Only Products and Other Stuff

Amazon has struck a deal with embattled online mortgage lender Better.com to offer up a new benefit to employees. Better.com is launching Equity Unlocker , a program that allows employees to use their vested equity as collateral for a down payment when trying to buy homes. Amazon employees in Florida, New York and Washington State will be the first to try the tool. Unique about the program, according to Better.com, is that employees will have the ability to finance their homes without actually selling their shares, only needing to pledge vested equity. Even former Amazon employees with vested equity can use the service, according to Better.com, and there are many, following Amazon’s companywide layoffs . Current and ex-workers can also use the mortgage tool for secondary vacation homes or investment properties. The closing cost, when the loan is secured, ranges between 2% and 5% of the loan, Better said on its website. There is a catch, however.  As reported earlier today by th...

StudentFinance , a European fintech that funds educational programs for individuals through so-called income share agreements , has raised €39 million ($41 million) in a Series A round of funding. Founded out of Spain in 2019, StudentFinance partners with educational institutions such as Ironhack and  Le Wagon to help finance those looking to upskill into disciplines like software development, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, serving as an alternative to traditional bank or student loans. The company says that it has developed AI models to discover the most in-demand skills across sectors and map this to the most suitable education providers catering to that gap. “We monitor and track publicly available job listing data, showing trends and fluctuations in labour demand,” StudentFinance co-founder and CEO Mariano Kostelec explained to TechCrunch. “We also use data from analyzing systemic and market changes such as government incentives for companies to become ‘gree...

Una Brands , a Singapore-based e-commerce aggregator, has raised $30 million in pre-Series C financing just five months after announcing its $30 million Series B funding  that was raised in September of last year.  Northstar Group, a regional private equity firm, is the sole investor in Una Brands’ latest round, which involves a mix of equity and debt, though Una Brands declined to break out how much equity versus debt the newest round involves. It also declined to disclose its valuation when asked. The company has now raised more than $100 million in total funding since its inception in 2021, and says it will use the new capital to continue developing its platform and buying up more direct-to-consumer brands in categories like home and living, mom and baby, and beauty and personal care.  Una Brands has differentiated itself as an Asia-focused e-commerce aggregator capable of operating brands across all channels, such as Amazon, Shopify, Shopee, Lazada and Tokopedia...

Mammoth, a recently launched Mastodon app that’s trying to make it easier on users who want to join the decentralized social web, has a notable financial backer. The company confirmed that its leading pre-seed investor is Mozilla, a proponent of the open web, which invested in the company’s first general round alongside others, including Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff. The company has a unique founding story as well. The app was originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, the creator behind a number of apps, including the whimsical music app Vinyls and the Twitter client Aviary 2 . The latter was impacted by Elon Musk’s Twitter API changes, which put an end to third-party Twitter clients , prompting Mehboob to turn his attention to the decentralized and open source Twitter alternative Mastodon. Mammoth was the result of those efforts, but it has since been acquired by the company that’s now running the project, led by principal developer Bart Decrem. No...

The Block -owned music streaming service TIDAL is shifting the way it pays artists after an experimental program failed to generate results. Unlike Spotify and other market leaders, which pay musicians small fractions (…of fractions) of pennies for each play, TIDAL has taken a more imaginative approach to artists payouts. The platform, which targets consumers who seek a higher-quality audio experience, introduced a novel direct artist payouts (DAP) program last year. For customers on the $19.99/month HiFi Plus tier, each individual subscriber’s most-listened artist would get 10% of their subscription fee. As it turns out, that plan didn’t work. In April, TIDAL will end the DAP program. “The DAP program focused only on a listener’s #1 artist, which left much, much less room for emerging artists to get paid,” TIDAL CEO Jesse Dorogusker wrote in a Twitter thread today. He said that 70,000 artists were enrolled in the program, but they only paid out $500,000, which was “far short” of ...

The NFT market may be finding its footing again as the market for non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain surpassed $1 billion for the first time since May 2022. Amid the recent rebound, NFT marketplace Blur has also bested the once-largest NFT marketplace OpenSea in monthly volume for the third month in a row as the crypto market debates the issue of NFT creator royalties. Earlier this month, Blur also released its highly anticipated token airdrop, which disbursed about 360 million Blur tokens to users, or about 12% of the project’s total supply. Many speculated that Blur activity would fall off after its airdrop lure concluded. Instead, trading volume on the marketplace continued to grow. The rise of Blur in the NFT market has helped reignite a debate concerning royalties. In previous quarters, OpenSea tried to balance creator royalties as it held the top position for NFT marketplaces, but Blur’s aggressive stance is causing OpenSea to change its tack. Blur’s NFT marketplac...

At a session on the future of 6G during Mobile World Congress, expert speakers from companies such as Samsung, the European Space Agency and Telefonica came together to give their views about how 6G will play out. The first thing to note is that it’s not arriving any time soon. The projections are that the likes of you and I will only get 6G into our hot little hands from around 2030 onwards, so it would be best to quell your ire for now. That said, the prospect of having a device streaming at least a terabyte of data into your eyeballs is enough to set our geeky hearts racing. We are talking about 100 times the capacity of 5G, with sub-millisecond latencies. Present on the panel was Kimberley Trommler (Head of Thinknet 6G, Bayern Innovativ GmbH), Yue Wang (Head of 6G Research, Samsung Research UK), Xavier Lobao (Head of Future Telecom Projects Division, European Space Agency), and Nicolas Kourtellis (Principal Research Scientist, Co-Director, Telefónica Research). Asked if they had...

After several rounds of layoffs , Twitter’s staff is down from about 7,500 employees to less than 2,000 — and one of the numerous cuts across the company eliminated the platform’s entire accessibility team last year. In an open letter to Elon Musk, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) called on the new Twitter owner to bring the accessibility team back. “Not surprisingly, since you shut down Twitter’s Accessibility Team, disabled users have reported increased difficulty and frustration using Twitter,” Markey wrote . Like any social platform, Twitter has had its foibles when it comes to accessibility — in 2020, Twitter didn’t even have an accessibility team and only established one after public outcry when the company rolled out voice tweets without captions. But in the few years Twitter did have an accessibility team, the company rolled out features for alt text on images, automatic captioning on videos, and captions for Spaces live audio rooms and voice tweets. Many disabled users foun...

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Today we’re thinking of the four astronauts heading to the International Space Station. See you guys soon! In this issue: Artificial gravity space station startup Vast makes its first acquisition Relativity Space sets a launch date News from Momentus, United Launch Alliance and more Vast acquires Launcher in quest to build artificial gravity space stations Vast Space , a company that emerged from stealth last September with the aim of building artificial gravity space stations in low Earth orbit, has acquired space tug startup Launcher. The acquisition, a first for Vast, will give the company access to Launcher’s Orbiter space tug and payload platform and its liquid rocket engine, E-2. Under the terms of the deal, Vast will also absorb all of Launcher’s talent, including Launcher founder Max Haot, who will join as president. The deal could be a big accelerator for Vast; the company’s founder, billionaire crypto pioneer Jed McCaleb, said Vast w...

While the chatter around the metaverse has slowed down, both social media companies and phone manufacturers have been experimenting with tech that could lead to commercial AR glasses. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Xiaomi unveiled its new prototype Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, which weighs 126 grams and has a “retina-level” display. Xiaomi has used a pair of MicroLED screens with a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and free-form light-guiding prisms to recreate an image. The company said that when PPD (pixels per degree) reaches 60, humans can’t perceive individual pixels. The Xiaomi AR glass display boasts 58 PPD, so that’s close enough. Xiaomi said it is using electrochromic lenses to adjust viewing in different light conditions. The glasses also have a complete blackout mode for a fully immersive experience — kind of making it like a VR headset. The new AR glasses connect wirelessly to your phone, which should be a Xiaomi 13 series phone or any other ...

Qualcomm announced at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) that multiple phone makers including Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Motorola, Nothing and Honor are bringing satellite communication capabilities to their phones. However, manufacturers didn’t provide details about what devices will first have these features and when the companies would launch them. Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon Satellite tech in partnership with satellite service provider Iridium at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last month. Using this solution, smartphones can have capabilities of two-way texting and other messaging applications using satellites in emergency situations. The chipmaker said that Snapdragon Satellite will be available across upcoming RF modems and multiple models of 8 and 4 series processors for smartphones. “ By incorporating Snapdragon Satellite into next – generation devices, our partners will be able to offer satellite messaging capabilities thanks to a mature and commercially available ...

CRED is rolling out a buy now and pay later service and a tap to pay feature as the Indian fintech platform broadens its offerings to boost engagement and monetization on the platform. Cred flash, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s foray into buy now and pay later category, will allow customers to make seamless payment on the app and across over 500 partner merchants including Swiggy, Zepto and Urban Company and clear the bill at no charge in 30 days. The customized credit extended to customers will allow them to make bill payments and recharges and other expenses with a single swipe and without having to wait for an OTP authentication code, said the startup, which is valued at over $6 billion . The service, powered by RBI-registered NBFC Parfait Finance and Investments Pvt Limited, will initially roll out to a select group of customers, the startup said. The BNPL product is the latest in a series of new offerings from CRED in recent years as it moves to make its eponymous fintec...

New smartphones may get most of the headlines at MWC, but at its core, the annual trade show is still a telco event. It’s maybe no surprise then that the large cloud providers, who are all vying for the lucrative telco market, also made a few announcements ahead of the event. AWS jumped ahead of its competitors by announcing its news a week early and today, it’s Microsoft’s turn. The new features the company today announced for telco’s using its Azure cloud services focus on four areas: network transformation, automation and AI, network-aware applications and what Microsoft calls “ubiquitous computing from cloud to edge.” “The future hyperscale cloud is going to look a lot different than the cloud we have today,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s EVP for Strategic Missions and Tech, told me. “Our expectation is that it’s going to expand; it will be a highly distributed fabric; it’s going to span from 5G to space. That future — this intelligent cloud, this intelligent edge — has to be powered...

Twitter has laid off at least another 50 employees, according to a report from The Information and posts on social media from former workers. And apparently not even Elon Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, the chief executive of Twitter payments who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription, was spared, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer . Alex Heath of The Verge also confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading many to speculate that Musk is cleaning house to redecorate with a new regime. Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss. When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD — Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022   The layoffs came this weekend after...

It takes a particular kind of chutzpah go up against the behemoths, especially when it comes to AR glasses. We already have Microsoft’s Hololens and Google Glass is being marketed as an enterprise device. But ThirdEye thinks its up for the challenge. ThirdEye is a spin-off of a project for the Department of Defense. Stealthily, it has been making steady in-roads into the AR smart glasses and the accompanying AI software space. The ThirdEye glasses may look like safety goggles — and they are, to some degree — but they do much more. The company’s second-gen X2 MR lets people access documents or schematics hands-free while working on a project. Live digital information can be projected onto the user’s field of view; it can also relay live images to a tablet or phone, allowing colleagues to provide guidance or oversee an activity. There’s also a low-resolution thermal sensor built into the glasses. And they’re lightweight. The company quickly found a customer in the military, which is...

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Storied venture firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested more in fintech than any other category in 2022, according to research from CB Insights. I’m not going to lie — upon learning this, my fintech-loving ears perked up. Sequoia apparently was fairly active overall last year despite the global downturn, with over 100 investments. And fintech represented n...