U.S. employees at Bandcamp, an online audio distributor, have announced their formation of a union. Last year, the platform was acquired by Epic Games, the multi-billion dollar company behind games like Fortnite and the Unreal gaming engine.

According to the union, known as Bandcamp United, a super-majority of workers are in favor of forming a union. They have authorized The Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU)’s Tech Workers Union Local 1010 division to represent their 62-person unit; this is the same group that supported Kickstarter United to form an historic first union among U.S. tech employees.

Bandcamp United — which includes engineers, writers, project managers, support staff and designers — is asking Epic Games to voluntarily recognize them. If the gaming company refuses, the workers can file for an election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

“We need a union at Bandcamp to ensure that all employees can ask management tough questions without fear of retribution,” said Cami Ramirez-Arau, a support specialist, in a press release. “The integrity of workers who build Bandcamp is a crucial aspect of the company’s ability to uphold its values. Bandcamp’s core mission is best protected via collective action and workers having a seat at the table.”

Per Bandcamp United’s mission statement, the union wants to eliminate historical disparities in pay within and across departments. The workers also want to ensure their access to paid time off, salary adjustments to meet changing economic realities, and consistency in their communications with management.

“It is important to us that Bandcamp’s artist-first mission continues with clarity and accountability, with all resources afforded to us distributed in the fairest and most transparent way possible,” the mission statement reads. “We feel a responsibility to support those who are most marginalized, to use our platform with integrity, and to provide reasonable protections and accommodations for those at-risk.”

Bandcamp stands out from its peers in music streaming, since musicians can limit how many times fans can listen to their songs for free without buying them. But when it comes to labor, workers at other streamers are also in the midst of historic organizing. A group of 40 YouTube Music contractors initiated a strike in early February, which is still ongoing.

In the gaming industry, a few departments within Activision Blizzard have managed to form unions, despite the company’s illegal interventions. Meanwhile, a group of 300 quality assurance testers at Microsoft’s ZeniMax studio earned union certification in January.

Epic Games did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Employees at Epic-owned Bandcamp form union by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/employees-at-epic-owned-bandcamp-form-union/

Tinder today is rolling out more features aimed at helping people find the right relationships for them, while also being more authentic on their dating profiles. Borrowing a feature from Hinge, another app owned by Tinder parent Match Group, Tinder users will now be able to indicate on their profiles the type of relationship they’re looking for — which today may involve various concepts around non-monogamy. It will also now allow members to display their pronouns on their profile.

Tinder and Hinge are starting to look more and more like the same app as Match sets its sights on attracting Gen Z users to fuel its growth. Though each app is marketed to slightly different segments of the online dating market, their feature sets are starting to line up. We saw this earlier with December’s launch of Tinder’s Relationship Goals feature — a feature it borrowed from Hinge — which lets people clarify what they’re looking for in terms of long or short-term commitment.

Now Tinder is stealing another Hinge feature with the addition of Relationship Types, which Hinge had introduced in November.

With Tinder’s update, members will be able to choose from a variety of terms they prefer to describe their desired relationship type, like monogamy, ethical non-monogamy, open relationship, polyamory, or even, “open to exploring.” Tinder says it’s making this shift as it found that 41% of Gen Z users are either open to or are actively seeking non-monogamous relationships.

According to a survey of 4,000 singles conducted on its behalf earlier this year, Tinder also found that open relationships (36%) and hierarchical polyamory (26%) were the most popular types of non-monogamous relationships among 18-25 year old actively dating singles in the U.S., U.K. Australia, and Canada.

Of course, consumer interest may not be the only thing driving Tinder to adopt the feature.

Its lack of more direct support for non-monogamous relationships in its product has frustrated both those seeking non-monogamy and those looking to avoid it. That’s led to a growing number of niche dating apps dedicated to non-monogamy, like Feeld, #Open, MoreThanOne and PolyFinda, as no one enjoyed being matched with someone whose relationship ideas and goals are so completely different from their own.

The addition of the feature also aligns with Tinder’s newly added Relationship Goals, which center on what people are looking for from a relationship outside of the “type.” This addition has allowed users to specify if they are in search of a “life partner,” or a “long-term,” “long-term, open to short-term,” “short-term, open to long-term,” or “short-term” relationship. Users can also say they are just “figuring out my dating goals,” if they don’t know.

Another new feature will now allow Tinder members to display up to four pronouns on their profile from a list of over 15 options, in addition to their sexual orientation and gender — which has been available for years. Again, Tinder cites Gen Z survey data as driving this change, noting that among singles ages 18-25, 33% agreed that their sexuality is more fluid, and 29% said their gender identity has become more fluid in the past 3 years. The company also said the LGBTQIA+ community is the fastest-growing group on Tinder.

Combined, the new features could help deliver better outcomes for Tinder members, as they could more easily vet potential matches and express themselves on the app. But the features serve another purpose as well: to lure Gen Z users back to Tinder.

As the Financial Times reported last year, Tinder had been struggling to attract new users after the lift of Covid lockdowns. The report noted that downloads of the app had dropped 5% in 2021, even as rivals grew, signaling user interest in exploring alternatives. More recently, Match Group forecast first-quarter 2023 revenue below expectations after Tinder drove the company’s first-ever quarterly revenue decline.

To address the Gen Z problem, Tinder recently unveiled a new marketing campaign, “It Starts with a Swipe.” The new ads aim to speak directly to this younger demographic, who often think of love and romance differently than older generations. Inspired by Gen Z, the campaign “not only celebrates a diversity of possibilities, but also genders, orientations, and multiculturalism,” the company said.

The new features are rolling out now to Tinder’s mobile app.

Relationship Type will be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Brazil, France, The Netherlands, Indonesia, Tawain, Italy, Spain, Thailand, Sweden, Germany, and Mexico. However, the pronouns feature is U.S.-only at this time, Tinder notes.

Tinder will now let daters define their ‘relationship type,’ add pronouns to their profile by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/tinder-will-now-let-daters-define-their-relationship-type-add-pronouns-to-their-profile/

At its virtual “Future of Work” event, Microsoft today announced the launch of an AI copilot — and make no mistake, Microsoft is all-in on using this ‘copilot’ metaphor across all of its products — to Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate. The idea here is to use AI to make using these tools for building line-of-business apps, flows and bots even easier by letting users use natural language to describe what they want to build.

“With Copilot, Microsoft Power Platform is bringing AI-powered assistance into Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s corporate VP for its low code application platform, writes in today’s announcement. “Makers now have a live in-studio copilot that helps them build solutions and provides suggestions for improvement. To build an app, flow, or bot, you can describe it using natural language and copilot can build it in seconds. It is that easy.”

At its core, this works a bit like using the new Bing or ChatGPT. You tell the Power Platform Copilot what you want and then refine these ideas through a back-and-forth with the bot in the chat sidebar.

In Power Apps, the main low-code tool of the Power Platform, users can now use sentences like “Create a time and expense application to enable my employees to submit their time and expense reports” and it will generate this app for them. But in addition to building these user interfaces and integrations with a company’s data sources, the Copilot can also help users analyze their data and visualize it (Microsoft’s example here is: “What are the most common reasons an inspection fails?”)

Given that Power Virtual Agents is part of the same platform and getting similar updates, it’s maybe no surprise that it’s now also more deeply integrated into Power Apps, allowing these developers to more easily add a chat bot to their apps.

Power Automate, Microsoft’s tool for automating workflows, the process is pretty much the same and the company argues that during its preview, customers saw a 50% reduction in the time it took to develop a Power Automate workflow.

One nifty feature worth calling out here is that since the service is integrated with a GPT model, users will now be able to use Power Automate to also automatically generate text or have the tool summarize existing documents.

For now, Microsoft describes these features as “experimental previews powered by Azure OpenAI Service with GPT” and warns that they are not meant for production use. That’s unlikely to stop most users from using them in production, but at least Microsoft can say that it warned people when their automated daily content update goes haywire.

Microsoft’s new Power Platform AI copilot will build your apps for you by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/microsofts-new-power-platform-ai-copilot-will-build-your-apps-for-you/

In the wake of the pandemic, more and more companies are relying on independent contractors to sustain and grow their businesses — and more people are turning to freelancing. According to a Fiverr poll, 45% of businesses are using more freelancers than before the pandemic. And Fiverr rival Upwork found that 39% of the U.S. workforce, or 60 million Americans, performed freelance work in the past year — a three-percentage-point increase from the year prior.

One of the major challenges for companies drawing on the gig economy is managing payroll and benefits. In fact, one survey found that three out of every five gig workers lose earnings because of technical difficulties clocking in or out. Inspired to solve it, Anthony Mironov and Greg Franczyk founded Wingspan, a payroll platform aimed at firms employing mainly freelancers.

Mironov came from the finance world, having spent several years as a private equity analyst, associate and consultant. Franczyk is an engineer by trade, previously leading the Washington Post’s software engineering division and managing an engineering team at Google.

“Behind each independent contractor is an individual vendor, W9, 1099, e-signature, background check and a reconciliation process — a situation that ultimately blocks companies from working with contractors more,” Mironov told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Greg and I founded Wingspan in 2019 to create the system of record and payroll platform for independent contractors. The future of work is happening now, but actually supporting it requires a paradigm shift in how companies efficiently engage with independent contractors at scale.”

Plenty of contractor-focused payroll platforms exist, like Gusto, Deel and Payable. And of course incumbent payroll providers like Square offer their own solutions. So what does Wingspan bring to the table?

Mainly consolidation, according to Mironov. “Hundreds of companies do bits and pieces of what Wingspan does: for example, there are many ways to send payments,” he added. “We are [an] all-in-one platform linking payroll, benefits and onboarding for freelancers, so Wingspan replaces multiple categories of tools typically used by mid-market businesses.”

To this end, Wingspan provides onboarding and management tools that allow companies to invite contractors with just an email, perform background checks and make same-day payments. Contractors can add a bank account, W-9 and any necessary e-signed documents themselves.

On the backend, employers get automated workflows for generating and filing contractor 1099 tax forms that attempt to identify write-offs and estimate withholdings. They also have the option of offering contractors access to discounted health, vision, dental and life insurance through the platform, Mironov says.

Beyond basic automation, Wingspan uses AI and machine learning to streamline certain tasks. For example, on the end-user side, users can import their off-platform expenses and Wingspan will try automatically categorizing them, taking a best guess as to whether they’re business-related or not and compiling multiple transactions into one report.

“Contractor data is spread across multiple business systems across orgs and needs to be maintained and updated manually when a contractor’s status changes (e.g. when they leave, change their address, change their bank account) — creating significant administrative overhead. Wingspan solves this by acting as a system of record for contractor identities,” Mironov said. “Our company-contractor graph allows companies to pay contractors who already have a profile on the system much quicker while giving contractors a single home for their administrative and financial needs across all clients.”

Whether because of those differentiating features or because global HR tech VC investment continues to outperform the market (the first half of 2022 saw funding reach $9.4 billion), Wingspan is growing at a healthy clip — at least according to Mironov. The company claims to have more than 20,000 members on the platform and “hundreds” of enterprise clients, and it’s on track to surpass a billion in contractor payments by the end of the year.

Just this week, Wingspan closed a funding round — a $14 million Series A — led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from existing investors including Distributed Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, Ludlow Ventures and 186 Ventures. It brings the company’s total raised to $23.5 million, which Mironov says is being put toward expanding the Wingspan platform and team.

Wingspan plans to double its 20-person team by the end of the year.

“Our customer base is broad and diverse, and while venture-backed startups may be reducing their contractor spend, freelancers are a critical part of the overall workforce,” Mironov said, touting the robustness of his business. “With all the recent news [about bank failures], it’s also worth noting that Wingspan partners with many different financial institutions to provide its service. By partnering low in the fintech stack and selecting providers that are optimized for specific use cases, we can provide the fastest payments and best end-user experience while also having a natural set of built-in redundant solutions.”

Wingspan raises $14M for its all-in-one payroll platform for contractors by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/wingspan-raises-14m-for-its-all-in-one-payroll-platform-for-contractors/

After serving as its chief executive for more than a decade, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear will take a step back at the company.

Shear is one of the original founders of Justin.tv, the variety livestreaming service that would grow into Twitch. Justin.tv was eventually overshadowed by Twitch, its spin-off service focused on gaming, and the latter product became the team’s sole focus back in 2014. That same year, Amazon bought the company for $970 million — a steal considering the Twitch’s massive cultural impact today.

In a blog post, Shear described his readiness to move on from the company he’s been intimately involved with for 16 years. “Twitch often feels to me like a child I’ve been raising as well,” Shear said. “And while I will always want to be there if Twitch needs me, at 16 years old it feels to me Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone.”

Twitch President Dan Clancy will take on the CEO role at the company in a leadership shift that’s effective immediately, while Shear will remain on as an advisor.

Shear’s decision to step down and elevate the Twitch’s president doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Clancy was already deeply involved with the company’s day-to-day operations and functioned as a public face for some of the company’s core conversations. Last September, Clancy penned a long letter to the Twitch community addressing controversial changes to the platform’s revenue split with top streamers.

“Emmett has dedicated 16 years to building Twitch, fostering our mission, and inspiring and empowering all of us to serve this incredible community,” Clancy said. “I’m so grateful for his partnership over the last four years, and for the opportunity to continue this work alongside a team that cares so deeply about our streamers and the larger Twitch community.”

This story is developing.

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is stepping down by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/twitch-ceo-emmett-shear-is-stepping-down/

The U.S. government has warned that multiple cybercriminal gangs, including a nation state-backed hacking group, exploited a four-year-old software vulnerability in order to compromise a U.S. federal government agency.

A joint alert released by the CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (known as MS-ISAC) on Wednesday revealed that hackers from multiple hacking groups exploited known vulnerabilities in Telerik, a user interface tool for web servers. This software — designed for building components and themes for web applications — was running on the U.S. agency’s internet-facing web server.

CISA did not name the breached federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agency, a list that includes the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Trade Commission.

When reached by email, CISA spokesperson Zee Zaman declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions.

The Telerik vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-18935 with a vulnerability severity rating of 9.8 out of 10.0, is ranked among the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities in 2020 and 2021. The bug was first discovered in 2019 and the U.S. National Security Agency previously warned that it had been actively exploited by Chinese state-sponsored hackers to target computer networks that hold “sensitive intellectual property, economic, political, and military information.”

CISA said the bug allowed the malicious attackers to “successfully execute remote code” on the agency’s web server, exposing access to the agency’s internal network. The advisory noted that the compromised agency’s vulnerability scanner failed to detect the bug because Telerik’s software was installed in a place where the scanner does not typically scan.

According to CISA’s advisory, the cybersecurity agency said it observed multiple hacking groups exploiting the flaw from November 2022 through early-January 2023, including the state-backed hacking group, and a Vietnam-linked credit card skimming actor known as XE Group.

CISA has released indicators of compromise and has urged organizations running vulnerable Telerik software to ensure security patches are applied.

Progress Software, which acquired Telerik in 2014, did not respond to our questions.

CISA this week also added an Adobe ColdFusion bug to its list of known exploited vulnerabilities, warning that the flaw — tracked as CVE-2023-26360 with a severity score of 8.6 — could be exploited to allow attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution.

Nation state hackers exploited years-old bug to breach a US federal agency by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/cisa-nation-state-hackers-breach-federal-agency/

Yes, reading the tech press in the last week has been pretty brutal. And yes, you and your startup may still be rattled by the Silicon Valley Bank crisis or worried about what’s going on at First Republic. Hell, you could still be working to secure your funds somewhere new.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The cliche about rain quantity during downpours exists because bad news tends to pile up when it arrives. That SVB imploded while startups were already struggling in the face of a sharply more conservative fundraising environment, a completely denuded IPO forecast, and antitrust making M&A a tough sell is therefore not surprising, even if a financial crisis felt like an unfair piling on.

But the news is not all bad. Amid the chaos, there are rays of good news. They include surprisingly good results from a pair software companies’ earnings reports and a bounce off recent lows for software valuations.

Bummed out from the last week? Here’s some bullish news for software companies by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/svb-uipath-pagerduty-saas/

During an AI-focused press event today, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, its latest push to embed its suite of productivity and enterprise apps with AI. Currently in testing with select (around 20) commercial customers, Copilot combines the power of AI models including OpenAI’s recently announced GPT-4 with business data and Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.

“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”

Copilot handles different tasks depending on the app in which it’s used. For example, in Word, Copilot writes, edits, summarizes and generates text, while in PowerPoint and Excel, Copilot turns natural language commands into designed presentations and data visualizations.

The PowerPoint capabilities are particularly nifty. Using Copilot, users can create a presentation based on a Word document, complete with a slick deck and table of contents. They can then refine that deck by asking Copilot to, for instance, “add animations to this slide” or “apply a modern style to the presentation.”

In Outlook, Copilot can help synthesize and manage inboxes as well as draft responses with toggles to adapt the length or tone. Meanwhile, in Teams, Copilot provides real-time summaries and action items in the context of conversations.

One of the more intriguing elements of Copilot is Business Chat, which brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files. With prompts like “tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” Business Chat will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.

Image Credits: Microsoft

In a blog post, Microsoft stressed that the models driving Copilot’s aren’t trained on customer content or on individual prompts. Specifics on pricing and licensing will be shared soon, it said.

AI is notoriously error-prone — even cutting-edge models like GPT-4 makes boneheaded mistakes. So what about Copilot? Microsoft doesn’t deny that it can get things wrong. But in the same breath, the company highlights the “grounding” that Copilot uses to improve the quality of the prompts it’s given.

In a live presentation today, Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro explained that prompts fed to Copilot are first filtered through the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft’s unified data API, for additional context. These modified prompts are then sent to GPT-4, and the responses are filtered back through the Microsoft Graph for safety, security and compliance checks and then sent back to Microsoft 365 apps.

“Sometimes Copilot will get it right, other times it will be usefully wrong, giving you an idea that’s not perfect but still gives you a head start,” Spataro said. “We make it clear how the system makes decisions by noting limitations, linking to sources, and prompting users to review, fact-check and adjust content based on subject-matter expertise.”

It’s hard to take Spataro at his word, considering Microsoft recently laid off a major ethics team within its AI organization. The team had been working to identify risks posed by Microsoft’s adoption of OpenAI’s language models throughout its software and services. But in the presentation, Spataro said that Copilot’s launch was in the interest of serving the “unmet needs” of Microsoft customers.

“We must move quickly and responsibly, learning as we go,” Spataro added. “We’re testing Copilot with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve our models as we scale, and we will expand to more soon.”

Copilot in Microsoft 365 follows the rollout of Copilot in Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s portfolio of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management tools, and it’s strong evidence that the company isn’t slowing down its investments in AI and automation. It was just in January that Microsoft invested billions more in OpenAI, the startup developing the technologies behind the various incarnations of Copilot, and the tech giant is evidently eager to see returns on investment.

The aggressive approach has had consequences, though. Microsoft is facing an internal shortage of the server hardware needed to run its AI, according to a report this week in The Information. The company has reportedly been forced to ration access to the hardware for some internal teams building other AI tools to ensure it has enough capacity to handle both Bing’s new GPT-4 powered chatbot and the upcoming, newly-announced Microsoft 365 Copilot tools.

Microsoft 365 gets a host of new AI-powered features by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/microsoft-365-gets-a-host-of-new-ai-powered-features/

Cloud costs remain a top concern for organizations. According to a recent Anodot survey, 50% of businesses are struggling to control them, in part because they lack visibility into their cloud usage. Unsurprisingly, reducing those costs has become a top priority. A report from Wanclouds finds that 81% of IT leaders have been directed by their C-suite to reduce or take on no additional cloud spending.

Surely that’s music to the ears of startups whose tech is designed to reduce cost spend. There’s several out there. But one of the more successful vendors is Cast AI, which today announced that it raised $20 million in an investment led by Creandum with participation from unnamed existing investors.

Founded by Yuri Frayman, Leon Kuperman and Laurent Gil in 2019, Cast AI — powered by AI, as the name implies — analyzes a company’s cloud usage to attempt to find the optimal cost-performance ratio. Cast AI customers can connect their cloud plans across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure to see recommendations and have the system implement them automatically.

“We decided to build a platform that would help companies automatically optimize and reduce their cloud costs — without manual intervention,” Frayman, who serves as Cast AI’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The need for such a platform became clear after we co-founded Zenedge, a cloud-based cybersecurity platform that was ultimately acquired by Oracle. As our application scaled up, we watched our cloud bill exponentially increase from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars … Our goal [with Cast AI] was to build the product we wished we had at Zenedge.”

According to Frayman, Cast leverages “many models” to drive its cloud usage optimization automation engine, which scales cloud resources up and down in real time while optimizing for cost. The models are trained on usage metadata from customers, public cloud pricing and inventory information, and undisclosed “other signals” that cloud providers make available. (Frayman notes that customers who don’t wish to submit their data for training can request that it be deleted.)

Some of Cast’s models are responsible for determining how often public cloud jobs might be interrupted, while others predict spare compute capacity availability. Still others are trained to anticipate seasonal changes in workload requirements, like decreases in cloud usage during the winter months.

“We’re able to predict lower future compute prices to impact future batch workload scheduling, kind of like searching for a cheaper flight on Kayak and booking a future date that’s cheaper,” Frayman explained.

As we’ve written about before, several years ago, the market for cloud optimization software, while nascent, was consolidating as incumbents in adjacent sectors saw an opportunity to make a mark. In 2017, Microsoft acquired Cloudyn, which provided tools to analyze and forecast cloud spending. VMware and NetApp bought CloudHealth and Spot (formerly Spotinst), respectively, within the span of a few years. Somewhere in the midst of all that, Apptio snatched up cloud spending management vendor Cloudability, while Intel purchased Granulate for $650 million.

The consolidation isn’t necessarily over. But some vendors are prospering, judging by their successful fundraises. For example, ProsperOps, a Cast rival, landed $72 million in a venture round that closed in February.

To stay competitive, Cast recently launched a “zero-cost,” trial-like cloud cost monitoring and reporting product and its first cybersecurity offering: a tool that shows users security best practice violations as measured by the Center for Internet Security benchmarks and shows ways to fix those violations.

“Our goal is to have fewer people doing higher-order, more interesting work in cloud operations,” Frayman said. “The industry is faced with a challenged customer that needs to save cloud costs immediately and cannot afford to parse through reports and assign people to solve the problem manually.”

Frayman declined to disclose Cast’s revenue numbers. But he did say that Cast’s quarter-by-quarter revenue has grown by over 220% since the platform launched. Thousands of customers’ apps are being optimized by the platform, he claims, and Cast is actively managing over a million public cloud CPUs.

He thinks the Silicon Valley Bank scare could spur business, too, given the newfound tightness of capital. To that end — in light of the bank failures — Cast is offering onboarding services for free for a limited time. Customers will pay only once they start saving money.

Frayman says that Cast will put the newly secured funds, which bring the startup’s total raised to more than $38 million, toward growing its team and “working toward being cash-flow positive.”

“We currently have 75 employees and expect to grow the team as the business scales, and as we continue to hit our metrics driven milestones,” he added. “We will add automated security capabilities into the Cast AI platform. We will also invest in other features to help our customers with ‘day-two’ operations, like monitoring, testing and alerting. That way, we can help maintain the performance and reliability of our customers’ clusters with the ultimate goal of minimizing or completely eliminating human intervention.”

Cast AI raises $20M to help companies reduce cloud spend by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/cast-ai-raises-20m-to-help-companies-reduce-cloud-spend/

The U.K. has become the latest jurisdiction to ban social video app TikTok from government devices, confirming reports that surfaced earlier this week.

The ban follows a security review ordered by U.K. ministers looking to establish whether government data could be compromised from social networks installed on work devices. Indeed, the review did include other social media apps, but the government has decided on a “precautionary ban” for TikTok only — likely because its use is limited in governmental roles, compared to something like Twitter. There is nothing to indicate that the Government has found any specific security concerns unique to TikTok.

However, the government has said that employees can still use TikTok on personal devices, while it will consider exemptions for work devices on a case-by-case basis.

“The security of sensitive Government information must come first, so today we are banning this app on Government devices,” Oliver Dowden, secretary of state and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said in a statement. “The use of other data-extracting apps will be kept under review. Restricting the use of TikTok on Government devices is a prudent and proportionate step following advice from our cyber security experts.”

TikTok has emerged as a hugely popular social network, claiming well over 1 billion users. Moreover, TikTok has overtaken the mighty YouTube as the preeminent social video app among teens, making it a hot medium for governments looking to tap into younger demographics.

The U.K.’s ban was mostly expected, and it comes less than a year after the U.K. Parliament closed its official TikTok account a few days after launch when politicians raised concerns that sensitive data could be passed to TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, which is headquartered in China. As with similar social apps, TikTok requires device owners to give permission to access data from the device, including contacts, content and location data.

TikTok in the spotlight

Today’s announcement comes amid a swath of similar bans elsewhere in the world, including the U.S. House of Representatives back in December, while the European Union and Canada issued blanket delete notices for TikTok on government devices last month. Belgium also announced a ban last week, while the Netherlands is considering a similar path.

Although TikTok isn’t facing any immediate threats in terms of nationwide bans, this rising tide of political discontent has led the company to embark on a major charm offensive, particularly in Europe. The company recently announced Project Clover, a program incorporating various privacy and security efforts including commitments around local data storage, sovereignty, and independent auditing processes.

“We are disappointed with this decision — we believe these bans have been based on fundamental misconceptions and driven by wider geopolitics, in which TikTok, and our millions of users in the U.K., play no part,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. “We remain committed to working with the government to address any concerns but should be judged on facts and treated equally to our competitors. We have begun implementing a comprehensive plan to further protect our European user data, which includes storing U.K. user data in our European data centres and tightening data access controls, including third-party independent oversight of our approach.”

The UK joins other countries in banning TikTok from government devices by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/the-uk-joins-other-countries-in-banning-tiktok-from-government-devices/