‘Network issue’ causes cloud outage that takes down multiple Microsoft services for more than 4 hours • TechCrunch

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Hello crunchies! We’re pretty excited about Mast‘s TechCrunch Live, where he talks to Cambly about how the company found profits after failing to raise a Series A. Mark your calendar for February 1! — Christina and haje

TechCrunch’s top 3

• And we are back!: So says Microsoft after some of its services, like Outlook, Xbox Live and Teams, were interrupted in a “change to Microsoft WAN”. Ivan reports.
• What you text is what you’ll see: We’ve been hearing about text to image lately, and today is no different. Remember back in October when Shutterstock and OpenAI teamed up to add artificial intelligence to Shutterstock’s libraries? Well, today the photo giant is showing us the fruits of that labor with a generative AI toolkit for creating images based on text prompts. Ingrid see you.
• Branch: BMW i Ventures gets a renewed charge from one of its most recent investments, injecting $13 million into Bulgarian company Ampeco, a company providing a management platform for electric vehicle charging, Mike reports. As he notes, you might recall that BMW was an early investor in the discontinued ChargePoint and ChargeMaster.

Startups and VCs

Injective, a layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million fund ecosystem initiative, said the platform’s CEO and co-founder Eric Chen. Jacqueline In its article, Injective is launching a $150 million ecosystem fund to accelerate the adoption of interoperable infra and DeFi.

One of the most remarkable things about construction robotics is the scope of tasks that can potentially be automated, brian writing. He thinks the whole category is a prime target for robotics startups, given that it addresses the three big Ds of automation – boring, dirty and (quite often) dangerous. So it makes sense that Built would buy another construction robotics company, Roin.

Fun stuff. There are five others as well:

When it comes to big language models, should you build or buy?

Americans spent nearly $20 billion on pizza deliveries in 2021. Most people could probably cook one at home, but speed and convenience are powerful incentives come dinnertime.

The same goes for machine learning algorithms: should companies select open-source models, license large language models without modifications, or customize them and pay much higher usage rates?

“While construction looks extremely attractive over the long term, it requires leadership with a strong appetite for risk over a long period of time,” writes ML engineer Tanmay Chopra.

Three others from the TC+ team:

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Big Tech inc.

Frederic took a look at what Google was doing at this year’s Flutter Forward event and found that the open source framework had some new graphics capabilities, and is launching its first efforts to compile Flutter to WebAssembly and is working on a RISC-V support. He writes: “Almost all of these features are still in Canarian branches and behind experimentation flags, but they show where Google plans to take this project in the coming months.

Here are five more for you: