Ahhh we are back!The little Thanksgiving break is over, and it’s time for another edition review week — The newsletter, where we quickly round up the most-read TechCrunch stories from the past 7 (plus) days. No matter how busy you are, it should give you a good idea of what people are talking about in tech this week.
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Instafest into instaviral: You’ve probably been to great music festivals before.but have you ever been to one only for you? maybe not. Instafest is a web app that’s been all the rage this week that helps you fantasize about what that festival will be like. Log in with your Spotify credentials, and it will generate a promotional poster for a pretend music festival based on your listening habits.
LastPass is (again) compromised: “Password manager LastPass says it is investigating a security incident after its systems were breached for the second time this year,” writes Zack Whittaker. The investigation is still ongoing, which unfortunately means it’s unclear what (and whose) data may have been accessed.
ChatGPT open: This week, OpenAI opened wide access to ChatGPT, which lets you interact with their new language-generating AI through a simple chat-like interface. In other words, it lets you generate (sometimes very well-written) paragraphs of text by chatting with a bot. Darrell uses it to instantly write the Pokémon cheat sheet he’s always wanted.
AWS re:Invents: This week, Amazon Web Services hosted its annual re:Invent conference, where the company showcased what’s next for the cloud-computing platform that powers the massive Internet. The highlight of the year?One Low-code tools for serverless applicationsOne ensure Giving AWS customers control over where their data is stored in the world (to help address increasingly complex government policies), and A tool to run “city-scale simulations” in the cloud.
Twitter suspends Kanye (again): “Elon Musk suspended Twitter account after Kanye West (aka Ye) tweeted anti-Semitic and violated platform rules,” wrote Ivan Mehta.
Spotify wraps it up: Every December, Spotify launches “Wrapped” – an interactive feature that captures your Spotify listening data for the year and presents it in a super-intuitive way. This year it has some straightforward stuff like how many minutes you’ve streamed, but it’s also expanded on ideas like “listening to personalities” — a Myers-Briggs-inspired system that puts each user into 16 camps One of, such as “Adventurer” or “Replayer.”
DoorDash layoffs: I hope there won’t be a layoff story in a week. Alas, DoorDash confirmed this week that it would be cutting 1,250 jobs, with CEO Tony Xu explaining that they were hiring too quickly during the pandemic.
Salesforce co-CEO resigns: “During a week in December last year, [Bret Taylor] Appointed chairman of Twitter and co-CEO of Salesforce,” writes Ron Miller. “A year later, he’s out of both jobs. ” Taylor said he “decided to go back to [his] Entrepreneurial roots. “
audio review
i hope things are small It was quiet in TC Podcast land last week due to the holidays, but we still have great shows! Darrell Etherington joined by Ron Miller and Rita Liao TechCrunch podcast On the departure of Salesforce co-CEO and China’s “Great Wall of Porn”; the team chain reaction shared an interview with Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of web3 development platform Alchemy; and the ever lovely fair The crew talks about everything from Sam Bankman-Fried’s frantic DealBook interview to why all three co-founders of funding startup Pipe quit at the same time.
TechCrunch+
What’s behind the TC+ member-only paywall? Here’s what TC+ members read most this week:
Lessons Learned From Raising $10M Without Giving Up A Board Seat: Reclaim.ai has raised $10 million over the past two years, all “without giving up a single board seat.” how? Reclaim.ai co-founder Henry Shapiro shares his insights.
Advisors are the new non-traditional venture capital: “Why are there so many advisor-led VC funds launching now?” asks Rebecca Szkutak.
Fundraising in an Era of Stricter VC Scrutiny: “Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they also have a ‘currency,'” writes DocSend co-founder and former CEO Russ Heddleston.
