To get a roundup of the biggest and most important stories from TechCrunch delivered to your inbox every day at 3pm PDT, subscribe here.
Good morning, wonderful specimens of humanity! It’s Friday and I’m writing this from the hammock in my sunny North Oakland backyard, so life isn’t that bad. (I can only assume that WFH stands for Work From Hammock).
This weekend, take a little time to apply to our Startup Battlefield 200. It gives you a chance to showcase your startup for free at TechCrunch Disrupt in October and win the $100,000 prize. Applications close on August 5, so get to work!
Have a good time, and see you next week! — Haje
TechCrunch Top 3
Startups and VCs
Everything is go, go, go in the world of insurance. Mary Anne reports that Lemonade acquired Metromile and quickly laid off around 20% of its staff. It makes sense, of course, in a world where there’s probably a fair amount of administrative and operational overlap between the two companies, but it’s always sad to say goodbye to beloved colleagues.
and don’t get lost Ariahow to piece the Exploration Company is developing a new reusable orbital spacecraft. “The [space] The exploration ecosystem is going to change dramatically in the next 10 to 15 years,” explained co-founder and CEO Hélène Huby. “If you make it happen, you have the great advantage of being one of the first to market.”
A few more nuggets to take you into the weekend:
- Taking the fun out of it all: A startup is charging $1.99 to write strings to power platforms like DALL-E, and I am desperate for humanity.. Come on, that’s half the fun! No thanks at all to Kyle for making me seethe with confused rage this afternoon. Fool.
- Making it rain in Africa: Zedcrest Capital, a firm known for its investments in equity and debt capital markets, but which recently began to venture into venture investing, has launched a $10 million “emergency fund” for African startupsaimed at stage companies prior to Series A, Label reports.
- Industrial vehicle driving classes: Polymath Robotics launches to provide plug-and-play autonomy software to any industrial vehicle, kirsten reports.
- the more you learn: You know what, I’ve never read one of DevineThe articles that didn’t made me go, “Hey! I did not know that!” This day, Shinkei Systems AI Guided Fish Catching robot gave me that moment of delight.
All My Apes Are Gone: Legal Disputes at the Intersection of IP and NFT
Image credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
When Andy Warhol appropriated the images of Campbell’s Soup in 1962, he was in luck: For various reasons, the company decided not to sue him for trademark infringement.
Yet one wonders how the situation would have played out 60 years later if Warhol had coined a series of NFTs with the iconic soup labels.
In her latest TC+ post, CORPlaw founder Kristen Corpion examined “the most interesting and important IP legal issues currently affecting the creation, transfer, and use of NFTs,” including trademark infringement, the doctrine of first sale and why Seth Green ended up paying a $100,000 premium to buy back his stolen Bored Ape.
(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, helping startup founders and teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
great tech inc
It will never abandon you. He will make an effort to never let you down. He probably won’t run and abandon you. But TikTok may be considering a music servicereport Aisha Y Ivan in an article that sadly falls short of the obligatory musical pun quota. Don’t worry folks, I’ll talk to her about it.
In the meantime, annie reports that Kenya is contemplating giving Facebook a blow with the ban hammer, after the country’s National Commission for Cohesion and Integration found that social media platform isn’t doing enough to eliminate hate speech.
- Is multimedia coming to Twitter?: It seems that the social media platform is tests that allow you to post images, videos and GIFs all in the same tweet, Ivan reports.
- We don’t want your steenking ads: Roku misses the mark in its quarterly results and blames advertising slowdown for falling short lauren reports.
- Bank balance goes down, stocks go up: Amazon reported its earnings and had a loss of $2 billion. It seems that the stonks love that kind of thing, because the stock price rosereports lauren.
- For you, special price. For you it’s double: Twitter Blue gets a price increase from $2.99 to $4.99 per monthreports Ivan.
- Where do you take someone after a “peekaboo” accident? to the ICU: Instagram practically copied BeReal for its dual camera functionbut a little missed the point along the way, Amanda Explain.
- Is there anything they can’t do?: Video memes, maybe music soon (see above) and now TikTok starts testing HTML5 minigames with a handful of partners, Sarah reports.