Only Products and Other Stuff

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone, I was shocked by what happened this month,” Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and former chief executive of the fallen FTX, said at The New York Times’ annual DealBook summit in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin. One of the biggest questions around this debacle is if there was any misuse of funds between Alameda and FTX. For some context, Alameda began struggling to pay lenders back as crypto prices began falling. As a result, it used FTX customer funds to make lenders whole; a move that both showed Alameda’s lack of assets, and triggered part of the crash when FTX customers began the crypto exchange equivalent of a run on the bank. When pushed by Sorkin, SBF said that he didn’t “knowingly co-mingle funds” between Alameda and FTX. “Given the size of the position, I think it was not our intention, it was, in effect, tied together substantially more than I would have ever wanted to be,” he said. “A lot of what we ended up doing and ...

It’s been quite a roller coaster ride for Bret Taylor over the last year. In one week last December , he was named board chair at Twitter and co-CEO at Salesforce. One year later, he doesn’t have either job. Taylor lost the job as Twitter board chair when Elon Musk took over last month and dissolved the Twitter board immediately. Today, he stepped down as co-CEO at Salesforce in a stunning announcement that appeared to come out of the blue. “After a lot of reflection, I’ve decided to return to my entrepreneurial roots. Salesforce has never been more relevant to customers, and with its best-in-class management team and the company executing on all cylinders, now is the right time for me to step away,” Taylor said in a statement announcing his resignation. Taylor, who helped guide the $27 billion Slack acquisition in 2020, appeared to be in line to take over whenever company founder and CEO Marc Benioff decided to step down . Now he has stepped away, and it’s not clear what has chan...

The built environment is responsible for nearly 40% of carbon emissions worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency. While a portion of that is from the energy and materials required to construct buildings, the lion’s share — nearly 90% on an annual basis — comes from their use. Decarbonizing the grid could go a long way to address that, but oftentimes it’s easier, and more profitable, to simply reduce emissions. That’s where proptech can step in. By cutting carbon emissions on the operations side, it can save building owners and managers money while also enhancing the experience for occupants. We asked three venture capital firms investing at the intersection of proptech and climate tech about how a focus on reducing emissions can trim a building’s carbon footprint and offer new opportunities for returns. It’s the last day of the TechCrunch+ Cyber Monday sale ! Don’t miss out on this chance to get 25% off on an annual subscription to TC+! Challenging market condition...

We’re getting ready to launch a price hike, but you still have time — 72 hours to be precise — to attend TC Sessions: Space 2022 on December 6 in Los Angeles for $199. Will you be in the room? Click, register and save: Space tech may come with a jaw-dropping price tag, but this space conference doesn’t. Buy your pass before December 2 at 11:59 p.m. PST — prices go up to $495 at midnight. Why pay more if you don’t have to? Let’s take a gander at just some programming we have lined up for the day. Check out the event agenda for specifics on all the speakers, topics and times. TechCrunch Space Pitch-off : You can improve your own pitch by watching how the VC judges react and by the questions they ask. It’s a window into what might make them decide to schedule a meeting with you. We’ll announce the competitors soon, and they’ll have to deliver their very best to impress our panel of expert judges: Jory Bell (Playground Global), Mark Boggett (Seraphim Space), Tess Hatch (Bessemer...

Netflix released nine more mobile games this month, the company announced on Tuesday. The addition of games brings Netflix’s total to over 40 titles, keeping the streamer on track to have more than 50 titles in its mobile games catalog by the end of 2022. Newly added games include “Country Friends,” the “FarmVille” clone developed by Gameloft; “Reigns” Three Kingdoms,” a card-swiping strategy game; “Skies of Chaos,” an arcade-style shoot-em-up game; “Flutter Butterflies,” a game for butterfly collectors and “Cats & Soups,” a relaxing cooking game. Other new titles include “Hello Kitty Happiness Parade,” “Immortality,” “Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales” and a TV game, “ Triviaverse .” Gameloft released “Country Friends” in 2015 when FarmVille and Hay Day were at their peak. “Country Friends” offers the same experience as the other farm management games, but it’s likely Netflix hopes that players will want to check out the game for yet another way to fulfill their farmer fantasies. ...

Over the past 11 years, eFounders has refined the startup studio model in Europe. The company has contributed to the launch of more than 30 different startups, including three unicorns —  Spendesk , Aircall and Front . While things seem to be doing well for the startup studio, eFounders is pivoting — sort of. As of today, eFounders is becoming Hexa , a holding company for different startup studios. You could have seen this change coming as eFounders hasn’t been just eFounders for a while. In addition to its initial studio focused on the future of work, eFounders has already launched two new studios — Logic Founders for fintech startups and 3founders for web3 startups. Hexa is going to run three different studios — Logic Founders, 3founders and, yes, eFounders. So what is happening with eFounders then? “I started writing a LinkedIn article saying that it is the last time I’m writing as the founder of eFounders,” eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elzière told me. But he is n...

Prismforce, an India-U.S. startup that provides IT and tech services companies with tools to build better talent supply chain, has raised $13.6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India. IT providers spend a large part of their variable costs on hiring skilled employees. But finding those employees from the ever-growing talent market and deploying them effectively to get adequate results is one of the most significant pain points for the industry worldwide. Prismforce is taking Amazon’s approach to matching the demand for talent with the supply for companies offering IT and tech services, said co-founder and CEO Somnath Chatterjee. “We are treating this as a supply chain problem, where you have to standardize demand, standardize supply, make the match happen, almost as if you are an e-commerce engine and e-commerce marketplace trying to make a talent marketplace,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. After spending 14 years as a partner at McKinsey, Chatterjee f...

Richard Garfield is a name familiar to many in the tabletop gaming world, most notably as one of the creators of Magic: The Gathering, the most prominent trading card game out there. But Garfield is dipping his toes into the world of digital and in particular blockchain-adjacent games, and TechCrunch took the opportunity to quiz the veteran gamemaker on the pros and cons of this and other new approaches to gaming. It should be noted at the outset that unlike the dubious profit-focused gameplay of your Axie Infinity and suchlike, Garfield’s new game, technically a “mode” of Blockchain Brawlers , is not focused on speculation but more of an experiment in distribution of a complete card-based game outside traditional publishing methods. It should probably also be noted that the game platform is full of the usual NFT and monetization chatter, but the core game itself, a 1v1 bluffing style match, is capable of being played with ordinary playing cards or for that matter numbered pieces o...

This time two years ago, I changed up my annual gift guide feature’s focus from travel to working from home. After all, very few of us were doing much traveling at the time. I planned to switch back as the world reopened; it’s clear now, however, that for many of us, there is no going back to the before times. The pandemic has had a number of lasting impacts in our lives, including how – and where – we work. But the transition from the office to home requires more than simply choosing not to get on that train every morning. Creating a home office is a deliberate act. At its center is building a space where it’s possible to be every bit as productive in the absence of in-face meetings and awkward break room conversations. You need to build a place that will sufficiently separate work life from the personal for eight to 10 hours a day. Here’s a handy gift guide for the person in life who needs a little extra push into that – or perhaps requires a refresh on some of the gear they pur...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced some notable new natural language querying capabilities that enable non-analysts to forecast future business outcomes. By way of a quick recap, AWS first introduced its QuickSight business intelligence service back in 2015 , allowing customers to visualize their data through dashboards and reports without requiring the technical prowess of a developer. Fast-forward to 2020, and AWS introduced natural language queries to the mix via QuickSight Q , enabling users to find answers simply by typing plain-English questions into a search bar, such as “ show me this month’s sales by segment .” Todays’ announcement builds on that, by serving answers to future-gazing questions. ML-powered forecasting with Q , as AWS CEO Adam Selipsky referred to the new feature on stage at AWS re:Invent today, allows users to view business performance forecasts without involving any analysts or data scientists. All they have to do is enter “ forecast ” or “ show me a ...

It isn’t like Instagram is a beacon of truth as it is, but things are about to get a lot worse, as Nufa takes any image and sculpts you into the “after” picture dream that every gym owner wants to project into our souls as they continue on their mission to make us all look like body-building beasts with cleavage out the wazoo and abs for days. The new mobile app “seamlessly transforms the human body into a picture in one click,” as it considers muscle structure, body type, skin color, body position and even tattoos to provide a “digital experience that hardly differs from real body transformation pics.” “For women, we have an additional feature of transforming the breast from the 1st to the 5th size that works even with neckline clothes,” Nufa’s head of Analytics, Artem Petrikeev, said in an email to TechCrunch. “We are changing body pics similar to how Faceapp changes selfies.” Can we be done making ourselves feel less than already? But hey, if this is your jam, I guess you, too...

On the heels of Tumblr’s decision to integrate with ActivityPub — the social protocol powering the open-source Twitter alternative Mastodon and others — it appears that photo-sharing site Flickr is now considering doing the same. Flickr CEO Don MacAskill today began to actively poll users about whether or not they’d like to see Flickr support the protocol, too. If it moved forward with this plan, Flickr would be the latest larger company to commit to joining the “ fediverse ” — the interconnected group of independent servers across the globe running free, open-source software that allows their users to communicate and connect with one another. The concept presents a challenge to modern-day social networks controlled by corporations — or billionaires like Elon Musk. ActivityPub is a key component to the fediverse, powering not only Mastodon, whose popularity has grown in the wake of Musk’s Twitter acquisition , but also other alternative social platforms including the Instagram-l...

If it seems like Post News launched overnight, that’s because it kind of did. Unlike Mastodon , Hive Social , or other existing social networks being flooded with dissatisfied Twitter users, Post News emerged two weeks ago . The platform was rushed into a live beta, since its team wanted to go public in a time when the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter leadership was front-and-center in our collective headspace. Post News has some similar basic functions to Twitter: you make posts, you like and repost other people’s posts, you follow interesting accounts. Yet in its beta stage, it still lacks basic functions like DMs, a native app and accessibility features like adding alt text to images (and, sparking concern for some users, the company said it was not prioritizing accessibility at this time). Post News is trying to capitalize on the “virtual watercooler for journalists” side of Twitter. The platform describes itself as a place to access “premium news content without subscription...