Hello and welcome back to Week in Review, your one-stop shop for the best stories of the week. Greg Kumparak had an enjoyable early summer break and has entrusted me with keeping you updated in his absence.
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Juul had a week. The e-cigarette maker, once valued at $38 billion, has received word from the FDA that it will no longer be allowed to sell or distribute vaping devices or tobacco-flavored pods and e-liquids. mint 5% and 3% in the US without “risks[ing] enforcement action.” The ban is the result of the company’s inability to prove its products are safe, but on Friday, a federal appeals court. freeze ban after the company applied for an urgent administrative leave. The stay will extend the time until the case can be heard by the court, although according to court documents, it “should not be construed in any way as a judgment of merit. “
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Power-off: One of the most read stories was about the Cloudflare outage, which resulted in taking many of the platforms we all know and love offline. However, the power outage was short-lived. The company has to face a similar incident last week, didn’t reveal what was causing the problem.
Zendesk acquired: A consortium of private equity firms bought the company for $10.2 billion, far below the price it received earlier this year. The deal is expected to close in Q4, at which point Zendesk will go private again.
Amazon whispers: At this week’s re:Mars conference, Amazon announced CodeWhisperer, an AI pair programming tool that can automatically complete entire functions based on just a comment or a few keystrokes. The company trained the system, which now supports Java, JavaScript, and Python, on billions of lines of publicly available open source code and its own codebase, as well as documentation and public code on public forums. .
C-suite departure: The CEO and CEO of MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub and other similar websites, abruptly left the company this week. MindGeeks claims departures are planned, even though it’s coming a week later report in the New Yorker about its censorship policies.
M&M & AI: Microsoft and Meta announced this week that they are using AI to help run their data centers. Microsoft, for its part, is developing an AI system to analyze data and generate alerts for teams so it can “prevent or mitigate the impact of safety incidents,” the company said. A complementary but related system, also under development, attempts to detect and predict impacts on data center construction schedules. Meta says that it has been developing physical models to simulate extreme conditions and feed this data into AI models responsible for optimizing power consumption, cooling and airflow. on your servers.
Wake-up technique: Israel-based startup Wilco is shutting down this week to help software engineers learn how to do the non-technical parts of their work. On this platform, developers join a mock tech company and participate in challenges designed to simulate real-world experiences. They then navigate these experiences using real-world tools and technologies. Haje spoke with On Freund, the company’s CEO. Read the Q&A here.
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Above TechCrunch Podcast this week, you can hear Darrell talk to Bill Gates. The two spoke at TechCrunch Sessions: Climate Facts last week about whether we can avoid climate catastrophe, the importance of crypto, and Elon Musk’s time management skills. Also on this week’s episode, Darell talks to Ingrid about Spotify’s acquisition of Voice AI startup Sonatic.
And on Found, Darrell and Jordan talked to Health Anja CEO and Founder Kathryn Cross, 23 years old TikTok influencers founder turned discussion on how different social channels can be useful to founders in different industries and why she thinks every company should be has its own influence.
things added
Want more TechCrunch? Head over to the aptly named TechCrunch+, where we can dig a little deeper into the topics our subscribers tell us they care about. Some of the good stuff this week includes:
Pitch Deck Teardown: WayRay’s $80 Million Series C Deck: WayRay’s deck consisted of 75 giant slides, and it’s clear that the founders had a different approach to what we’re used to seeing today. However, you can’t argue with fundraising success of this magnitude.
It’s time for LPs to take more responsibility in the fight for economic equality: Dominic-Madori Davis, one of our newest TC+ reporters, looked at the responsibility of LPs to raise venture capital funding for Black founders.
What if my crypto job is gone? Immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn answers a question from an F-1 student who just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science – and has a steady job at a cryptocurrency company.
