Netflix today announced that it is discontinuing its support for Conductor, a popular orchestration engine for microservices the streaming giant open-sourced in 2016.
While Netflix will no longer be maintaining this repo, members of the Conductor community have been active in promoting alternative forks of this project, so we trust that the health of the community will remain strong moving forward.”One of those companies is Orkes, a startup founded by the engineers who originally created the Conductor project while they were at Netflix.
The team plans to maintain in close relationship with the rest of the Conductor community.
“We are excited to work in partnership with the broader community to ensure that Conductor continues to thrive and this new chapter for Conductor OSS reflects the collective vision of this thriving community,” Orkes writes in its announcement.
This makes it easier for developers to add language models and machine learning inferencing to their workflows by leveraging Orkes’ pre-built integrations with services like Azure Open AI, OpenAI and Google’s Vertex AI.
Digital asset risk infrastructure-focused Andalusia Labs, formerly known as RiskHarbor, has raised $48 million in a Series A round at a valuation “north of $1 billion,” the company exclusively shared with TechCrunch.
Alongside the fresh capital raise, Andalusia Labs opened its global headquarters in Abu Dhabi.
The $48 million will also be used to grow its product development and expand the team, said Raouf Ben-Har, co-founder of Andalusia Labs.
All aim to provide digital asset support to institutions, developers and consumers through their respective niches.
“Developers, developers, developers,” said co-founder Drew Patel.
Worldcoin, a crypto project co-founded by Sam Altman, said it now supports integrations for its World ID with Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify and Mercado Libre.
Or, Shopify store owners can use World ID for fraud prevention or one-time promotions.
The “standard” or “World ID Orb” level involves creating a profile and also getting your irises scanned by one of the company’s Orbs to verify your identity.
“High” or “World ID Orb+” security requires you to also use facial recognition to secure the app besides the previous two steps, Sada said.
You can use one World ID per device, so if you have a phone and an iPad for example, you can create two World IDs.
Zuper, a field service management company, closed on $32 million in Series B funding to provide its customers with technologies and tools to cater to a wider range of workers.
While other field service management companies target specific parts of the market, Zuper was designed to encompass the entire workflow.
That has now evolved into working with small business and enterprise customers, Subbaraj said.
Within that group there are more than 50,000 users of the Zuper platform.
We announced ZIVA earlier this year, and it’s an alpha right now, but our goal is to bring GenAI to the field service management.”
South Korean internet giant Kakao — in the middle of multiple investigations over antitrust and securities violations — has appointed a new CEO as it tries to turn the ship around.
Shina Chung, who had been running the company’s venture arm, is moving to the top role at the company.
Separately, just last month, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called for a review of the monopolistic practices of Kakao’s taxi-hailing unit, Kakao Mobility.
Korea’s antitrust regulator had already fined Kakao Mobility about $20.3 million for unfair service in February.
Kakao Mobility, which has about 74% of the ride-hailing market in the country as of September, separately is trying to lower the temperature around this controvery.
Kenyan e-commerce and fintech platform for mass market consumers Copia Global has appointed John Lazar, the ex-CEO of Metaswitch, a Microsoft subsidiary, to its board off the back of $20 million in new funding.
Without the capital to get it all the way to profitability, it made sense to hold off there.
Both companies have encountered headwinds that question the sustainability of B2C e-commerce in Africa even though they operate different e-commerce models.
However, both platforms are confronted with distinct objectives: Copia strives to achieve profitability in a single market, Kenya, while Jumia has to battle it out across 11 markets.
The founder and chairman noted that once the e-commerce company achieves profitability in the East African market, it plans to extend operations to 14 other countries it has strategically mapped out.
With two large-scale elections in the U.S. in India next year, Threads aims to introduce a fact-checking checking program to the social network.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the social platform currently matches ratings from Facebook or Instagram to similar content.
Separately, Meta shared in a blog post that soon U.S-based Threads users will be able to increase, decrease, or maintain the same level of demotion on fact-checked posts.
Meta and Threads haven’t been keen on bolstering news on the platform.
And while Threads has stayed away from news until now, with fact-checking programs it will have to get involved.
Metafuels sets out to change the landscape of sustainable jet fuel, and has just picked up an $8 million suitcase from baggage carousel 3 at its local ZRH.
The company is making the sky green — literally — with its new fuel, which it calls aerobrew.
The company is focusing on jet fuel as its primary output, buying a ticket to make jet fuel conforming to aviation standards.
“Operational safety is paramount from fuel handling on the ground to high-altitude combustion performance,” notes Leigh Hackett, co-founder and CCO at Metafuels.
Metafuels’ eSAF technology enables a seamless transition away from fossil-based kerosene using a process they developed to convert green methanol to eSAF.
The FCC explained that this first application was a high-level, short one, and that those qualifying for that would receive closer scrutiny.
(In fact the FCC had considered not even letting orbital communications companies apply, but decided to allow them to compete on their merits.)
This was in addition to “numerous financial and technical deficiencies” the agency identified in the proposal and the company’s operations.
It even leaned on the promise of SpaceX’s super-heavy launch vehicle Starship as evidence for these claims.
As the FCC points out, though:A the time of the Bureau’s decision, Starship had not yet been launched.
Blue Origin is aiming to finally conclude a more than 15-month pause in operations of its New Shepard suborbital rocket, with the company announcing today that it will fly an uncrewed mission as early as December 18.
The company confirmed the launch on its social media account following a Bloomberg report of an internal email on the new targeted date.
The mission, called NS-24, will carry 33 science and research payloads and other cargo.
The Federal Aviation Administration formally concluded its investigation into the mishap in September, instructing Blue Origin to implement 21 corrective actions, including redesigning the engine and nozzle components as well as “organizational changes.”This new launch date means that Blue Origin has implemented all the actions and received its modified launch license from the FAA.
To date, the vehicle has flown more than 22 times, and has taken 31 people to the edge of space and back (including CEO Jeff Bezos himself).
