Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch PM! Today we bring you news about Notion adding some new features, San Franciscans having a new way to ride around town, a lawsuit against generative AI startups, Stability AI bringing in some help from heavy hitters and Google’s Gemini for email is here. Let’s dig in!

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Notion puts Notion Sites in motion: Popular productivity tool Notion has long allowed its users to make any of their pages public. Now the company is expanding on this with the launch of Notion Sites, which adds several new features to its existing publishing tools. For the most part, these are pretty straightforward, but together, they do make for a more polished publishing experience. Read more

Waymo steps on the gas of its San Francisco plans: Waymo said that anyone can download the app and then immediately hail one of its robotaxis in San Francisco. The announcement comes just a couple of weeks after Waymo voluntarily issued a software recall to all 672 of its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis after one of them collided with a telephone pole. Read more

Internet disruption in Kenya: London-based internet rights monitoring group NetBlocks has reported a major internet disruption in Kenya following a wave of demonstrations across the country. Police violently cracked down on citizens taking to the streets to protest a government bill to hike taxes despite tough economic times and widespread corruption. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads 🗞

Fearless Fund co-founder steps down: Ayana Parsons said she was leaving her position as chief operating officer of the venture capital firm. Read more

The day the AI music died: Like many AI companies, Udio and Suno relied on large-scale theft to create their generative AI models. This they have as much as admitted, even before the music industry’s new lawsuits against them have gone before a judge. Read more

Stability gets some capital but won’t say how much: Stability AI, the beleaguered generative AI startup behind Stable Diffusion, is making changes. Among them, Napster founder and ex-Facebook exec Sean Parker, who is part of the investor group, is now executive board chairman. Read more

Gemini wants to help with email: Google is rolling out its new Gemini AI side panel in Gmail that can help you write emails and summarize email threads. With the new integration, you can use Gemini in Gmail to get help drafting an email or receive suggested responses to an email. Read more

Threads in the fediverse: Instagram’s Threads expands further into the fediverse and is now opening its beta for sharing to users who are 18 and up and who are using Threads with a public account in global markets. Read more

Circular and Oura settle: As part of a settlement agreement in an ongoing patent suit, Circular has agreed to a multi-year agreement with Oura where the French company will license the market leader’s intellectual property for devices sold in the U.S. Read more

iPhone looks in the mirror: iPhone Mirroring, one of the more notable features arriving in Apple’s upcoming operating systems, is now available to developers testing the beta versions of iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. Read more

Boeing’s Wisk Aero buys Verocel: Verocel is a software verification and validation company that’s been serving the aerospace industry for 25 years. Read more

Finding a job in the U.S. is no picnic if you’re an immigrant: Luckily, Jobright has created an AI agent that acts just like a headhunter tailored to your skills. Read more

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY 💰

Payabli is building payment management tools for software startups. Read more

Tengo untangles the messy world of public sector procurement with AI. Read more

Smashing, from Goodreads’ co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations. Read more

Backed by David Sacks, Garry Tan and Walter Isaacson, Created by Humans helps people license their creative work to AI models. Read more

Coder nabs new funds to move dev environments to the cloud. Read more

k-ID wins $45 million to help game devs speedrun the child safety compliance puzzle. Read more

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TechCrunch Minute 🕒

X still can’t handle its bot problem: Not really a shocker, right? I mean, they let anyone pay for the verified checkmark. It came to a head last summer when X admitted it had a problem with users getting too much spam from verified accounts. And now some of the bots are powered by AI. So why is X failing so supremely at controlling spam? Didn’t Musk buy the platform in part due to his frustrations with bots? Hit play and let’s chat!

Around the web 🌐

2021 VC funds didn’t age like the fine wine they were supposed to: The Wall Street Journal reports that the venture capital industry was great in 2021, but many of the funds starting in that year are underperforming. Read more

That didn’t take long: Don’t look for a deal between Apple and Meta to happen anytime soon, according to Business Insider. Read more