So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
As many of you know, we’d set ourselves a 1 month challenge to grow The Grapevine by 1,000 subscribers. Thanks to so many of you, we blew through that target and in the last month brought on 1,222 new subscribers. Welcome to the newcomers and thank you to all the people that shared us!!
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 139 super short seconds.
☕ Starbucks Enters Web3! The coffee giant has launched an NFT based loyalty program to its first group of beta testers. The goal is to reward loyal customers with coffee themed NFTs that link to real world experiences such as a trip to coffee farm in Costa Rica. This is a great use case, excited to see where this goes. Read more here.
🎉 Party in the Meta Union The metaverse… everyone’s favourite pastime. Well, the EU Commission for Foreign Aid thought it would be a great way to get young people engaged. So, they held a ‘gala’ concert costing around $400k and a total of five people turned up. This video shows what you missed out on.
🦄 An NFT Marketplace….Marketplace? Uniswap has launched an NFT marketplace. This twist? They enable you to purchase NFTs from multiple different marketplaces simultaneously. The web2 equivalent here is a site that lets you buy from Amazon, Ebay and Etsy all in one go. Read more about the launch here.
🧓 De-Age with Disney! Disney have released a machine learning product that de-ages people. There is a clear use-case here for films, production and photography. See it in action here.
🌎 Ikea is Saving The World! Pretty interesting article from Sifted around climate hardware tech, it looks like Ikea has backed more startups like this than the majority of VCs. The article also has examples of big deals that have been done in this space. Have a read here.
🐦 How Will Twitter Break? An engineer at Twitter has given their view of how Twitter might break in the coming weeks (one major bug has already been spotted here). Have a read here.
🎥 TikTok For E-Commerce. Amazon has launched a TikTok style feed to displays videos and photos of items you might want to buy. I think this has huge potential to increase conversions and creating a better shopping experience. Take a look here.
🔫 Killer Robots U-Turn San Francisco has become famous for its lack of discipline when it comes to crime. For a second though, it went rogue. Last week, legislators approved the use of robots equipped with lethal weapons. This triggered outrage and led to a complete reversal. Did it set a precedent?
👮 Guilty as Charged Off the back of Elizabeth Holmes’ 11 year sentence for fraud around Theranos, her COO (and former partner) Sunny Balwani was sentenced to 13 years. He’d pled not-guilty and insisted he wasn’t involved in key decision-making. However, when presented with a text from Sunny that said “I am responsible for everything at Theranos”, we think that defence fell apart.
🤑 Money & Power There’s visualisations… and there’s visualisations. This is the latter. This infographic will show you where all of the world’s money and markets are held - whether billionaires, companies countries, sectors, or stock markets. It taught us a lot.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis