How PayJoy built a $300M business by letting the underserved use their smartphones as collateral for loansLerato Motloung is a mother of two who works in a supermarket in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Then, in February 2024, she saw a sign about PayJoy, a startup that offers lending to the underserved in emerging markets.
Motloung is one of millions of customers that San Francisco–based PayJoy has helped since its 2015 inception.
And, unlike other startups offering loans to the underserved, it’s doing so in a way that’s not predatory, it says.
Last September, PayJoy announced that it had secured $150 million in Series C equity funding and $210 million in debt financing.
TikTok is expanding its Effect Creator Rewards monetization program to more regions and lowering its payout threshold, the company announced today.
The program, which launched in May 2023, rewards creators for the effects they make through TikTok’s AR development platform, Effect House.
TikTok is also updating the program’s payout model, as creators will now only receive rewards for effects used in public videos.
Effect Creator Rewards is now available in a total of 53 regions.
Previously, creators needed an effect to have been used in 200,000 qualified videos within 90 days for the effect to start collecting rewards.
Social network Bluesky, a competitor to X, Threads, Mastodon, and others, is opening up its doors with today’s news that the network is now opening up federation, following its public launch earlier this month.
The move will allow anyone to run their own server that connects to Bluesky’s network, so they can host their own data, their own account and make their own rules.
That sent some former Twitter users in search of alternatives that were more sustainable, like Mastodon and Bluesky.
While this model is similar to Mastodon, Bluesky uses a newer social networking protocol, the AT Protocol, while Mastodon and many other networks today use ActivityPub.
“After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users,” it says.
Earlier this year, GitHub rolled out Copilot Chat, a ChatGPT-like programming-centric chatbot, for organizations subscribed to Copilot for Business.
Copilot Chat more recently came to individual Copilot customers — those paying $10 per month — in beta.
“And code complete was just the beginning.”Little else about Copilot Chat has changed since the beta.
Developers can prompt Copilot Chat in natural language to get real-time guidance, for example asking Copilot Chat to explain concepts, detect vulnerabilities or write unit tests.
Like all generative AI models, the model underpinning Copilot Chat, GPT-4, was trained on publicly available data — some of which is copyrighted or under a restrictive license.
It can be hard to carry too much cash around these days, as most people use electronic payment methods like credit cards or digital wallets. However, there are still some…
