💰 Parag's $40m Payday
Legs in the Metaverse, State of AI, & Gas
GM Grapeviners,
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 135 super short seconds.
🐦 Chief Twit It’s finally happened - Elon Musk has finally bought Twitter! Yesterday, he rocked up at the office carrying a kitchen sink and subsequently fired several key executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal. It’s rumoured the outgoing chief executive will be paid around $40m in severance… not bad for a year’s work.
🤖 Rogan & Jobs? This really is amazing. Podcast.ai has launched a 20 minute podcast of Joe Rogan interviewing the sadly long dead Steve Jobs. The Twist? The podcast has been generated completely by AI. This is truly mind blowing. Listen here.
📖 AI in 2022 Artificial Intelligence has re-emerged this year as the most talked about trend amongst investors and entrepreneurs. Want to understand exactly what is going on? Check out the renowned State of AI report for 2022 here.
😢 Flux = Shut. Flux, the digital receipts startup is shutting down. Flux give you a breakdown of each and every item you bought during a purchase on your banking app. This is super sad, for those of you who have been in fintech for a while, you’ll recognise Flux as one of the OGs of the community. Best of luck to the team. Read more here.
📦 TikTok Takes On Amazon The social media giant is building its own fulfilment centres in order to create an e-commerce supply chain. This’ll provide warehousing, delivery, and returns to enable ‘TikTok Shop’. The move from social media to e-commerce continues.
📈 The Chart-Topping App You Haven’t Heard About “Gas” is trouncing TikTok on the app charts currently. The anonymous question-and-answer app focuses on cultivating positivity and involves questions about your classmates. Users collect coins for answering questions, and can use them to unveil who answered questions about them.
🦵Meta Announces Legs! Facebook has announced a whole bunch of product updates including legs for their avatar. Our two favourite announcements? Their new $1,500 headset (video review here) and this new hyper realistic avatar of Zuck (video here).
📰 Meta Bins Bulletin. Facebook has shut down its subscription newsletter service given low adoption. Are we surprised? Nope. We use their biggest competitor called Substack and it’s awesome. Facebook seems to be spinning up and shutting down a whole bunch of new features recently (like it’s video dating service). Read more about Bulletin here.
🇨🇳 Biden Blocks Chips The US has ramped up its technological war on China by implementing tough controls on the export of American chip technology to the country. It’s a fascinating showcase of how technology is used to exert political power. Read more here.
🧠 The Mini Brain? Researchers have grown a ‘mini-brain’ in a lab and have taught it to play Pong, the 1970s 2D video game. Admittedly it’s not a Pong world champ yet, but this truly is brilliant. Have a read about the research here.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis