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Happy Tuesday Crunch, our crunchiest friends. So glad to see you again.
Yesterday, Haje wondered if he was an AI, so he clearly needs a vacation. Shall we bask together in the glory of tech news today?
Table of Contents
The businessroundups.org Top 3
- You are blocked: Sometimes technology does what it’s supposed to do. In Apple’s case, researchers working on spyware vulnerabilities said the “Lockdown Mode” could thwart the advance of the notorious mercenary hacker NSO Group. Lorenzo has more. Also, Apple opens its first store in Indiabut there are…challenges, Manic writes.
- Don’t forget your boarding pass: Alaska Airlines is doing away with check-in kiosks in favor of a more modern gate look. Airmen must print boarding passes at home or check in with their smartphone, Frederick reports.
- Truth seeker: Elon Musk wants to develop his own chatbot called TruthGPT, which he describes as “a maximum truth-seeking AI”, reports Ivan.
Startups and VC
Mansa, a free ad-supported streaming service and content aggregator that offers a curated selection of black cultural content, launched out of the blue today, Lauren reports. Mansa offers a wide variety of contentfrom on-demand titles and digital linear (FAST) channels to short videos and user-generated content.
And we have another loosely composed melange of tasty snacks for you:
TC+
SaaS Retention Benchmarks: How Is Your Business Performing?
SaaS companies are like leaky rowboats. If retention rates aren’t strong enough to overcome churn, they will absorb water until they sink to the bottom.
Sid Jain, a senior analyst at ChartMogul, surveyed 2,100 companies and found that “more than half of SaaS companies had lower retention rates in 2022 compared to 2021.”
In this detailed breakdown, he compares net revenue retention rates by ARR range and identifies benchmarks for companies that have yet to fit the product market.
“What’s considered a good net retention rate varies by stage of your business,” advises Jain. “Always take into account the stage your company is in when benchmarking.”
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Three more from the TC+ team:
Big Tech Inc.
You must love Darrell‘s headline for his article today, “Goodbye to the fat middle”, which on the surface may be a tribute to getting rid of their frizzy belly fat, but Darrell is really mean about Adobe’s new AI-powered features, and what that means for the human workforce, which is that “what matters most in danger of dying out in the future within these Adobe bullet points is basically the fat middle of the bell curve of multimedia editing work.
Some television platforms and shows are quieter than others, but Prime Video customers who need a little extra sound to hear dialogue just got a boost. Sara report that if you cannot watch television without subtitlesPrime Video has a new feature that makes dialogues easier to hear.
And we have five more for you:
