TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: AWS

1. An interview with AWS' new CEO: Matt Garman started at Amazon as an intern in 2005 and worked his way up. Today, he's the CEO of AWS, one of the largest cloud providers in the world. He recently sat down with TC's Frederic Lardinois to talk about generative AI, the open source ecosystem, and the need to serve startups and developers. Read More

2. Comcast suffers a massive data breach: The telecom giant says cybercriminals stole the personal data of more than 230,000 customers. The hackers didn't come for Comcast directly, but targeted a third-party debt collector that the telco uses. Read More

3. Fisker keeps falling: Failed EV startup Fisker has abandoned its headquarters and left them in "complete disarray," with drums of hazardous waste, auto equipment, vehicles, and full-size clay modes littering the building. Big yikes. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

Open BB co-founder and CEO Didier Lopes. Image Credits: OpenBB

🤑 Terminally open: The Bloomberg Terminal is indispensable for many, but at $25,000 per year, only rich brokerages, banks and trading firms can afford it. OpenBB is a fledgling fintech that wants to take on investment research heavyweights with its new, free version of a financial data and tooling product. Read More

🪫 Ola Electric takes a dip: The EV maker's IPO was one of the most hyped in India, but thousands of customers have been complaining about both its electric scooters and service. Its stock price has now taken a tumble, and its market share is eroding away. Ola Electric's market cap fell below $4.75 billion for the first time since its IPO in August. Read More

👋 Work now, oust later: Seven of Klarna's directors have agreed to oust investor Mikael Walther from the board. The tea is that Walther is buddies with Klarna co-founder Victor Jacobsson, who isn't with the company anymore, but is a major shareholder and reportedly a thorn in the side of the company's co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Read More

🌍 The Flutterwave effect: "We want to be that infrastructure layer that powers all the who's who of payments on the continent; I'd say we want to be the Adyen of Africa," Olugbenga Agboola, CEO of Africa's most valuable company Flutterwave, told TechCrunch. Read More

📹 Bringing home security tech into 2024: Tony Fadell, the creator of the iPod, talked to TC about a company he has invested in: Plumerai is working on home security cameras that use on-device AI processing to perform tasks like people detection and familiar facial identification without sending data to remote servers. Read More

Around the Web

🇰🇵 North Korea has influencers, too: 404 Media reports that North Korea is taking a new tact to convince the West that it's actually a really great place to live – AI-generated TikTok influencers. The posts are bizarrely wrapped in ads for aging supplements. Read More

🎮 Epic's epic plan: After laying off 16% of staff last year, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the company is now "financially sound." He talked to The Verge about Epic's plans to combine the power of its high-end game engine, Unreal Engine, with its simpler Unreal Editor for Fortnite to make a truly unreal engine. Read More

👀 It's 2024. Do you know where your children are? The EFF has outlined how parents can protect their kids from being tracked across the internet using their Advertising IDs. When kids turn 13, they age out of data protections from the COPPA and become immediate targets. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: Sonair

🐬 Learning from dolphins: Norwegian startup Sonair is using ultrasound technology for computer vision. How? By reading sound waves to detect people and objects in 3D in a way that doesn't require much energy or compute – meaning it could potentially replace the prohibitively expensive LIDAR. Read More