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Happy Friday! Join us in wishing Lorenzo a very heat welcome to the staff! He’s becoming a member of our crack staff of cybersecurity reporters, working alongside Zack and Carly. He simply revealed his first article on TC, about T-Mobile reporting a hacker accessed personal data of 37 million customers. Welcome aboard!!
Enjoy your weekend! — Christine and Haje
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Alphabet spells out layoffs: With all that discuss tech layoffs prior to now couple months, it was solely a matter of time earlier than we noticed one thing from Google’s mother or father, Alphabet. The search engine big introduced it was slicing 6% of its workforce, which impacts 12,000 folks. And just like the others, CEO Sundar Pichai took his flip explaining how the company “employed for a different economic actuality,” Paul writes.
- Game off: With gaming being as well-liked as it’s, this subsequent layoff story is a little bit of a shock, although not completely sudden since media corporations are being hit onerous. Entertainment company Fandom, which publishes content material beneath Giant Bomb, GameSpot and Metacritic, laid off roughly 10% of its workers throughout these publications, Ivan stories.
- It’s all about the money, money, money: Social media influencers in India must disclose promotional content material, aka paid promotions, to the federal government, and now the Department of Consumer Affairs has launched some pointers on how to do this. Jagmeet has extra.
Startups and VC
A $32 million seed spherical for Chris DeWolfe’s latest gaming company could look like a throwback to frothier instances, like … 2021. But that’s how much PLAI Labs just raised in a deal led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), stories Connie. She factors out that that’s a lot of moolah in a unstable market, even coming because it does from two separate a16z funds: the agency’s $600 million debut video games automobile and its $4.5 billion crypto fund, each of which had been introduced final May.
Here’s one other handful for ya:
4 buyers talk about the subsequent massive wave for various seafood startups
Image of WildType’s sushi-grade, lab-grown salmon. Image Credits: Arye Elfenbein/WildType
There’s a lot of hype round plant-based burgers and nuggets, however various seafood merchandise are attracting extra consideration — and funding — from buyers lately.
“More than $178 million was pumped into various seafood within the first half of 2022, and the market’s worth is poised to achieve $1.6 billion over the subsequent 10 years,” she stories.
To study extra about this maturing area, Christine Hall surveyed 4 buyers to get their ideas on regulation, the “distinctive challenges” corporations face as they attempt to attain scale, and the way they’re approaching progress and danger:
- Kate Danaher, managing director of ocean and seafood, S2G Ventures
- Friederike Grosse-Holz, director, Blue Horizon
- Christian Lim, managing director, SWEN Capital Partners’ Blue Ocean
- Amy Novogratz, co-founder and managing associate, Aqua Spark
Three extra from the TC+ staff:
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup groups get forward of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% low cost on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Okay, no extra layoff speak. We are going to have some enjoyable, as a result of it’s Friday, rattling it!
Are you continue to enjoying Wordle? Or maybe you switched to its clone Quordle. Well, Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster, Paul stories. If you’ve by no means tried it, Quordle is just like the essential Wordle idea, guessing a phrase in a specific amount of tries, besides there are 4 five-letter phrases to guess directly, with simply 9 tries. It could be simply the factor to heat you up on a chilly winter’s night time.
Here’s 4 extra for your Friday enjoyment:
- Your flip: Amanda writes that after weeks of backlash and protest from content material creators and followers, Dungeons & Dragons’ publisher made a choice to place the sport beneath a Creative Commons license.
- An abrupt goodbye: After lately slicing off third-party purchasers, together with Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter went ahead and officially banned them, Kyle writes.
- ICYMI: Netflix founder Reed Hastings stepped down as co-CEO however will stay on the board, Taylor writes. Meanwhile, Netflix is eyeing free streaming “FAST” channels as a risk to develop its adverts enterprise, Lauren stories.
- Up, up, and away: As Darrell writes, Canada is getting up off the sidelines and becoming a member of the area race, saying it needs to support commercial space launches.
