đ« Escobar's Newest Enemy
Whatâs happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? đ Pablo Escobarâs Brother sues Klarna, Spotify continues its acquisition rampage and Chinaâs Singleâs Day break records.
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The Grapevine Newsflash đ„
12 tech & startup stories in 187 very short seconds.
đŁ Spotifyâs Acquisition Rampage! Spotify have acquired Megaphone, a podcast technology startup for publishers and advertisers, for $235m. Spotify has made a number of other deals in the podcasting space, acquiring Gimlet Media for $200m, Parcast for $56m, The Ringer for $196m, Anchor for $140m and signing a $100m distribution deal with Joe Rogan.
đ± Affordable Loan TikTok Dances? Challenger banks, in the face of increasing competition to acquire users, are turning to platforms like Instagram and TikTok to find new customers. Some are skeptical of the strategy while regulators are clamping down to make sure âFin-influencersâ arenât pushing bad products to people.
đș Netflix TV? Netflix is trailing a TV channel thatâs only accessible to Netflix subscribers through the Netflix platform in France. Pretty cool move and definitely something different for the streaming giant. Read more here. Â
đź Next Gen Consoles Come Out Gamers flocked to stores and pre-order websites in order to get their hands on the new Xbox Series X & Sony PS5 - with some people queueing up to 20+ hours to do so. Theyâre selling out quick but the question remains whether the gaming industry will maintain its pandemic-fueled growth once in-person forms of entertainment return.
đ€ WTF is Machine Learning? Want to learn more about Machine Learning but donât want to be overwhelmed with complexity and jargon? Read this 6 minute blog on the 5 types of Machine Learning Algorithms out there.
đŠ Railsbank Raises $37m! The UK based Banking-as-a-Service fintech offers APIs to enable banks and other fintechs to launch financial products like credit cards or loans in a few simple lines of code. Read more about Banking-as-a-Service here or checkout Railsbank here.
đ« Escobar Sues Klarna! Pablo Escobarâs brother is suing Swedish fintech giant Klarna for âŹ400,000. Escobar Inc, claims they sold thousands of branded mobile phones through Klarna and are yet to receive the money. Get the full scoop from Sifted here. Klarna is currently prepping for their IPO.
đ Unbiased Twitter? With Facebook and Twitter clamping down on the spread of election misinformation, Conservatives have flocked to Parler, a Twitter competitor that brands itself as a âFree Speech Social Networkâ. Parler soared past TikTok, Instagram and YouTube in the app store rankings this week too. Read more here.
đ Chipping Away at Intel Apple has announced a new set of Macs that, for the first time, use their own processors. This marks a break from Intel who have provided the. chips for Macs since 2005. Itâs another sign of the growing power and autonomy of large tech companies. The big benefit for us? Up to 20 hours of battery life.
đ€ Hopping into the the Cash Virtual events company, Hopin, has raised a $125m Series B round at a $2.1bn valuation just a few months after a $40m Series A. This is ridiculously fast and theyâve clearly been a huge winner from the Covid-enforced movement to digital events. According to the company, they have had more than 3.5m users and annual recurring revenue has gone from $0 at the beginning of the year to $20m. Oh.. and theyâre hiring like crazy.
đïž Shopping Spree Chinese retail giant, Alibaba, sold a record $75.1 BILLION of goods for this yearâs âSingles Dayâ - a holiday that celebrates people who are not in relationships. It was a big test of consumer confidence post-Covid and comes as regulatorâs apply pressure to the Chinese tech giants.
đ âSTOP THE LABELSâ Twitter announced that it labeled 300k tweets related to the election as disputed in the last week of October, thatâs 0.2% of the total. A big offender? 34% of Donald Trumpâs tweets were labeled. Twitter used this to suggest that this strategy worked to limit the spread of misinformation; expect this to continue.
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