Day: April 28, 2023

States have taxed motorists at the pump for more than a century. Yet, as electric cars gain ground, what happens when folks stop refueling altogether?

State lawmakers are increasingly imposing annual fees on EV owners, arguing they should pay up because they still rely on public infrastructure to get around. Texas is on track to become the latest state to levy such a tax, following more than a dozen others, including Georgia, Michigan and Ohio.

The Texas Senate passed SB 505 at the end of March. This week, the state’s House has cleared a similar bill, sending it on to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. The latest version of the bill lays out a $200 yearly registration fee for electric vehicles, with exceptions carved out for slow “Neighborhood Electric Vehicles,” as well as autocycles, mopeds and motorcycles. The bill states that the resulting fees “must be deposited to the credit of the state highway fund.”

Though Texas is certainly not alone in moving forward with such a bill, its $200 fee is on the high end, matching only Georgia. Colorado is the state with the lowest EV fee (excluding states that have no fees), at $50 per year.

Speaking against the bill in a statement to local media outlet KRLD, Environment Texas director Luke Metzger argued the $200 fee is punitive and “will make it harder for Texans to afford these clean vehicles which are so critical to reducing air pollution in Texas.”

Electric cars are still priced out of reach for many Americans. In September 2022, the average price for EVs sat at $65,291, versus $48,094 for gas guzzlers, per Cox Automotive.

OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has closed its new funding round of over $10.3 billion, TechCrunch has learned.

VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global are in the round, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion to $29 billion. This is alongside a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year, a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch. The size of Microsoft’s investment is believed to be around $10 billion, a figure we confirmed with our source.

If all this is accurate, this is the closing of the round that The Wall Street Journal reported was in the works in January. We confirmed that was when discussions started, amid a viral surge of interest in OpenAI and its business.

While Microsoft’s investment comes with a strong strategic angle — the tech giant is working to integrate OpenAI’s tech across a number of areas of its business — the VCs are coming in as financial backers.

From what we understand, the term sheets have been signed by investors and the money’s been transferred; still to come is countersigning from OpenAI. The plan was to make this investment public next week.

Altogether, outside investors now own more than 30% of OpenAI.

According to PitchBook data, it appears that Peter Thiel had already been a backer but it seems this is the first time Founders Fund will be investing; K2 Global, a firm with just one partner, Ozi Amanat, and Thrive are also first-time backers of the startup. From PitchBook data, it looks like Sequoia, a16z and Tiger Global had been earlier investors in the company but they’d sold stakes; this latest investment would bring them back in.

A number of firms, including Tiger and Sequoia, have had some knocks as a result of the financial crisis the tech sector has seen in the last year; in general, a number of VCs have massively slowed down their investing pace, sitting on so-called “dry powder” waiting for a better climate, and maybe better opportunities.

So at a moment when investors are on the hunt for interesting AI startups to back, OpenAI is likely seen as the kind of opportunity that looks good right now.

“They’re probably trying to use this [funding] to say hey, look, we found a golden apple,” a source said of the decision to back OpenAI here and now. “Venture is a very strange place where anything can happen. You can go big to broke to big again, at any time.”

OpenAI has an army of technical teams working across a range of areas, but the area that has attracted a lot of attention of late is GPT, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is OpenAI’s family of large language models used by third parties by way of APIs.

There is also ChatGPT, the generative AI service that OpenAI released at the end of November 2022 based on GPT that lets anyone type out a natural question and get a cogent, detailed answer. ChatGPT has been a certifiable hit, with more than 1 billion visitors to its website in February, says SimilarWeb — and that’s not including those using that tech via third parties.

Generative AI is very much all the rage right now, but OpenAI has its controversies, too, with many focused on that buzzy, consumer-facing ChatGPT product. People have questioned whether it lies, whether it is a “virus,” how it handles privacy, if it can be manipulated to be toxic or commit libel; and in the wake of so many more rushing into AI development, even the very nature of how “open” OpenAI’s GPT branding will be longer term has come up for discussion.

In fairness, OpenAI has acknowledged the work that still needs to be done, and meanwhile it’s continued to develop services and iterate. In February, the startup introduced a paid version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Plus with a faster user experience. It was

Startups are making satellite connectivity more accessible with Lynk and AST SpaceMobile leading the charge. Rogers network customers in Canada will soon have direct satellite-phone connections thanks to a deal with Lynk, while AST SpaceMobile has made the first direct phone-to-satellite call using an unmodified consumer handset. Overcoming the technical challenges of terrestrial networking through a licensed carrier, comprehensive connectivity packages are now possible. Scaling remains a challenge, but it’s a significant step in the future of mobile plans, phone models and satellite services.

Lynk is aiming for as universal an SMS service as possible to ensure that no one stranded or out of range will be without signal. Its deals with various carriers across the world and a deal with Rogers Canada indicate the service is beginning to expand to new territories. The company’s SMS service provides indispensable information like shelter locations during power outages or natural disasters.

AST SpaceMobile has launched its first test satellite, paving the way for its constellation of satellites that will provide “2G, 3G, 4G LTE and 5G” coverage from space. While Apple and Iridium have emergency SOS services, they’re limited to pre-made messages and satellite sighting. T-Mobile and SpaceX also have plans to connect phones to a Starlink data connection soon. In the near future, satellite services will be a feasible line item on any mobile plan or phone model.

However, despite the progress, there’s still skepticism surrounding the scalability of the technology. But as companies continue to innovate, satellite connectivity may soon be a standard offering on any mobile plan or phone model. It’s a significant achievement in the world of technology, though, and a step forward for people who live in remote areas of the world. It gives them the ability to communicate with the world, even in the toughest of situations.

Many startups believe there is no need to rethink the gripper due to its cost and resource intensiveness. MIT’s new approach to robotic gripping is compared to manipulating an arcade claw, but with real-time reflexes and feedback. An algorithm instructs the robot to perform one of three grasp maneuvers in response to real-time measurements, allowing the fingers to grab, pinch, or drag an object until it has a better hold. The gripper is designed to adapt to each object’s particular shape and weight distribution, using sensors on the tips and feedback from a camera on the base. The team successfully demonstrated the system’s ability to pick and place household objects without having to re-adjust in more than 90% of the 117 attempts.

The project builds on actuators developed for the school’s mini cheetah robot, allowing it to react to uneven terrain on the fly. The new system is built around an arm with two multi-joint fingers using a camera on the base and sensors on the tips. By adjusting accordingly to an object in real-time, the gripper can pick up objects with strange or unexpected weight distributions, without having to withdraw and try again.

Toms River, NJ, April 10, 2023 –(PR.com)– Spark Flames, a new online store specializing in vintage pocket lighters and tobacciana, is proud to announce its official launch. The store offers a wide selection of vintage lighters and tobacco-related items, including pipes, ashtrays, and pocket and tabletop lighters, from the early 20th century.

“We’re excited to offer collectors and enthusiasts a one-stop shop for all their vintage lighter and tobacciana needs,” said Natalie Quinn, the founder of Spark Flames. “Our selection includes a wide variety of styles and designs, from sleek Art Deco lighters to intricate engravings and precious metal plating. We also carry a variety of popular brands, including Zippos, Ronsons, and Dunhills.”

In addition to its wide selection, Spark Flames also prides itself on its commitment to authenticity and quality. The company carefully curates its selection, ensuring that all items are authentic and in good condition. The store also offers a 30-day return policy on all purchases.

“We understand the importance of authenticity and quality when it comes to vintage lighters and tobacciana,” said Natalie Quinn. “That’s why we take great care in curating our selection and only offer items that are authentic and in good condition.”

Spark Flames also offers a variety of resources for collectors, including how-to videos to repair vintage lighters and give them a new spark.

Visit Spark Flames online at sparkflames.com to browse the store’s selection and learn more about vintage pocket lighters and tobacciana.

The future of vertical farming is full of possibilities, as it offers hope in addressing growing concerns about food safety, aging populations, and potential environmental collapse. However, it is a challenging industry, particularly for early companies that must focus on driving down unit economics to make the technology more affordable.

Being an early player in this space can have its risks, as Upward Farms found out when it recently announced its closure despite plans to open a 250,000-square-foot farm in Pennsylvania. According to the Brooklyn-based firm’s founders, vertical farming is a complex industry where new challenges continuously emerge, making it difficult to convince potential investors to invest in a long-term project with an uncertain outcome.

Despite the closure, the Upward Farms team remains optimistic, pointing out that a small portion of their team will continue working on microbiome-related projects. While other big names in the vertical farming industry, such as Bowery and AeroFarms, continue to thrive, the closure of Upward Farms highlights the challenges faced by early players in this space. However, the closure may lead to valuable innovations that could be shared with other industry partners in the future.

Shares of First Republic Bank plunged by nearly 50% Friday, ratcheting pressure on the troubled bank and adding to its mounting market-confidence woes.

As of noon ET, the stock was trading at $3.72, down 40% from Thursday’s close of $6.19, after having dropped as low a $3 at one point Friday. Before the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in early March, First Republic Bank’s shares were trading at $115, so the current price represents a massive drop. It is also trading significantly lower than its 52-week high of $171.09.

After the failure of tech-friendly Silicon Valley Bank, an open question was whether other banks with related clientele would suffer a similar fate. While SVB was busy imploding, concern rose that First Republic Bank might see a similar flight of deposits, leading to its own failure.

Those worries accelerated this week after the bank reported its first-quarter earnings, revealing the extent to which its deposit base had contracted.

In its earnings report, First Republic shared that it closed last year (a pre-crisis figure) with $176.4 billion worth of deposits. That figure fell to just $104.5 million by the end of the first quarter. Included in that figure, however, was $30 billion worth of deposits from other banks, blunting somewhat the flight of customer capital from the financial institution.

Since that report earlier in the week, several things have happened.

Reuters reported Friday that officials from the American government were working with industry participants in hopes of “putting together a lifeline for the troubled lender.” Later, CNBC reported that optimism for an industry-led lifeline was fading, and that it was more likely that the “Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to take it into receivership.”

That’s not so good for the bank, or its customers. While during SVB’s time in the barrel the U.S. government ensured that all of its deposits would be secure and accessible, there is no clear indication yet that that is new de facto policy, or that First Republic customers will enjoy similar protections.

If you’re asking yourself why any customer of the bank would therefore choose to keep money at First Republic given the struggling lifeline talks, possible government intervention, and murky protections for account balances over the quarter million dollar mark, the answer is that they probably won’t. In turn, accelerating deposit flight will only worsen the situation, as we saw with SVB.

Not to be a banking doomer, but this goose appears pretty darn cooked.

There is a critical software vulnerability found in genomics giant Illumina’s DNA sequencing devices that the U.S. government has warned about, and that hackers can exploit to modify or steal patients’ sensitive medical data.

In separate advisories released on Thursday, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that the security flaw — tracked as CVE-2023-1968 with the maximum vulnerability severity rating of 10 out of 10 — allows hackers to remotely access an affected device over the internet without needing a password. If exploited, the bug could allow hackers to compromise devices to produce incorrect or altered results, or none at all.

The advisories also warn of a second vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-1966 with a lower severity rating of 7.4 out of 10. The bug could allow attackers to remotely upload and run malicious code at the operating system level, allowing them to alter settings and access sensitive data on the affected product.

The vulnerabilities affect Illumina’s iScan, iSeq, MiniSeq, MiSeq, MiSeqDx, NextSeq and NovaSeq products. These products, used worldwide in the healthcare sector, are designed for clinical diagnostic use in sequencing a person’s DNA for various genetic conditions or research purposes.

Illumina spokesperson David McAlpine told TechCrunch that Illumina has “not received any reports indicating that a vulnerability has been exploited, nor do we have any evidence of any vulnerabilities being exploited.” McAlpine declined to say whether Illumina has the technical means to detect exploitation, or say how many devices are vulnerable to the flaws.

Illumina CEO Francis deSouza said in January that its installed base was more than 22,000 sequencers.

In a LinkedIn post, Illumina CTO Alex Aravanis said that the company discovered the vulnerability as part of routine efforts to assess its software for potential vulnerabilities and exposures.

“Upon identifying this vulnerability, our team worked diligently to develop mitigations to protect our instruments and customers,” Aravanis said. “We then contacted and worked in close partnership with regulators and customers to address the issue with a simple software update at no cost, requiring little to no downtime for most.”

News of the Illumina vulnerability comes after the FDA last month announced it will require medical device makers to meet specific cybersecurity requirements when submitting an application for a new product. Device makers will have to submit a plan explaining how they plan to track and address vulnerabilities, and include a software bill of materials detailing every component in a device.

As expected, companies are continuing to cut back on their cloud spend where possible, as tech budgets continue to get careful scrutiny. That resulted in a quarter in which the cloud grew 19%, up $10 billion over last year to $63 billion. That doesn’t sound too terrible, except when you compare the numbers to last year when the market grew 32%.

Clearly we are still in a cost cutting cycle and it’s having an impact on cloud infrastructure revenue growth, but Synergy Research reports that there are signs that we could be coming out of the recent doldrums. Synergy’s chief analyst John Dinsdale says that overall the market remains solid, and we are starting to see a shift in some of the trends that have been contributing to the the downward growth.

“There has been some angst about declining cloud growth rates, but the Q1 worldwide market value grew by more than $10 billion compared with the first quarter of 2022. Clearly the relatively weak economy has caused some enterprises to more closely review spending on cloud services, but the market continues to grow despite those challenges,” Dinsdale wrote in a comment to the press.

He points out that the Chinese market has returned to growth and exchange rate pressure has started easing, contributing to growth in the EMEA and APAC regions. “The law of large numbers pretty much dictates that growth rates must decline, but in absolute terms the market continues to grow at a healthy rate, driven by the fundamental benefits of cloud adoption,” Dinsdale said.

It’s fair to say that most industries would be happy with a growth rate that’s nearly 20% in this economic climate, but the cloud has been dealing with rates in the high 30s until recently, so it feels worse, and as we’ve learned, perception counts.

This is especially true for Amazon, where AWS has been the growth engine for the company for more than a decade and it’s suddenly looking at a quarter where the growth plunged into the teens to 16%. Again, for a mature company, that doesn’t feel that horrible, but the cloud revenue numbers continue to trend down from the 20% rate the company saw the prior quarter.

Meanwhile Azure growth also continued to drop too. While Microsoft’s cloud arm grew at a higher rate than Amazon at 27%, that was down from 31% the prior quarter. Google Cloud was up 27.5%, slowing from 32% the prior quarter, but turning a profit for the first time.

What impact does all of that have on market share? Well, as it turns out, not that much. Amazon has owned a fairly steady third of the market for years, even as the pie has grown. Microsoft has been gaining slowly but steadily, and Google has reached 10% and so far is holding steady there. The big three account for 65% of the total revenue.

For the quarter, AWS continues to have 32% market share, good for over $20 billion for the quarter, Microsoft held steady from the prior quarter at 23%, good for over $14 billion in revenue for the quarter and with 10% Google Cloud took in over $6 billion.

Synergy looks at infrastructure and platform as a service, as well as hosted private clouds to come up with its market numbers.

Nothing goes up forever, but there are signals on the horizon that perhaps the cloud infrastructure market will return to growth. There is certainly still plenty of room, especially with these companies looking at adding data-intensive AI workloads, and with that, the market should stabilize over time.

Today, Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, launched in public preview with an expanded set of features.

Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization.

“Since October, the AI models have steadily improved, and we’ve worked to weave these powerful capabilities throughout the Designer canvas in even more delightful ways while keeping you in control,” Bryan Rognier, GM at Microsoft’s 365 Consumer division, wrote in a blog post published today.

Now Designer can generate written captions and hashtags relevant for social media posts, offering several suggestions users can choose from. It can also create animated visuals, complete with backgrounds and text transitions, powered by AI.

In the future, Designer will gain additional editing features, Microsoft says, including the ability to place an object in a specific spot in a graphic and automatically fill in the rest of a picture. Forthcoming “erase” and “replace background” options, meanwhile, will let users brush over objects, people or backdrops they didn’t intend to be in a graphic.

Designer will remain free during the preview period, Microsoft says — it’s available via the Designer website and in Microsoft’s Edge browser through the sidebar. Once the Designer app is generally available, it’ll be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and have “some” functionality free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft didn’t elaborate.

Addressing some of the legal questions that’ve sprung up recently around AI-powered image-generation systems, Microsoft says that users will have “full” usage rights to commercialize the images they create with Designer and Image Creator. It’s unclear whether that might change in the future, though, given the ongoing court battles involving OpenAI and other startups commercializing generative AI tools.

Most conversations around personas happen with the marketing or product teams. These groups use personas to define typical customers by their demographics, likes, values, backgrounds, goals, challenges, aspirations, etc. A persona profile includes a picture and some statements representing the person.

It might include where to reach that person, especially for marketing purposes. The product team might use it for successful product design so that a product is sticky, has higher performance, and has fewer technical issues.

Using persona-based services in implementation, customer support, and customer success lay an essential foundation for startups and early-stage companies. We did, and it has transformed our company.

It began with an internal commitment to become a 100% customer-centered organization. We knew we could improve the customer experience, which was good, but not the level we strive for. We satisfied customers, but we also weren’t making them ecstatic. We looked at every process, deliverable, product, and customer engagement through the lens of the customer and committed to a method of constant reinvention to improve the customer experience.

So, we dove into the numbers.

Even though each customer implementation was different, there were some similarities and characteristics we could cross-match among multiple customer sets. We looked at 250 data points — about two-thirds were internal and the rest were from secondary research about the company and the market.

Some of the items we looked at were:

• Have they used a competitor’s software?
• What is their reason for choosing us?
• Are they transitioning from spreadsheets and files?
• What specific problems are they trying to solve? For example, one customer noted that competitors provided partner quotes in hours as opposed to their company, which took multiple days.
• What is their primary goal to achieve with our software?

We added this intelligence to the standard knowledge transfer call between the sales and implementation teams to learn as much about the customer as possible. We used all those points to categorize each customer into one of four personas. These personas work for us. Your customer data can lead you to create the personas that matter most in your customer base.

We categorized our implementations into four different personas.

• Simplicity — Focused on implementation speed, time to success, and out-of-the-box functionality. CSMs should be involved in 30-60-90-day planning and best practices early.
• Marketing — Focused on design and partner experience. They might ask 10 questions about the picture gallery on the partner portal homepage. They will ask about specific design elements, such as if buttons can have rounded corners instead of squares, etc.

Brave just announced that it is now exclusively using its own index for its search engine. In other words, it doesn’t rely on third-party solutions like Bing anymore.

When the company launched Brave Search in 2021, it mentioned that it relied on other providers for nearly 13% of its queries. A year later, that number was slashed to 7%.

“By default, Brave Search users will now receive 100% of results from the Brave Index, giving users fully independent results. As always, our results will preserve user privacy,” Brave said in a blog post.

The company said that things like the Web Discovery Project — which let people who use Brave’s web browser contribute anonymous data to build Brave’s index — helped it push towards self-reliance. Plus, Brave was concerned about the future of the Bing API — especially after Microsoft’s strengthened its partnership with OpenAI and announced a significant increase in API pricing for Bing’s index.

The company noted that users will still be able to use Google Fallback Mix — a feature that allows users to privately query Google in case Brave Search doesn’t have answers.

In addition to this, Brave announced its own search API but said that details about this program will be revealed in the future.

Brave is trying to use fewer solutions published by big tech companies to set itself apart. In March, the company launched a summarization feature that wasn’t powered by OpenAI’s tech.

In comparison, some of Brave’s competitors like DuckDuckGo and Neeva are still relying on sources like Bing. Though, the latter already plans to ditch Bing in a few years.

Hackers have stolen email addresses, direct messages, and other personal data from users of two dating websites, according to a data breach expert.

Earlier this week, someone alerted Troy Hunt, the founder and maintainer of the data breach alerting website Have I Been Pwned, that hackers had breached two dating websites, CityJerks and TruckerSucker. Hunt told TechCrunch that he analyzed the stolen data and found usernames, email addresses, passwords, profile pictures, sexual orientation, users’ date of birth, their city and state, their IP addresses, and biographies. The stolen passwords are scrambled with a weak algorithm that could potentially be broken and allow hackers to see the actual passwords.”

“It’s really just a typical forum breach, albeit with super sensitive content,” Hunt said.

The sensitive content, for example, include hookup messages, such as “I will b [sic] in Jackson on business during the day on Nov.13 if interested message back I won’t have a place, will u?” and sexual preferences, such as “trucker that loves suckin [sic] chubby guys,” according to Hunt.

Hunt said that the tipster told him the breach was advertised on a hacking forum. TechCrunch independently verified that the data stolen from CityJerks and TruckerSucker is being advertised on the forum.

In a post advertising the data stolen from TruckerSucker, the seller claims the database contains information on 8,000 users. In the post about CityJerks, the seller claims the database contains data from 77,000 users.

CityJerks advertises itself as a place to help people find partners to “masturbate mutually.”

“Masturbating mutually will connect you and your sweetie, your partner or a fellow member on an ever deeper level. No matter how long you’ve been together, you want that for sure! The feedback from our customers speaks for itself,” the site read.

TruckerSucker bills itself as a place to “meet masculine men,” a place for “REAL TRUCKERS and REAL MEN.”

The administrator of the two websites did not respond to a request for comment.

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Do you have more information about other data breaches? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Wickr, Telegram and Wire @lorenzofb, or email lorenzo@techcrunch.com. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has seen its stock tumble 20% in after-hours trading after reporting first-quarter earnings Thursday.

The company missed Wall Street revenue estimates of $1 billion, closing out the quarter with $989 million. That’s down 7% from the same period last year, and it represents the first time since Snap went public that revenue fell.

Snap attributed this downgrade to a “disrupted” demand for ads after making upgrades to the platform on which it sells ads. It might also have something to do with the privacy changes Apple has made, which make it more difficult for advertisers to collect data and target ads.

The company is not the only one experiencing the impact of reduced digital ad revenue. Ad revenue for YouTube, for example, dropped 3% in the first quarter. And as a smaller company that’s popular among Gen Z users, Snap faces competition from TikTok.

Larger companies like Meta are starting to see ad revenue rebound. The Facebook-parent company’s earnings Wednesday reported a revenue beat that suggests Meta is coming out of its downward slump and into revenue growth.

As is becoming the norm in the tech industry, Snap has over the past year had to lay off staff and try to mitigate costs by slowing production on things like Snap-funded originals, minis and games, hardware and more. The company is now pivoting toward more AI-focused endeavors.

Last week, Snap launched its OpenAI-powered chatbot, My AI, that lets Snapchat users chat to the bot individually or with a group. The company said users were sending more than 2 million messages a day to the bot, but that could just be the initial novelty factor unless the product improves. Snapchat subsequently saw a spike in one-star reviews as users trash-talked the chatbot and called for its removal.

Snap is also working to boost revenue from subscriptions. The company offers a $4 per month subscription for Snapchat+, which offers features like custom notification sounds, story expiration controls, customizable chat wallpapers and more. Snap has also said subscribers, of which there are about 3 million today (barely 1% of daily active users), will gain access later this year to a feature that lets My AI reply to them with a visual Snap by generating an image based on the conversation.

During the quarter, Snap also launched AR Enterprise Services, a new SaaS business, to sell its AR technology suite to other companies.

“We are working to accelerate our revenue growth and we are using this opportunity to make significant improvements to our advertising platform to help drive increased return on investment for our advertising partners,” said Spiegel in a statement.

A lot of these changes haven’t yet manifested into significant revenue dollars for the company, which at the end of the day is still struggling with its core ad business.

Reddit announced Thursday that it is testing Discord-like chat channels with select subreddits. With this move, the social network is trying to give more avenues for community members to interact with each other apart from the usual asynchronous commenting system.

The company said it is starting this test with 25 volunteer subreddits — the company didn’t share a list of those subreddits. It specified that participating communities have less than 100,000 members.

Reddit said that channels will be persistent on the community navigation bar so members can revisit them frequently.

The company mentioned that it has learned from previous chat products like the community chat rooms feature, which was discontinued in 2020. In particular, it plans to give more control to moderators. The new feature will have a dedicated channel for moderators to chat about managing the subreddit. Plus, they will be able to decide if they want to enable this feature for the community in the first place.

Additionally, the platform is giving moderators tools like the ability to choose who can participate in the chat, manage the chat queue, and moderate reported messages in a conversation.

In the r/modnews subreddit, the social network announced that it plans to introduce features for channels including threading, pinned messages, user mentions with push notifications, and messaging editing for the sender in the future.

The social network is also accepting applications from moderators of subreddits that want to try out the chat channels feature for their community.

When users pushed back on the post announcing channels, a moderator said that the company is launching this experiment to provide more ways for community members to converse with each other.

“We love our ‘tree of posts,’ asynchronous text-based communities, and making sure they have what they need to thrive is important to us. At the same time, we want to provide options for communities that like to interact in different ways, or that have sub-groups that like to interact in different ways,” they posted.

A number of communities on Reddit rely on external real-time chat servers like Telegram, Discord, or IRC to facilitate conversations between members. The introduction of channels might incentivize communities to stay on the platform more.

The platform has tried out different ways for live interactions like its now-depreciated Clubhouse clone called Reddit Talk and Live Chat posts within a community.

Reddit is not the only company launching ways for communities to host conversations. Last year, WhatsApp launched its discussion group feature for organizing different groups around a school or a club. Meanwhile, developers of the Telepath social network are trying to make group conversations suck less with a unique thread-based approach in their new app called Wavelength — the app works for both small groups of friends and large semi-public chat rooms.

Clubhouse, a social audio app created by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, has laid off more than half of its staff due to customer habit changes and remote work complexities, as stated in a blog post by the co-founders. The affected employees will receive severance and healthcare coverage for a few months. A Clubhouse spokesperson declined to comment on the number of people impacted or the number of remaining employees.

Last October Davison told TechCrunch that the company had nearly 100 employees. This is the second round of layoffs for Clubhouse in less than a year; the previous one involved a few role eliminations as part of team streamlining, according to a statement to TechCrunch.

The social app, backed with more than $100 million in venture capital and valued at $4 billion by investors, is struggling to find its role in a post-COVID world where it’s difficult for people to find the time for long conversations. Its co-founders acknowledged that the product needs to evolve, and with their smaller team, they will focus on building “Clubhouse 2.0.” Davison’s product philosophy revolves around social audio and remote work. He points out that the audio product is designed for multitasking and feels that the trends they’re building towards are permanent.

Clubhouse did confirm it still has “years of runway left” and is not implementing a hiring freeze yet.

Contact Natasha Mascarenhas on Twitter @nmasc_ or on Signal at +1 925 271 0912 for further insight.