Sunday, August 4, 2024

Image Credits: Andrew Brookes

As much as I love Impossible Burgers and Beyond Sausage, there are carnivores and startups dreaming of something even closer to the real thing: eating meat grown from cells rather than slaughtered animals.

Christine Hall reports that there are more than 200 companies in the lab-grown meat industry. Unfortunately, the sector has hit a rough patch, with many startups shutting down or scaling back.

Some of this can be blamed on the broader economy and on the caution of investors. But there may be more fundamental issues, since most companies have yet to produce large quantities of meat through these processes, and they have not yet received regulatory approval.

Read on to see what else TechCrunch has been covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Colin Hawkins / Getty Images

How Europe's digital regulations are reshaping the tech industry: Natasha Lomas examines Europe's Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which focus on different things but were conceived jointly as a way to curb Big Tech's market power. While it's probably too soon to assess their ultimate impact, there have been some early wins for regulators. Read more

Why hot startups don't always sell: There's been a lot of discussion and speculation around cloud security startup Wiz's decision to walk away from Google's massive acquisition offer. Ron Miller discusses the thought process behind similar acquisitions with Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of Harness, who sold his former startup, AppDynamics, to Cisco for $3.7 billion. Read more

Yelp's chief product officer discusses the company's AI strategy: Yelp is far from the only tech company trumpeting AI in its recent announcements, but it faces a unique challenge in balancing new tech with the authenticity of its user reviews. I spoke to Yelp CPO Craig Saldanha about how he's approaching that balance and what's coming next. Read more

What else we're reading 📖

Bloomberg reports that Facebook parent company Meta is hoping to recruit everyone from Judi Dench to Awkwafina to record and use their voices in AI projects — perhaps providing the voice of an AI assistant. The details of these projects aren't clear yet, but the company appears to be racing to complete these deals before its Connect conference in September. Read more

Meanwhile, after Google's Olympics-themed AI commercial was widely criticized (including by yours truly), AdAge reports that the company has pulled the ad. Read more