Aaaand we’re back! With our Thanksgiving mini-break behind us, it’s time for the next edition of The Week in Review — the newsletter where we quickly recap the most read TechCrunch stories of the past seven (business) days. No matter how busy you are, this week should give you a pretty good idea of what people are talking about in tech.
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Instafest goes instaviral: You’ve probably been to a great music festival before. But you have been in a mine just for you? Probably not. Instafest, a web app that went super-viral this week, helps you imagine what a festival could look like. Log in with your Spotify credentials and it’ll generate a promo poster for an ambitious festival based on your listening habits.
LastPass is broken (again): “Password manager LastPass says it’s investigating a security incident after its systems were breached for the second time this year,” writes Zack Whittaker. Research is still ongoing, which unfortunately shows that what (and whose) data can be accessed is very unclear.
ChatGPT opens: This week, OpenAI opened up wide access to ChatGPT, which lets you interact with their new language-generation AI through a simple chat-style interface. In other words, it lets you create passages of (sometimes frighteningly well-written) text by talking to a robot. Darrell used it to instantly write the Pokémon cheat sheet he’d always wanted.
AWS re: Inventing: This week, Amazon Web Services hosted its annual re:Invent conference, where the company showcases what’s next for the cloud computing platform that powers so much of the web. This year’s highlights? A low-code tool for serverless applications, a pledge to give AWS customers control over where their data is stored around the world (to help manage increasingly complex government policies), and a tool for running “city-scale simulations” in the cloud.
Twitter Suspends Kanye (Again): “Elon Musk has suspended Kanye West’s (aka Ye) Twitter account after the latter posted anti-Semitic tweets and violated the platform’s rules,” writes Ivan Mehta.
Spotify completes it: Every year in December, Spotify ships “Fixed” – an interactive feature that takes your Spotify listening data for the year and presents it in a super visual way. This year there are simple things like how many minutes you stream, but it’s also branching out with ideas like “listening to personalities” — a Myers-Briggs-inspired system that places each user into one of 16 camps, like “Adventurer” or. “Replay.”
DoorDash cuts: I was hoping to go a week without a roster-breaking layoff story. Unfortunately, DoorDash confirmed this week that it is laying off 1,250 people, with CEO Tony Xu explaining that they were hired too quickly during the pandemic.
Salesforce CEO steps down: “In one week last December [Bret Taylor] Appointed Chairman of the Board at Twitter and CEO at Salesforce,” writes Ron Miller. “A year later, he has nothing to do.” Taylor says he “decided to come back [his] entrepreneurial roots”.
audio generalization
I expected things to happen little In TC Podcast land, we were quiet last week due to the holidays, but somehow we still had some great shows! Ron Miller and Rita Liao joined Darrell Etherington The TechCrunch Podcast CEO of Salesforce and talk about the departure of China’s “great wall of porn”; Team A chain reaction web3 shared an interview with Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of development platform Alchemy; and always lovely Capital the crew talked about everything from Sam Bankman-Fried’s wild DealBook interview to why all three of Pipe’s startup funding co-founders quit at the same time.
TechCrunch+
What’s behind the TC+ members-only paywall? Here’s what TC+ members read most this week:
Lessons for raising $10 million without giving up a board seat: Reclaim.ai has raised $10 million over the past two years “without giving up a single board.” How? Henry Shapiro, co-founder of Reclaim.ai shares his thoughts.
Advisors are the new non-traditional VC: “Why are so many advisor-led venture capital funds starting now?” Rebecca Szkutak asks.
Fundraising during more VC screening: “Founders can get discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they have ‘currency,'” writes Russ Heddleston, co-founder and former CEO of DocSend.