Hello again! greg here we go again review week.WiR is a newsletter where we’ve collected the most-read TechCrunch stories from the last 7 days and summed them up in as little text as possible — no bullshit, no bullshit, *just a quick glance you might Everything you want to know about tech this week.
*might be a bit of a nonsense.
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most read
Tip Your Amazon Driver (On Amazon’s Dime): If you have an Alexa device at home, Amazon will pay your delivery driver an extra $5 if you say “Alexa, thank you my driver” after delivery. Sure, Amazon could have paid drivers more in the first place…but frustratingly, that probably wouldn’t make Amazon one of the most-read headlines of the week.
Slack CEO leaves: last week Salesforce CEO Brett Taylor Stepping down; this week, Slack (owned by Salesforce) CEO Stewart Butterfield announced he, too, will be stepping down in January.Ron Miller Shares His Insights on Inbound Slack CEOs Lidiane Jones and her decades of product experience.
“twitter profile”: “Elon Musk reminded his followers on Friday that owning Twitter now means he controls every aspect of the company — including what its employees said in closed-door meetings before he took over,” Taylor said in a series of once-private Twitter internals. Newsletter writes listing.
Lensa AI is all the rage: Do all your social media friends suddenly have avatars that make them look like sci-fi gods and action heroes? That’s likely because of Lensa AI, the photo editing app that went viral this week after adding support for Stable Diffusion’s AI-generated art tools. However, popularity is not without controversy—many continue to debate the ethics of selling things generated by artificial intelligence trained on the work of real people; meanwhile, others point out that AI may be “deceived” Generate otherwise disallowed NSFW images.
More tech layoffs: this week Airtable laid off About 20% of the workforce – more than 250 people.lattice 20% layoffs, which is 260 people for them.African fintech unicorns Chipper Cash cuts 50 jobsand the UK drag-and-drop e-commerce platform Primer give up 85 (about a third of companies).
Google Merges Maps/Waze Teams: When Google acquired navigation app Waze in 2013 for more than $1 billion, Google said they would “temporarily” separate the Waze and Google Maps teams. As it turns out, “currently” means about 9.5 years, but Google confirmed this week that the two teams will be merging. Google says it wants Waze to remain an independent service.
Twitter Blue could cost more on iOS: Twitter’s $8 “blue” subscription plan (with a blue “verified” checkmark) at few false startsbut when it returned, it reportedly cost a few dollars more if you subscribed through the iOS app to offset Apple’s cut.
audio review
set up – Our podcast about founders and the companies they build – has a new co-host! Becca Szkutak joined the role this week, joining Darrell Etherington to speak with Daye CEO Valentina Milanova.Meanwhile, the Equity staff tries to put 2022 in perspective year-end reviewTaylor Hatmaker jumped on it TechCrunch podcast Explore what the sudden explosion of AI-generated art means for real human artists.
TechCrunch+
Here’s what subscribers read the most on TechCrunch+:
Investors sound alarm bells over possible private equity tech deal: “Who wants to sell when prices are low?” ask Ron Miller and Alex Willhelm.
Rootine’s $10M Pitch Platform: “If you told me a company charging $70 a month for multivitamins raised $10 million in funding, I’d ask to see the receipt,” Haje wrote. With this in mind, he took a deep dive into the pitch decks that help make it happen.
