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happy Friday! Join us in wishing Lorenzo A very warm welcome to the team! He’s joining our crack team of cybersecurity reporters, working alongside Zack and Carly. He just posted his first article on TC, about T-Mobile reported that a hacker accessed the personal data of 37 million customers. Welcome aboard!!
Enjoy the weekend! – Christine And Pilgrim
Top Techcrunch 3
- Alphabet defines layoffs: With all this talk of tech layoffs in the past couple of months, it was only a matter of time before we saw something from Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The search engine giant has announced that it will cut 6% of its workforce, affecting 12,000 people. Like the others, CEO Sundar Pichai took a turn explaining how the company employs different economic realities, pee Writes.
- game over: As popular as games are, the next layoff story is a bit of a surprise, though not entirely unexpected since media companies are being hit hard. Entertainment company Fandom, which publishes content under Giant Bomb, GameSpot and Metacritic, has laid off nearly 10% of its staff across those publications, Ivan reports.
- It’s all about money, money, money: Social media influencers in India are required to disclose promotional content, also known as paid promotions, to the government, and now the Ministry of Consumer Affairs has released some guidelines on how to do this. Jagmeet he has more.
Startups and VC
The $32 million seed round for Chris DeWolfe’s newest toy company might sound like a throwback to more wonderful times, like… 2021. But that’s How much PLAI Labs just raised in a deal led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)reports Cosmic. That’s a lot of money in a volatile market, she notes, even coming from two separate a16z funds: the company’s $600 million premiere toy car and its $4.5 billion crypto fund, both announced last May.
Here’s another bunch for you:
4 investors discuss the next big wave of alternative seafood companies
WildType sushi-class lab salmon photo. Image credits: Ari Alfenbeen/Wild Type
There’s a lot of hype around vegan burgers and nuggets, but alternative seafood products are attracting more interest — and funding — from investors these days.
“More than $178 million was injected into alternative seafood in the first half of 2022, and the market is expected to reach a value of $1.6 billion over the next 10 years,” she says.
To learn more about this mature space, Kristen Hall surveyed four investors to get their thoughts on regulation, the unique challenges companies face as they try to scale, and how they approach growth and risk:
- Kate Danaher, Managing Director, Oceans & Seafood, S2G Ventures
- Frederick Gross-Holz, Director, Blue Horizon
- Christian Lim, Managing Director, Blue Ocean Coin Capital Partners
- Amy Novogratz, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Aqua Spark
Three more from the TC+ team:
Techcrunch + It is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can register here. Use the code “DC” to get 15% off an annual subscription!
BigTech Inc.
Well, no more talk of layoffs. We’re going to have some fun, because it’s Friday, dammit!
Do you still play Wordle? Or maybe it turned into a Quordle clone. we will, Quordle was acquired by Merriam-WebsterAnd pee reports. If you haven’t tried it before, Quordle is similar to Wordle’s basic concept, guessing a word in a certain amount of tries, except that there are four five-letter words to guess at once, with only nine attempts. This might just be the thing to keep you warm on a cold winter’s night.
Here are four more for you to enjoy on Friday:
- Your turn: Amanda He writes that after weeks of backlash and outcry from content creators and fans, Publisher of Dungeons & Dragons He made the decision to put the game under a Creative Commons license.
- Sudden goodbye: After cutting third-party clients recently, including Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter stepped forward and officially banned themAnd Kyle Writes.
- ICYMI: Netflix founder Reed Hastings He stepped down as co-CEO but will remain on the board of directors. Taylor Writes. while, Netflix looks to free streaming of ‘FAST’ channels As a possibility to develop its advertising activity, Lauren reports.
- Up above and far away: like Daryl He writes, Canada is rising from the sidelines and joining the space race saying it wants to to support commercial space launches.