Wilhelm takes a look back at the weekend and what’s ahead in the week. As noted in Friday’s newsletter, there was a weekend bonus with Nubank’s CEO. Over in stocks and crypto, some indices reached record highs, while token prices are also on the ascent. Alex also goes through what’s happening with Apple, new AI rules in India, Waymo’s trip to the airport and Salla raising a huge pre-IPO round. Listen to it all here.

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