Amazon SHOCKS with Massive Fee Hike, Unveils Powerful ChatGPT Machine! You Won’t Believe What Apple Reveals at Upcoming Press Conference!

Welcome friends to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter that rounds up the major technological happenings of the last few days. If you’ve been under too much pressure to follow events step by step, you’ve come to the right place. That’s what WiR is for.

In this issue of WiR, we cover Teamshares, a New York-based VC-backed startup quietly buying mom-and-pop stores; Zepto, who became India’s first unicorn in 2023; OpenAI, which is launching ChatGPT for enterprise customers; and Google, which introduces BigQuery Studio, a “new way” of working with data. We also highlight Apple’s upcoming press conference, where it is expected to announce the iPhone 15, as well as new travel features in Google Flights, spyware for Brazilian phones being hacked, and more.

If you haven’t already, sign up here to receive WiR in your inbox every Saturday. Now, without further ado, here are the news of the week!

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Here goes the neighborhood: Teamshares has big ambitions to seize an opportunity in the offing: that of small businesses without a succession plan. Although Teamshares says it sometimes pays below market price for a company, it names a new president and gives 10% of the company’s shares to its employees. TOAccording to co-founder and CEO Michael Brown, the plan is to generate revenue from a growing range of fintech products that it sells to the companies it buys.

A newly created unicorn: Zepto, the instant grocery delivery startup, has raised $200 million in a new round of funding at a $1.4 billion valuation, it said Friday, at a time when most other companies in the category have died or are in trouble. Zepto, which sells and delivers everything from groceries to electronics, processes more than 300,000 orders a day in seven cities in India. The company plans to go public in 2025.

ChatGPT comes to the company: Aiming to capitalize on the viral success of ChatGPT, OpenAI has announced the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-focused edition of the company’s AI-powered chatbot application. ChatGPT Enterprise adds “enterprise-grade” privacy and data analysis capabilities on top of basic ChatGPT, as well as enhanced performance and customization options.

Google launches BigQuery Studio: Introduced at the Google Cloud Next conference this week, BigQuery Studio is a new service within big queryGoogle is fully managed no server data warehouse. The service provides a unique experience for editing programming languages, including SQL, Python, and Spark, to run “petabyte-scale” machine learning and analytics workloads. With BigQuery Studio, teams can directly access data wherever they are working and take advantage of additional controls for “enterprise-level” governance, regulation, and compliance.

New iPhone incoming: Apple’s next iPhone event is scheduled for September 12. The firm has sent out invitations to this week’s press conference, which is again scheduled to take place at its Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino. The iPhone 15 will almost certainly be the centerpiece of the extravaganza, writes Brian, with the Apple Watch Series 9 likely to appear alongside the Vision Pro, Apple’s AR headset, before the latter launches in 2024.

Cheap Airfare Alerts: Google Flights is rolling out a new feature to help travelers better determine the right time to book. Launching this week, the company features insights that leverage historical trend data to allow users to see when prices have generally been lowest for their chosen destination on selected dates. In some cases, Google will refund the difference if the fare is lowered before departure.

Spyware for Brazilian phones hacked: A Portuguese-language spyware called WebDetetive has been used to compromise more than 76,000 Android phones in recent years across South America, mainly in Brazil. WebDetetive is also the latest phone spyware company to have been hacked in recent months. In an undated note seen by TechCrunch, anonymous hackers described how they found and exploited various security vulnerabilities that allowed them to compromise WebDetetive’s servers and access its user databases.

Amazon increases shipping fees: Amazon is increasing its free shipping minimum to $35 for customers who don’t have a Prime membership in some regions. Until now, the minimum free shipping was $25. Amazon says it is testing the new free shipping threshold randomly by region grouped by zip code and that everyone in the same region will see the same free shipping threshold.

Babylon Health implodes: It’s the end of the road for Babylon Health, the London telehealth startup that was once valued at almost $2 billion after being backed by the founders of DeepMind and some deep-pocketed health insurance companies. After the company’s US shares lost value and its operation declared insolvency earlier this month, the company’s UK subsidiary formally went into administration this week. At the same time, the administrators sold a large part of their assets to eMed Healthcare UK, a new subsidiary of the US company eMed. Ingrid has the full story.

The new law allows users to opt out of the algorithm: Internet users in the European Union this week connected to a quiet revolution in major social networks: the ability to say “no thanks” to artificial intelligence hacking your attention. thanks to the block Digital Services LawFacebook and Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat users can easily opt out of “personalized” content feeds based on “relevance” (i.e. following) and switch to a more humble type of news feed that is populated with posts from their friends displayed in chronological order. order.

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this week in Equity, the team delved into how “great” founders are successfully guiding their companies towards positive cash flow. The episode featured Anu Hariharan, who previously worked with a16z, sits on the Brex board of directors, and more recently has been investing in late-stage companies at Y Combinator.

Meanwhile, beyond Found, Ida Josefiina, co-founder and CEO of Sane, a social knowledge-sharing platform, attended an interview. Josefiina spoke about how her foray into existentialist ideas and the power of collective intelligence put her on the path to starting this company.

AND Chain reaction said Craig Salm, legal director of Grayscale Investments. Grayscale is a digital asset investment firm that aims to provide products and services, such as the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, to institutional and individual investors. The company was founded in 2014 and is now one of the largest digital asset currency managers in the world.

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TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth feedback, analysis, and surveys, which you’ll learn if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not here consider signing up. Here are some highlights from this week:

All products are garbage: Haje writes that as we move deeper into late capitalism, a paradoxical phenomenon is taking shape. Despite economic prosperity allowing more people to purchase high-quality goods, there seems to be a general trend towards lower quality and availability. Bottom line: Even if you can afford high-quality products that are designed and built to last, they’re getting harder to find.

Drought of IPOs: Exit volume from startups has been weak since late 2021. But it’s easy to get used to new market conditions and lose track of how long they’ve been around, write Alex and Anna, and how different they are from what came before. They look at the new data on IPOs, or rather, the recent lack of IPOs.

Instacart S-1: Speaking of IPOs, Alex and Anna also delved into Instacart’s SEC paperwork from last week. What does the startup have in store for its current investors and for those who may want to grab some of its shares when it goes public? They try to answer that burning question.

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