Using AI to Revolutionize Sales: How to Generate a Powerful Sales Letter for Your Business

If you're a business owner understanding the power of artificial intelligence (AI) has become crucial for staying competitive. All businesses need sales. One area where AI is revolutionizing the sales process is in generating powerful sales letters.

The impact of direct mail proven through decades of marketing. Crafting a compelling sales letter is essential for capturing the attention of potential customers and persuading them to take action. We can modernize this tactic with the help of AI. Brands can now automate and optimize the lead generation process to maximize their sales potential.

By leveraging AI technology like ChatGPT, businesses can analyze vast amounts of data. Then using these same tools we can extract valuable insights about our target audience. This allows businesses like yours to create more personalized and targeted sales letters. These customized marketing messages hit customers on an individual level.

You see  AI algorithms can identify patterns and trends within customer data. This enables smart brands to address specific pain points and interests of our audience.

Plus, AI enables businesses to streamline the writing process. Chatbots use natural language processing capabilities to sound very human. This allows for the generation of sales letters that are not only persuasive but also grammatically correct and coherent. AI-powered writing assistants can suggest improvements and provide real-time feedback. By interacting with the AI  the final sales letter is of the highest quality. This tactic can also reduce your costs of outsourcing to copywriters, content creators and other writing professionals.

But wait there's more.

In addition to enhancing the content creation process, AI can also assist with automating the distribution and tracking of sales letters. By integrating AI-powered chatbots and email automation tools, businesses can engage with potential customers in a timely and personalized manner. Do you want to know what is another huge advantage? AI can analyze customer responses and interactions, allowing for real-time adaptation and optimization of sales strategies.

It really is a no-brainer. Utilizing AI to revolutionize sales by generating powerful sales letters is a game-changer for businesses.

By leveraging AI's data analysis capabilities, streamlining the writing process, and automating distribution, businesses can create more personalized and persuasive sales letters. In turn this action drives conversions. You've now learned why embracing AI technology in the sales process is not only a competitive advantage but also an opportunity to optimize sales efforts. At the end of the day this strategic approach can increase your sales revenue.

Need help with implementing these strategies and tactics in your company? Be sure to reach out today.

https://normbondmarkets.com/using-ai-to-revolutionize-sales-how-to-generate-a-powerful-sales-letter-for-your-business/

The battery business is booming and Zeekr kicks off it IPO roadshow

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The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. 

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

We have a lot to cover so let’s jump in. But wait! One note to share: These days, I’m a semi-regular guest on TechCrunch’s Equity Podcast, including an episode that aired Friday that covers robotaxis, Nvidia’s earning, plus Better.com and startups that are full of shit (you’ll get the joke if you listen).

Vamos.

Want to reach out with a tip, comment or complaint? Email Kirsten at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com.

Reminder that you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

Deal of the week

The battery business keeps attracting capital.

Just take a look at Swedish lithium-ion battery producer Northvolt. The company raised around $1.2 billion in a convertible notes from BlackRock and various Canadian pension plans. Participants in the round included Goldman Sachs, Volkswagen, Baillie Gifford, Swedbank Robur, Singapore’s GIC and Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises.

That cash will be used to build new factories in North America and Europe.

Northvolt has been on a bit of tear the past few years — even before the big battery boom really took off. The company has raised $9 billion in debt and equity since 2017, including $1.1 billion in convertible notes last year. The company has also secured more than $55 billion in orders from customers like BMW, Fluence, Scania, Volvo and Volkswagen.

The Northvolt deal gives me another chance to plug a collection of articles we put together earlier this month on the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, including a look at how startups have benefited and a map that tracks all the battery factories in North America. Once Northvolt picks a location for this next factory, we’ll update the map.

Other deals that caught my attention …

Accure, a startup that uses AI to predict lithium-ion battery failures, raised $7.8 million in a Series A2 round led by Blue Bear Capital and HSBC Asset Management with participation from Riverstone Holdings and Capnamic Ventures.

Channel19, a startup that developed software for refrigerated trucking companies, raised $2.7 million in pre-seed and seed funding round led by Augment Ventures with participation by Accion Venture Lab, TMV, Overton Venture Capital and Refashiond Ventures. Several Silicon Valley and freight tech industry angels also participated, according to the company.

Electric Era, a startup founded by former SpaceX engineers that developed software and hardware to make EV charging stations faster and more reliable, raised $11.5 million in a Series A round led by HSBC’s asset management arm. Climate-tech fund Blackhorn, lithium-mining giant SQM and mobility-focused investor Proeza also participated.

NaaS Technology Inc., an EV charging service company in China, said it plans to acquire Charge Amps AB in a deal valued at $66.4 million.

Nickelytics, an advertising tech startup focused on rideshare, has been acquired by Texas-based venture capital group T72 Club Inc. Terms were not disclosed.

Zeekr, the Chinese EV maker under Geely Holdings, is kicking off its roadshow with investors ahead of its initial public offering, Reuters reported citing unnamed sources. Zeekr’s aim is a share sale that will push its valuation over $13 billion. Zeekr filed confidentially for an IPO back in December and raised $750 million in February. If Zeekr is successful and actually lists, this could be one of the largest Chinese IPOs in the past two years.

Chinese companies listing on U.S. exchanges haven’t had the smoothest of rides. Didi, which raised $4.4 billion in its June 2021 IPO,  ran up against Chinese regulators. The company delisted later that year. A few other Chinese companies, including Hesai are dipping their toes back in the U.S. IPO waters now that there is more regulatory clarity in both countries. Last year, the U.S. and China struck a deal that allows American officials to review audit documents of Chinese businesses that trade in the United States, an agreement expected to lower the likelihood of Chinese companies on U.S. exchanges delisting.

Notable reads and other tidbits

ADAS

Polestar plans to make Mobileye’s hands-off, eyes-off automated driving technology (called Chauffeur) available to owners of the upcoming Polestar 4 electric SUV coupe. The vehicle, which launched in China and will hit global markets in 2024, comes standard with Mobileye’s SuperVision advanced driver assistance system. Polestar plans to add Chauffeur at a later date, but did not specify when.

Tesla shareholders who sued the company for financial losses stemming from Elon Musk’s “funding secured” tweet in 2018 are set to receive compensation now that the case has been settled. The SEC said 3,350 eligible claimants will share in the $42.3 million payout.

Speaking of Tesla, CEO Elon Musk livestreamed a test drive of FSD Beta v12 — a yet-to-be-released version of its automated driving software (the video has since been posted on YouTube by a number of people). To be clear, this is not a self-driving car; it is ADAS that requires a human to be ready to intervene at any time. The 40-minute video showed the vehicle handling roundabouts and intersections and even some construction. At about the 19-minute mark Musk had to intervene and take control of the vehicle when it misread the traffic signal and tried to go through a busy intersection at the wrong time.

Autonomous vehicles

Baidu expanded its Apollo Go driverless ride-hailing service to cover trips to and from Wuhan Tianhe International Airport. The company now operates Apollo Go robotaxis in five cities in China.

Beep has partnered with self-driving software company Oxa (previously known as Oxbotica) to deploy autonomous vehicles in the United States.

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

Jaguar Land Rover has found a use for its second-life Jaguar I-Pace batteries.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating whether Ford‘s 2022 recall of nearly 49,000 Mustang Mach-E electric vehicles sufficiently addressed issues and whether more vehicles should be included in the recall.

Gig economy

Uber is blaming high insurance rates for its decision to raise the minimum age requirement for new drivers in California to 25 years old. There are some caveats though.

People

General Motors’ Ultium Cells, the joint venture with LG Energy Solutions, reached an agreement with the United Auto Workers to increase pay for workers at its Ohio battery factory by an average of 25%.

Wu Xinzhou, the former vice president of autonomous driving at Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng, posted on social media site Weibo that he’s taken a job at Nvidia.

Disrupt!

Vroom vroom! TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place in San Francisco on September 19–21, is where you’ll get the inside scoop on the future of mobility. Come and hear from today’s leading mobility entrepreneurs on what it takes to build and innovate for a more sustainable future. Save up to $400 when you buy your pass now through September 18, and save 15% on top of that with promo code STATION. Learn more.

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2590887

The mugshot that launched a thousand memes

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Memes can happen in the blink of an eye, like a Jeopardy! contestant who accidentally makes a sexual innuendo under the pressure of stage lights, or a kid who randomly gets interviewed on a playground and professes his undying love for America’s most plentiful crop, corn.

But as soon as we knew former President Donald Trump would be processed at Fulton County Jail for his fourth indictment, we knew that the resulting mugshot would be all over the place for years to come, from novelty t-shirt stands to our hypothetical future childrens’ history textbooks. We waited for it, knowing that as soon as the image was released to the public, it would become unavoidable.

“This will break Etsy,” Jesse Case wrote in a now-viral tweet (or X post, whatever). And sure enough, less than 24 four hours after Trump’s mugshot was released, Etsy already turns up 5,290 results to the search “trump mugshot.”

What the chicken nuggets in my microwave see at 3AM: pic.twitter.com/4nzuueZwuS

— Kristi Yamaguccimane (@TheWapplehouse) August 25, 2023

Even the former president himself has already set up an extensive merch store with t-shirts, posters, mugs and stickers featuring the photo, which is accompanied by text declaring “NEVER SURRENDER!” It’s unclear if Trump chose this wording since he literally surrendered to Fulton County Jail, or if this somehow went over his team’s head. But nonetheless, Trump supporters can now buy their very own mugshot beer koozie, and yes, this sentence took a year off of my life to type.

Naturally, fake mugshots circulated social media before the real thing was even released — and perhaps due to their less rigorous fact-checking standards, pop culture news accounts like Pop Base beat legacy news outlets to the punch, circulating the now ubiquitous mugshot.

It didn’t matter what Trump’s mugshot would look like. No matter what, this image was going to be both a viral meme and an historically monumental artifact. But even without any editing, Trump looks yassified: his bright blonde hair shows no trace of gray, draped in a swoop across his forehead. Prison lighting is unforgiving, but combined with the over exposure of the flash, Trump almost looks younger, as the shadows smooth out the wrinkles on his left cheek. The wave of his hair is perfectly positioned in the center of his forehead, accentuating his angry countenance. At first glance, it looks as though his eyebrows and hair are one, making his scowl even more sinister, more jarring.

Image Credits: Anonymous internet user, with permission to TechCrunch

As TikToker Kirby Alice pointed out, there’s an irony to these historic mugshots, which aren’t very high-quality images, since, well, they’re mugshots from a county jail.

“I can pretty well guarantee that whatever camera they have to take mugshots was probably purchased at like, a Radio Shack circa 2007,” she said, days before Trump turned himself in. “It might be in the back of a closet suffering heat damage in Georgia right now, and it is about to take one of the most important images in American history.”

@kirby.alice

If you have the ability to rectify this situation i am personally begging that you do not

♬ original sound – kirby

I’m reminded of a recent episode of “The Kardashians,” when Kim brought an entire hair and makeup team with her to the DMV to get her license renewed, cheating us out of the idea that awkward driver license photos are the one great equalizer of mankind. While Trump’s team surely thought long and hard about everything from his tie color to his facial expression, he wasn’t going to get any special treatment while getting processed in jail, even as some probably underpaid municipal employee pressed the shutter button to take an undoubtedly iconic photo of our lifetime.

“LizaMinnelliOutlives was how I saw Trump’s mugshot,” a friend wrote to me on Discord. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that we found out that the Queen of England died due to the pronouncement that Liza Minnelli had outlived Queen Elizabeth II.

Liza Minnelli has outlived America’s wait for Donald Trump's mugshot. His latest arrest was finally accompanied by his first perp photo. pic.twitter.com/GXaICDO9yV

— LizaMinnelliOutlives (@LiZaOutlives) August 25, 2023

After Trump’s presidency, the American right and left are so far divided that perhaps only the Donald himself could unite us once more: Everyone, regardless of their political affiliation, is making memes of Trump’s mugshot. It is, quite literally, memetic, as used in the Richard Dawkins sense. It will be circulated, remixed, repurposed and mutated until it perhaps outlives even the LizaMinnelliOutlives meme, surviving the brutal natural selection that is the attention span of digitally-addled brains.

In liberal internet circles, the mugshot is a cause for celebration, an “I told you so” to relatives who were naively lured by Trump’s emboldening rhetoric almost eight years ago. And yet on Truth Social, the somewhat dormant social app that Trump himself founded, the image is a rallying cry — it’s literally being used to solicit campaign donations — yet Trump supporters still find the image funny.

One Truth Social meme account edited Trump’s mugshot to replace the Mona Lisa, as crowds swarm to get a closer look. Another user advertised t-shirts with the mugshot that declare “my pronouns are Trump/won,” which also conveys a serious misunderstanding of how grammar works.

You would think that nothing could be more political than a mugshot of a former president who is indicted for interfering with the democratic process. But some memes just aren’t political at all, reminding us of the absurdity of the moment.

“who cares,” wrote @roastmalone_ on X (Twitter). “trump isn’t even the first actor from home alone 2 to have his mugshot released.”

Former president Trump returns to Twitter, now X, with his mugshot

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2590682

Zepotha is huge on TikTok, but it’s no Goncharov

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The seminal 1987 horror film “Zepotha” is back on TikTok.

Reaction videos to the film’s gory forest scenes dominate user feeds. TikTok users are digging through their parents’ wardrobes to recreate the vintage outfits from the movie. Fanart of the characters and convoluted theories about the movie’s ambiguous ending keep going viral. The tag #Zepotha has nearly 160 million views, and the movie’s theme song — an ethereal, synth-heavy pop beat — is trending. 

If you don’t remember Zepotha, you’re not alone. Zepotha never existed. 

It’s all part of a clever marketing campaign to promote a new song by the musical artist Emily Jeffri. The 18-year-old singer posted a video about making a fake movie go viral on TikTok by dropping casual mentions of it without any context. She encouraged followers to tell other creators that they “look EXACTLY like the girl from Zepotha” to stir up confusion. Her original video has 7.6 million views. In another video, she recommended bringing up Zepotha “every time a film bro mocks you” to gaslight them into believing that the movie is real. 

Zepotha is a massive inside joke on TikTok — if you know, you know. 

“Together we will witness new lore develop, main characters will emerge, etc,” Jeffri said in a TikTok posted over the weekend. “We can convince thousands of people that this weirdly titled 80s horror film actually exists.” 

@emilyjeffri

putting this song forward as the movie’s main theme, i think it has zepotha vibes tbh #80s #nostalgia #horror #horrormovie #80shorror #bit #trickster #moohaha #newmusic #queerartist #spooky #zepotha

♬ DO YOU REMEMBER ME – jeffri

The trend is working. Within days, the sound featuring Jeffri’s new song was used in over 12,000 videos. Other users leaned into the joke, claiming that they wrote extensive, smutty fanfiction about the film’s tragic protagonists. Fans posted “trailers” of Zepotha, and spread rumors about a 2024 reboot. They posted fake eBay listings for “rare” Zepotha VHS tapes and mint condition posters. When other users expressed doubt or confusion about the movie, Zepotha truthers insisted that their parents had shown them the movie as children. 

“I did NOT watch Zepotha and become traumatized for them to just say we made it up,” a user commented on a TikTok about the movie. 

“old person here (30) i definitely saw a glimpse of zepotha at blockbuster back in the 90s,” another said. “so I CAN CONFIRM IT’S REAL.” 

Going viral on TikTok was once a perk that fast-tracked artists to making it in the music industry. Now, it’s an expectation. Artists tease previews of their new singles for weeks before actually releasing them, in hopes of manufacturing a trend to accompany their music. Last year, Halsey complained that her label wouldn’t let her release a new song without a “fake” viral moment. Organic virality is possible, but makes TikTok users suspicious. The platform is so saturated with new music that up-and-coming artists are written off as industry plants before they even have the chance to prove otherwise. TikTok users are wary of anyone who claims to have written “the song of the summer” or “the post-breakup song,” especially if the music they wrote conforms to the “TikTok music formula” — pop music made to go viral. 

Sharing any kind of art is an act of vulnerability, but especially so for independent musicians on TikTok. Sharing too earnestly is cringe, and sharing too proudly is artificial. One of the few strategies that actually works is for artists to market to niche internet communities, like fan edits of tragic gay anime pairings. 

Jeffri’s campaign is particularly clever because it builds a trend that happens to feature her song, instead of forcing her song into a trend. Zepotha is bigger than her song, at this point, and the more it spreads, the more removed it is from Jeffri herself. Zepotha is an inside joke, but few TikTok users know how the joke started. Knowing who Jeffri is doesn’t matter, though; as long as the videos use Jeffri’s song, her campaign is working. 

While the strategy works to draw in new listeners, Jeffri’s claim over the trend also limits Zepotha from achieving its potential as a collaborative bit. 

Collectively gaslighting the internet into remembering a fake movie isn’t new. Last year, Tumblr “brought back” the 1973 Martin Scorsese drama “Goncharov,” an Italian mafia film that revolved around crime, power and a forbidden love triangle. Like Zepotha, Goncharov never existed. But Tumblr users committed to the bit, and created a detailed Google doc about the film’s characters, their relationships and their backstories. The collaborative effort also included a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie, which users coordinated through a Goncharov Discord server. 

Scorsese himself joined in, and in a text to his daughter posted on TikTok, said, “I made that film years ago.” 

While Zepotha is popular, it hasn’t reached the commitment to detail or collaboration that Goncharov did. Tumblr users have criticized Zepotha as a disorganized popularity contest, rather than a collective effort. Multiple creators started Google docs to write Zepotha’s lore together, but failed to agree on a singular story. There is no definitive list of characters featured in the film, and the names that TikTok creators do reference in their Zepotha posts vary in spelling. 

“Zepotha will never succeed because tiktok users don’t have the attentions spans to pull off a goncharov,” Tumblr user sbibble said. “Meanwhile we have nothing better to do and decades of fan fiction experience.” 

Zepotha’s greatest flaw isn’t the lack of centralized lore — it’s that, unlike Goncharov, a single creator is claiming ownership of the joke. This week, Jeffri announced a short film competition that would award the winner £500. The winning film would also become “canon” in the Zepotha universe. 

“as the creator of zepotha i feel it is important that we restore order & organise our lore,” Jeffri said in the video announcing the short film competition. “time for you, the REAL creative geniuses behind all of this, to bring zepotha to life in your own short movies.” 

Goncharov worked so well because countless users worked on it together. Fans discussed plot points for hours at a time on Discord before writing them into the shared Google doc, which canonized the lore. Tumblr users wrote detailed analyses of the film’s themes and clock motifs, based on other users’ additions to the Google doc. Goncharov writers went as far as agreeing that scenes in the film had to be compliant with the period-appropriate Hays Code, the industry guidelines that prohibited nudity, profanity and realistic violence. Tumblr users created a definitive story from thousands of ideas. 

Zepotha, on the other hand, is an idea with a single origin point that has branched off into countless deviating storylines. Choosing a single winning short film to decide the film’s plot encourages fans to compete with each other, instead of build on each others’ creativity. It isn’t inherently better or worse than how Goncharov creators worked, but does limit Zepotha’s impact on internet culture. Zepotha is so popular because it’s fun to be in on the joke, not necessarily because of the creative potential. 

The Goncharov hype lasted for weeks, and although it’s slowed down in the past year, the Discord server is still active. Jeffri posted about Zepotha less than a week ago, but users are already tiring of the trend. 

Whether Zepotha lasts doesn’t matter as much for Jeffri. It doesn’t need to be the next Goncharov for her to make an impact. She already managed to make her song viral, and for an independent artist on TikTok, that’s enough of a win.

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2585013

Researchers jailbreak a Tesla, the FCC fines robocallers and WeWork finds itself in trouble (again)

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Welcome, friends, to TechCrunch’s Week in Review (WiR), the newsletter where we recap the week that was in tech. For those new to WiR, think of it as a digest of stories and pieces that topped the charts over the past five days or so.

In this week’s edition of WiR, we cover researchers figuring out a way to “jailbreak” Teslas, the AI.com domain name switching hands and the FCC fining robocallers. Also featured are stories about WeWork’s perennial struggles, Google’s Messages app fully embracing RCS, and spyware maker LetMeSpy shutting down after a massive data breach.

If you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR in your inbox every Saturday. Now, on with the recap.

Most read

Jailbreak your Tesla: A group of researchers say that they’ve found a way to hack the hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what normally would be paid upgrades — such as heated rear seats — for free. Lorenzo has the story.

AI.com switches hands: A few months back, OpenAI seemingly purchased the domain AI.com in order to redirect it to the web app for its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. But now AI.com redirects to X.ai, Elon Musk’s machine learning research outfit — suggesting that the CEO of X (formerly known as Twitter) has come into possession of the domain.

FCC fines robocallers: The FCC has fined a robocaller a record $300 million after blocking billions of their scam calls. But as Devin writes, whether and when the money will be paid is, as always, something of an open question.

WeWork in trouble . . . again: WeWork this week announced a net loss of $397 million for the second quarter on revenue of $877 million. The 13-year-old flexible space provider — which faces both increased competition and declining post-pandemic demand — didn’t mince words, admitting that “substantial doubt exists about [its] ability to continue.”

Google Messages embraces RCS: Google said this week that it’s making its Messages by Google app more secure with improvements to RCS, or Rich Communication Services — a protocol aimed at replacing SMS. The company says it’ll now make RCS the default for both new and existing Messages app users, and end-to-end encryption for group chats is now fully rolled out to all RCS users.

Google launches Project IDX: In more Google news, the tech giant this week launched Project IDX, an AI-enabled, browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps.

ChatGPT custom instructions expand: OpenAI this week announced that it’s expanding custom instructions — a way to give users more control over how ChatGPT responds — to all users, including those on the free tier of the service. The feature, which was first unveiled in July as a beta for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, allows users to add various preferences and requirements that they want the AI chatbot to consider when responding.

Spyware maker shuts down: Poland-based spyware LetMeSpy is no longer operational and said it will shut down after a June data breach wiped out its servers, including its huge trove of data stolen from thousands of victims’ phones.

Audio

This reporter would venture to say that TechCrunch’s roster of podcasts has something for every interest. This week, as every week, there’s intriguing new material for your listening enjoyment.

On Equity, the crew talked about a lawsuit targeting a grant program providing small checks to Black women small-business owners and how some countries are taking a different track, including the U.K.

Meanwhile, this week’s episode of Found focused on Anurupa Ganguly, the founder and CEO at Prisms, a startup designing VR math curriculum for middle and high school students. Ganguly talked about how her time as a teacher in the Boston and New York City public school systems provided early inspiration for the company, and what it’s been like selling to schools, as well as her take on company culture in relation to remote and hybrid work.

And Chain Reaction hosted Robbie Ferguson, the co-founder and president of Immutable. Immutable is a web3 company consisting of two entities: Immutable Platform, a developer platform for building and scaling Ethereum-based web3 games, and Immutable Games, a web3 game developer and publisher.

TechCrunch+

TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are a few highlights from this week:

Room-temp superconductor? Not so fast: The internet — and more than a few scientists — got their hopes up a couple weeks ago when a team of physicists from South Korea announced that they had created a room-temperature superconductor from a slew of common yet unlikely materials. But, as Tim writes, it’s probably, disappointingly bunk.

Taking another look at venture debt: Silicon Valley Bank’s nosedive has soured many on venture debt, and for early-stage companies, it bears being cautious. As an option for growth-stage companies with more predictable cash flow, however, things may be a little different. Haje investigates.

Taking a page from mobile gaming: Retaining mobile app subscribers is harder than it was last year, but paywall optimization and gamified UX can help. Anna explores the ins and outs of the turbulent market, and how apps are following examples from mobile gaming.

Get your TechCrunch fix IRL. Join us at Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco this September to immerse yourself in all things startup. From headline interviews to intimate roundtables to a jam-packed startup expo floor, there’s something for everyone at Disrupt. Save up to $400 when you buy your pass now through September 18, and save 15% on top of that with promo code WIR. Learn more.

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2581511

4 ways generative AI makes founders more interesting to journalists

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Craig Corbett
Contributor

Craig Corbett is a partner at Publicize, a PR agency helping tech leaders and investors push their brands to the front and center of a rapidly evolving media landscape.

The advent of generative AI will lead to a tectonic shift in how startups do PR over the next few years. In July, the Associated Press became the first major news company to sign a deal with OpenAI, while media job cuts have reached record highs.

Gutted newsrooms could stymie one of the greatest engines of startup growth. While generative AI will enhance the capabilities of many publications, they’re also creeping onto news sites in ways we can’t foresee while journalists are laid off. Inevitably, some startups will choose to use AI to churn out thought leadership and PR content.

The problem with that is, if anyone and everyone can do something, then it becomes devoid of value. If any founder can ask ChatGPT to create a listicle on “5 reasons e-commerce will grow in 2023,” then the internet will become even more saturated with that kind of content. And that content is professional-sounding, yes, but impersonal, starved of real-life narratives, and flair-less.

Startups that want to be seen amid the flurry as AI enters the media will need to remember that what most people really want is a human story.

The good news is, this will actually push startup PR to evolve. In-house PR teams will want to elevate their content above the tedious noise. PR agencies will strive to show startups why they shouldn’t be using ChatGPT to do their job. Editors will scream out for original articles over rehashed content. PR and human-written thought leadership will have to sharply differentiate itself from the unoriginal content of overused AI.

Seeing a strong voice of reason or controversy, a provocative response to current events and rapidly unfolding topics — that’s something people are always hungry for. It’s alive, shaped by the world around us, and helps us make sense of it.

Ironically, AI could make PR more responsive, human, relevant. So, where do AI’s limits lie — and where will successful PR strategies shine in the age of ChatGPT?

Embed yourself in current (and future events)

AI does not exist in the present. It’s trained on past datasets, but it can’t follow today’s news, much less if that news hasn’t been published online.

I know from my PR work that journalists take a heightened interest in a business leader when they can speak knowledgeably (and quickly) on unfolding events. As do readers: 62% of professionals want to see thought leadership on current trends.

But how will generative AI change this scenario? It’s likely that the role of journalists will move away from what’s generally achievable by AI — generic advice articles, listicles, etc. — and they’ll have more time to write articles on current events and hard-hitting trends, imbued with relevant commentary.

So, that’s what they’ll want to see more of from founders — commentary on the Senate just passing a new immigration bill and how that will affect tech talent; a thought piece on how startups can leverage a new TikTok trend for growth.

An effective PR strategy will involve a shift in behavior:

• Monitoring daily media for current events.
• Inserting yourself and your company into breaking news.
• Being a founder who can provide punchy opinions on select themes.
• Assessing which topics you can speak to beyond your niche: for example, a fintech founder can seek to become an expert in emerging regulation.
• Linking this kind of outreach back to your core mission and messaging.

Other than being timely, the difference between you and ChatGPT is that you have friends. You have your finger on the pulse of specific “offline” circles in a way that’s not possible for an AI bot. Journalists will value you being able to bring insights on the word on the street — what the sentiment is over X news story among your peers, the conversations you have with colleagues over the state of the industry.

Finally, you can also peer into the future. A true industry expert can read what’s happening on the ground — not just online — ask for peers’ opinion on a matter of interest, and offer predictions on where a trend is going. Be careful only to do so when your margin of error is small.

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2579381

If it hadn’t been for them meddlin’ kids

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Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

Not to get all GrumpyManYellsAtCloud.gif, but I’m getting pretty tired of the myth of the dropped-out-of-college founders. Investors — and the broader ecosystem — have known for a long time that while there are some high-profile outliers, it’s much easier to build a startup if you have a fat Rolodex, some experience, and perhaps a few failures under your belt. I know Hollywood doesn’t think it’s nearly as good of a story, but . . . perhaps it’d be good to balance things out a little on that front.

Apropos meddling: Those robots have been hard at work generating smut, and Kyle reports that as AI porn generators get better, the stakes get higher. Perhaps as a result of that story (and the internet reaching fever pitch over AI porn), an interview we did with the Unstable Diffusion team last year is hella trending again on TechCrunch.

Apropos even more meddling: It seems that even very experienced founders get things pretty wrong from time to time, too — Elmo isn’t done running Twitter into the ground, it seems. This week, the burning wreckage of a social media site officially changed its logo to X. That has had some, er, curious side effects, including a lot of rebranding and renaming. Uniting the themes of smut and social media, Twitter Videos has so far resisted to rename itself, and one social media account (NSFW) seems to hint at why.

More AI. Always more AI

Image Credits: nadia_bormotova / Getty Images

I know, it seems like there’s always an AI section in Startups Weekly at the moment. Don’t blame me — blame the flamin’ hot news coming out of that vertical at the moment.

On TC+, Nick Zamanov penned an article about how his company tried using OpenAI to generate marketing strategies — and was delighted to discover that it worked.

Meanwhile, OpenAI just released a neat feature that introduces customized instructions for ChatGPT. Instead of having to type “write me a three-section newsletter in the style of TechCrunch’s Startups Weekly, and smatter in some really dumb jokes,” you can configure that as the default behavior. Writing newsletters is going to be so quick in the future, I swear. (Just kidding: I’ve tried. ChatGPT’s attempts at writing this thing were as dull as dishwater. My job is safe for another week or two.)

The bots are coming to the Androids: ChatGPT comes to Android, and soon became available in the U.S., India, Bangladesh and Brazil. OpenAI plans to release the app in more countries very soon.

I’m sure that wasn’t a stressful job: After just 18 months in the job, OpenAI’s head of trust and safety Dave Willner steps down. The company’s CTO Mira Murati will manage the team on an interim basis while they find a replacement.

Let’s translate this from corporate-ese into bot-speak: A startup that’s building tools to help prepare enterprise data to get gobbled up into large language models, Unstructured raises $25 million.

The art of changing your mind

Image Credits: Images by Christina Kilgour / Getty Images

This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the job of a founder. I already mentioned the TechCrunch+ piece I wrote about startups not just being a young person’s game, and I spoke with a founder who decided to replace himself as the CEO of his own company. Earlier this week, I also spoke with DeeDee Deman, who has spent the past 50 years headhunting CEOs, to get some tips on how you can think about finding a new CEO for your startup.

While on the topic of replacements — Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz moves on, almost 40 years after he joined the influential venture fund. He’s going to continue board work with a handful of companies but is planning to hand over most of the workload to other Sequoia partners.

Companies are still going public. Just not startups: It’s been a drought in the tech startup IPO space, but on TC+, Alex crunched the numbers and realized that there’s still a lot of activity — and it’s making startups look silly as hell.

Optimizing for impact: More and more companies are thinking about climate — and impact investors are flocking to the segment. That scares me a bit, but Agnes Svensson, the chief impact officer at Norrsken VC, shares five key questions climate tech founders should ask impact investors.

One of the most amazing social experiments: Reddits r/place is an incredible experiment, where a logged-in user can place a single pixel on a canvas every 5 minutes. It’s one of my favorite things about the internet, because it requires something utterly rare: coordination and teamwork. Of course, redditors used this year’s evolution of the game to shout loudly about the API changes that have sparked a revolt on the social media site.

Pulling into the pit stop

 

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Autonomous trucking company Aurora sells $820 million worth of stock in order to continue its drive toward launching an autonomous trucking business in 2024. Around the same time, Waymo put the brakes on its self-driving trucks program.

Meanwhile, peeking at Tesla’s business fundamentals, Rebecca reminds us that the company is an automaker, not a tech company — and that its margins look a lot more like Ford than, say, Salesforce.

Time for another U-turn: We’ve been flip-flopping on this one for a while, but it seems like GM has changed its mind once again, saying it isn’t going to kill off the Chevy Bolt EV after all. Personally, I think that’s great. We need smaller, more affordable EVs.

Tapping the zap: Seven of the largest automakers today announced a joint venture to create a massive EV charging network across North America.

Topping up at home: In smaller charging news, Voltpost raised a $3.6 million seed round to bring EV charging to the curbside.

Top reads on TechCrunch this week

In addition to some of the big hitters sprinkled throughout above, here are some of our mustn’t-miss stories for the week:

Maybe it’s just taking a nap?: I argued that VR as a category is dead and failed to find a killer app. AR is picking up the mantle, but we’ll see if it can do better.

I dunno, maybe hide better?: Zack reports that North Korean hackers targeting JumpCloud may have forgotten to mask their IP addresses properly, researchers say.

Buy it, then kill it: Aria reports that SpaceX has made only one acquisition to date (that we are aware of), but Swarm Technologies is halting new device sales. It seems that the acquisition may have been an aqui-hire, as Swarm’s founders are finding senior positions across SpaceX.

Stalking for cash: Zack had a couple of popular articles this week. He reported that Spyhide stalkerware is spying on tens of thousands of phones, and he dug into how TheTruthSpy stalkerware made its millions.

Enough, already: It’s getting more and more frustrating to report on this, but startups with all-women founding teams raised just $1.4 billion in H1, Dominic-Madori reports. That’s a paltry 1.6% of all venture funding invested. Mixed-gender teams picked up 28%.

Get your TechCrunch fix IRL. Join us at Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco this September to immerse yourself in all things startup. From headline interviews to intimate roundtables to a jam-packed startup expo floor, there’s something for everyone at Disrupt. Save up to $600 when you buy your pass now through August 11, and save 15% on top of that with promo code STARTUPS. Learn more.

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2575778

A new study found that Facebook’s Pages and Groups shape its ideological echo chambers

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New research published Thursday offers an unprecedented dive into political behavior across Facebook and Instagram — two major online hubs where people express and engage with their political beliefs. The studies, published by an interdisciplinary set of researchers working in tandem with internal groups at Meta, encompasses four papers published in Science and Nature examining behavior on both platforms around the time of the 2020 U.S. election.

The papers — only the first wave of many to be published in the coming months — grew out of what’s known as the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (FIES), an unusual collaboration between Meta and the scientific research community. On the academic side, the project was spearheaded by University of Texas Professor Talia Jomini Stroud of the school’s Center for Media Engagement, and NYU’s Professor Joshua A. Tucker, who serves as co-director of its Center for Social Media and Politics.

The findings are myriad and complex.

In one study on Facebook’s ideological echo chambers, researchers sought insight about the extent to which the platform’s users were exposed only to content that they were politically aligned with. “Our analyses highlight that Facebook, as a social and informational setting, is substantially segregated ideologically—far more than previous research on internet news consumption based on browsing behavior has found,” the researchers wrote.

At least two very interesting specific findings emerged out of the data. First, the researchers found that content posted in Facebook Groups and Pages displayed much more “ideological segregation” compared to content posted by users’ friends. “Pages and Groups contribute much more to segregation and audience polarization than users,” the researchers wrote.

That might be intuitive, but both Groups and Pages have historically played a massive role in distributing misinformation and helping like-minded users rally around dangerous shared interests, including QAnon, anti-government militias (like the Proud Boys, who relied on Facebook for recruitment) and potentially life-threatening health conspiracies. Misinformation and extremism experts have long raised concerns about the role of the two Facebook products in political polarization and sowing conspiracies.

“Our results uncover the influence that two key affordances of Facebook—Pages and Groups—have in shaping the online information environment,” the researchers wrote. “Pages and Groups benefit from the easy reuse of content from established producers of political news and provide a curation mechanism by which ideologically consistent content from a wide variety of sources can be redistributed.”

That study also found a major asymmetry between liberal and conservative political content on Facebook. The researchers found that a “far larger” share of conservative Facebook news content was determined to be false by Meta’s third-party fact-checking system, a result that demonstrates how conservative Facebook users are exposed to far more online political misinformation compared to their left-leaning counterparts.

“… Misinformation shared by Pages and Groups has audiences that are more homogeneous and completely concentrated on the right,” the researchers wrote.

In a different experiment conducted with Meta’s cooperation, participants on Facebook and Instagram saw their algorithmic feeds replaced with a reverse chronological feed — often the rallying cry of those fed up with social media’s endless scrolling and addictive designs. The experience didn’t actually move the needle on the how the users felt about politics, how politically engaged they were offline or how much knowledge they wound up having about politics.

In that experiment, there was one major change for users who were given the reverse chronological feed. “We found that users in the Chronological Feed group spent dramatically less time on Facebook and Instagram,” the authors wrote, a result that underlines how Meta juices engagement — and encourages addictive behavioral tendencies — by mixing content in an algorithmic jumble.

These findings are just a sample of the current results, and a fraction of what’s to come in future papers. Meta has been spinning the results across the new studies as a win — a view that flattens complex findings into what is essentially a publicity stunt. Regardless of Meta’s interpretation of the results and the admittedly odd arrangement between the researchers and the company, this data forms an essential foundation for future social media research.

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2575728

AI leaders warn Senate of twin risks: Moving too slow and moving too fast

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Leaders from the AI research world appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss and answer questions about the nascent technology. Their broadly unanimous opinions generally fell into two categories: we need to act soon, but with a light touch — risking AI abuse if we don’t move forward, or a hamstrung industry if we rush it.

The panel of experts at today’s hearing included Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, UC Berkeley’s Stuart Russell and longtime AI researcher Yoshua Bengio.

The two-hour hearing was largely free of the acrimony and grandstanding one sees more often in House hearings, though not entirely so. You can watch the whole thing here, but I’ve distilled each speaker’s main points below.

Dario Amodei

What can we do now? (Each expert was first asked what they think are the most important short-term steps.)

1. Secure the supply chain. There are bottlenecks and vulnerabilities in the hardware we rely on to research and provide AI, and some are at risk due to geopolitical factors (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan) and IP or safety issues.

2. Create a testing and auditing process like what we have for vehicles and electronics. And develop a “rigorous battery of safety tests.” He noted, however, that the science for establishing these things is “in its infancy.” Risks and dangers must be defined in order to develop standards, and those standards need strong enforcement.

He compared the AI industry now to airplanes a few years after the Wright brothers flew. There is an obvious need for regulation, but it needs to be a living, adaptive regulator that can respond to new developments.

Of the immediate risks, he highlighted misinformation, deepfakes and propaganda during an election season as being most worrisome.

Amodei managed not to bite at Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) bait regarding Google investing in Anthropic and how adding Anthropic’s models to Google’s attention business could be disastrous. Amodei demurred, perhaps allowing the obvious fact that Google is developing its own such models speak for itself.

Age of AI: Everything you need to know about artificial intelligence

Yoshua Bengio

What can we do now?

1. Limit who has access to large-scale AI models and create incentives for security and safety.

2. Alignment: Ensure models act as intended.

3. Track raw power and who has access to the scale of hardware needed to produce these models.

Bengio repeatedly emphasized the need to fund AI safety research at a global scale. We don’t really know what we’re doing, he said, and in order to perform things like independent audits of AI capabilities and alignment, we need not just more knowledge but extensive cooperation (rather than competition) between nations.

He suggested that social media accounts should be “restricted to actual human beings that have identified themselves, ideally in person.” This is in all likelihood a total non-starter, for reasons we’ve observed for many years.

Though right now there is a focus on larger, well-resourced organizations, he pointed out that pre-trained large models can easily be fine-tuned. Bad actors don’t need a giant data center or really even a lot of expertise to cause real damage.

In his closing remarks, he said that the U.S. and other countries need to focus on creating a single regulatory entity each in order to better coordinate and avoid bureaucratic slowdown.

Top AI companies visit the White House to make ‘voluntary’ safety commitments

Stuart Russell

What can we do now?

1. Create an absolute right to know if one is interacting with a person or a machine.

2. Outlaw algorithms that can decide to kill human beings, at any scale.

3. Mandate a kill switch if AI systems break into other computers or replicate themselves.

4. Require systems that break rules to be withdrawn from the market, like an involuntary recall.

His idea of the most pressing risk is “external impact campaigns” using personalized AI. As he put it:

We can present to the system a great deal of information about an individual, everything they’ve ever written or published on Twitter or Facebook… train the system, and ask it to generate a disinformation campaign particularly for that person. And we can do that for a million people before lunch. That has a far greater effect than spamming and broadcasting of false info that is not tailored to the individual.

Russell and the others agreed that while there is lots of interesting activity around labeling, watermarking and detecting AI, these efforts are fragmented and rudimentary. In other words, don’t expect much — and certainly not in time for the election, which the Committee was asking about.

He pointed out that the amount of money going to AI startups is on the order of 10 billion per month, though he did not cite his source on this number. Professor Russell is well-informed, but seems to have a penchant for eye-popping numbers, like AI’s “cash value of at least 14 quadrillion dollars.” At any rate, even a few billion per month would put it well beyond what the U.S. spends on a dozen fields of basic research through the National Science Foundations, let alone AI safety. Open up the purse strings, he all but said.

Asked about China, he noted that the country’s expertise generally in AI has been “slightly overstated” and that “they have a pretty good academic sector that they’re in the process of ruining.” Their copycat LLMs are no threat to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, but China is predictably well ahead in terms of surveillance, such as voice and gait identification.

In their concluding remarks of what steps should be taken first, all three pointed to, essentially, investing in basic research so that the necessary testing, auditing and enforcement schemes proposed will be based on rigorous science and not outdated or industry-suggested ideas.

Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT) responded that this hearing was intended to help inform the creation of a government body that can move quickly, “because we have no time to waste.”

“I don’t know who the Prometheus is on AI,” he said, “but I know we have a lot of work to make that the fire here is used productively.”

And presumably also to make sure said Prometheus doesn’t end up on a mountainside with feds picking at his liver.

FTC reportedly looking into OpenAI over ‘reputational harm’ caused by ChatGPT

source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2574362

Tesla stock falls as margins slip, VanMoof files for bankruptcy, and Aurora sells $820M worth of stock

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Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Your usual host Kirsten Korosec is still away, so you have me for one more week. Let’s jump in.

U.S. policymakers and agencies are looking for ways to regulate autonomous vehicles on a larger scale.

First, there’s the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which plans to announce a new rule-making in September that could benefit AV companies like Cruise and Zoox, both of which have plans to launch purpose-built robotaxis that don’t have steering wheels or pedals.

General Motors, which owns Cruise, submitted a petition in February 2022 to NHTSA to deploy up to 2,500 of the Cruise Origins annually without human controls and may soon have an answer.

At a congressional level, lawmakers will host a hearing on July 26 aimed at reviving long-delayed legislation on the safe and regulated adoption of self-driving cars. The panel will consider separate draft legislation from Representative Bob Latta (R-OH) and Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI).

The hearing will be convened by a House subcommittee titled “Self-Driving Vehicle Legislative Framework: Enhancing Safety, Improving Lives and Mobility, and Beating China.” That last bit is important. American industry for decades has used the threat of some other great superpower gaining the upper hand as a narrative to drive forward technological progress, for better or worse.

Before we dive in, a quick highlight of my TechCrunch+ story this week that looks into Tesla’s stock price, which has dropped about 10% since the company reported Q2 earnings (more on that below), and why it’s priced as a tech company when its margins scream automaker.

Want to reach out with a tip, comment or complaint? Email Kirsten at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or Rebecca at rebecca.techcrunch@gmail.com. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec or @rebeccabellan.

Reminder that you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

Micromobbin’

Some more grim news from VanMoof as the e-bike darling that was venture backed to the tune of $189.1 million filed for bankruptcy. VanMoof is considering a third-party sale so that its activities can continue. Those activities being the highly customized parts and the unique digital unlock key that’s connected to VanMoof’s servers. We reported that Cowboy came up with an app to let VanMoof owners retail digital keys to their bikes, but the access is limited.

TechCrunch how the company managed to go bankrupt in a booming e-bike market. One industry insider told us that VanMoof spent big on marketing and over-ordering and neglected to think about supply chain and unit costs.

As TC’s Ingrid Lunden pointed out: “If the unit economics of the bikes never worked out, and an app can be built in a day to unlock those bikes that are in the market already, why would anyone want to assume the assets of the failed startup?”

In other news…

Bird is officially back in compliance with the NYSE.

London-based bike-share HumanForest has launched a new feature, Forest Parcel, to provide a zero-emission, on-demand parcel-delivery service.

Taur, the front-facing scooter manufacturer, has launched its second model, the Taur II, on Kickstarter. The scooter has up to 40 miles of range.

Taur also started a campaign to challenge the U.K. government on their stance on owned scooters, which are still illegal to ride on public roads. There are, however, shared scooter pilots, which often serve to sway government and public opinion away from scooters as a viable transportation option due to the behavior of renters and potential for street clutter. The company said it would reimburse the fines of any Taur customer who is fined by the police for riding on U.K. roads. And if the scooter is confiscated, Taur will replace it free of charge.

Commsignia launched a V2X device for e-bikes and other micromobility vehicles that broadcasts messages about the cyclist’s position and direction from other road users. It also receives messages from other vehicles and alerts the rider to potential hazards.

Deal of the week

Autonomous vehicle company Aurora Innovation has sold $820 million worth of stock. About $220 million came from a public offering that priced the stock at $3 per share, and the remaining $600 million came from a concurrent private offering of stock priced at $2.70.

Aurora, a pre-revenue company building frontier technology, has been spending a pretty penny in its pursuit of commercializing self-driving trucks by the end of 2024. In 2022, the company lost about $1.7 billion.

Aurora hasn’t been shy about its need to raise more funds in order to make it to commercialization and beyond. The company said it has about $785 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments as of June 30, 2023. This infusion of capital gives Aurora another $1.6 billion to play around with. The company is hoping the funds will take it “well into 2025.”

Other deals that got my attention…

Alpha Grid, a San Francisco–based EV charging deployment optimization startup, raised a $2.5 million pre-seed led by Asymmetric Capital Partners. Twine Ventures also participated.

Lithium-ion battery recycling company Aqua Metals has entered into a strategic partnership with Yulho, a battery materials company based in South Korea. The partnership includes a $5 million equity investment from Yulho into Aqua.

Berlin-based Cycle has secured $11.3 million in Series A funding to expand its e-bike subscription model for the last-mile delivery industry. The funds will be used to expand geographically throughout Europe, including the U.K.; bring on new customers in parcel and mail logistics; and grow its fleet size.

EVgo and its eXtend partners received $13.8 million in funding from Ohio’s DOT to deploy 20 fast-charging stations.

Farizon, Geely’s electric and hybrid truck unit, has raised $600 million to expand outside of China.

Fortescue Future Industries, a global green energy and metals company, will acquire EV truck maker Nikola’s Phoenix Hydrogen Hub project for $24 million.

Singapore’s ride-hailing and food delivery company Grab, via its car rental unit Grab Rentals, will acquire Trans-Cab, the city-state’s third-largest taxi operator. The terms weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition size is estimated at around $75 million.

New York–based supply chain and visibility startup Leverage raised $7 million in a round led by Chicago Ventures.

Auto supplier Magna is investing a whopping $790 million to build three new supplier facilities in West Tennessee, including the first two onsite at Ford’s BlueOval City.

Indonesia EV maker Maka Motors raised $37.6 million in seed funding to mass produce its two-wheeled EVs. Maka will start deploying its first pilot EVs this month and is aiming for volume production in late 2024.

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel, is reportedly in talks to raise $700 million at a $5 billion valuation. The company would not confirm the reports.

Hong Kong–based delivery robot startup Rice Robotics raised $7 million in additional seed funding from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, Soul Capital, Audacy Ventures and others.

Truckstop was acquired by FreightFriend, a platform for capacity and freight management tools.

Notable news and other tidbits

ADAS

Mobileye has introduced a vision-only speed assist solution for automakers. The camera-based Intelligent Speed Assist is launching in production vehicles this year and lets cars sense speed limits without needing to rely on third-party map and GPS data.

Autonomous vehicles

Cruise’s full-page ad in several newspapers calling humans terrible drivers got the attention of the former NHTSA head. “Using the pain and suffering of those deaths for self-promotion of an unproven and unsafe product is unscrupulous,” said Joan Claybrook.

Speaking of Cruise, the company has officially started initial robotaxi testing in Miami.

Another Cruise-related issue. The California Public Utilities Commission — the agency that has the power to give Cruise and Waymo final sign-off on their plans to expand commercial robotaxi services across San Francisco 24/7 — will question the two companies over how they will deal with robotaxis malfunctioning and blocking access from first responders. The July 31 meeting, which will also hear from city agencies that are opposed to the expansion, might change the terms of the permits.

Kodiak Robotics is working with Drivewyze to launch a weigh station program for self-driving trucks on Texas interstates. The goal is to address how trucks will handle weigh station inspections without a driver present to facilitate the process.

Earnings

Online used car retailer Carvana reported higher-than-expected earnings of $2.96 billion in Q2, with adjusted EBITDA totaling $155 million. The company sold 76,530 cars during the quarter, which was slightly fewer than expected by analysts.

Carvana also announced it will reduce its outstanding debt by over $1.2 billion by exchanging existing unsecured debt with new notes. The company might also sell up to $350 million in new stock as part of the restructure.

The combined news of healthy earnings and debt exchange deal caused Carvana’s stock to spike Wednesday as high as $60.90. The company’s stock has come back down to earth somewhat, settling at around $47 Thursday at market close.

Tesla hit $25 billion in revenue in the second quarter, which just beat Wall Street estimates. Despite the record revenue, Tesla’s stock started to slide in after-hours and the next day by as much as 10%. That was likely a response to Tesla’s continued hit to automotive gross margins after a series of price cuts. Margins slid to around 18%, which is down from the 25% Tesla was rocking a year ago.

Tesla also reported that solar installations are slipping, but energy storage installations saw a boost in the second quarter.

Electric vehicles

Ford has slashed the price of its F-150 Lightning, in some trims by as much as $10,000. The automaker cited manufacturing efficiencies as the cause of the lower price.

Ford is also being questioned by House Republicans over its battery cell technology deal with China’s CATL in its upcoming $3.5 billion battery cell plant in Michigan.

General Motors is experiencing downtime at its CAMI plant in Canada (which builds the BrightDrop commercial EVs) in order to manage parts-availability issues. Regular operations will resume July 31, and it won’t affect GM’s overall EV production targets in North America — 50,000 in the first half and 100,000 in the second.

Remember the Kia Boys? The people who had been following a viral trend on TikTok to steal Kias using a USB cord? A 14-year-old Texas boy has been linked to nearly 40 thefts.

The NHTSA has opened up its third special investigation into a Tesla crash this year. This is related to a fatal crash involving a 2018 Model 3 and connected to the vehicle’s Autopilot system.

Nissan has joined the ranks of automakers that have adopted Tesla’s NACS charging standard for its Ariya and future EV models.

Rivian can move ahead with its EV facility production plans in Georgia after the state’s Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the validity of about $700 million in tax breaks the EV startup expects to receive.

Stellantis has signed $11.2 billion worth of contracts through 2030 to secure semiconductors needed for its EVs and high-performance computing functions.

India’s Tata Motors plans to build a 40 GWh battery cell gigafactory in the United Kingdom. The over $5.16 billion investment will deliver batteries for JLR and Tata Motors, with supplies beginning in 2026.

Vietnam’s VinFast will hold a groundbreaking ceremony at its electric vehicle factory in North Carolina on July 28. The company expects to invest $4 billion in the factory, which is designed to reach a capacity of 150,000 vehicles per year.

Volkswagen’s Knoxville Innovation Hub has published research breakthroughs to increase EV range and recycle vehicle materials, the company said. These include a wireless EV charging concept.

TeslaCrunch

It was another big week of Tesla news, especially with the automaker kicking off earnings season. Let’s dive in.

During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla was in talks with a major OEM to license its FSD software and hardware out to them. FSD (“full self-driving”) is Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system that is NOT fully autonomous, despite the tech’s confusing name. Musk also said that for Q3 only, Tesla owners looking to upgrade to newer models could transfer their FSD over.

Earlier in the week, Tesla announced that drivers with home solar and a Powerwall charger now have an in-app option to exclusively charge up their vehicle via excess solar energy.

The automaker also showed off its first Cybertruck built at Giga Texas over the weekend, to much fanfare but few specifics. We’re still wondering about production capacity and price, which were not addressed during the earnings call.

Outside the U.S., Tesla is hoping to expand its German factory, but residents want assurances on water use, biodiversity protection and environmental impact.

Also, Tesla directors, including Musk, will have to pay $735 million back to the company to settle claims from shareholders that they excessively overpaid themselves. As part of the deal, the directors also agreed not to receive compensation for 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Miscellaneous

ByteDance’s Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) is doing food delivery now? So food delivery giant Meituan decided to add more video to its app in kind.

Policymakers have introduced a bill that would increase fuel taxes for private jet travel from the current $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon, and remove existing fuel tax exemptions for logging and oil or gas exploration. The idea is that if the rich want to pollute our skies, they can pay extra. The revenue generated by the so-called FATCAT Act would be transferred to a fund that would support air monitoring for environmental justice communities.

Spotify is bringing a new experience to Teslas that will make displaying content bolder and more accessible. Drivers can take advantage of features like QR codes for easy log-in, access to audiobooks, and one-touch jump to artists and album pages.

Uber Freight has laid off almost 50 brokerage employees.

People

EVTOL startup Archer has brought on Nikhil Goel, co-founder of Uber Elevate, as the company’s chief commercial officer. This comes on the heels of adding former FAA administrator Billy Nolen.

Ride-hail

InDrive has launched its bid-based ride-hail app in Miami, its first U.S. market. The company’s business model is based on customers naming their own fare and nearby drivers accepting, declining or countering the offer.

Revel, the Brooklyn-based startup doing shared e-mopeds, EV charging hubs and an all-electric, all-employee ride-hail service, announced that it has hired over 1,000 New Yorkers as Q2 employee drivers.

The California Supreme Court rejected an argument by Uber that hoped to limit the ability of its drivers to take employment-related disputes to court. The court unanimously determined that the defendant, driver Erik Adolph, couldn’t sign away his right to represent his peers in a class-action lawsuit, even though his contract requires him to take any employment-related disputes to arbitration. This ruling could have ripple effects in the gig economy space.

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source https://techcrunch.com/?p=2573070