🇺🇦 Tech For Ukraine
Hacker Army, NFT Free Fall, & Friends with Benefits
We’d be wrong to go about this week as normal. It is anything but. The Grapevine is a small but mighty newsletter, and I think you’ll all join us in our wish that the situation in Ukraine gets better and fast. The one reassuring thing from the last week is how the whole world, and especially the tech world, has stood up and made themselves counted.
Scroll down and you’ll see various ways that people have supported Ukraine, and ways you can support right now 🇺🇦
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
9 tech & startup stories in 121 super short seconds.
🇺🇦 Hacker Army Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have joined various volunteer units to fight for Ukraine… in the cyber world. This often involves distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Russian businesses, as well as identifying and fixing potential Ukrainian vulnerabilities. Keep it up!
🎨 Ukraine to Issue NFTs. Following £38m in crypto donations, Ukraine is planning to launch a series of NFTs to fund their armed forces. This is truly brilliant. Read more here.
📉 N-F-Free-Fall NFTs may have been all the rage the last few months, but data shows that daily sales are down 83% from their all-time high. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the price has dropped 30%. Is this a red flag for the market? or to be celebrated that prices are finally coming down so the less wealthy can pick them up?
🤔 What’s Web3? Good question! Have a listen to Benedict Evans’ podcast on what ‘web3’ means, what noise you should ignore and what questions we should be asking. Have a listen here.
👒 Walmarts Virtual Clothing! Walmart is now letting customers try on clothing virtual clothes using a ‘computer vision neural network’ powered feature. Customers can select a model that matches their body type and see how clothes they want to buy look on that model. Read more here.
🚗 Spotify’s Car Thing! Spotify have launched their first hardware product called ‘Car Thing’. The gadget is meant to sit on the dashboard of your car, connect to your spotify and play music and podcasts. This is super cool, and it’s a great move from Spotify to try and draw you into their ecosystem. Check out the Car Thing here.
👇 Klarna Loses $748m. The Swedish Buy Now Pay Later giant has reported a huge financial loss in 2021. So Klarna is doomed? Nope. Klarna now has 46m customers in 45 countries and reported an operating income of $1.6bn.
🎮 Netflix and Game Netflix has acquired Next Games, the makers of mobile games based on several TV shows, for $72m. It signifies a big push into gaming by Big Tech (triggered by Microsoft’s $75bn purchase of Activision Blizzard), but also shows how Netflix is building a further ecosystem around their content. To us, it strikes a lot of similarities to Disney’s approach.
💲 Friends with Benefits (no not that kind) A decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) called ‘Friends with Benefits’ has grown into a social club of 6000 members for crypto’s ‘creative class’. It is said to be the modern Soho House and costs around $3,400 (at today’s prices) to join. Read the story of the organisation here.
🇺🇦 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.
Want to have a chat?
Shoot us an email at founders@onthegrapevine.co
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis