🎂 Wikipedia Turns 20
What’s happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍 Big tech dominates the news, Samsung announces a robot that’ll pour you a glass of wine and new research shows that budgeting apps might not be good for our finances!
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
13 tech & startup stories in 183 super short seconds.
🚨 Trump Takedown It’s been a hell of a week for big tech & free speech. It’s been coming for a long time and now it’s all happening at once, here’s everything you need to know: Why was Parler shut down? How did Twitter’s CEO justify banning Trump? And what are Facebook & Twitter going to do about issues abroad?
☁️ The Future of Cloud! Greylock, a highly prestigious venture capital firm, has published a short article on the future of cloud technology which you can read here. For an easy summary of what Cloud is, check out this 3-minute video from AWS here.
📁 UK Gov Publishes its AI Report! You can check it out here. We're impressed.
🏦 Checkout Raises $450m. UK Fintech Checkout.com has raised Series C funding at a $15bn valuation. Checkout is building 'one-stop-shop' payments technology for large merchants like Transferwise, Deliveroo, and Samsung. Looking for a new move? Checkout currently has 120 open roles, which you can find here.
🚘 Tesla’s Unstoppable Stock Price! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has requested Tesla recall 158k Model S and Model X vehicles due to an issue over failing touch-screens. Has this impacted Tesla's share price? Nope. It's actually up slightly at the time of writing. Read more here.
📍 StreetCred Gets Snapped Up! Snapchat has acquired StreetCred, a startup building a platform for location data. Why? Snap is probably looking to use StreetCreds tech to enhance its Snap Map feature that shows users 'public' snaps around locational hotspots! Read more here or see a list of Snapchats 19 acquisitions here.
👛 Budgeting Blunder! If you're reading this newsletter, there is a very good chance you've, at some point, used a budgeting app. However, new research has shown that these apps may actually harm and not help users' budgeting habits. In a study of 1,000 adults, those who tracked spending via a smartphone were more likely to overspend. Read a summary of the original research here.
🤖 Butler Bot? Samsung is working on Bot Handy, a one-armed robot with two large digital eyes that can pour wine, do your laundry, set the table, or load the dishwasher. Although the bot is currently 'in development' you can get a sneak peek here.
🎂 Happy Birthday Wiki! It is Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary today. In that time they’ve published 56 million articles in 316 languages while 1.7bn people visit their site each month (while saving us countless times at university…). Check out this piece which sums up their journey.
🔐 Should You Control Your Data? The Inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has a new company. ‘Inrupt’ is a reaction to the amount of power and personal data that resides within tech giants. They’re creating Personal Online Data Stores (PODS) to allow each person to control their own data in a digital safe. They’ve raised $20m and have started work with a few partners.
💬 Private Messaging Boost Encrypted messaging services, Telegram & Signal, have experienced a huge increase in downloads as fears grow on the role of big tech companies and free speech. Telegram added 25m users in the few days after the Capitol attack and Signal added 1.3m users on Monday alone this week (a big increase from their average of 50k a day last year).
📷 The Creator Economy Onlyfans, a social network that allows individuals to sell content to subscribers, is now at 90m users (up from 120k in 2019) and 1m creators. It has become especially popular for models, sex workers and many other people trying to make some additional cash. However, it highlights how the pandemic has disproportionally affected women and Onlyfans isn’t always the answer.
💼 MeetingTech ‘Zoom Fatigue’ is on the rise as we spend more and more of our time on video calls. But what is the future of these meetings? Check out The Wall Street Journal’s take (it includes AI moderators, Fitbit for meetings & heart beat tracking).
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis