Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch PM! Today we're looking at a social media app called noplace that will remind you of the early days of social media platforms. There’s also news about Cartken’s cute delivery robots, a celebration over at Threads and some venture capital news. We'll be off on Thursday to celebrate the holiday. To those living in the U.S., happy Fourth of July!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Noplace

Well, it was definitely someplace: It looks like the mid-2000s are back! A new app called noplace raced to the top of the App Store as it launched out of invite-only mode. Designed to appeal to a younger crowd — or anyone who wants to connect with friends or around shared interests — noplace is like a modern-day MySpace with its colorful, customizable profiles. People are sharing things like relationship status, what they’re listening to or watching, what they’re reading or doing, and more. Read more

The call is coming from inside the app: Twilio confirmed that “threat actors” were able to identify the phone number of people who use Authy, a popular two-factor authentication app owned by Twilio. While Twilio said it has solved the problem, one expert says the threat is not over yet. Read more

Cartken’s AV vision: Cartken’s sidewalk delivery robots first rolled into the world with a narrow charter: carrying everything from burritos and bento boxes to pizza and pad thai to hungry customers. Today, the company sees opportunity for its robots to navigate the outdoor environment of pedestrian-filled sidewalks and the indoor world of factories, labs, industrial buildings and even airports. Read more

Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Getty Images

Cloudflare is going after bots: Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training with an amendment to the site's robots.txt, which lives in the source code and tells bots which pages they can access. Not all AI scrapers respect this. Cloudflare developed a new, free tool that prevents bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models. Read more

Nano Dimension acquiring Desktop Metal: The finer financial details are still being worked out, with the sale price ultimately ranging anywhere from $135 million to $183 million. At the high end, the deal marks more than a 27% premium over Desktop Metal’s closing price. Read more

Threads turns 1: Meta’s Threads will celebrate its first year with over 175 million monthly active users. Read more

Amazon retires Astro for Business: It was just seven months ago that the company was debuting Astro for Business, a security robot for smaller businesses. It’s being discontinued but not shelved. The next iteration will hit closer to home. Read more

Granza Bio grabs $7 million: This is the tale of two Ashwins who decided to explore the idea of turning research on the immune system into a company. Their company, a YC grad, is developing a novel approach to delivering immunotherapy and other “attack particles” to various parts of the body. Read more

Driving Forces shuts down: Solo general partner Sidney Scott announced on LinkedIn this week that he was shutting down his $5 million fintech and deep tech VC fund that he started in 2020, calling the past four years “a wild ride.” Despite a healthy performance on the fund, Scott realized the ride would not last forever. Read more

LG’s latest acquisition: LG has acquired an 80% stake in Athom, a Dutch smart home company and maker of the Homey smart home hub. The home products giant plans to integrate Athom’s Homey platform, which links thousands of appliances, sensors and lighting devices, with its LG ThinQ platform. Read more

Popster plays a new tune: A generative AI tune, to be exact. The music video-sharing app is getting an AI image generator for cover art and a collaboration capability where artists can remix another user’s songs. Read more

Video call reactions, be gone!: Confetti is great and all, but seriously. We have a guide to help you turn off reactions on your iPhone and Mac so you don’t get surprised during a video call. Unless you like surprises like that, in which case, carry on. Read more

TechCrunch Minute

Image Credits: Getty Images / MirageC

YouTube makes it easier to report and take down AI deepfakes: It’s so easy to make a deepfake of another person’s voice or face, but not always easy to report it. YouTube has made some small changes that make it slightly easier to report a video that uses your likeness without consent. Whether this move is successful will depend on how well enforced it is. If YouTube can speed up the process of removing potentially harmful content, then we’ll call it a win. Hit play and let’s chat!

Around the web 🌐

Elon Musk to Bill Gates: “Stop shorting Tesla!”: According to a tweet by Elon Musk on X, the duo still seem to be at odds with each other two years later. Yahoo Finance reports the rivalry started in 2022, when an exchange between them was leaked that included Musk refusing to support Gates’ charitable work after he found out Gates had a half-billion-dollar wager on Tesla’s share price falling. Read more

Artists aren’t thrilled with Apple Intelligence: They are saying the consumer tech giant isn't forthcoming about how Apple Intelligence will go about gathering the data and information used to train models, Engadget reports. It’s becoming an age-old story of AI. Read more

Microsoft settles personal leave suit: The company is reportedly paying $14.4 million to settle the case in California that had to do with alleged retaliation against employees who took their legally protected time off, CNBC reports. Think parental and disability leave. Read more