Category: TECHNOLOGY
TuSimple continues its slide into the ether with new delisting warning
It wasn’t that long ago that self-driving trucks company TuSimple was on a tear — raising funds, locking in partnerships and hitting some development milestones that seemed to push to it to the front of the AV pack.
A string of internal scandals and executive upheaval that resulted in the ousting of co-founder Xiaodi Huo, an SEC investigation and a restructuring in December has left the former darling of the nascent self-driving trucks sector in shambles. And now its on the cusp of being delisted from the Nasdaq exchange.
The company reported Thursday that it received a delisting notice from the Nasdaq for failing to file its quarterly report on time. TuSimple hasn’t filed a quarterly report for the fourth quarter or full-year results. It last reported earnings for the quarter ended September 30.
Shares fell nearly 30% in trading Thursday to $0.80.
Nasdaq will suspend trading of TuSimple shares on May 15 unless it files an appeal. TuSimple said it intends to appeal and will ask for an extended stay of the suspension of trading until its hearing with Nasdaq.
The company also said its board has approved appointment of UHY LLP at its new independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022.
When TuSimple launched in 2015 it was one of the first autonomous trucking startups to emerge in what has become a small, yet bustling industry that now includes Aurora, Kodiak and Waymo. TuSimple’s founding team and its earliest backers Sina and Composite Capital are from China, but the company positioned itself as an U.S. company with its global headquarters in San Diego and later an engineering center and truck depot in Tucson and a facility in Texas to support its autonomous trips
The company scooped up capital from a diverse consortium of strategic investors, including Volkswagen AG’s heavy-truck business The Traton Group, Navistar, Goodyear, and freight company U.S. Xpress. And in March 2021 filed for an IPO, eschewing the financial SPAC trend.
Despite its upward trajectory there were problems lingering in the background. Its S-1 flagged a regulatory risk due to its Chinese funding source. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States would eventually conclude its review and TuSimple would work to offload the Chinese piece of its business.
TuSimple shares would reach its peak in July 2021 when the price hit $62.58. Over the next six months, its share price dropped by half. But the real fall would begin in late December 2021. Shares have fallen 97% since then.
In 2022, internal drama would lead to the ousting and rehiring of CEO Cheng Lu, who returned after Hou who had held CEO, president and CTO posts, was fired by the board. Hou, who co-founded TuSimple in 2015 with Mo Chen, was also removed from his position as chairman of the board and member of the board’s government security committee.
Hou’s firing came a day after The Wall Street Journal published a report citing unnamed sources that TuSimple was facing concurrent probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Securities and Exchange Commission and Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS). The investigation was focused on TuSimple’s relationship with Hydron, a hydrogen-powered trucking company led by TuSimple co-founder Chen and backed by Chinese investors.
Hou has disputed the reason for the firing, posting on his LinkedIn account that he resigned from TuSimple’s board due to disagreements over Lu’s compensation package, as well as the company’s shift in focus from Level 4 autonomy to Level 2 autonomy.
TuSimple also lost Navistar as a partner in late December when the two companies ended a plan to co-develop self-driving trucks. A few weeks after the deal fell apart, TuSimple announced plans to lay off 25% of its total workforce, or about 350 workers, as part of a broader restructuring plan designed to keep the company running.
TuSimple continues its slide into the ether with new delisting warning by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
VanMoof updates its last-gen e-bikes with simplified X4 and S4 models
Dutch e-bike maker VanMoof is refreshing its entry level lineup with a pair of new bikes available in some very springy colors. The X4 and S4, out this month, retain the frame and philosophy of VanMoof’s previous X3 and S3 e-bikes while trimming some of the complexities that made those models notably high-tech but less reliable for some riders.
Gone is the Matrix display, the impressive screen on the bike’s top tube that displayed critical info like speed and battery levels. The X4 and S4 swap that display, which was well-loved though arguably excessive for this price tier, with a spartan phone mount (for built-in charging, you’ll need to move up to the luxury S5 and A5 models). These models have also swapped out the previous 3-speed gear shifting system for a simpler 2-speed shifter while retaining the speed boost button, most of the anti-theft technology with the exception of Apple integration and the general design and vibe.
Fans of last-gen’s X3 and S3 models may be skeptical about some of the changes, but VanMoof could win them over with one big improvement: color options. VanMoof’s always built some of the most stylish bikes around and it’s high time that potential buyers have more color choices. Prospective buyers now decide between evergreen, purple fog, sunbeam yellow and a foam green, with some fun contrasting bungee cord options that make those hues really pop. The two handsome green options are personally making me question buying a relatively unexciting sky blue X3 on sale last year.
Last year, VanMoof debuted a pair of higher-end e-bikes known as the S5 and A5, adding in a handlebar LED display, USB charging and a new motor for $3998 (at the time of writing; VanMoof has a bad habit of tinkering with its pricing way too often). The company also previously announced an even higher-end, high concept, high speed bike called the VanMoof V, though who that’s really for or how much it will cost remains to be seen.
Hopefully the X4 and S4’s substantial design changes along with VanMoof’s $2,498 price point for these new bikes helps the company’s operation become more sustainable. VanMoof was apparently in trouble toward the end of last year, nearly running out of cash and scrambling for an infusion of investment. While some reviewers, myself included (full disclosure: I bought an X3 last year) haven’t run into many problems, VanMoof needs to clean up its track record of reliability and quality control issues and offer a customer support experience that matches the thoughtful elegance of some of the best e-bikes on the market.
That crisis appears to have been averted, for now at least, and hopefully VanMoof is able to chart a smoother course and stay on the map for the foreseeable future.
VanMoof updates its last-gen e-bikes with simplified X4 and S4 models by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch
Hear how MinIO built a unicorn in object storage on top of Kubernetes and open source
Everything needs a home, and Garima Kapoor co-founded MinIO to build an enterprise-grade, open source object storage solution. The pitch sounds amazing: simple, high performance, and a native Kubernetes integration. I’m excited to announce I’m interviewing Kapoor and MinIO investor Mark Rostick of Intel Capital on MinIO’s growth and how the company manages serious competition.
This TechCrunch Live event is free to attend, and I hope you can make it. Register here.
It might not be the buzziest areas to grow a company, yet MinIO found a niche selling object storage, while competing directly with Amazon S3. Perhaps the open source component helps drive interest from its target developer market looking for an alternative from the cloud giant. It’s never easy competing with the likes of Amazon, yet MinIO has been able to find success.
Garima Kapoor co-founded MinIO in 2014 and has since grown the company to a billion-dollar valuation. Along the way, Kapoor raised $126.30 million from venture capital, including from Mark Rostick of Intel Capital.
I have a lot of questions about MinIO:
- Why did it get into a business competing directly with Amazon?
- What role did open source have in building a developer audience?
- How did cloud-native technologies contribute to your success?
- What did Mark and Intel Capital see in this company that made them think they could succeed in a crowded and mature market?
And you can ask questions too! Each week on TechCrunch Live, registered Hopin attendees can submit questions, and I’ll do my best to ask as many as possible.
TechCrunch Live is our weekly event series featuring top founders and investors. The show records live, most Wednesdays at 12:00 p.m. PDT. It’s free to register and attend. Watch past episodes on our YouTube channel and subscribe to the podcast here.
Hear how MinIO built a unicorn in object storage on top of Kubernetes and open source by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Pitch Deck Teardown: Fibery’s $5.2M Series A deck
I love a good, clear business model, and Fibery’s is a pretty decent example here; it shows the high-level pricing model (multiaccount SaaS), the target market, and how it is pricing itself. It shows an expected LTV that’s pretty conservative (the $7,000 LTV using these numbers assumes an average account size of 20 or so).
Inbound marketing and customer success are both great when the customers are coming to you, and “partners network” is a little fuzzy. But it’s missing the customer acquisition cost. I’ll say a bit more about this below when I talk about things that could be improved but overall it’s a solid slide.
Metrics!

[Slide 12] Show me that traction. Image Credits: Fibery
A good traction slide forgives all sins, and this is a great snapshot of where the business is right now. The fact that the logo churn (i.e., churn of number of customers) is higher than the revenue churn indicates that the company is able to retain its higher-value customers. That’s good. The rest of the stats look good, too, for a company at this stage. Clear, simple, concise.
Still, I wish Fibery had shown some of these metrics as graphs. Having $350,000 annual recurring revenue is impressive, but if it had been stagnant for the past six months, that’d ring some warning bells. Investors don’t invest in snapshots, but in trends, so you may as well show them.
The other quirk is that the numbers are inconsistent. On slide 11, it says that the expected average account size is 20-30, but on this snapshot slide, it shows that Fibery currently has 15 paid users per account. Not saying anything about how it expects to grow that number makes me suspicious.
Bonus win: Great ask slide

[Slide 15] Yessssss. Image Credits: Fibery
The slide is labeled “plans,” but this is what I usually refer to as the “ask” slide.
Fibery is a really interesting startup that’s aiming to be the single source of truth and work for product companies. The Cyprus-based company raised a $5.2 million series A recently, and I wanted to take a closer look at what makes the startup tick.
We’re always looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
Fibery raised its round with a 15-slide deck and shared the whole thing with TechCrunch+ unedited. That’ll give us a good idea of how the company landed its $5.2 million investment.
These are the slides:
- Cover slide
- Problem slide
- Solution slide
- Market-size slide
- Competitor slide
- Competitive analysis slide
- Product slide
- “Building blocks” slide
- Feedback/customer validation slide
- Go-to market strategy slide
- Business model slide
- Traction slide
- Milestones to date slide
- Team slide
- The ask slide
Four things to love
Click through the full deck and you’re treated to a lot of white space, simplicity and clarity. The company made a few unusual design choices, which really work for me, and the story hangs together well. But there are a few things that I particularly enjoyed.
A solid competitive analysis
The company has two competition slides:
[Slide 5] Competition, part 1. Image Credits: Fibery

[Slide 6] Competition, part 2. Image Credits: Fibery
Competition slides are often an afterthought, either because startups underestimate their competitors, or because they claim that they don’t have any. Fibery does a really good job on both fronts.
On slide 5, the company breaks down both the existing players in this space in a really elegant way, and shows that there’s a big market worth going after. It even manages to identify some of the strengths in its competitors, which is always a nice touch — especially if the solution does something slightly different or is able to offer an additional set of features or an approach to the problem that unlocks a broader or different customer base. Investors who might be interested in this space will know Jira, Trello, Asana and Zendesk; Fibery is shrewdly positioning itself opposite a few multibillion dollar companies. Smooth.
On slide 6, there’s a slightly deeper dive into the other no-code tools Fibery considers to be competitors. Again, the company is choosing to praise its competitors for their strengths (“Best Tables” for Airtable and “Best Wiki” for Notion).
This helps give a deeper understanding of what the company perceives is its positioning in the market.
Great business model clarity

[Slide 11] Business model. Image Credits: Fibery
I love a good, clear business model, and Fibery’s is a pretty decent example here; it shows the high-level pricing model (multiaccount SaaS), the target market, and how it is pricing itself. It shows an expected LTV that’s pretty conservative (the $7,000 LTV using these numbers assumes an average account size of 20 or so).
Inbound marketing and customer success are both great when the customers are coming to you, and “partners network” is a little fuzzy. But it’s missing the customer acquisition cost. I’ll say a bit more about this below when I talk about things that could be improved but overall it’s a solid slide.
Metrics!

[Slide 12] Show me that traction. Image Credits: Fibery
A good traction slide forgives all sins, and this is a great snapshot of where the business is right now. The fact that the logo churn (i.e., churn of number of customers) is higher than the revenue churn indicates that the company is able to retain its higher-value customers. That’s good. The rest of the stats look good, too, for a company at this stage. Clear, simple, concise.
Still, I wish Fibery had shown some of these metrics as graphs. Having $350,000 annual recurring revenue is impressive, but if it had been stagnant for the past six months, that’d ring some warning bells. Investors don’t invest in snapshots, but in trends, so you may as well show them.
The other quirk is that the numbers are inconsistent. On slide 11, it says that the expected average account size is 20-30, but on this snapshot slide, it shows that Fibery currently has 15 paid users per account. Not saying anything about how it expects to grow that number makes me suspicious.
Bonus win: Great ask slide

[Slide 15] Yessssss. Image Credits: Fibery
The slide is labeled “plans,” but this is what I usually refer to as the “ask” slide. Lots of founders get this wrong, so it’s a delight to see it done so well. Fibery doesn’t explain what a “strong marketing” team is, and “setup and improve channels” doesn’t mean much. Having clear MRR and ARR goals for EOY 2023 and 2024 is great, and having a clear launch target for a new version of the platform is even better.
In the rest of this teardown, I’ll take a look at three things Fibery could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
Pitch Deck Teardown: Fibery’s $5.2M Series A deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/sample-series-a-pitch-deck-fibery/
Meta is killing the Messenger app for Apple Watch on May 31
Meta is killing its Messenger for Apple Watch app on May 31, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. Apple Watch users who have the app installed are being notified that “after May 31st, Messenger won’t be available as an Apple Watch app, but you can still get Messenger notifications on your watch.”
Although you will still be able to receive notifications for new messages, you won’t be able to respond to them and will instead have to use your iPhone app to do so.
“People can still receive Messenger notifications on their Apple Watch when paired, but starting at the beginning of June they will no longer be able to respond from their watch,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email. “But they can continue using Messenger on their iPhone, desktop and the web, where we are working to make their personal messages end-to-end encrypted.”
The Messenger app for Apple Watch offers a lot of convenience for its users, as you can still receive messages on your watch even when your iPhone is not paired with the wearable. Users are already taking to social media to voice their displeasure about the upcoming move.
NOT HAPPY @Apple @messenger #applewatch #wtf pic.twitter.com/B81aK6EUf3
— Amanda Nova (@M_anda_M) May 9, 2023
It’s unknown why Meta has decided to discontinue its Messenger app for watchOS. Messenger joins a list of other platforms that have sunsetted their Apple Watch over the past several years, including Slack, Uber and Twitter.
The change comes as Meta’s other messaging app, WhatsApp, is working on a native WearOS app. Earlier this week, WhatsApp launched a beta version of its app compatible with Google’s smartwatch platform. People using WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.23.10.10 will be able to link their Wear OS-based smartwatch. Users will be able to check their messages on the smartwatch, and all chats will be end-to-end encrypted. Google said that support for calls and starting conversations will be available when the app is available to all users.
The move also comes as Meta has been introducing some changes around Messenger. A few months ago, the company began testing the ability for users to access their Messenger inbox within the Facebook app. Back in 2016, Facebook removed messaging capabilities from its mobile web application to push people to the Messenger app, in a move that angered many users. Now, the company is testing a reversal of this decision.
Meta is killing the Messenger app for Apple Watch on May 31 by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/meta-killing-messenger-app-apple-watch-may-31/
SLAIT pivots from translating sign language to AI-powered interactive lessons
“We actively communicate with users and try to find the best prices and economic model that makes subscription plans affordable. We would really like to make the platform free, but so far we have not found an opportunity for this yet. Because this is a very niche product… we just need to make a stable economic model that will work in general,” he said.
The traction is also a flywheel for the company’s tech and content. By collecting information (with express opt-in consent, which he says the community is quite happy to provide) they can expand and improve the curriculum, and continue to refine their gesture recognition engine.
“We see two directions for growing in,” Fomin said. “The first is to cover more language groups, like British sign language and Japanese sign language. Also we would like to make the curriculum more adaptive, or provide a curriculum for medical and scientific signs. If we have enough investment to grow and scale we can be a leading platform globally to automate talking to doctor in sign language.”
After that, he said, “Maybe we can finally develop a translator. We can break through this barrier!”
Millions of people use sign language, but methods of teaching this complex and subtle skill haven’t evolved as quickly those for written and spoken languages. SLAIT School aims to change that with an interactive tutor powered by computer vision, letting aspiring ASL speakers practice at their own rate like in any other language learning app.
SLAIT started back in 2021 as the sign language AI translator (hence the name): a real-time video chat and translation tool that could recognize most common signs and help an ASL speaker communicate more easily with someone who doesn’t know the language. But early successes slowed as the team realized they needed more time, money, and data than they were likely to get.
“We got great results in the beginning, but after several attempts we realized that, right now, there just is not enough data to provide full language translation,” explained Evgeny Fomin, CEO and co-founder of SLAIT. “We had no opportunity for investment, no chance to find our supporters, because we were stuck without a product launch — we were in limbo. Capitalism… is hard.”
“But then we thought, what can we do with the tech we’ve got from R&D? We realized we needed to do an education solution, because for education our technology is definitely good enough,” he continued. Not that there are lower standards for people learning, but the fluidity and subtlety of fluent and mature sign language is orders of magnitude more difficult to capture and translate than one or two words at a time.
“We found an extremely talented guy (CTO Nikita Nikitin) who helped us develop a product, and we made SLAIT School. And now we have our first customers and some traction!”
Existing online sign language courses (here’s a solid list if you’re curious) are generally pretty traditional. You have lectures and demonstrations, vocabulary lists, illustrations, and if you pay for it online, you can have someone review your work over video. It’s high quality and much of it is free but it isn’t the kind of interactive experience people have come to expect from apps like Duolingo.
SLAIT School uses an updated version of the gesture recognition tech that powered the translator demo app to provide instant feedback on words and phrases. See it in video form, then try it until you get it. Currently it’s for desktop browsers only but the team is planning a mobile app as well.
“We have some room for improvement, but it’s exactly what we planned to deliver. Students can access the platform, do practice, make signs, interact with the AI tutor, and it costs them same as one hour with an in person tutor,” said Fomin. “The mobile apps we aim to do for free.”
Users can do the first few lessons in order to see that the system works, then it’s $39 monthly, $174 half-yearly, and $228 yearly. The price may seem high compared with large-scale language apps supported by capital and other business models, but Fomin emphasized this is a new and special category, and real-world tutors are their primary competition.
Image Credits: SLAIT School
“We actively communicate with users and try to find the best prices and economic model that makes subscription plans affordable. We would really like to make the platform free, but so far we have not found an opportunity for this yet. Because this is a very niche product… we just need to make a stable economic model that will work in general,” he said.
The traction is also a flywheel for the company’s tech and content. By collecting information (with express opt-in consent, which he says the community is quite happy to provide) they can expand and improve the curriculum, and continue to refine their gesture recognition engine.
“We see two directions for growing in,” Fomin said. “The first is to cover more language groups, like British sign language and Japanese sign language. Also we would like to make the curriculum more adaptive, or provide a curriculum for medical and scientific signs. If we have enough investment to grow and scale we can be a leading platform globally to automate talking to doctor in sign language.”
After that, he said, “Maybe we can finally develop a translator. We can break through this barrier!”
SLAIT pivots from translating sign language to AI-powered interactive lessons by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Axiom Space gears up for second private human spaceflight mission to ISS
Axiom Space’s second private crewed mission to the International Space Station is now scheduled to launch in just ten days, with the four-person crew preparing to conduct more than twenty scientific experiments while in space.
The Ax-2 mission will now launch no earlier than 5:37 PM EST on May 21 from SpaceX’s Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The crew will travel to the station onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule, where they’ll remain for a roughly 10-day stint. This will mark the second fully private crew to visit the ISS; the first mission, also operated by Axiom Space, took place in April 2022.
The crew includes Peggy Whitson, the mission commander and Axiom’s director of human spaceflight; John Shoffner, the pilot; Ali Alqarni, mission specialist; and Rayyanah Barnawi, also a mission specialist. Alqarni and Barnawi are both members of Saudi Arabia’s first astronaut class, and will be the first people from that country to visit the ISS. Shoffner, an Axiom investor, is the only paying customer on the crew.
The foursome will engage in a ton of scientific research while aboard the station. The more than 20 payloads that will travel with the crew, which span the life sciences, biomedicine, and technology demonstrations, are sponsored by the ISS National Laboratory. Experiments include examining the impact of microgravity on stem cell production, studies on bioengineered human tissue, and a project that will help advance detection of a treatment for cancer on Earth. The crew will also undergo a battery of tests to better understand the impact of spaceflight and microgravity on the body.
Private human spaceflight mission is just one part of Axiom’s plan. The company is also among a growing crowd of players aiming to operate a private space station. Their plan involves attaching modules to the ISS, and later operating these modules as a free-flying station once the ISS is decommissioned in 2030. The first module is scheduled to launch in 2025.
Axiom also announced last month that it signed an agreement to establish a joint venture with one of its investors: Korean pharmaceutical firm Boryung, who contributed $50 million in capital last December. The JV was announced last month.
Axiom Space gears up for second private human spaceflight mission to ISS by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch
‘Bigolas Dickolas’ is more powerful than the Pulitzer Prize
Video game consultant Rami Ismail was a bit sleepy in an early morning meeting, until his client said something particularly strange: “I’m really just looking for a way to get my game its Bigolas Dickolas moment.”
“I had to absolutely wake up very fast to politely find a way to explain I had no idea what they meant,” Ismail told TechCrunch.
Earlier this week, a fan account for the anime series “Trigun” tweeted emphatically that everyone must immediately buy “This is How You Lose the Time War,” a queer, dystopian time travel novella published in 2019. The tweet garnered 10 million impressions, and enough people took the advice from this anime fan – whose display name is “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” – that the novella shot up the charts to #3 on Amazon’s book list. No, not sci-fi Amazon, or queer time travel romance Amazon. It is the #3 book out of literally every book on Amazon because of an anime fan named “bigolas dickolas.” Per Amazon’s charts, the book is selling better than Dr. Seuss’ “Oh the Places You’ll Go” and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.”
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, the co-authors of the book, sounded downright giddy when we talked on the phone Wednesday afternoon. Their novella was already relatively successful among sci-fi fans, winning the coveted Hugo and Nebula awards when it came out. In El-Mohtar’s words, “it achieved the dream of being a midlist book.” Now, almost four years later, it’s extremely abnormal for a book to get a second wind of sales like this.
I do not understand what is happening but I am incomprehensibly grateful to bigolas dickolas
— Amal El-Mohtar (@tithenai) May 8, 2023
“I really think a huge part of why [the tweet] hit the way it did was that there’s no link,” El-Mohtar said. “It’s just the book cover, and the follow up tweet engaged in that kind of stan violence of like, ‘grabbing you by the throat, you must do this thing.”
Among its existing fanbase, “Time War” is beloved for being more like a longform, epistolary poem than a piece of fiction – but El-Mohtar and Gladstone found bigolas dickolas wolfwood’s tweet to be gorgeous in its own right.
“It’s a beautifully written tweet,” Gladstone told TechCrunch. “It’s a grand swell of Twitter rhetoric… the way it’s constructed, the use of cases, the use of stan violence…”
“Yes!” interjected El-Mohtar. “There’s a poetry to it!”
BookTok – a community on TikTok that talks about books – has revolutionized the publishing industry. Madeline Miller, who blurbed “Time War,” published “The Song of Achilles” in 2012 with an initial run of 20,000 copies. The book, a queer retelling of a story from “The Iliad,” went viral on BookTok in 2021, and has now sold more than 2 million copies. Writers like Emily Henry, Colleen Hoover and Taylor Jenkins Reid have experienced similar success, defying the standards of book publishing.
But Twitter is normally not a useful place to sell books.
“When you think of a book going viral, it’s usually on TikTok, and it’s because everyone is talking about it,” said Kelsey Weekman, an internet culture reporter who reads around 400 books per year. “For this book to have immediately blown up because of one single tweet… I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, especially not since BookTok.”
The problem with BookTok is that as authors’ careers have been propelled forward, so have the careers of “bookfluencers,” who make a living by creating content about books. The entire influencer economy is predicated on the belief that people are more likely to buy things when they get a recommendation from a friend (or, a cool person they follow online) – but when paid brand deals with publishers and the constant churn of content creation eclipse the unbridled joy of reading, fans might not see these recommendations as gospel.
Enter: bigolas dickolas wolfwood, an anime account who stopped tweeting about “Trigun” for just one moment to command to their followers, “*grabs you personally by the throat* you will do this. for me. you will go to the counter at barnes and noble. you will buy this. i will be greatly rewarded.” It was such a novel moment on Twitter that even Simon and Schuster’s corporate marketing account engaged with the tweet, which makes the whole situation even more delightful, because we now know that marketing executives at publishing houses are talking about “bigolas dickolas.”
“There’s so many people out there trying to be influencers, whose job it is to recommend books,” Weekman told TechCrunch. “But just seeing genuine enthusiasm from some random person about something makes it seem like a better investment to me. It feels refreshing to get a recommendation from a real person.”
“Trigun yaoi twitter more persuasive than Oprah” and other internet sentences
— Cat Manning (@catacalypto) May 11, 2023
Much like the TikTok For You page, the Amazon bestsellers list works in mysterious ways. Some publishing experts say that the list’s algorithm prioritizes the velocity of sales, rather than the total number – but no matter how you slice it, bigolas dickolas wolfwood is doing more for “Time War” this week than winning a Pulitzer did for “Demon Copperhead,” which sits at #6 on the list.
Unfortunately, due to how publishing works, Gladstone and El-Mohtar told TechCrunch they likely won’t know the extent of how this impacted their sales until next year. For now, they are basking in the glory of it all: how more people will read their book than ever before because of some anime fan with a silly dick joke as their Twitter display name.
“As much as it’s a part of the funniness of the narrative that it’s an anime fan account, there is actually a lot of anime at the heart of the book,” said El-Mohtar. She and Gladstone started writing “Time War” after exchanging their favorite anime, like “Revolutionary Girl Utena,” “Sailor Moon,” and yes, even “Trigun.”
Future royalties aside, Gladstone’s favorite part of the bigolas dickolas saga is that, as the current “main character” on Twitter, this random anime fan is not trying to drop their Soundcloud or sell galaxy lamps.
“The thing that they’re shooting their shot on from this whole absurd experience is tweeting Dark Horse Comics to ask them to reprint the original Trigun,” Gladstone said.
‘Bigolas Dickolas’ is more powerful than the Pulitzer Prize by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/bigolas-dickolas-time-war-booktok/
Dungeons & Dragons gets its very own streaming channel
After the film “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” became a hit, topping $200 million at the worldwide box office, Hasbro wants more. Hasbro-owned production company eOne announced Thursday that it is launching a new free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel dedicated to the widely popular role-playing tabletop game. Variety was the first to cover the announcement.
The Dungeons & Dragons Adventures is a 24-hour FAST channel set to launch this summer. It will feature original programming based on campaigns played by content creators, third-party content from top influencers as well as older stuff like the 1983 animated Dungeons & Dragons series.
Original shows coming to the new channel include:
- Encounter Party: based on the podcast of the same name, the show features six members, including “The Walking Dead” star Khary Payton. The campaign occurs in the Forgotten Realms, a common setting in the game.
- Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!: variety improv show where special guests and celebrities act out as first-level players in battles against high-level monsters and beasts. The series was co-created by actor Matthew Lillard, mainly known for his role as Shaggy in the 2002 live-action “Scooby-Doo” movie.
- Heroes’ Feast: cooking competition/talk show based on the recipes of the bestselling cookbook, Heroes’ Feast. The show is co-hosted by “Insecure” actress Sujata Day and chef and internet personality Mike Haracz.
Hasbro said the Dungeons & Dragons Adventures FAST channel will live on several platforms, but the company hasn’t established any deals yet for which specifically, reported Variety.
Dungeons & Dragons made a massive comeback in recent years and is more mainstream nowadays. This is thanks to the many content creators that host livestreams featuring creative storytelling and impressive dice rolls.
For instance, “Critical Role,” a weekly show featuring a group of voice actors, has gone on to make millions, signing multiyear deals with Amazon to produce TV series based on its two campaigns, “Vox Machina” and “Mighty Nein.”
It’s nice to see more content creators — like “Encounter Party,” which arguably has less recognition than a high-paying channel like “Critical Role”– get a platform to showcase their collaborative stories. However, we’re curious whether the shows will draw a large audience.
The FAST market may be booming, but viewers mainly use the services to watch old movies and shows like episodes of “The Twilight Zone” or “Teen Mom.” Is the FAST space an optimal place for Dungeons & Dragons content? We’re not sure.
Also, it will be interesting to see what other content creators appear on the new channel, given the backlash from fans earlier this year.
In January, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) received backlash for updating its Open Gaming License, which appeared to threaten creators’ livelihoods.
Shortly after the protests, however, WoTC announced that it is licensing the game’s core mechanics under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, allowing everyone to publish and sell works based on Dungeons & Dragons. (Hooray!)
While the issue has been resolved, content creators may still be wary of partnering with WoTC.
Either way, the Dungeons & Dragons Adventures FAST channel is certainly a fascinating move on WoTC’s part, yet it might be a pleasant surprise for fans.
Or it could flop. Who knows?
Dungeons & Dragons gets its very own streaming channel by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/dungeons-dragons-gets-its-very-own-streaming-channel/
Tensor is climbing to the top of the Solana NFT marketplace totem pole
Just two months ago, NFT trading platform Tensor raised $3 million in a seed round. Fast forward to today, and it is close to regaining its position as the biggest Solana-based NFT marketplace based on market share.
“A lot of momentum came from the announcement,” Tensor co-founder Richard Wu said, speaking about the seed round, which TechCrunch covered exclusively in March. “When it comes to a marketplace, liquidity is key to attract users, and it had a snowball effect on itself.”
Tensor last week reached 45% of Solana’s NFT market share, surpassing Solana-centric NFT marketplace Magic Eden’s 44% share over a seven-day period, according to data collected by Tiexo. While the 1% difference may seem nominal, it’s a huge jump for a fairly new platform up against a giant with almost 200x the users.
Tensor launched a private beta in June 2022 and opened to the public the following month. In March, it had over 30,000 monthly active users, and by April, its MAU was up about 317% to over 125,000, co-founder Ilja Moisejevs said.
Compared to Magic Eden, which has 22 million unique monthly visitors, that makes its share of the market is substantial.
Magic Eden has since regained the top slot for Solana-based NFT volume over the past seven days with 44.2% share, per Tiexo data, and Tensor isn’t far behind at 40.5%. But market share is “not the top priority” for Tensor, Wu said. “For us, market share is a proxy for what we’re building, but at the end of the day, our goal is to grow Solana 10x.”
“I think a lot of people on Twitter like to dramatize things,” Moisejevs said. “They want to see a battle of marketplaces. There’s healthy competition between us [and Magic Eden], but the point we want to drive home is we’re not here to win 80% of a non-existent market. We want us to win, Solana to win, and we will be a bigger business if Solana as a chain does well.”
Solana is the third-largest blockchain for NFTs by sales volume, with over $3.96 billion in all-time sales, according to data from NFT aggregator CryptoSlam. In the past 30 days, Solana NFT sales volume decreased about 24.4% to $73.3 million, the data showed.
In general, the Solana ecosystem is getting stronger, at least compared to six months ago, Wu said. One prime example of that is the people and projects like Mad Lads, he said, adding that at one point, it was a top collection by volume ahead of some Ethereum blue chip collections. “What they’ve done and demonstrated with their launch on Solana is incredible.”
Tensor is climbing to the top of the Solana NFT marketplace totem pole by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/tensor-solana-nft-market-share/