Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Hello! So happy to have you back here for TechCrunch PM. Among the great things you’ll find below is a scoop on a conservative mobile carrier being hit by a data breach, as well as some venture funding rounds, some Trump spam on Bluesky and TikTok’s latest program for creators. Let’s dig in!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Sonos

Sonos has headphones: It’s taken them some time, but Sonos now says it has a set of headphones for all the users who begged them to make a set. The over-ear Ace headphones will cost you $449, and as Brian Heater notes, there’s a lot of competition at this price point. Read more

That’s not very Patriot-ic: U.S. cell carrier Patriot Mobile experienced a data breach that included subscribers’ personal information, including full names, email addresses, home ZIP codes and account PINs. Read more

H raises $220M: H, a startup based in Paris and previously known as Holistic AI, is just a few months old and already managed to bring in that chunk of change. No surprise, it’s an AI startup working on new models with an impressive founding team. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

Spam in the decentralized network: A spam attack occurring on Bluesky’s network on May 11 that involved a flood of posts reading “Remember to always vote Trump” was found to have originated on the social networking protocol Nostr. Read more

TikTok is pulling out all the stops: TikTok doesn’t want to be banned in the United States, so it announced a new platform called TikTok Change Makers Program that includes 50 global creators who “create a positive impact on and beyond the platform.” Read more

Spotify’s “Listening Party” is a flop so far: Billie Eilish hosted a Listening Party for her top fans (who were selected based on Spotify data) on May 17 to celebrate her latest album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” It was a decent turnout, with 2,500 users in attendance. The Listening Party experience was a mixed bag. Read more

Pinecone for all: Pinecone completely rearchitected its product to launch Pinecone Serverless, which frees its customers from having to think about managing their deployments and scaling them. Today, Pinecone serverless comes out of beta and is now generally available. Read more

What happened at Microsoft’s Build:Build is Microsoft’s largest developer conference, and of course it’s all about AI this year. Here are some of the takeaways:

GitHub Copilot gets extensions

Microsoft’s Power Automate no-code platform adds AI flows

Microsoft intros a Copilot for teams

Microsoft upgrades its AI app-building platforms

Creating the "food as medicine" category with Ashley Tyrner from FarmboxRX: This week on Found, we talk with the CEO and founder of FarmboxRX about bootstrapping, working with health plans, and becoming the first produce-as-a-prescription company. Listen here

Money, money, money

Stack AI wants to make it easier to build AI-fueled workflows. Read more

Porsche Ventures invests in battery startup South 8 to boost cold-weather EV performance. Read more

WitnessAI is building guardrails for generative AI models. Read more

Bill Gates-backed wind startup AirLoom is raising $12 million, filings reveal. Read more

Around the web

Image Credits: Getty Images/Patra Kongsirimongkolchai / EyeEm

The new streaming bundle you weren’t asking for: Yahoo Finance reports that the new Peacock, Netflix, Apple TV+ bundle will start at $15 per month if you are okay with ads. If that’s not your jam, it’s time to write to someone because they aren’t offering ad-free yet. Read more

New Ether ETFs are coming: Barron’s takes a look at what this could mean for other crypto. Read more

TechCrunch Minute

Adobe lodges branding complaint against indie emulator app Delta: It’s been a wild few months for the developers behind Delta, a retro game emulator app. Their latest hiccup came when Adobe accused the app of copying its logo, which is literally just a stylized version of the Greek letter delta. But for this indie app with a team of two, getting legal threats from Adobe isn’t even close to the most interesting thing about it. Nope, that came from Apple. Hit play and let’s chat!

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