Praveen chintu

WhatsApp parent company Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a faster and "more private" way to transfer WhatsApp chat history between two devices. The new feature will enable users, for the first time, to preserve their complete chat and media history without having to exit the app. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/aNEvHSR

Four years after partnering with Apple on the launch of the Apple Card , Goldman Sachs may be eyeing the exits. The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman is “looking for a way out” of its high-profile deal with Apple, which recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Card holders.  The investment banking firm is apparently in talks to offload the partnership to American Express, the WSJ report added, but so far nothing seems to be set in stone, nor is it clear if Apple would support the handoff. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if such an arrangement comes to pass. Earlier this year, Goldman CEO David Solomon said he was “ considering strategic alternatives ” for the investment firm’s consumer arm. Beyond its deal with Apple, Goldman’s consumer-facing business includes a credit card partnership with General Motors as well as GreenSky, the lending company Goldman bought for $2.2 billion in 2021 . For their part, Apple and Goldman did not immediately respond ...

Travis VanderZanden’s slow-motion departure from Bird is now complete. The scooter rental company announced in a late-Friday news dump that the executive has stepped down from his role as chairperson of Bird’s board, “ effective immediately .” Replacing VanderZanden is John Bitove, who played a role in saving Bird’s bacon this past December via its merger with Bird Canada. VanderZanden had led the micromobility company from its inception as its president and founding CEO, but that all changed last year when Bird’s declining stock price culminated in a delisting warning from the New York Stock Exchange. Soon after, VanderZanden stepped down from his role as president , handing over the title to Bird’s then-chief operating officer Shane Torchiana. Torchiana went on to assume the CEO post as well several months later. At the time, VanderZanden called the reorg a “long-planned transition.” According to Bird,  VanderZanden “decided to step down [from the board] to pursue other ve...

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how some of the biggest companies in the world have as much — if not more — power than entire countries. Most countries, at least, have some level of democratic oversight, but that isn’t true in the same way for companies. My question, then: In a world where the policies of, say, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter become de facto standards all around the world, should we have a greater degree of say (TC+) in what those policies are? The other thing that’s kept me busy this week is fundraising. Alex talked with 11 VCs (TC+) about how hard it was for their companies to raise so far this year. Meanwhile, I talked with a number of founders who were really struggling to raise money. The truth is, the founders struggling the most have three things in common (TC+). Now let’s take a look at what happened in the world of startups this week. Notes from the securi...

Canada has enacted a new law called Bill C-18, popularly known as the Online News Act, that requires two companies (Meta and Google) to pay publishers for showing links to news in their products. Google has argued that this is "the wrong approach to supporting journalism in Canada." Bill C-18 has become law and remains unworkable, Google said. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/fYGJmeU

Seoul-based e-commerce company Levit , an operator of the shopping app Alwayz , wants to make the shopping experience more entertaining and affordable. The two-year-old startup has recently raised $46 million in a Series B round of funding led by DST Global Partners with participation from new investor BOND and existing backers KB Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Korea Investment Partners, GS Ventures, and Klim Ventures. With the latest round, Levit has raised a total of $67 million since its inception. Alwayz offers a wide range of products, from daily groceries to home appliances and apparel to cosmetics. But it deviates from typical e-commerce platforms by incorporating social features like short videos and gamification into online shopping to draw customers.  For example, users can earn rewards by playing games nurturing the pig character Don-Don-E, or receive crops in real life after successfully cultivating crops by playing a game called AI-Farm in its app. In addition, Alw...

The moment Amazon feared when FTC Chair Lina Khan was appointed may soon arrive: Bloomberg reports that the agency is putting the final touches on its most substantial antitrust case against the tech giant, and could file suit in the next few weeks. According to documents viewed by Bloomberg and sources familiar, the upcoming suit will allege that Amazon systematically disadvantages merchants who don’t use certain “optional” services like “Fulfilled by Amazon.” If the FTC can show that Amazon is maliciously manipulating a market it has something like monopoly power in, it could make the case that the company needs to be broken up or restructured. To do so is not easy, however: Amazon grew fat under the doctrine that essentially, if consumers aren’t directly affected, even something that looks, walks and talks like a monopoly isn’t one. Khan famously challenged this doctrine in an extensive law review article that marked her as a rising star and potentially the biggest threat to a s...

Ayal Yogev Contributor Share on Twitter Ayal Yogev is the co-founder and CEO of Anjuna , a multi-cloud confidential computing platform. Generative AI has the potential to change everything. It can inform new products, companies, industries, and even economies. But what makes it different and better than “traditional” AI could also make it dangerous. Its unique ability to create has opened up an entirely new set of security and privacy concerns. Enterprises are suddenly having to ask themselves new questions: Do I have the rights to the training data? To the model? To the outputs? Does the system itself have rights to data that’s created in the future? How are rights to that system protected? How do I govern data privacy in a model using generative AI? The list goes on. It’s no surprise that many enterprises are treading lightly. Blatant security and privacy vulnerabilities coupled with a hesitancy to rely on existing Band-Aid solutions have pushed many to ban these too...

Everyone knows that raising venture capital has been harder for startups lately — unless you are building an AI startup , of course. But instead of only talking to founders, we’re flipping the script today. We wanted to hear from investors how their portcos are handling a cash-light environment. To that end, TechCrunch+ recently asked 11 VCs how the first half of 2023 bore out for their investments. From their answers, it appears a startup’s ability to fundraise in today’s climate is based on several key factors, including capital efficiency, the market and its needs. Q2 failed to bring a funding reprieve for web3 startups and unicorns How bad was H1 2023? Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy was succinct when we asked how 2023 was shaping up for his firm’s portfolio companies: “Fundraising is challenging, full stop.” “Challenging” is a good descriptor. So is “quiet,” which is how Jason Lemkin of SaaStr Fund put it. For Kaitlyn Doyle of TechNexus Venture Collaborative, the year has...

Fund of funds (FoF) were created to serve as a bridge for LPs to get access to managers they couldn’t back otherwise. But in an environment where funds are not seeing consistent support from their existing LPs, and there are more venture funds than ever, is their role still relevant? Fund of funds fundraising — say that five times fast! — has declined for years. To compare, traditional U.S. venture firm fundraising set a record in 2022 with $162 billion. U.S.-based VC FoF raised just $400 million in the first quarter of 2023, according to PitchBook, and $3 billion in 2022. This compares to $24.4 billion in 2021 and $33.7 billion — the fundraising peak — in 2017. It’s not surprising why many LPs have soured on the strategy, said Kyle Stanford, a senior venture analyst at PitchBook. For one, backers of these funds pay a mix of fees to both the FoF and the underlying commitments the FoF manager makes. “LPs have that double layer of fees. And that extra time it takes after [an ...

Pokémon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 employees today, just one year after it laid off around 90 employees . During last year’s layoffs, Niantic canceled four projects, including a Transformers game. Some Niantic games will meet the same fate this time around. After four months in the App Store, Niantic is shutting down NBA All-World ; the company will also cancel production on a game based on the Marvel franchise. “In the wake of the revenue surge we saw during Covid, we grew our headcount and related expenses in order to pursue growth more aggressively,” CEO John Hanke wrote in an email to employees , cross-posted to the company blog. This has been a common refrain among the hundreds of tech companies that have conducted layoffs over the last year — companies claimed they overhired during the pandemic and now need to right-size their teams. In Niantic’s case, Hanke said that revenue has returned to pre-pandemic levels, and new projects have not delivered as much revenue as they ...

Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here . Credit card giant Visa is acquiring Brazilian payments infrastructure startup Pismo for $1 billion in cash in what is likely one of the largest fintech M&A deals taking place this year so far. Founded in 2016 by Juliana Motta (CPO), Ricardo Josua (CEO), Daniela Binatti (CTO), and Marcelo Parise (VP of engineering), São Paulo-based Pismo has quietly racked up a list of big-name customers, including Citi, Itaú (one of Brazil’s largest banks), Revolut, N26, Nubank and Cora. The startup processes almost 50 billion API calls and $40 billion in transaction volumes annually, and powers almost 80 million accounts and over 40 million issued cards. For some context of the explosive growth Pismo has seen, at the beginning of 2021, it was doing less than $1 billion per month in transaction volume, according to Josua. It ended 2020 with fewer than 10 million accounts total.  Over time, Pismo has expanded out of its home country an...

Just over one year ago, spend management decacorn Brex declared that it was “ less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers ” in an announcement that caused shock waves in the startup community. While Brex soon clarified that by smaller customers it meant small to medium-sized businesses and non-funded startups, the move still felt like a stunning reversal, considering the company had started its life as a credit card company for startups . The announcement came about two months after Brex announced a “ big push into software ” and that it was placing greater emphasis on moving upmarket to serve larger, enterprise customers. But then in March, Silicon Valley Bank imploded .  Brex was one of the bidders for the early-stage and growth portfolios of the bank, which was known for providing a swath of financial services to the startup community. Ultimately, First Citizens Bank took over, but some of those former clients shunned the idea of working with such a large bank a...

David Lazovsky and Preet Virk, technologists with backgrounds in semiconductor engineering and photonics, came to the joint realization several years ago that AI and machine learning workloads would quickly encounter a “data movement” problem. Increasingly, they predicted, it would become challenging to move data to and from compute hardware as AI models scaled past what could be kept on the die of any one memory chip. Their solution — architected by Phil Winterbottom, previously a researcher at the distinguished Bell Labs — was an optical interconnect technology for compute-to-compute, compute-to-memory and on-chip data transmission. Along with Winterbottom, Lazovsky and Virk founded a startup, Celestial AI , to commercialize the tech. And now, that startup is attracting big backers. Celestial AI today announced that it raised $100 million in a Series B round led by by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund. The tranche, which brings C...

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot , has taken the world by storm. Capable of writing emails, essays and more given a few short prompts, ChatGPT has become one of the fastest-growing apps in history. Beyond that, it’s begun to find a place in the enterprise, particularly with the launch of plugins that connect the chatbot to third-party apps, websites and services. Most recently, ChatGPT Plus subscribers now have access to a new feature called Browsing, which allows ChatGPT to search Bing for answers to prompts and questions. But ChatGPT isn’t always the most cooperative assistant . Getting it to output something specific requires careful fine-tuning of the prompts. A number of resources and guides for ChatGPT prompt writing have sprung up since the tool’s launch. But not all of them are especially easy to follow — or intuitive. To help folks both new to ChatGPT and looking to learn new tricks, we’ve compiled a list of the best ChatGPT prompts for different types of workflows —...

Tata Communications has agreed to acquire US-based communication platform service provider Kaleyra Inc. for $100 million. The deal includes the acquisition of Kaleyra's debt and is subject to approval from stockholders and regulatory authorities. Kaleyra, with 640 employees across 16 offices, provides omnichannel communication services such as messaging, video, and voice-based services. Tata Communications expects the acquisition to result in short-term dilution in EBITDA but anticipates positive growth in the mid-term, driven by synergies and infrastructure capabilities. The acquisition will also allow Tata Communications to expand its customer base and global presence. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/G7oUs0R

The United States Department of Homeland Security caused a stir last February when it revealed that it was exploring deploying robot dogs on the U.S./Mexico border. “The southern border can be an inhospitable place for man and beast, and that is exactly why a machine may excel there,” the DHS’s Brenda Long said at the time. “This [Science and Technology Directorate]-led initiative focuses on Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicles, or what we call ‘AGSVs.’ Essentially, the AGSV program is all about…robot dogs.” The story raised the ire of several Democratic politicians, including New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted, “It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarization. From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan + non-controversial, yet healthcare + housing isn’t. It’s BS.” It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend thei...

In wake of Twitch’s seemingly unattainable Partner Plus program , which grants a 70/30 subscription revenue split on the first annual $100,000 that qualifying Partners make, jaded streamers are claiming that they’ll move to the streaming rival Kick .  The new livestreaming platform offers streamers a 95/5 subscription revenue split — a fraction of Twitch’s standard 50% cut, which it takes from both Affiliates and Partners. Though it isn’t uncommon for new social platforms to use bait and switch tactics to attract new users, many streamers are already flocking to Kick. It’s possible that Kick will change its revenue split as it grows, or move the goalposts to qualify for monetization, but the site has already signed prominent streamers.   Major Twitch creators have been swayed into joining Kick, including Félix “xQc” Lengyel, who signed a $100 million non-exclusive deal with the platform last week. Days later, Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa also announced that she’s...