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Pleased Friday, our crunchiest of friends!
Over the previous couple of days, we’ve been telling you about all of the cool stuff that’s happening at Disrupt. Well, guess what — we’re getting a hardware stage as well! Hardware gets its turn within the highlight at Disrupt 2023…Exciting times!
The TechCrunch Top 3
- You Heardle-d it here: Christine thinks Heardle, the Wordle-like music guessing game, was too hard, so she gave up on playing some time ago. Nonetheless, it was a well-liked game with numerous people, peaking at 69 million monthly desktop and mobile web visits in March 2022. Now Sarah writes that lower than a yr after acquiring Heardle, Spotify is shutting down the sport. You get six guesses as to why, but to the tune of tears being shed across the web.
- Speaking of being shut down: Parler, the social media network that emerged when former president Donald Trump was banned from other sites, has a latest owner. No, not Ye, but digital media company Starboard. Oh, and Starboard has plans to shut it down temporarily in order that it may well be revamped. Aisha has more.
- Zoom will see you now: To spice up its asynchronous offerings, Zoom is acquiring Ireland-based worker communications platform Workvivo. Paul writes that Workvivo had the “remote-work revolution” on lock, which might be what attracted Zoom to it.
Startups and VC
James Murdoch’s enterprise fund Bodhi Tree slashed its planned investment into Viacom18 to $528 million, down 70% from the committed $1.78 billion, the 2 said late Thursday because the weakening global economy hammers investors’ appetite, Manish reports. Viacom18, a three way partnership between Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance and Paramount Global, didn’t say why Bodhi Tree slashed its pledged investment.
Meanwhile, PBS and a handful of other news organizations have joined NPR in stepping away from Twitter, the social media platform once synonymous with breaking news, Taylor reports. NPR announced that it would depart the platform altogether last week after Twitter misleadingly attached a label reserved for state-run media entities to its account.
And we’ve got five more for you:
4 SaaS engagement metrics that attract investors
Image Credits: Tetra mages (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Past performance doesn’t at all times predict future results, but it surely’s the most effective place to seek out customer retention stats which have investor appeal.
Based on Oleksandr Yaroshenko, head of investments and strategy at edtech startup Headway, engagement rates for existing customers are “the most effective predictors for resubscription.”
On this post, he explores gamification strategy and shares ideas for constructing a “golden cohort” that represents your audience.
Three more from the TC+ team:
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You may join here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Do you must read a ten,000-character tweet? We don’t either — oh wait, you said yes. Okay, well buckle up because Twitter now offers 10,000-character-long tweets for Blue subscribers, reports Ivan. For those who’d wish to see what a ten,000-character tweet looks like, we got you, boo. How a few 10,000-character TechCrunch article? We rustled up one for you from the archives.
Moving over to the state of Washington, where Uber and Lyft drivers won paid family and medical leave. Rebecca writes that the state’s senate passed a law that makes it the primary within the nation to supply this type of profit for ride-hail drivers.
Now here’s five more for you:
