Plus: Millennium Space Systems CEO quietly leaves the company
Wednesday, August 28, 2024 | | | Welcome to TechCrunch PM! Today we have a shake-up at Fluid Truck; a new AI wearable available for preorder; some layoffs at Apple; and Gemini is back to generating images of people. Let's go! | | | Image Credits: Bryce Durbin | 🚛 Fluid Truck shake-up: Fluid Truck, which was founded to disrupt the commercial vehicle rental industry, has ousted its sibling co-founders, sources told Rebecca Bellan. Employees are describing it as a "hostile takeover." The leadership restructuring comes after the venture-backed company lost tens of millions of dollars as of June 31. Read more 🚀 Space shake-up: Jason Kim has quietly left his role as CEO at Millennium Space Systems, Boeing's satellite maker. Kim was not an original founder of Millennium but has been with the company for nearly four years. Read more 🔄 Tumblr transition: Today, Tumblr parent company Automattic announced that it was moving Tumblr's blogs over to WordPress. Automattic said the switch will only be noticeable on the back end. This makes a lot of sense considering Automattic also owns WordPress. Read more | | | Image Credits: George Rose/Getty Images | | | 🍎 Apple layoffs: Apple is conducting layoffs that affect around 100 people. Most of the cuts were to people on the Apple Books app team and people on other service teams like Apple News. Read more 🚗 Tesla takes its time: It's been more than a year since Tesla said it would open its Supercharger network to non-Tesla vehicles, but that has yet to happen. There are many potential reasons for the delay, from lower EV demand to Elon Musk axing most of the Supercharger team. Read more 🧷 Another AI wearable: Today Plaud.ai started taking preorders for its NotePin, an AI-powered wearable that takes notes for you. Brian Heater notes that we've seen quite a few companies trying to make AI wearables with little adoption; we'll see if NotePin fares differently. Read more 📲 Back to Snapchat: Snapchat is launching an initiative to help educators better understand the social media platform their students are using. This launch includes a website to help educators learn how students are using it and resources to help educators protect teens on it. Read more 👯 People pleaser: After a six-month hiatus, Google is bringing back Gemini's ability to generate images of people. To start, the feature will be available only to select paying users, as Google looks to get feedback and iterate before rolling the feature out to the public. Read more 💻 Are Google's monopoly cases too late? Today on Equity, we sat down with Neil Chilson, formerly with the FTC and currently at the Abundance Institute, to discuss Google's antitrust cases in online search and ad tech, and to speculate on the outcomes, competition, and the future of AI search. Listen here | | | Image Credits: SHIROKUMA DESIGN / Getty Images | 👂 Pylon platform: When Pylon got started, it focused on managing B2B customer conversations in channels like Slack and Microsoft Teams. It received feedback that it needed to expand and offer a platform of comms tools to be successful. It did and just raised $17 million. Read more 🪲 AI hack: Born at a hackathon, Agency AI created debugging tools for AI agents that monitor them and make sure they don't go rogue. The company just raised a $2.6 million pre-seed round. Read more | | | ⚙️ Damn, Daniel: Daniel Gross has long been an investor in AI startups but hasn't received the same level of attention for it as others in his field. The Information did a deep dive into Gross, highlighting some of his investments and what he's up to now. Read more 🌊 OpenSea's story: The Verge reports on the rise and fall of OpenSea, the largest market for NFTs. The company is facing pending litigation from the SEC and a "matter" with the FTC, and it's being scrutinized by U.S. and international tax authorities. Read more | | | Featured jobs from Crunchboard | | | Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. | | | Update your preferences here at any time | | Copyright © 2024 TechCrunch, All rights reserved.Yahoo Inc. 110 5th St,San Francisco,CA | | | | |
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