Steve Thomas - IT Consultant

There are multiple messaging apps active in Southeast Asia and most consumers prefer to use them over email when they contact a business. Respond.io serves as a central dashboard for the biggest apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, Viber, Telegram and WeChat. The Malaysia-based company said today it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Headline, with participation from AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group and Calendula Ventures.

Respond.io is currently used by more than 10,000 companies, including Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat and Bigo.

Respond.io’s dashboard, which processes over 140 million messages per month, consolidates all the messages a business gets, so the right person can see them. It also includes marketing, selling and support tools and can perform automated workflows, like building chat menus, drip campaigns, internal pipelines and invoking external actions. One benefit of using a central dashboard is that managers can quickly see if a conversation has been dropped and revive it.

Since its last round of funding in January 2020, Respond.io has grown its revenue 25x. Its latest funding will be used to continue attracting large enterprises by adding more to its suite of integration capabilities, and expanding beyond Asia to the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

Respond.io was launched in 2017 by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed and Iaroslav Kudritskiy to serve as an omni-channel messaging inbox. Its product-first strategy means Respond.io develops its platform using feedback from its customers. It has a public roadmap and hundreds of customers can vote for the features they would like to see, helping Respond.io prioritize deployments.

For example, it recently localized Respond.io in Spanish because about 30% of its customer are in Spanish-speaking countries, and a high number voted for the platform to be available in Spanish.

Another example is its Contact Merge tool. Since customers often message from multiple channels, this means their chats were being dispersed across different profiles on the platform, Salandra said. The Contact Merge tool uses an algorithm to identify returning customers, even if they start using a different channel for messages.

Before founding Respond.io, Salandra worked at software companies like Runtastic (which was acquired by Adidas), Google and IBM. He saw that marketing software like Hubspot and Salesforce focused mostly on emails, offering little support for instant messaging, even though that’s what many customers prefer to use.

At Runtastic, Salandra told TechCrunch that “whenever people reached out to us on Facebook Messenger with sales or support inquiries, we’d ask them to email us so we could follow up, but they’d get frustrated and drop off. As a consumer, I understood, I’d been in their shoes. I hated making phone calls to resolve something because I’m from a generation that doesn’t instinctively communicate that way.”

Salandra saw a market for business instant messaging, filling in the gap left by marketing software like Hubspot and Salesforce.

When Respond.io was created, most messaging apps didn’t have APIs yet. The only channel it could connect with was Telegram. “But we were certain this was going to change, we were 100% confident,” Salandra said. “We just need proof of concept.” So the team reverse-engineered a popular messaging app without an API to connect to Respond.io’s platform, and sold it as a solution to early customers, including a major conglomerate. Later on, as messaging channels began launching APIs, Respond.io integrated with them, too.

Respond.io’s competitors include MessageBird, SleekFlow, Trengo, Verloop and Callbell, all of which also consolidate messages from different channels into a single dashboard. Salandra said Respond.io differentiates with its product-led growth strategy and content leadership. “While they tend to be more sales-driven, we concentrated on our product and content. We don’t imitate existing solutions or sell run-of-the-mill products.”

Salandra also noted his company’s pricing structure. Instead of charging by user or seat, it launched Monthly Active Contacts (MAC), so clients are only charged for the contacts they talk to.

In a prepared statement, Akio Tanaka, partner at Headline, “We’re impressed with Respond.io’s growth trajectory, achieved through product-led growth strategy and organic marketing. We see the huge potential behind the Respond.io technology and are proud to support the team on its way to transform enterprise client communication across the industries.

Malaysia-based Respond.io helps businesses juggle multiple messaging apps by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Changes are incoming to draft online safety legislation in the UK which continues to attract controversy over the impact on free speech. The draft Online Safety Bill has already been years in the making but new prime minister Liz Truss signalled earlier this month that she wants “tweaks” to ensure it does not harm freedom of expression.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning, Michelle Donelan (pictured above), the new secretary of state appointed by Truss to head up the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), hinted that these incoming changes will focus on restrictions in the area of legal but harmful speech.

Asked about the new category of ‘legal but harmful speech’ that the bill creates — and whether she would be keeping it or not — Donelan confirmed “that’s the bit we will be changing”.

She declined to provide exact details of the incoming policy tweaks — saying the changes would be set out in parliament in due course. However she did specify that the changes will focus on unpicking restrictions for adults, not children. “That element is in relation to adults,” she emphasized. “The bits in relation to children and online safety will not be changing — and that is the overarching objective of the bill and why we put it in our manifesto.”

This raises questions about how platforms that do not age verify their users would be able to prevent children from being exposed to unrestricted legal but harmful content they may show to adults — without either A) applying the restriction anyway (i.e. in case children stumble upon such content) so generally purging ‘legal but harmful content’ with resultant harms for speech; or B) age verifying all users, and thereby putting the British social web behind a universal age-gate; or C) using some form of targeted age assurance technology on users they suspect are minors, assuming they’re willing to take the legal risks if they fail to identify all minors and end up showing some prohibited content to kids.

Pressed on how the bill will protect children if legal but harmful content is allowed, Donelan declined to go into details — so we’ll have to wait and see whether the government will be recommending platforms opt for A), B) or C) — saying only: “We will be ensuring that children are protected.”

“The main part of the bill is about making it a priority for social media providers and websites that generate user content and making sure that if they do act in the wrong way that we can stick massive fines on them which would be very punitive and prevent them from doing so again and really be a deterrent in the first place,” she added.

The new DCMS secretary of state was also pressed on the question of criminal liability for senior execs. The draft bill includes such powers for senior execs at companies that fail to cooperate with regulatory requests for information. However online safety campaigners have been pushing to extend personal liability powers — calling for prosecutions to be able to lead to fines for such individuals or even prison.

Donelan confirmed that such extended criminal liability powers are not currently in the bill. And while she did not categorically rule out the possibility that the government could look at expanding provisions in this area, she suggested its priorities (and ideology) are focused elsewhere.

“I’ve only been in the role two weeks, I will be looking at the bill in round — but my clear objective is to get this bill back to the house quickly, to edit the bit that we’ve been very upfront that we’re editing and to make sure that we get it into law because of course we want it in law as soon as possible to protect children when they’re accessing content online,” she said.

“I’m a champion of free speech — absolutely,” she added at another point during the interview, responding on why the government is unpicking restrictions in the area of legal but harmful content for adults. “We do need to make sure we’ve got the balance right in this piece of legislation. And we’re a government that will make bold and decisive decisions but if there’s things that need to be revisited we certainly won’t shy away from that.”

Molly Russell inquest

In related news today, an inquest opens into the suicide of five years ago of 14-year-old Molly Russell. The school girl had viewed pro-suicide and self-half content on Instagram — and her death galvanized campaigners for online safety legislation. The inquest is expected to focus on big tech platforms, interrogating their role in the tragedy. The BBC reports that senior executives from Meta and Pinterest are due to give evidence to the inquiry after being ordered to appear by the coroner.

Donelan described Russell’s story as “heart-breaking” — and said the inquest taking evidence from tech firms is an “important” moment.

“I think it’s important that this inquest is going ahead. That social media key players will be going to the inquest, submitting information and evidence — so that we can properly access exactly what they did and the role that they played,” the DCMS secretary of state said, adding: “We’ve got to make sure as a government that we prevent horrendous incidents like this happening again.”

Donelan sidestepped a question on whether or not she agrees with criticism from child safety campaigners that social media companies have taken a business decision not to invest in child safety measures. But added: “We need to be holding them to account on these matters, we need to be making sure that they are prioritizing the welfare and well-being of children and young people when they access content online so that we prevent instances like this.

“And that’s why we’re bringing forward the Online Safety Bill — it’s gone through most stages in the house. We’ve got to get it back to the House and get it into law.”

UK to change Online Safety Bill limits on ‘legal but harmful’ content for adults by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Last week, we got a glimpse of how SoftBank is pulling away from some of its more exuberant investing of the past years, when news broke that it had sold its entire stake in edtech startup Kahoot, at a loss. This week, we’re getting a look at what SoftBank is doing to diversify how it deploys capital with a little less direct risk to itself: DTCP says that SoftBank has taken a major stake in its next fund, part of a $300 million tranche that it has raised to double down on growth rounds in Europe.

For background, DTCP is a fund that started as the venture arm of Germany’s telco Deutsche Telekom but is now run as an independent firm — DT remains an investor, but in a little piece of pivotal rebranding, DTCP now stands for “Digital Transformation Capital Partners”.

Others in this first close include DT, as well as unnamed institutional, pension fund, corporate, and family office investors.

This fund, DTCP’s third, is a mark of how far the European ecosystem has come along when it comes to growth rounds: once it would have been a rarity to raise growth rounds in this region, with the more promising startups founded in Europe decamping to the U.S. to tap investors there if they wanted to scale. These days, it’s more likely they may find that investment closer to home.

This latest fund from DTCP is expected to close in March 2023, and the target is to make it $500 million (or a $600 million hard cap).

Within that, SoftBank, alongside fund founder DT, are the anchors — by far the biggest backers — Thomas Preuss, managing partner at DTCP Growth, said in an interview.

The firm is already investing out of the fund — specifically, it put an additional $15 million into a Series B for conversational AI platform Cognigy.ai, bringing the total raised for that round to $59 million.

More generally, the focus for DTCP will be on cloud-based enterprise software, SaaS, cybersecurity, web3, AI and fintech — all big categories in Europe and Israel, the key regions DTCP will be covering, alongside the U.S.

And notably, while there remain investors, even in the current market, who are focusing on deep tech and other categories that might take a long time to see a return, DTCP is taking a more pragmatic view — something that might have resonated with SoftBank.

The Fund is targeting about 25 equity investments in the range of $20 to $25 million for businesses in early growth or growth stage. “Defensible market positions and technological advantage” is the order of the day, and so is another key requirement: a minimum of $10 million ARR to be considered to be backed.

“We are still in the Stone Age when it comes to deep tech,” Preuss said.

It will be interesting to see how the role of more localized VCs will evolve in the coming years, as partners to the larger global firms that have started to take a bigger interest in investing outside of their home markets. While SoftBank is likely to continue making direct investments, investing in a fund like DTCP helps it source more deal flow, both as an indirect backer and to vet more companies that it might want to pursue directly as well. That’s especially an interesting function given that SoftBank is reportedly downsizing operations in a number of markets, including Europe, reducing the team it might have on the ground to do this itself.

DTCP’s first fund in 2015 and second fund in 2018 totaled $410 and was invested in 32 enterprise software companies across Europe, Israel, USA and Asia, and DTCP notes that 11 of those investments have been acquired or gone public so far. They include Auth0, Fastly, Sagnavio and Guardicore.

DTCP, the former venture arm of Deutsche Telekom, taps SoftBank as an anchor LP for its next $500-600M fund by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Web Summit, one of the world’s largest events centered around technology startups, is to launch a brand new venture capital vehicle consisting of two new funds, TechCrunch understands. The move follows an acrimonious fall-out between Web Summit’s co-founders, who first started the now-defunct Amaranthine VC fund in 2018, in part to join the ballooning investment ecosystem which had grown up around the Web Summit events.

While it’s been previously reported that Web Summit cofounder, Paddy Cosgrave, will imminently launch his new vehicle, Web Summit Ventures (WSV), the nature and size of the fund has not, until now, been revealed.

TechCrunch understands that WSV will command $40 million in funding, split into two $20 million funds. They will be dubbed “Web Summit Ventures Early” and “Web Summit Ventures Growth,” respectively . The Early fund will invest at the early stage and Series A, while the Growth fund will invest at the ‘Series B and beyond’ stages. Both will be ‘follow-on’ funds and are not intended to lead funding rounds, say sources. This mirrors the previous Amaranthine strategy.

Further confirmation of the funds’ existence comes in the form of a new job posting advertising for a for an Associate for the fund.

It’s understood that WSV is intended to replace Cosgrave’s previous attempt to enter the investing game, after the Amaranthine Ventures vehicle ended up embroiled in a series of byzantine legal fights amongst its founders and partners.

As previously reported in the Irish media, documents filed in the Companies Registration Office in Dublin, Ireland, where Web Summit was originally launched, show that Cosgrave, Web Summit CEO, is listed as a director of the Web Summit Ventures Management Ltd.

It’s understood that only Cosgrave and Chris Murphy and will be partners in Web Summit Ventures. Murphy is a former Web Summit employee, who went on to work for the Amaranthine Fund for nearly three years as its Managing Director.

A well-placed source told TechCrunch that one of the main differences with the new WSV fund is that a number of tech founders will join as LPs, include some of the founders of Twitter, Tinder, N26, Checkout.com, Rappi, Algolia, Lightricks and Wise, along with a handful of GPs at some VC funds who said to be investing personally, although this has not been independently confirmed.

The story of Web Summit’s attempts to participate in the vast ecosystem of startups it was amassing begins in 2018.

The Amaranthine Fund was set up by Cosgrave, David Kelly, a Web Summit co-founder, and Patrick Murphy, a fund manager, in 2018. But while it managed to back, among others, Hopin (the online events startup, the valuation of which soared to $5.6 billion during the remote-working era of the pandemic) a series of bitter disagreements led to Cosgrave suing Kelly and Murphy in the US courts.

The $50 million Amaranthine fund has since rebranded at Tapestry after the lawsuits were filed.

But the acrimony is not just confined to the US.

Cosgrave is also suing Kelly in the Irish High Court. Kelly and Murphy deny the allegations, while Kelly is separately suing Cosgrave in the High Court over alleged minority shareholder oppression. Cosgrave denies the claims.

A spokeperson for Web Summit declined to comment on the launch of WSV, citing regulatory restrictions.

Sources say Web Summit Ventures will be a new $40M follow-on fund by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

When it comes to fintech, consumers have commanded the most attention in the last decade, with banking, credit, investing and other legacy services getting the disruption treatment. But at the same time, there’s been a growing trend for building more for the B2B market, and today one of the newer hopefuls in that space is announcing funding ahead of a public launch in Q4 this year.

Sequence, which wants to create what it describes as a new kind of FinOps stack for B2B businesses — APIs and other tools to create more responsive pricing, billing, and related services, leveraging data and analytics to do so — has raised $19 million, a seed round that it will be using to continue developing its products and hiring more talent.

Sequence is based out of London, England, and the funding is coming from an impressive list of investors, considering the company has yet to launch.

Andreessen Horowitz — the Silicon Valley firm that’s recently been getting more active in Europe — is leading the round, with Salesforce Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Crew Capital, Passion Capital, Dig Ventures, Fin Capital, and 9Yards also participating; angels in the round include the founders of Plaid, Intercom, Jeeves, GoCardless, Marshmallow, Lendable, Hopin, UiPath, Monzo, Comply and others that are not being named.

Reports of this seed round, and A16Z’s involvement, actually emerged about a year ago, with some of the attention coming not just from the big-name backer but the track record of the founders. Riya Grover, the CEO, previously founded a ‘cloud canteen’ startup called Feedr that sold to Compass Group; meanwhile, co-founder Eamon Jubbawy, who is the chairperson, had been one of the co-founders of identity verification startup Onfido. In any case, at the time, the funding had yet to close and ultimately ended up with more investors and at a larger size.

Small note on valuation: the earlier reports pegged Sequence’s valuation at $50 million-$60 million, but Grover said in an interview last week that the startup would not be disclosing its valuation. However, I’d point out that there are a couple of factors that could be buffeting that number. The “cost of capital” has definitely gone up in the last year and put pressure on valuations overall. But on the other hand, also in the last year, Sequence has launched its private beta and is disclosing a few early users such as Deliveroo, Pipe, Snyk and Reachdesk.

Companies like Stripe, Paddle and Modern Treasury have opened the door to making it easier for digital businesses — not necessarily at their core payments and billing companies — to   use APIs to incorporate more modern payments, billing, reconciliation and other revenue-related services into their financial stack. The opportunity that Sequence is targeting is related to all of these but is taking target at a more specific gap in the market.

As Grover described it to me, it’s one thing to make it easier for a company to incorporate a payments flow into a product. What Sequence is aiming to do, however, is to make it just as easy to build pricing and payments services that are more personalized to the customer, and to a particular moment, not unlike what businesses often do in e-commerce transactions.

It does this by leveraging payments and transaction data that its business customers might already have in their systems but haven’t been able to parse and proactively apply, by way of integrations to third-party apps like Salesforce, Hubspot, Xero, Netsuite, and Quickbooks. (And it focuses on two primary ways that businesses pay each other for goods and services — bank payments or debits rather than card payments — for the payments themselves.) In this, Sequence and its investors believe the startup is an early mover in building building payments software that allows businesses to capture data in real time and to feed that into dynamic pricing and payments flows.

On top of this, Sequence is built as a “low code” service, bypassing the need for developers to build, test and ship changes.

“In a B2B environment, when you’re building new products and pricing plans, you want an interface that doesn’t always rely on developers,” she said. “We are empowering operators to empower themselves.”

The role of no-code and low-code software has often been described in terms of being more efficient, or just to cut through red tape in helping non-technical people get more hands-on with the digital products they are themselves using, but it has more recently taken on a more pragmatic, fiscally-minded purpose: at a time when companies are reevaluating their spend on new product and projects and how they allocate their talent resources, services like billing and payments are also getting revisited.

Sequence cites figures from Notion Capital that estimate that B2B businesses today spend a surprising 7% to 9% of revenue building billing and payments infrastructure, and that includes not just software or SaaS investments, but engineers required to implement them.

“We’ve seen an acute pain point and therefore compelling opportunity around automating and managing payments and finance workflows,” said Seema Amble, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “The Sequence team really impressed us with both a strong team and initial customer set excited by the vision.”

Sequence orders up $19M led by A16Z for a new approach to B2B fintech by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

After getting Sherlocked by Apple’s AirTag and exiting to Life360 late last year, lost item tracker Tile is launching a new product — and it’s not a hardware device. Today, the company introduced new “Lost and Found” labels, which are simply QR code stickers that you can place on anything that might go missing. By scanning the QR code, someone who finds the missing item can view the owner’s contact information and arrange for the item’s return.

The company says this solution is designed for those items where using a Bluetooth tracker is not the right option, but it also serves as a means of introducing new users to Tile as the stickers are marked with the company logo.

Tile has historically offered a variety of Bluetooth trackers in different shapes and sizes, including the Tile Pro, Tile Mate, Tile Slim, and Tile Sticker. This lineup offers more ways to track items than Apple’s AirTag does, as some of its trackers are made to fit into wallets alongside your credit cards while others be adhered to something like a bike — perhaps in a discreet location, like under the bike seat. Meanwhile, it can be difficult to use AirTag for these same needs.

But even with this varied collection of devices, there are a number of objects that still couldn’t be easily tracked using a Bluetooth dongle.

For example, Tile suggests the new stickers could be used for things like school books, musical instruments, sports equipment, earbuds cases, travel mugs and more.

To use the new stickers, Tile customers can choose which forms of contact information they want to share — it doesn’t have to be their home address, phone number or email. They just have to pick at least one method of contact in order to fill out the form, Tile says. Those who are more privacy-minded could set up a virtual phone number or separate email for this purpose.

The stickers could also help to expand Tile’s market amid the growing concerns that people have with Bluetooth trackers in general, following the launch of AirTag. Apple’s entry into the market raised awareness of how the small devices could be used in negative ways, like for stalking people or car theft. A sticker doesn’t present this same concern as it’s just a way to share contact information. In other words, it’s not much different than putting your phone number on your dog’s tag, or even just creating your own DIY lost-and-found labels that you print yourself at home.

Of course, Tile’s labels likely look nicer than those you would make yourself, with their colorful borders in shades of forest, plum and teal.

However, the price for a set of stickers (3 sheets with 15 stickers) is a bit high at $14.99 — they are, after all, just stickers.

“The addition of Lost and Found Labels to Tile’s product suite enhances our global network by making all important items findable,” said Life360 CEO Chris Hulls, in a statement about the launch. “This is the first of many steps Life360 and Tile combined are taking to make every day easier with ways to stay organized, connected with family members, and safe,” he added.

The stickers are available for sale on Tile’s website, starting today.

Tile rolls out ‘Lost and Found’ QR code stickers to complement its hardware lineup by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Instacart’s willingness to go public this year is now slightly better understood after The Wall Street Journal reported that the grocery delivery giant isn’t planning on a mega-fundraise when it does list.

While the mechanics of a company’s public debut have only so much variation — direct listings and traditional IPOs both result in a newly public company, after all — Instacart’s plans provide us with useful hints about its recent financial history.

That Instacart is expected to go public this year at all is a minor miracle; the U.S. market for new technology listings has been moribund for quarters now. The slack IPO market is a marked shift from the active 2020-2021 period that saw a good number of startups and unicorns — private-market companies worth $1 billion or more — list when investors had bid the value of tech shares to new heights.


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Prices have since come down, at times sharply from pandemic-induced highs. Most tech upstarts are holding back on public listings in response, presumably concerned about matching final private-market valuations in an IPO or other form of flotation.

Keeping financial tabs on Instacart as it preps its IPO by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

OurCrowd, the global crowdfunding venture firm, today announced its newest fund. As the organization announced at today’s Clinton Global Initiative event in New York, it is partnering with the WHO Foundation to launch its Global Health Equity Fund (GHEF), a $200 million fund that will focus on healthcare solutions that can have a global impact.

Even before the pandemic, OurCrowd had long invested in medical startups, but that only accelerated during the pandemic, and best I can tell, it has also become somewhat of a personal mission for the firm’s founder and CEO, Jon Medved. ”COVID-19 was a wake-up call for me as an investor,” said Medved. “The pandemic opened my eyes to health inequity around the world and reinforced the potential of innovative technology to save lives […] This new fund builds on that success with the explicit orientation of having impact. The collaboration with the WHO Foundation will allow us to identify even more exciting investments and facilitate the commitment of investors and entrepreneurs to equitable access to the technologies we support.”

While the fund’s focus is on healthcare, the management team is taking a wider view here that goes beyond startups in the medical field, including other areas that can also have a more indirect impact on health, such as energy and agriculture, for example.

OurCrowd is aligning its fund with the WHO Foundation’s Access Pledge. The idea here is to ensure that portfolio companies will make their solutions accessible to populations experiencing inequity. Specifically, this means any GHEF portfolio company will develop an Access Plan for their solutions and the WHO Foundation and OurCrowd will launch an advisory board to provide them with the assistance needed to do so. That’s not, after all, something that most startups are used to doing — and not necessarily something that most investment funds would want their companies to focus on. But especially in the healthcare space, this seems like the right thing to do.

“Despite clear models for successfully balancing economic return with equitable access, such as the provision of medicines for HIV and AIDS, the world failed to deliver solutions for COVID-19 to everyone, everywhere,” said WHO Foundation CEO Anil Soni. “It is imperative that we deploy solutions in response to that failure, including directing investment to innovation and aligning both to equity as a goal from the start.”

OurCrowd CEO Medved will lead the fund’s team together with OurCrowd Managing Partner Morris Laster and the firm’s team of clinical experts, with WHO Foundation’s Impact Investment Officer Geetha Tharmaratnam also providing support.

At this point, OurCrowd has invested in about 350 companies across its 39 funds for its more than 215,000 members, making it one of Israel’s most active investors. Some if its other healthcare-centric investments include Alpha Tau Medical, which focuses on treating solid malignant tumors, and BrainQ, a non-invasive technology to treat stroke and other neurological pathologies.

OurCrowd announces its new $200M Global Health Equity Fund by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Rockstar Games has confirmed that it recently “suffered a network intrusion” that resulted in the massive leak of 90 videos of early development versions of Grand Theft Auto 6. The company said in an official statement on Monday morning that the intrusion resulted in “an unauthorized third party illegally” accessing and downloading “confidential information from our systems,” though it adds that they don’t anticipate this will have any effect on its ongoing live game services or development timeline.

The company said via a spokesperson that it won’t be commenting beyond this statement on the leak, which popped up over the weekend on GTAForums (which has since removed the content at the request of the copyright holder, ie., Rockstar). While the developer said it’s “extremely disappointed” that the game leaked in this manner, it added that it’s as committed as ever to delivering a top-quality next instalment in the celebrated franchise.

There’s no official timeline on GTA 6’s release at the moment, but it’s likely going to happen sometime in either 2024 or 2025 based on current predictions.

Rockstar Games confirms GTA 6 footage leak by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Everyone wants to get in on the AI image generation action, but if you’ve been intimidated by the existing options out there based on Stable Diffusion, including the Midjourney Discord bot, you’re in luck: Diffusion Bee is a simple Mac app that gives you everything you need to generate your own images from text prompt using the open-source AI image generation framework.

The app, developed by Divam Gupta, requires no technical expertise whatsoever and installs on M1 Macs via drag-and-drop. You will need an M1 or M2 Mac running at least macOS 15.2, however — the app takes advantage of Apple Silicon’s built-in AI smarts and runs the Stable Diffusion model locally, which has the added advantage of ensuring that nothing is sent to any servers.

Diffusion Bee screenshot with prompt and resulting image

Image Credits: TechCrunch

You can tweak settings including image height and width, as well as the number of steps the model runs through to generate your result, and the “Guidance Scale” — how much importance the model places on your text prompts when generating its results. Note that in my testing at least, adjusting these parameters higher than the defaults resulted in big increases in how long it took to produce the images.

This is an extremely easy (and free) way to start playing around with Stable Diffusion yourself, provided you’ve got a Mac to use it.

This Mac app makes it easy to create your own AI images with Stable Diffusion by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Rockstar’s next instalment in its Grand Theft Auto series could be one of the most anticipated video games in existence, and a new purported leak could offer us our best look yet at GTA 6. The trove of data, which PCGamer discovered via a GTAForums post by the alleged hacker themselves, contains some 90 videos of clips from the game, with debug code and interfaces running and helping back up the veracity of the claims.

Interestingly, the hacker (who goes by ‘teapotuberhacker’ on the GTAForums) also claims to be the person responsible for the recent Uber hack, and says that they got the video by gaining access to a Rockstar employee’s Slack account — which is the same MO for Uber’s massive breach.

The leaks themselves appear either legitimate, or fakes created with such a high degree of attention to detail and authenticity that they have won over what was initially a very skeptical GTAForums member audience.

Various clips from the leak depict both male and female protagonist characters, which does fit with other reports about what to expect in the forthcoming game. They also show gameplay taking place in a Miami-analog fictional city, again matching early reports about what GTA 6 will bring to the franchise.

It’s worth noting that these videos likely show an older build, which some indication they could be from around 2017. The game has been reportedly in development since 2014 (GTA 5 originally launched in 2013) so it would be reasonable to expect development snapshots to be from various builds over the years.

Earlier this month, Rockstar rolled the credits from GTA 5 and GTA 5 Online on its website, titling the page ‘Thank You,’ which many took as a sign that it was winding down active development on the long-running and much-expanded fifth instalment in the series to focus more directly on the forthcoming sequel.

We’ve reached out to Rockstar owner Take-Two Interactive but did not hear back immediately. We’ll update this post with more if and when they respond.

Massive GTA 6 gameplay video leak depicts male and female playable characters by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Hello, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the last sevenish days. The goal? Even if you’ve had a busy week, a quick skim of WiR should keep you in the (tech) loop.

Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

This week was a bit all over the place, with another big story breaking every couple hours. Let’s just drop right in, shall we?

most read

  • Cutbacks at Area 120: Area 120 is Google’s in-house incubator, meant to let Googlers with potentially big ideas tap the mega company’s resources to turn said ideas into something real. This week, however, Google confirmed that it’s slashing half of the Area 120 projects currently in development, with the incubator “shifting its focus” to AI projects. Impacted employees are being given until early 2023 to find a new job within Google.
  • Adobe buys Figma: In one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time, Adobe announced this week its intent to buy the collaborative/web-based design tool Figma for a whopping $20 billion. Figma saw ridiculous growth throughout the pandemic, as many, many tech teams went remote and adjusted their workflows accordingly. Even for a company as big as Adobe, winning that part of the workflow back would’ve been tough.
  • Layoffs at Twilio: Twilio confirmed this week that it’ll lay off roughly 11% of its workforce — somewhere between 800 and 900 people — as the company focuses on reaching profitability in 2023.
  • iOS 16 goes live: As expected, iOS 16 rolled out to Apple devices this week. Want our thoughts on it? Find Romain’s review here. Want to know all of the not-so-obvious new features hiding within the update? Check out Ivan’s list. Most of our readers seem to be looking for interesting ways to use those new Lock Screen widgets.
  • South Korea issues an arrest warrant for Terraform Labs’ founder: “A court in South Korea has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs,” writes Manish, “escalating its probe into the crypto ecosystem whose two tokens lost $40 billion in value in a span of days earlier this year.”
  • Uber hack: Late Thursday night, Uber confirmed that it’s “responding to a cybersecurity incident” after a hacker seemingly breached the company’s internal network, with the hacker reportedly announcing their presence (and protesting how Uber pays its drivers) right within Uber’s Slack.

audio roundup

If you like TechCrunch for your eyes, check out TechCrunch for your ears. This week in TechCrunch podcast land, the Equity team talked about how Y Combinator has evolved in recent years, the Chain Reaction crew “dug into the institutional embrace of blockchains by stodgy financial powerhouses,” and the Found team went all “greatest hits” by revisiting an interview with Figma founder Dylan Field from earlier this year.

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Adobe buys Figma, Uber gets hacked, and Google shrinks Area 120 by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch