Month: July 2021

Facebook just announced plans to pay content creators more than $1 billion by the end of next year through new bonus programs designed to keep creatives plugged into its app ecosystem. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the new funding to “reward creators for great content” on his Facebook page. The company will
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There is an art to engineering, and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, those two worlds collided when they created the widely successful open-source graphics program, GIMP, as college students at Berkeley. That project was so successful that when the two joined Google in 2002, Sergey Brin and Larry Page
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The fintech funding continues to roll in at a rapid pace, a result of the huge shift underway in how consumers spend and manage their money. In the latest development, Revolut — the London-based financial “superapp” that provides banking, investing, currency transfer and other money management services to some 16 million users globally — this
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American Express is branching out into financial planning, with a little help from a seven-person startup called BodesWell. This week, the credit card giant launched a pilot of its first self-service digital financial planning tool, dubbed “My Financial Plan (MFP).” The six-month pilot kicked off on July 11 with about 25,000 select Amex cardmembers. American
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Every application is a palimpsest of technologies, each layer forming a base that enables the next layer to function. Web front ends rely on JavaScript and browser DOM, which rely on back-end APIs, which themselves rely on databases. As one goes deeper down the stack, engineering decisions become ever more conservative — changing the location of
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Leap, a platform for people over 55 to learn via social interaction, has raised $3.1M funding in a seed round led by European early-stage investor Creandum, and SF-based South Park Commons. Also participating was Learn Start/Learn Capital, alongside angels Michelle Kennedy (Peanut founder), Sahil Lavingia, and Tim Tuttle. Leap members gather online to collectively “learn,
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<a href=”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-13/apple-goldman-plan-buy-now-pay-later-service-to-rival-paypal”>Bloomberg broke news earlier this week that Apple, the consumer hardware giant with a rising services focus, is building a buy now, pay later (BNPL) service that will integrate with its Apple Pay system. The news sent shares of Affirm down just over 10% by the end of the day, and it shed 2.5%
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The company behind ubiquitous livestreaming software Streamlabs is introducing a new way for streamers to share their gaming highlights to platforms well beyond Twitch. Streamlabs calls the new tool Crossclip, and it’s available now as an iOS app and as a lightweight web tool. With Crossclip, creators can easily convert Twitch clips into a format
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Facebook’s lead regulator in the European Union must “swiftly” investigate the legality of data-sharing related to a controversial WhatsApp policy update, following an order by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB). We’ve reached out to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for a response. Updated terms had been set to be imposed upon users of
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Easy Eat AI, a Singapore-based startup that wants to “transform restaurants into technology companies,” announced today it has raised $5 million in funding. Easy Eat AI offers an operating system for restaurants that lets them digitize all parts of their business, from inventory and customer orders to delivery, and gain AI-based data analytics to improve
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Simpplr, a modern platform for building intranet sites (or ’employee communications and enablement platforms,’ as the company calls it), today announced that it has raised a $32 million Series C round led by Tola Capital. Norwest Ventures, which led the company’s Series B round last year, as well as Salesforce Ventures and George Still Ventures
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While retail investors grew more comfortable buying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2021, the decentralized application world still has a lot of work to do when it comes to onboarding a mainstream user base. Phantom is part of a new class of crypto startups looking to build infrastructure that streamlines blockchain-based applications and provides
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Anthony Cimino Contributor Anthony Cimino, head of policy at Carta, works with policymakers and innovators to drive economic opportunity through expanding equity ownership and private market liquidity. The increasing regulation of ESG (environmental, social, governance) disclosure reporting may have started in the public markets, but will almost certainly have downstream effects for private market actors
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