Only Products and Other Stuff

Shared electric scooters came onto the scene five years ago with a promising vision of getting people out of cars and onto greener modes of transportation. Yet despite billions in VC money and plenty of hype , the future that micromobility companies promised still hasn’t quite arrived. In cities like Paris, most people aren’t replacing car trips with shared e-scooter jaunts in a meaningful way; the cost of riding scooters makes them an expensive option for last-mile transit connections and equitable access; and the public disclosures of Bird and Helbiz have shown us that achieving profitability is incredibly difficult. Plus, cities that allowed shared e-scooter companies in their midsts are increasingly making it difficult for scooter companies to operate sustainably. For the sake of traffic flow and carbon emissions , there need to be alternatives to cars. Are shared e-scooters the answer to that, or are they just another shitty option? What have we gained by introducing shared...

This was a rough year for customer experience. We’ve been hearing for years how important customer experience is to business, and a whole business technology category has been built around it, with companies like Salesforce and Adobe at the forefront. But due to the economy or lack of employees (perhaps both?), 2022 was a year of poor customer service, which in turn has created poor experiences; there’s no separating the two. No matter how great your product or service, you will ultimately be judged by how well you do when things go wrong, and your customer service team is your direct link to buyers. If you fail them in a time of need, you can lose them for good and quickly develop a bad reputation. News can spread rapidly through social media channels. That’s not the kind of talk you want about your brand. We’re constantly being asked for feedback about how the business did, yet this thirst for information doesn’t seem to ever connect back to improving the experience. And make ...

The gigantic technological leap that machine learning models have shown in the last few months is getting everyone excited about the future of AI — but also nervous about its uncomfortable consequences. After text-to-image tools from Stability AI and OpenAI became the talk of the town, ChatGPT’s ability to hold intelligent conversations is the new obsession in sectors across the board. In China, where the tech community has always watched progress in the West closely, entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors are looking for ways to make their dent in the generative AI space. Tech firms are devising tools built on open source models to attract consumer and enterprise customers. Individuals are cashing in on AI-generated content. Regulators have responded quickly to define how text, image, and video synthesis should be used. Meanwhile, U.S. tech sanctions are raising concerns about China’s ability to keep up with AI advancement. As generative AI takes the world by storm towards the e...

Fidelity, which was among the group of outside investors that helped Elon Musk finance his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, has slashed the value of its stake in Twitter by 56%. The recalculation comes as Twitter navigates a number of challenges, most the result of chaotic management decisions — including an exodus of advertisers from the network. Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund stake in Twitter was valued at around $8.63 million as of November, according to a monthly disclosure and Fidelity Contrafund notice first reported today by Axios. That’s down from $19.66 million as of the end of October. Macroeconomic trends are likely to blame in part. Stripe took a 28% internal valuation cut in July, while Instacart this week reportedly suffered a 75% cut to its valuation. But Twitter’s wishy-washy policies post-Musk clearly haven’t helped matters. The network’s become less stable at a technical level as of late, on Wednesday suffering outages after Musk made “significant” backend s...

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Welcome back to your daily digest of TechCrunch goodness. It is my last day with you (you’re welcome!), so Christine will be back in the Daily Crunch seat on Tuesday. Haje will not be back just yet because he is heading to Vegas as part of the team covering CES. Speaking of CES, Brian raised the curtain on what we can expect from its first full-fledged production since before COVID. Bye for now, folks. Safe and Happy New Year to you all. — Henry At the top Into the Matrix : No, not that Matrix. We’re talking about the open standards-based comms protocol called Matrix that Paul went deep on. Its network doubled thanks in part to increased use by enterprises and government. Reddit is also having a go, experimenting with it for its chat feature. For the fusion : Tim took a look at five startups primed to benefit from the recent breakthroughs i...

Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid , combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 , and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans. “By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce quality content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content output, reducing the risk of burnout,” Habib told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to keep up with the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI.” But depending on how they’re used, tools like QuickVid threaten...

As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel , a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands. The terms of the deal, which was first reported in the Belgian paper De Tijd, have not been disclosed. Founded in 2009, Luxexcel uses 3D printing to make prescription lenses for glasses. More recently, the company has focused its efforts on smart lenses, which can be printed with integrated technology like LCD displays and holographic film. “We’re excited that the Luxexcel team has joined Meta, deepening the existing partnership between the two companies,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. It’s rumored that Meta and Luxexcel had already worked together on Project Aria , the company’s augmented reality (AR) research initiative. In September 2021, Meta unveiled the Ray-Ban Stories , a pair of smart glasses that can take photos an...

Interoperability and decentralization have been major themes in tech this year, driven in large part by mounting regulation, societal and industrial pressure, and the hype trains that are crypto and web3 . That rising tide is lifting other boats: an open standards-based communication protocol called Matrix — which is playing a part in bringing interoperability to another proprietary part of our digital lives: messaging. The number of people on the Matrix network doubled in size this year , according to Matthew Hodgson, one of Matrix’s co-creators — a notable, if modest, boost to 80.3 million users (that number may be higher: not all Matrix deployments “phone home” stats to Matrix.org). While the bulk of all this activity has been in enterprise communications, it looks like mainstream consumer platforms might now also be taking notice. Some sleuthing from engineer and app researcher Jane Manchun Wong unearthed evidence that Reddit is experimenting with Matrix for its Chat feature —...