Venture

Daily Crunch: Hackers leak names, personal details of donors to ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest

Comment

Image Credits: Stephanie Keith / Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, February 14, 2022! Oh, what we have for you today. If you wanted mega-rounds, Apple’s latest hijinks, and even some political-hacker drama, TechCrunch has your back!

Before we dive in, tickets for our Sessions: Mobility event are now out, and we just announced that Mary D’Onofrio from Bessemer is coming to Early Stage to chat ARR. I think I am moderating that one? See you there! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Hackers leak Ottawa protest donor information: The standoff between North American protesters arguing against vaccine mandates in Canada took a new turn “after fundraising site GiveSendGo was targeted by hackers overnight,” leading to the apparent disclosure of donor data. This particular breach is not the only that platform GiveSendGo is dealing with, TechCrunch reports.
  • Texas AG sues Meta over facial recognition tech: Texas’s attorney general (himself under FBI investigation) is suing Facebook’s parent company, alleging that “the company’s use of facial recognition technology, which it has now discontinued, violated the state’s privacy protections regarding biometric data,” TechCrunch reports. The suit, per the WSJ, is for hundreds of billions of dollars.
  • Apple fined €5M by Netherlands: Speaking of government-versus-technology action, the Netherlands have put yet another fine on Apple’s tab after the country’s government said that Apple was applying “unreasonable” to dating apps in its App Store. Apple had previously been told to allow dating apps to use non-Apple payments tech in their mobile applications. (There’s no drug more addictive than a history of successful rent-seeking!)

Startups/VC

As the share prices of food-delivery companies fade, what’s ahead for instant-delivery startups? That’s the question I dug into this morning, sifting through a host of data from European delivery companies that have taken blows in the public markets in recent weeks. On the other side of the coin are a host of big-dollar deals for upstart companies that want to deliver goods even more quickly than takeout services. How the math will shake out is going to be interesting.

Jio Platforms puts $200M into Google-backed Glance: More evidence of the rising importance of the Indian tech scene can be found in the news that a company that displays media and other content to Android lockscreens has just raised nine figures from a subsidiary of Reliance Industries. Recall that Google invested $4.5 billion into Jio back in 2020, when a number of companies from other countries wanted a piece of the carrier’s upside.

  • Casual games are big business: Tripledot just raised $116 million at a $1.4 billion valuation on the strength of its mobile gaming business, which includes a solitaire title and something involving wood and sudoku. I was behind on this one, not knowing that the London-based company had also raised a $78 million Series A last year.
  • Remedial Health wants to digitize Nigerian pharmacies: Backed by Y Combinator, Remedial Health wants to “digitize pharmacies and stem the supply of fake and substandard pharmaceutical products” in Nigeria to start, with the rest of the African continent to follow. The company just raised $1 million for its efforts.
  • Digital asset management is hot: Keeping digital assets safe is “an admittedly unsexy fragment of the booming industry,” TechCrunch reports, noting a wave of funding rounds in the space in the last six quarters. The larger cybersecurity market, of course, has been on fire in recent years.
  • Startup ‘Schoolytics’ does what it says on the tin: OK what if, instead of just telling your parents that you were doing well in school, they could check a digital dashboard of your performance? And then those dashboards were aggregated at the parent, teacher and school levels? That’s Schoolytics. And it’s going to be a nightmare for kids hoping to keep their school life private. Helicopter parents rejoice!
  • Proxi wants to make maps cool: For folks too young to recall the particular hell of unfolding a map in a car while your parents shouted at you/one another/your siblings about where to turn, navigation today has become a simple operation. But it’s also impersonal. Proxi wants to shake that up with personal mapping.
  • A solution for plastic waste? Novoloop wants to turn used polyethylenes into plastics that can compete with “plastics made directly from petrochemicals,” TechCrunch reports. If the startup – which just raised $11 million – can pull this off, it could truly shake up how we recycle.

Why are cybersecurity asset management startups so hot right now?

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The digital transformation sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic has created tangible benefits for the cybersecurity industry: In 2021, investors poured $29.5 billion into cyber startups, a YoY increase of 138%.

“M&A activity skyrocketed by more than 294% to $77.5 billion,” reports Carly Page. “And those focused on securing an organization’s internet-facing assets have received more attention than most.

Why are cybersecurity asset management startups so hot right now?

Big Tech Inc.

  • India bans more Chinese apps: The rift between the Chinese and Indian technology markets became more apparent today, with around 50 more apps from China getting yanked from India’s app stores. The Indian government was behind the move, which comes after earlier bans. The two countries have endured rising tensions in recent years, including disputes over border territories.
  • What’s ahead for foldable smartphones? The answer is Samsung, and its enthusiasm for the model, it appears. Given my standard level of sci-fi consumption, I presume that in time all screens will bend. My question is merely how quickly that future arrives.
  • Do you want to see the Super Bowl ads? Here they are.
  • Snapchat to introduce creator revenue share: After reaching profitability, Snapchat is going to start sharing the pie. A new product that puts ads in users’ stories will split the income. For Snapchat diehards, this may be good news, provided they are on the creator and not the consumer side of the consumption coin.

Introducing TechCrunch Experts: Recruiters

dc experts
Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If that’s you or someone you know, you can let us know here.

More TechCrunch

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google’s Gemini updates: How Project Astra is powering some of I/O’s big reveals

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade