It’s Friday (or should I say Free-Ya.) did you. Give yourself a pat on the back — and read the rest of this week’s review edition, TechCrunch’s newsletter recaps the past seven days in tech (sign up here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday). I will continue to be your WiR emcee for the next few weeks until Greg returns from parental leave. Goodness knows I lack his wisdom, but I try to make up for it in the pit. Please make it easy for me.
First things first, I’m contractually obligated (not really… but really?) to highlight TechCrunch’s upcoming events this calendar year.
TechCrunch Live is having a special (virtual) tour of City Spotlight: Boston on February 27th, and it’s going to be completely free. That’s right – free! There’s no excuse for skipping this one. Beyond City Spotlight, TC will return to Boston in April for Prestage, featuring expert-led sessions about growing — you guessed it — a startup company. Last but not least, mark your calendars for TechCrunch Riot 2023, September 19-21 in San Francisco. One will remember.
PSAs out of the way, let’s get to the conclusion:
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Erase your mistakes; One of Google Pixel’s best photo editing features, Magic Eraser, is now making its way to other Android and iOS devices. But it will not be free. This week, Google announced that its popular tool, which uses AI to remove unwanted content from images, will be available to Google One subscribers and existing Pixel owners. Google One subscribers will receive a few other editing tools like new HDR video effects, a unique collage style, and more.
Facebook jail Sara reports that META will reform the penal system based on recommendations from the monitoring board, an independent body of experts, academics, civic leaders and legal experts. The social network said it has improved its procedures to focus on punishing users by restricting their ability to post and explaining the reasons behind content removal.
Tiktok in cars Tik Tok is already making its way into vehicles, starting with the new Mercedes-Benz E-Class, which will go on sale in the fall of 2023. The car’s newly developed MBUX infotainment system, which allows drivers a “super screen” covering the entire dashboard. To click and watch videos on the TikTok app while the vehicle is parked. How about overloading for TikTok?
AI in my Spotify: Spotify this week launched a new AI feature called “DJ” to better customize the music listening experience for its users. Similar to Radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature uses Spotify’s “incredibly realistic sound” to deliver selected music along with AI-powered commentary about your favorite tracks and artists. Orderly!
Depreciation: Netflix slashed subscription costs in more than 100 states last week as customers continue to ponder which streaming services to stick with amid price hikes. The company has recently come under fire after passing password-sharing laws for Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, but another reason for the price cuts is to better compete with competition like Paramount+, Apple TV+, Disney+ and Hulu.
Military Secrets; On Monday, the US Department of Defense discovered the security of a vulnerable server that had been leaking US military emails to the open internet for the past two weeks. The server is hosted in the Microsoft Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically isolated from other commercial customers and thus can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data.
In OpenAI calculations: OpenAI is quietly launching a new developer platform that will allow customers to run the company’s new machine learning models, such as GPT-3.5, with special capabilities. In screenshots of documentation posted on Twitter by early access users, OpenAI describes the upcoming offering, called Foundry, as “designed for clients with large workloads.”
YouTube goes multilingual: YouTube announced this week that it will add support for multilingual audio tracks, which will help creators add titles to their new and existing videos and reach a global audience. The company says the technology to support multilingual audio tracks is developed in-house by YouTube, but creators must partner directly with third-party dubbing providers to produce audio tracks.
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Here’s your weekly reminder that TechCrunch has a diverse collection of podcasts for your listening pleasure. This week on the TechCrunch podcast, came log on Darrell to talk with Taylor About the Supreme Court cases that could change the Internet as we know it. In a chain reaction, Jacqueline They interviewed Alex Adelman, founder and CEO of Lolly, a bitcoin rewards app that allows people to earn bitcoins or cash back when they shop online or in more than 10,000 stores. The Foundation spoke with Michael Chime, the show’s co-founder and CEO, who is leading the charge to update 911 calls by making the group accessible to video and photos. And in equity, the gang has covered trends such as the return and acceleration of IPOs that support startups by laid-off tech workers.
