So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 150 super short seconds.
🥽 The Fidelity Metaverse! US Investment firm Fidelity has launched a gamified financial education experience in Decentraland (one of the more popular metaverses). Is this actually a great channel to educate people about their finances? Read more here.
💰 Robinhood Layoffs. Robinhood has laid off 9% of it's workforce. Why? The company scaled incredibly quickly last year, and this year growth has stalled (with less trading activity in the equities and crypto markets). Read more here.
🪂 Another Crypto Airdrop? Optimism a product that sits on-top of Ethereum is ‘airdropping’ tokens to its users. Why? These tokens will reward early adopters and will be used in their new community as a mechanism to vote on important issues.
💰 LeftLane Capital Closes a $1.4bn Fund. The New York based VC firm has raised a huge new fund to continue to invest in consumer tech. LeftLane has invested in Calm, Weezy, Freetrade and M1 finance in the past! Read more here.
🤑 Everyone Has a Boss Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, we’re sure you’ve seen the news that Elon Musk will likely acquire Twitter. Nevertheless, just because he’s buying the company, doesn’t mean he’s the boss entirely. This week, he lost a bid to get out of an agreement with regulators to require oversights of his tweets about Tesla.
🤖 Open Sourcing Twitter? Elon Musk’s idea to show the world Twitters algorithms might have some fatal flaws. MIT has made the argument that exposing these algorithms (of which there are many) may not tech us much about how they actually work. Read more here.
🧠 Not-So Smart Contracts. An NFT launch this week went wrong, with $34m of Ethereum being ‘locked’ in a smart contract. It’s completely unretrievable! Read more about this here, or better understand smart contracts by clicking here.
📉 Fast Follower After one click checkout company Fast went bankrupt earlier this month, there has been rumours about their primary competitor Bolt. This week, their biggest customer sued Bolt for ‘utterly’ failing to deliver on their promised capabilities. Beginning of the end for another one click checkout company or unfortunate timing?
📷 Drone Cam Snap has unveiled a new product… a flying camera named ‘Pixy’. It’s the ultimate selfie camera meaning there’s no more need for ‘selfie arm’ in photos. It’s not cheap though.. it retails for $230. We doubt this’ll be around long (just like the Spectacles).
💀 CNN Dead The Newest Streaming Service You’ll Never Use? CNN+. It’s ending about a month after its launch and tens of millions of dollars of investment. Its demise was not only due to poor early results, but also a lot of politics and differing strategies amongst their group companies.
👩🚀 Cryptonauts We’re always on the hunt for the best crypto projects. Our current favourite? Crypto Space Agency. Their mission is to bring together the space and crypto communities, with their first objective to send members of the CSA community into space. Bezos’ Blue Origin has confirmed CSA has purchased a seat on an upcoming flight.
🇺🇦 Supporting Ukraine 🇺🇦
We’re incredibly saddened at the current situation unfolding in Ukraine. We want to actively state that we stand by the people of Ukraine and are encouraging all our readers to donate via RedCross here.
£10 could provide a hygiene kit to a family of five, giving them supplies to stay healthy for a month
£20 could provide five blankets to families taking shelter
£33 could provide 40 chlorine tablets to ensure that families have access to clean, safe water
£72 could provide a thermometer to help treat those who have fallen ill
£210 could provide a fully equipped first aid kit, including supplies, to a first aider treating those wounded
If you also want to help in other ways (e.g. joining a protest, hosting Ukrainians or support the cyber defence) then check this link.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis & Bitcoin