😲 Bank Makes Profit
GMO Trees, Napster's Comeback & Satya on ChatGPT
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 117 super short seconds.
🔵 Twitter Blue ! To everyone’s surprise, 180,000 folks are now paying for Twitter Blue. Big revenue? Not really…great start, yep! Read more here.
🏦 NatWest Goes…Fintech? The UK Bank has acquired an 85% stake in Cushon for $144m. Cushon offers ISAs, GIA and Pension products and has £1.7bn of assets under management. Their signature product is a ‘Net Zero’ pension with a friendly UI. Read more about the deal here.
😲 Bank Makes Profit Revolut has finally released its 2021 annual reports…showing its first-ever year of profit. Its foreign exchange and wealth division (inc. crypto) was responsible for 55% of total revenues. There’s still some suspicion around their reporting practices but this does represent a big moment for the neobank model.
🎵 Remember Napster? Yes…Napster that’s right. They’ve just purchased Mint Songs, an NFT Marketplace for music. Napster is doubling down on their web3 strategy and has set up a separate entity to make more acquisitions just like this.
📈 The Satya Show! Checkout this fantastic interview on ChatGP3, the future of search and speculation on how Google might respond 👇
🖥️ Intel’s Last Legs? Have a read of this blog here, which discusses the future of Intel. TLDR? Intel is going away, but it’s certainly not the tech giant it once was.
😎 An AR Moncole! If you want to look like the Monopoly Man we suggest you invest in this Kickstarter Campaign. All jokes aside, Monocole is a pocked sized AR device you fix onto your glasses, pretty cool eh.
📺 Record Twitcher Kai Cenat might not yet be a household name, but he’s just broken Twitch’s record for the most amount of subscribers. The 21-year-old streamed for 24 hours a day for the month of February in an effort to drive up subs to 300,000.
🌲 GMO Trees Could genetically modified trees save us from climate change induced oblivion? Living Carbon, a biotech company, has engineered poplar trees to grow wood at turbocharged rates while absorbing Co2 from the air. It’s by no means a proven fix though; they have very limited peer-reviews. Let’s hope.
👮 Engineering FTX’s Downfall Nishad Singh is the FTX alum that you’re probably the least familiar with. As FTX’s director of engineering, he wrote the code that allowed SBF to divert FTX funds to Alameda and knew about the misappropriation of funds. This week he pled guilty to six criminal counts, including wire fraud. His story is interesting, read more here.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis