Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Welcome to TC PM! Today we have updates regarding new products at Ring, Ford and Volkswagen, as well as news on multiple company acquisitions.

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

💻 Mixed messages: The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority announced today that it was ending its probes into Apple and Google regarding how their respective app distributions could hurt developers. But Apple and Google aren't out of the woods yet. Read more

🤪 AIs got jokes: Have you ever been Rickrolled? Well, thanks to advances in technology, you can now be Rickrolled by an AI agent. Lindy discovered its AI agents had done that to two customers recently and is working to fix the error. Read more

🪲 iPhone bug: A security researcher today found that typing four characters can crash your iPhone. But don't worry: Experts told us the bug does not appear to be a security issue. Read more

A Message from The Aerospace Corporation

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Ford

🛻 Fun at Ford: Ford announced today that the first vehicle to be built on the company's low-cost EV platform will be an all-electric, midsize pickup truck. This model will be a follow-up to Ford's electric F-150 and will be released in 2027. Read more

🚐 Van life: In other electric vehicle news, Volkswagen took another baby step today toward releasing its electric minivan, which was announced two years ago. The ID. Buzz now has both a price tag and a mileage range. Read more

🔔 Ring ring, hello? Ring, Amazon's video doorbell system, is releasing the next version of the Ring Battery Doorbell. This latest device includes new features like color night vision and a longer battery life, among others. Read more

⌨️ Competitors unite: Incident management startup FireHydrant announced today that it had acquired previous competitor Blameless for an undisclosed price. Both companies assist site reliability engineers who work to keep software and websites running. Read more

🎉Congrats, Claude: Anthopic's AI application Claude has now reached $1 million in gross mobile app revenue. The program reached the milestone in 16 weeks with nearly half of its revenue coming from customers in the U.S. Read more

Condolences: It was confirmed today that U.K. tech mogul Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah are dead. Their bodies were recovered in the aftermath of a capsized yacht catastrophe earlier this week off the coast of Sicily. Read more

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Lumin CEO announces DocuSign competitor

Founder and CEO of PDF multi-tool Lumin, Max Ferguson, has announced a competitive new product. Lumin Sign is an eSignature workflow tool that provides enterprise-level care to the small and medium-sized businesses left behind by eSignature giants like DocuSign. Try before you buy and compare for yourself - no strings attached.

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Money, money, money

Image Credits: Henrik Sorensen / Getty Images

💰Big bucks: Grafana Labs, which helps enterprises visualize and analyze their data, just raised a round that values the company at $6 billion. The company garnered that valuation after raising $270 million in a mix of primary and secondary funding. Read more

🛍️ Open for business: Openmart wants to be known as the AI alternative to Zoominfo. The YC-backed startup helps enterprises find and sell to small local businesses, and it just raised a $2.75 million seed round. Read more

🎥 Another acquisition: Whether you want to stay in or go out, Zomato says it has you covered. The Indian food delivery conglomerate paid $244 million to acquire the entertainment ticketing division of Paytm, an online marketplace for tickets from planes to movies. Read more

Around the web

⛏️ Meta on the move: Today Fortune reported that Meta quietly released a new web crawler that is scraping the internet for data it can use to train its AI systems. What could possibly go wrong? Read more

🍗 Chick-fil-A on TV: Do people want to stream content from their favorite fried chicken chain? We'll find out! Deadline reported today that Chick-fil-A plans to produce content for its own streaming service. My first question is: What? My second question is: Can the content be streamed on Sundays? Read more