Ben Smith / New York Times: After leaving Meta, Brandon Silverman, co-founder of Facebook-acquired CrowdTangle, has helped craft a bipartisan bill to boost social networks’ transparency — The co-founder of CrowdTangle has been working with Congress on legislation to make tech companies disclose their inner workings.
Author: Sophia
Sophia
Sophia is an entrepreneur and blogger. She is passionate about software, disruptive technology, personal development, and inspiring others.
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely steps down as CEO and names head of communications and marketing Ami Gan as his replacement; Stokely will remain as an adviser — OnlyFans named spokesperson Ami Gan as its new chief executive officer, replacing Tim Stokely, who founded and built the media company …
Alice Hancock / Financial Times: Dublin-based Flipdish, which provides tech for creating food ordering apps to ~7K restaurants in 25 countries, raises $96M led by Tencent at a $1.25B valuation — Food ordering app specialist benefits from rush to create restaurant delivery services during pandemic
Richard Lawler / The Verge: After experiencing an outage on Tuesday, Spotify says it is back up, and Discord says its services are coming back online with some limitations — Unrelated issues disconnected both services this afternoon — If you can’t connect to Spotify or Discord, then no, it’s not just you or your internet connection.
Catalin Cimpanu / The Record: Amid a shift in malware targeting UEFI firmware, Kaspersky details new MoonBounce UEFI bootkit that can survive even after swapping the infected PC’s hard drive — Security researchers from Kaspersky said on Thursday that they had discovered a novel bootkit that can infect a computer’s UEFI firmware.
Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch: After criticism from users, Discord CEO Jason Citron says it has no plans to add crypto and NFT tools to the service — Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron sought to reassure users Wednesday that the company doesn’t have impending plans to shift its business toward NFTs.
The Information: Sources: Bolt, which offers a one-click checkout service, is seeking to raise ~$400M at a $14B valuation, after raising $393M at an $11B valuation in October — With the ink barely dry on one fundraising effort by Bolt, a firm that makes e-commerce checkout software, the startup is already pitching investors on a new round.
uli Clover / MacRumors: Kuo: the 2022 MacBook Air will have a new form factor, an M1 chip, no mini-LED display, more color options, and is slated for production in late Q2 or Q3 2022 — Following today’s event that saw the introduction of the Mac Studio, respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has provided some detail …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: London-based Papier, which sells personalized paper-based stationery online, raises a $50M Series C led by Singular, bringing its total raised to $65M — Papier, a startup leveraging technology to bring very non-tech products into the world, has raised some funding to continue expanding …
em Aswad / Variety: John Lennon’s son Julian plans to auction off memorabilia as NFTs, including handwritten notes from Hey Jude; Lennon will retain the physical counterparts — “Lennon Connection: The NFT Collection” is presented by NFT marketplace YellowHeart and Julien’s Auctions.