It’s round two of our Pub Quiz!
If you didn’t do too well on our first one, no worries — New Year’s Eve is around the corner, so we’ve created a second game to help you kick off the night.
Good luck, and Happy New Year!
(P.S: Remember to click the box and scroll.)
More than 40 investors share their top predictions for 2024 Investors aren't sure about the fate of IPOs and AI next yearIf I had to characterize 2023, I’d say it was the year of the great venture divide.
To find out, TechCrunch+ surveyed more than 40 venture capital investors about how they are preparing for next year and what they expect.
Some investors think exits will return in full force in 2024, but others predicted the industry would not see meaningful liquidity until 2025.
Several investors expect AI investing to cool next year, and an almost equal number think the sector will continue to remain red hot, only in different ways.
Lisa Wu, partner, Norwest Venture Partners: As multi-stage investors, we meet founders wherever they are on their journeys.
Financial Intelligence Unit, an Indian government agency which scrutinizes financial transactions, said Thursday nine global crypto exchanges — including Binance, Kraken, Kucoin and Mexc — are operating “illegally” in the country without complying with the local anti-money laundering act and asked the IT Ministry to block their websites.
Global crypto exchanges are required to comply with India’s anti-money laundering rules and cannot evade the guidelines just because they don’t have physical presence in the country, the government agency said.
Cryptocurrencies were brought into the ambit of anti-money laundering / counter financing of terrorism framework in India in March this year.
India began taxing virtual currencies last year, levying a 30% tax on the gains and a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction.
“Most Indian crypto exchanges are FIU registered entities and adhere with the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
In the past three years, a lot of companies launched DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and we even saw a brief period when those promises were fulfilled.
When the market was on the up and up, Black founders, like many other founders out there, were raising record amounts.
But come 2022, the market dipped, interest rates skyrocketed, investments nearly froze, hiring slowed, and widespread layoffs hit everyone.
Today, it almost feels like many of the promises the venture capital industry made in 2020 have gone unfulfilled.
To find out exactly how many kept their word, we checked up on some of those that made commitments to DEI following the BLM protests in 2020.Who kept their word?
Apple’s warnings in late October that Indian journalists and opposition figures may have been targeted by state-sponsored attacks prompted a forceful counterattack from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Behind closed doors, senior officials from Modi’s administration went further, demanding Apple soften the political impact of the warnings, Washington Post reports.
Senior officials summoned Apple representatives to insist they provide alternative explanations, even flying in an Apple security expert to meet with ministry leaders, the report adds.
For Apple, maintaining its commitment to user security took priority over risks to its growing India business.
Apple, which opened two official stores in India this year, plans to move 25% of iPhone production to India by 2025, according to JP Morgan analysts.
Once again, Etsy’s layoffs come as no surprise Junkification and fierce competition paint a tough path aheadRemember when we wrote that Spotify’s latest layoffs make sense?
Well, we feel the same about Etsy’s announcement that it would lay off 11% of its workforce.
This is not us being callous with employees affected by these layoffs, or making excuses for what led the NASDAQ-listed marketplace to that point and what could perhaps have been prevented.
We are just saying that this isn’t much of a surprise.
But more than quantitative, Etsy’s challenge is qualitative.
Pornhub’s parent company Aylo Holdings will pay $1.8 million to the U.S. government to resolve a charge of profiting off of sex trafficking.
In the worst cases, this can mean that victims of sex trafficking are portrayed in these adult videos against their will, or even without their knowledge.
By 2019, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of California indicted GDP for sex trafficking, among other charges.
But it wasn’t until several months after GDP was found guilty of sex trafficking that the network’s videos were removed from Pornhub and other Aylo sites.
Among other safety measures, the act requires platforms to comply with certain child protection provisions.
Spotify is pulling support for two music festivals in protest against a controversial new tax directed at music-streaming platforms operating in France, and threatened more action will follow in the coming months.
While all the major music-streaming platforms have come together in opposition to the new law, including Apple, Google’s YouTube, and local player Deezer, Spotify has been the most vocal.
In the wake of the announcement last week, Spotify said that the move was a “real blow to innovation,” and that it was evaluating its next moves.
The company later pulled a 180-degree turn when the government gave assurances that music-streaming platforms wouldn’t be expected to cover any extra costs resulting from the law.
“Spotify will have the means to absorb this tax, but Spotify will disinvest in France and will invest in other markets,” Monin said in an interview with FranceInfo last week.
As if last year’s fabulous Dual Asteroid Redirection Test firing a satellite bullet into an asteroid wasn’t enough, now researchers are doing detailed simulation of the nuclear deflection scenario envisioned in 1998 space disaster film Armageddon.
At Lawrence Livermore National Lab, a team led by Mary Burkey (above) presented a paper that moves the ball forward on what is in reality a fairly active area of research.
The problem is that a nuclear deflection would need to be done in a very precise way or else it could lead (as it did in Armageddon) to chunks of the asteroid hitting Earth anyway.
In particular, understanding whether or not an attempted deflection mission will break apart an asteroid has been a long-standing question in the planetary defense community.
Every detailed, high-fidelity simulation and every broad sensitivity sweep brings the field closer to understanding how effective nuclear mitigation would be.
But that also means that you have options for grabbing a last-minute gift for that gamer in your life!
If they are over 35: Super Mario RPGIf your gamer is a nostalgic one (as those of us “of an age” often are), get them Nintendo’s latest nostalgia bait, the remake of Super Mario RPG.
Like Super Mario RPG, some people feel a little weird paying full price for an old game, but getting it as a gift lets them dive in without a care.
(PC, PlayStation, Xbox)If they have a friend they play with a lot: Remnant IIDoes your gamer have a buddy they reliably play with?
It’s a lot of trends at once, sure, but it all fits really well together and is delightful start to finish.
