š¤ Apple's Secret New Team
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So, whatās happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? š Bezos steps down as Amazon CEO, Appleās head of hardware takes a new role, AI demonstrates a sexist attitude & Dogecoin rises to new heights š
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The Grapevine Newsflash š„
13Ā tech & startup stories inĀ 165Ā super short seconds.
š Bye Bye Bezos Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has stepped down as CEO to transition to a āExecutive Chairmanā role. He will be replaced by the cloud computing (AWS) chief, Andy Jassy. This is big. To get a sense of what this means, take a look at the Bezos era by numbers, or a run-down of all of the scandals during his tenure. Or, learn more about the new boss here.
š¤ Appleās Mystery New Team. Apple's Head of Hardware Engineering is moving roles working on an undisclosed project reporting directly to Tim Cook. Could this be Apple's secret electric vehicle? A pair of VR glasses? or something we haven't heard about yetā¦Read more here or read Apple's press release here.
š Bebo is Back The founder of old-school social network, Bebo, has relaunched the company with the intention to focus on profiles and ālive social networkingā. Michael Birch and his wife had sold Bebo for $850m to AOL, bought it back for $1m, and then sold it to Twitch again for $25m. Coming soon.
š° The UKās Newest Old Challenger Bank! This week we heard Fidelity is in talks to invest Ā£100 into Starling Bank. We've also seen Cashplus, a fifteen year old lender, secure a banking license and become the UKās newest challenger bank. Read more here.
š How are IPOs priced? Find out here.
š¤ Sexist AI! An AI was shown a cropped for of AOC, a prominent US Democrat Politician, and autocompleted her wearing a bikini. Read this interesting piece from MIT on how algorithms that have been trained through Reddit and Twitter are showing signs of embed racist and sexist ideas. Full article here.
š° $15bn Pricetag. Last month, Checkout raised $450m at a $15bn valuation to grow its āone-stop-shopā payments technology. Sifted has written a great article examining whether the $15bn price tag is justified. Have a read here.
š„ WSB on The Big Screen As the WallStreetBets noise dies down, the most influential players have been approached by Hollywood producers to turn it into a film. The founder of the Reddit sub-channel has in-fact sold the rights to his life story to the same studio who created āWonder Womanā amongst other big name films.
š« Facebook Banned A few days after a devastating military coup in Myanmar, use of Facebook has been blocked. Citizens had been posting images of protest against the coup including the three-finger salute shown in āThe Hunger Gamesā movies. Facebook is Myanmarās dominant online communication channel used by 50%+ of the population. Itās a worrying development and worth keeping an eye on.
š§ Is Email the New Old Thing? HubSpot has announced the acquisition of The Hustle, a daily business and tech newsletter with 1.5m subscribers. It was a big reason why we launched this newsletter in the first place so weāre delighted to see this. Itās reported to have had a $27m price tag which is pretty decent for an email newsletterā¦ (we wonāt sell out donāt worryā¦).
š Who Are Europes Top Young VCs? Sifted has published a list of Europeās top 30 young VCs here.
š Dogecoin to the Moon Crypto is reaching new heights this week, supported by high-profile proponents like Elon Musk. In particular, Dogecoin has blown past a $6bn market capitalisation. It seems to suggest crypto is becoming more mainstreamā¦ albeit powered by memes.
š TikTok v2? Thereās a new Chinese social app in town. Kuaishou allows users to create animated images (GIFs), short videos & live streams. They now have 769m monthly active users and went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange, soaring almost 200% on their first day of trading. Hereās a rundown of the company or take a look at this short video explanation.
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