Hello friends! Lucas always starts this, doesn’t he? Lucas is out for a few weeks, so I’ll handle the week-in-review until he comes back. TL; DR on me: I’m Greg, and I’ve been with TechCrunch for a long, long time. I joined when Twitter found the vowel in his name and people thought Facebook’s valuation was ridiculously $ 15 billion. (For reference, Facebook’s market cap broke $1 trillion last month.)
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Although Zoom started in 2011, its growth in 2020 was completely different. The epidemic spread Zoom overnight in the reputation of a product-name-as-an-action hall, “Let’s zoom in next week” “This Xerox for me?” Or “Photoshop it” or “Google it.” With rapid growth, of course, comes increasing pain.
There was a significant improvement in trolling in this torment. The concept of “Zoombombing” is born, where unauthorized people crash a zoom call and find out how to turn it off with bad pictures, hate speech, and anything else that might explode before the moderator (often unfamiliar with the zoom interface). By April 2020, Zoom had changed its settings to make meetings a little less zoombomb by default but by then a lawsuit had already been filed. In fact, fourteen lawsuits were filed and later turned into one.
The lawsuits argued that the company had not done enough to prevent Zoombombing, as well as sharing user data with third parties without the user’s permission. Zoom has agreed to settle $85 million this week, as well as promising to add more protection against crushers.
This is an interesting example of how widespread/sudden popularity can cause all sorts of new problems. Google’s next flagship Android phone is coming! When TBD? How much? Good question! At the first official recognition of the Pixel 6’s existence, the company retained an unusual number of details, perhaps to focus on the chip they were building on a custom AI-centric system.
