Byju’s had launched its first rights issue in late January, but a court order directed the company to not tap the funds it had raised through that rights issue after many of its investors opposed the fundraise.
Thursday’s court order is the latest episode in the spectacular collapse of Byju’s, once the world’s most valuable edtech startup.
TechCrunch couldn’t determine exactly how much Byju’s ended up raising in the first rights issue.
In the letter, he urged his estranged investors to give him another chance and participate in the rights issue.
“But my benchmark of success is the participation of all shareholders in the rights issue.
Apple has removed the Meta-owned end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp from its App Store in China following a government order citing national security concerns, the news agency Reuters reported Friday.
Meta’s newer, Twitter-esque text-based social networking app, Threads, has also been pulled from the App Store for the same reason, it said.
But the AppleCensorship site, which tracks App Store removals, records both Signal and Telegram as having been “disappeared” from Apple’s mainland China App Store.
Last year another Twitter alternative, Jack Dorsey-backed Damus, was also pulled from Apple’s China App Store shortly after it had been approved.
Although quite a number evidently managed to do so, as Threads quickly landed in the top 5 on Apple’s China App Store last summer.
The CFPB is permanently banning BloomTech from consumer lending activities and its CEO, Austen Allred, from student lending for a period of ten years.
Allred founded BloomTech, which rebranded from the Lambda School in 2022 after cutting half its staff, in 2017.
(According to the CFPB, BloomTech originated “at least” 11,000 such loans.)
BloomTech didn’t market the loans as such, saying that they didn’t create debt and were “risk free,” and advertised a 71%-86% job placement rate.
And, unbeknownst to many students, BloomTech was selling a portion of its loans to investors while depriving recipients of rights they should’ve had under a federal protection known as the Holder Rule.
Meta said on Monday that it plans to “temporarily” shutter Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction imposed by the Turkish competition authority last month over the way Meta shares data between Threads and Instagram.
In 2022, Turkey imposed a $18.6 million fine on Meta for combining user data across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Initially, the only way Meta allowed users to delete a Threads profile was by deleting their whole Instagram account, though it later introduced a separate mechanism for those wishing to ditch their Threads profile only.
Turkish regulators had announced the investigation on the way Meta linked Threads with Instagram in December, concluding last month that there was a strong case to answer for.
The latter of these options means a user’s profile can be resurrected when and if Threads is available in the country again.
With the aim of identifying criminal suspects, U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies.
So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big tech companies, like Google, to turn over information from their vast stores of user data.
Reverse searches effectively cast a digital dragnet over a tech company’s store of user data to catch the information that police are looking for.
Microsoft, Snap, Uber and Yahoo (which owns TechCrunch) have all received reverse orders for user data.
Some companies choose not to store user data and others scramble the data so it can’t be accessed by anyone other than the user.
SBF sentenced, Worldcoin hit with another ban order and big web3 pre-seed rounds are backWelcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
This week in web3Crunching numbersThis week the crypto market prices were a bit more chipper, with the top cryptocurrencies being green on the week.
The second-largest crypto, ether, increased 2.6% on the week to $3,550, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic action used to prove something about a piece of data, without revealing the origin data itself.
Scott and I discuss Space and Time’s origin story, how data warehouses work in Web 2.0 versus web3 and the importance of data transparency.
Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace.
For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment.
“Thus, Amazon misleads consumers as to the moment of conclusion of the sales contract,” the authority wrote [in Polish; this is a machine translation].
It also found the e-commerce giant failed to provide information about the “Delivery Guarantee” in the purchase confirmation sent to shoppers.
Amazon was contacted for comment on the sanction but at the time of writing it had not responded.
Controversial crypto biometrics venture Worldcoin has been almost entirely booted out of Europe after being hit with another temporary ban — this time in Portugal.
The order from the country’s data protection authority comes hard on the heels of the same type of three-month stop-processing order from Spain’s DPA earlier this month.
Portugal’s data protection authority said it issued the three-month ban on Worldcoin’s local ops Tuesday after receiving complaints Worldcoin had scanned children’s eyeballs.
By contrast, EU data protection law gives people in the region a suite of rights over their personal data, including the ability to have data about them corrected, amended or deleted.
As Tools for Humanity’s lead DPA, under the one-stop-shop (OSS) mechanism in bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is responsible for investigating privacy and data protection complaints about the company.
DoorDash is expanding its partnership with Alphabet’s Wing to bring its drone delivery pilot to the U.S., the company announced on Thursday.
DoorDash first launched its drone delivery pilot program in Australia in 2022, where it is now operating drone deliveries with over 60 merchants.
Once they select the drone option, their order will be prepared and delivered via a Wing drone within 30 minutes.
Most of Wendy’s items will qualify for drone delivery, but certain items be not be eligible if they exceed volume and weight restrictions.
If the order contains more than what one drone can carry, DoorDash will deploy up to three drones to deliver the order.
Controversial eyeball scanning startup Worldcoin has failed to get an injunction against a temporary suspension ordered Wednesday by Spain’s data protection authority, the AEPD.
Today a Madrid-based High Court declined to grant an injunction against the AEPD’s order, saying that the “safeguarding of public interest” must be prioritized.
However the court found the AEPD’s suspension order to be justified on account of the risks around biometric data and how many individuals are being put at risk by Worldcoin’s processing, including children.
Again, the Court was unimpressed, dismissing what it described as “unsubstantiated assertions” and pointing out the AEPD’s suspension is time-limited; only applies in Spain; and is compensable (i.e.
Reached for comment on the dismissal of its appeal for an injunction, Tools for Humanity’s spokeswoman, Rebecca Hahn, emailed a statement she said is attributable to Worldcoin:
