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Shared electric scooters came onto the scene five years ago with a promising vision of getting people out of cars and onto greener modes of transportation. Yet despite billions in VC money and plenty of hype , the future that micromobility companies promised still hasn’t quite arrived. In cities like Paris, most people aren’t replacing car trips with shared e-scooter jaunts in a meaningful way; the cost of riding scooters makes them an expensive option for last-mile transit connections and equitable access; and the public disclosures of Bird and Helbiz have shown us that achieving profitability is incredibly difficult. Plus, cities that allowed shared e-scooter companies in their midsts are increasingly making it difficult for scooter companies to operate sustainably. For the sake of traffic flow and carbon emissions , there need to be alternatives to cars. Are shared e-scooters the answer to that, or are they just another shitty option? What have we gained by introducing shared

This was a rough year for customer experience. We’ve been hearing for years how important customer experience is to business, and a whole business technology category has been built around it, with companies like Salesforce and Adobe at the forefront. But due to the economy or lack of employees (perhaps both?), 2022 was a year of poor customer service, which in turn has created poor experiences; there’s no separating the two. No matter how great your product or service, you will ultimately be judged by how well you do when things go wrong, and your customer service team is your direct link to buyers. If you fail them in a time of need, you can lose them for good and quickly develop a bad reputation. News can spread rapidly through social media channels. That’s not the kind of talk you want about your brand. We’re constantly being asked for feedback about how the business did, yet this thirst for information doesn’t seem to ever connect back to improving the experience. And make

The gigantic technological leap that machine learning models have shown in the last few months is getting everyone excited about the future of AI — but also nervous about its uncomfortable consequences. After text-to-image tools from Stability AI and OpenAI became the talk of the town, ChatGPT’s ability to hold intelligent conversations is the new obsession in sectors across the board. In China, where the tech community has always watched progress in the West closely, entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors are looking for ways to make their dent in the generative AI space. Tech firms are devising tools built on open source models to attract consumer and enterprise customers. Individuals are cashing in on AI-generated content. Regulators have responded quickly to define how text, image, and video synthesis should be used. Meanwhile, U.S. tech sanctions are raising concerns about China’s ability to keep up with AI advancement. As generative AI takes the world by storm towards the e

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Welcome back to your daily digest of TechCrunch goodness. It is my last day with you (you’re welcome!), so Christine will be back in the Daily Crunch seat on Tuesday. Haje will not be back just yet because he is heading to Vegas as part of the team covering CES. Speaking of CES, Brian raised the curtain on what we can expect from its first full-fledged production since before COVID. Bye for now, folks. Safe and Happy New Year to you all. — Henry At the top Into the Matrix : No, not that Matrix. We’re talking about the open standards-based comms protocol called Matrix that Paul went deep on. Its network doubled thanks in part to increased use by enterprises and government. Reddit is also having a go, experimenting with it for its chat feature. For the fusion : Tim took a look at five startups primed to benefit from the recent breakthroughs i

Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid , combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 , and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans. “By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce quality content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content output, reducing the risk of burnout,” Habib told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to keep up with the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI.” But depending on how they’re used, tools like QuickVid threaten to

The first open-source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived, but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all. This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta’s Make-A-Video , released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT. The system combines PaLM , a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create a system that can accomplish pretty much any task that ChatGPT can, including drafting emails and suggesting computer code. But PaLM + RLHF isn’t pretrained. That is to say, the system hasn’t been trained on the example data from the web necessary for it to actually work. Downloading PaLM + RLHF won’t magically install a ChatGPT-like experience — that would require compiling gigabytes of text from which the model can learn and finding hardware beefy enough to handle the training workload. Like ChatGP

As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel , a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands. The terms of the deal, which was first reported in the Belgian paper De Tijd, have not been disclosed. Founded in 2009, Luxexcel uses 3D printing to make prescription lenses for glasses. More recently, the company has focused its efforts on smart lenses, which can be printed with integrated technology like LCD displays and holographic film. “We’re excited that the Luxexcel team has joined Meta, deepening the existing partnership between the two companies,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. It’s rumored that Meta and Luxexcel had already worked together on Project Aria , the company’s augmented reality (AR) research initiative. In September 2021, Meta unveiled the Ray-Ban Stories , a pair of smart glasses that can take photos an

Despite, well, everything, the U.S. is still the best place in the world for Black startup founders to raise money. The check sizes are bigger, the market more mature, the ambition oversized. There are more funds, more options, more opportunities, more, more, more. It’s quite easy to harp on the dismal funding and often discriminatory treatment that Black founders receive in the U.S. Through the haze, though, the reality is that the heart of the American Dream is still beating. For example, Lotanna Ezeike , a serial founder, said he’s looking to fundraise for his new startup in the U.S., despite raising more than $1 million for his U.K.-based fintech, XPO. “Across the pond in the U.K., thinking tends to be very limited, especially around the seed stage,” he said, adding that a seed in the U.K. is a pre-seed or family round in the U.S. “I think this is because of how small the U.K. is compared to other regions, so the mind can only dream so big. It’s a spiral really — less wealth,

Lukas Gentele Contributor Share on Twitter Lukas Gentele is the CEO of Loft Labs , which builds open source developer tooling for Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a wonderful but complex software that can present significant “Day Two” challenges when put into production. Developers who are new to Kubernetes — and most are — face a large knowledge gap when they look to sustain and optimize Kubernetes clusters. In this piece, I will share several ways to address problems as they arise. Optimize your Kubernetes cluster for cost As adoption of Kubernetes rises, the need for applications and engineers to access clusters is also growing. However, it is neither feasible nor cost-efficient to always use entire physical clusters to achieve this goal. Virtual clusters are a great way to reduce costs. In a scenario of 100 developers, we calculated up to 78% savings by using open source virtual clusters. Leveraging virtual clusters with open source software such as VirtualCluster o

In 2014, Prayank Swaroop made a pitch to the storied venture firm Accel, where he worked as an associate, about future marketplaces in India. At the time, Flipkart and Snapdeal were the only two e-commerce startups in India that had shown a semblance of scale. Swaroop made a case that as more Indians come online, opportunities will emerge in food delivery, automotive aftermarket, warehousing, road freight, and social commerce among many other marketplace areas. Swaroop, now a partner at the firm, turned out to be right. Urban Company, which operates in the domestic help sector, is valued at over $2 billion; Zomato and Swiggy are delivering food to millions of customers each month; Spinny and Cars24 are selling hundreds of thousands of cars each quarter; social commerce startup DealShare is valued at over $2 billion and Meesho just short of $5 billion. Hundreds of millions of Indians have come online in the past decade and over 100 million are making online transactions and purchases

Taking a deep breath as I write these words: Next week, TechCrunch will return to our first in-person CES in three years. Phew. It felt good to finally get that off my chest. The last time our team flew to Las Vegas for the event was January 2020 . An auspicious date. It wouldn’t be long before the entire world went pear-shaped. It was a big show, with 117,000 in attendance, per the CTA’s (Consumer Technology Association) figures. The event, which its governing body would rather you not call the Consumer Electronics Show , has become a sprawling affair in recent decades. Attempting to see the entire show is a fool’s errand. Back in my younger, more hopeful days, I made a point of seeing as much of it as I could, making a pretty good run at walking every official hall. That’s become increasingly impossible over the years, as the show has spilled out well beyond the confines of the Las Vegas Convention Center. There’s the Venetian Convention and Expo Center (RIP the Sands), countless