Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM! Today I bring you news that AT&T informed customers of a data breach, Meta has a chip on its shoulder, Checkr makes some layoffs and Google Photos infuses AI into its latest upgrades. Meanwhile, YouTube hopes to keep kids off comments, and we noticed the lack of Latin American startups in Y Combinator's latest cohort. Enjoy!

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Image Credits: AP / Paul Sancya

More on AT&T's data breach: The U.S. telecommunications giant said it sent out letters notifying more than 51 million people that their personal information was compromised in a data breach. AT&T, which still has not identified the source of the leak, reset passwords in March. Read More

Meta has a new custom AI chip: Meta is spending time developing chips to run and train Meta's AI models. Its latest labor of love is the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator. This chip runs models, including for ranking and recommending display ads on Meta's properties, such as Facebook. Read More

Checkr cuts 382 employees: Checkr, an employee background check startup once valued at $5 billion, confirmed that it made layoffs across all departments and different levels this week. This reflects 32% of the company's workforce and comes nearly two years after acquiring Inflection, the startup behind GoodHire, a background-checking platform for small- and midsized businesses. Read More

Afternoon must-reads

Google Photos gets an AI upgrade: All Google Photos users will now get the new editing features, including the AI-powered Magic Editor, for free. This also includes features like Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and the light-changing tool Portrait Light. Read More

eBay continues to invest in trading cards: The e-commerce marketplace made three deals with Collectors, the parent company of Professional Sports Authenticator — a trading card commercial agreement; the acquisition of auction house Goldin by eBay; and the sale of eBay's vault to Collectors, which creates a new offering that merges the existing vault services. Read More

YouTube removing child comments: We all know that the comments section on pretty much anything can be a toxic environment. In an effort to keep kids from wading in the toxicity pool, the streaming giant alerted people who supervise a child's account that it will introduce a "read-only" comments option to their child's experience. Read More

Diversity in space: Just in time for National Space Day on May 3, the Space Foundation and the Aerospace Corporation come together with Space Workforce 2030 to be more transparent about the demographics of their workplaces, as well as their hiring and recruitment, in an effort to be more diverse. The effort now has a leader, Melanie Stricklan, formerly of Slingshot Space (and the Air Force). Read More

AI did it: There was only one Latin American startup in this winter's Y Combinator batch, so Anna Heim spoke to founders and investors about what they think the reason is. Read More

Only the lonely: A new app called Buffet is aiming to address the loneliness epidemic by helping users meet new people by quickly matching them with a person and a place to meet up. Read More

On the pods: Today on Equity, we dug into Multiverse's acquisition of Searchlight, the latest Guesty round, the Monad Labs transaction that led us to try and explain the difference between L1 and L2 blockchains, Cyera's recent mega-round and a new venture capital fund targeting growth rounds in Africa. Read More.

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Money, money, money

Collaborative Robotics, now with a fresh $100 million Series B, is prioritizing "human problem-solving" over humanoid forms. Read More

Turkish startup ikas attracts $20 million for its e-commerce platform designed for small businesses. Read More

Around the web

It's time to celebrate what could be the end of hidden fees and taxes associated with signing up with an internet service provider. Engadget reports that those giant ISPs, those with more than 100,000 subscribers, must provide a "nutrition label" of sorts that displays all the charges, fees and taxes. Read More

Meanwhile, among the low-cost airline carriers, investors have their sights set on Breeze Airways, which is bringing in profits. The Street has more. Read More

And CNET writes that more leaks about the iPhone 16 Plus suggest the battery will be smaller. Read More

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TechCrunch Minute

Google's Gemini Code Assist wants to use AI to help developers: Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled. Google now has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers, which means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up. Hit play and let's talk!