👀 What TikTok Knows About You
Snapchat reaches $100bn, NFTs continue to explode, and are we in a simulation?
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 130 super-duper short seconds.
🎨 OpenSea Raises More Money. It’s been a wild year for NFTs. OpenSea, a site that lets people discover, buy and sell NFTs, has raised another $100m in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. They value the company at $1.5bn. You can read more about OpenSea here. Still struggling to get your head around NFTs? Watch this two-minute explainer video here.
👻 Snapchat’s Growth! Snapchat now has 293m daily active users and is growing faster than it ever has before. The company, once doubted by many, is now worth over $100bn. Read more here.
👀 What TikTok Knows About You We’ve all been there… you’re scrolling through TikTok and it just never ends. The algorithm seems to know you so well that all the content is so engaging. How? Check out this investigation from the Wall Street Journal into how TikTok’s algorithm discovers out your deepest desires.
📹 Is Anything Real Anymore? Deepfakes are developing fast. A new documentary about the famous chef, Anthony Bourdain, is under fire for using A.I. to mimic his voice. Is it ethical to do that without his approval prior? Also, take a look at this video explaining how a visual effects artist has created an incredibly realistic Tom Cruise deepfake that has amassed around 100m views on TikTok.
🚀 Latin America’s Fintech Boom! Check out this brilliant blog by a16z on the booming Latin American fintech scene. It covers some macroeconomic conditions alongside talks about some of the larger players like Nubank, the most valuable challenger bank in the world. Take a read here.
💻 Simulation Theory. Are we living in a detailed computer simulation? And how can we know for sure? Watch this great 4-minute video that digs into this topic. Youtube link here.
🏥 NHS Digital. Great blog here about how COVID has accelerated the NHS’ digital transformation journey. Have a read here.
🎵 TikTok The Music Company. TikTok has published some great statistics on how the app drives trends in the music industry and how it’s made creators famous overnight. Check it out here.
🤠 Space Cowboy Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, celebrated his retirement by… going to the edge of Space. He went in his very own Blue Origin rocket alongside his brother, aviator Wally Funk, and… student Oliver Daemen. This set several records including both the youngest person in space (18) and eldest (82). Check out the highlights from their interview after the flight here.
🧠 Brain Waves A competitor to Musk’s ‘Neuralink’ project, Paradromics has raised $20m to bring forward the future of brain implants. They’ve built an 8mm square module that gets implanted into the surface of the brain cortex. Microwires act to translate the brain’s bioelectric signals into digital ones that can be translated into actionable commands. It’ll be some time until we see this in humans though, with the hardware still being fine-tuned & regulators apprehensive.
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Over & Out,
Nick, Louis, & Isabel