Month: March 2021

Fireblocks has raised a $133 million Series C funding round led by Coatue, Ribbit and Stripes. The company provides several products that let you store, transfer and issue digital assets. In particular, Fireblocks provides custody to institutional investors — it currently stores $400 billion in cryptocurrencies. BNY and SVB Capital are also participating in today’s funding
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Facebook this morning announced it will increase the penalties against its rule-breaking Facebook Groups and their members, alongside other changes designed to reduce the visibility of groups’ potentially harmful content. The company says it will now remove civic and political groups from its recommendations in markets outside the U.S., and will further restrict the reach
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John S. Kim Contributor John S. Kim is CEO of Sendbird, makers of a customizable chat and messaging API service for mobile and web applications. Social+ companies are upping the stakes for everyone by giving consumers multiple benefits at once: products that serve a purpose but also meet our need for belonging to a community.
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Instagram and WhatsApp experienced an apparent outage on Friday. It began around 1:40 p.m. ET and lasted for more than half an hour. WhatsApp was unable to connect to the server, and messages were not being delivered. It’s not clear if the issue also affected Facebook Messenger, which last year rolled out new functionality to
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Facebook’s hardware strategy often looks pretty opaque from the outside. The company has done fairly well with Oculus sales amid pandemic demand. Even its Echo Show competitor Portal has seen a bump as people have been forced to socially distance. The company’s smartphone partnership with HTC, meanwhile, fell flat eight or so years back. Earlier
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Facebook develops a new way to interact with AR, Uber’s facial recognition policy faces scrutiny and SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster hits a major milestone. This is your Daily Crunch for March 19, 2021. The big story: Facebook shows off wrist-based interface This project comes out of Facebook Reality Labs and is supposed to present an
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The Swiss-based, venture capital-backed, direct air capture technology developer Climeworks is partnering with a joint venture between the government of Norway and massive European energy companies to map the pathway for a business that could provide not only the direct capture of carbon dioxide emissions from air, but the underground sequestration and storage of those
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Nancy Pfund Contributor Nancy Pfund is founder and managing partner of DBL Partners, a venture capital firm whose goal is to combine top-tier financial returns with meaningful social, environmental and economic returns in the regions and sectors in which it invests. It seems that every week a new agribusiness, consumer packaged goods company, bank, technology
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Micah Kotch Contributor Micah Kotch is the managing director at URBAN-X. Individual solutions to the collective crisis of climate change abound: backup diesel generators, Tesla powerwalls, “prepper” shelters. However, the infrastructure that our modern civilization relies on is interconnected and interdependent — energy, transportation, food, water and waste systems are all vulnerable in climate-driven emergencies.
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About four years ago, social impact organization Norrsken Foundation launched a small program investing around €30 million in capital it had received from its wealthy patron, Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth. Now, that initiative has become its own impact investment firm, Norrsken VC and, according to people familiar with the firm, is about to close on
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