When the open source streaming service, Apache Kafka, was created in 2011 at LinkedIn, it was a different world.
The way they do that is by taking advantage of today’s cloud environment to separate compute from storage using an object storage service like Amazon S3.
“When you interact and store data in cloud object storage you get to sidestep all these networking fees that plague these big data systems when they get lifted, shifted into the cloud,” he said.
“Based on our experience building the kind of storage system on top of object storage we had built at DataDog, we felt like streaming systems should work the same way.
The founders brought some of the folks who helped build Husky to build the new system, and today they have 9 employees.
Proton Mail, the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) email service from Swiss company Proton, is now officially available via a dedicated desktop app some three months after debuting in beta.
However, despite previous claims that the client would be available to all Proton Mail users in early 2024, the company has decided to restrict it to paying users.
In related news, Proton is also making its email service available via a standalone Linux desktop app, launching today in beta.
It’s worth noting that while Proton Mail has been available to desktop users from the company’s inception, initially through the browser and more recently a “bridge” which opened up access to Proton Mail through third-party desktop clients such as Apple Mail and Outlook, today’s news brings a dedicated Windows and MacOS app to the fray.
This means that emails can be cached and accessed when offline, while users can funnel into Proton Mail directly from the MacOS dock or Windows Start menu.
Paramount Global has reached a binding agreement to sell its stake in Reliance-controlled Indian media house Viacom18 to Reliance for $517 million, both companies said Wednesday.
The deal will increase Reliance’s stake in Viacom18, which operates dozens of TV channels as well as streaming service JioCinema, to 70.49%, Reliance said in its disclosure.
Law firm JSA Associates said late last month that it was advising the two firms for the deal.
The move follows Disney announcing plans to merge its India business with Viacom18 late last month.
Viacom18 also counts Bodhi Tree, an investment firm run by James Murdoch and Uday Shankar, among its backers.
Waymo will begin offering a robotaxi service to the public in Los Angeles this week and in Austin by the end of the year, the company’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakan said Wednesday at SXSW.
Opening up a robotaxi service means the public will be able to hail a ride in a driverless car via the Waymo One app.
Austin will become the fourth city where Waymo operates a commercial driverless service.
Waymo also operates a robotaxi service in Phoenix, San Francisco and soon Los Angeles.
Unlike Texas, regulators in California require companies hoping to deploy commercial robotaxi services to attain a number of permits.
The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires.
For example, someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network.
Bluesky says installing filters from independent moderation services will be as easy as following another account.
People running moderation services will be able to set custom labels and determine what they do.
Moderation services aren’t tied to individual accounts, so multiple people can manage them together.
Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank bills itself as an API-driven ‘Banking as a Service’ platform.
But Griffin isn’t likely to offer banking accounts directly to consumers, but to other businesses needing to offer embedded financial solutions such as savings accounts, safeguarding accounts and accounts for holding client money.
Last year in North America, Treasury Prime secured a $40 million Series C, Synctera $15 million and Omnio raised $9.8 million.
So they’re leveraging an existing financial relationship to bundle additional financial services in an embedded way.
All of that needs to sit in specially marked bank accounts.” Griffin’s aim, he says is to pick up as much of that business as possible.
Profitable car rental service Turo is still ready for an IPO, but its growth cratered in 2023Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing.
The company has put the capital to good use, posting quick revenue growth since 2019, positive operating income since 2021 and net profit since 2022.
In 2021 Turo’s growth rebounded from 2020’s pandemic-driven woes impressively, rising 213% that year to $469 million.
However, triple-digit growth was short-lived at the car rental company, which saw its revenue growth slow to 59% in 2022 when it recorded $746.6 million worth of total revenue.
TechCrunch calculates that its Q3 2022 to Q3 2023 growth rate was 13.6%, while its Q4 to Q4 growth over the same time frame was a slightly sharper 14.3%.
Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning.
YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix.
Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all.
Update 05/05/2024 11:45 AM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online.
Co-founders Ozgun Erdogan and Umur Cubukcu previously built Citus Data, where they also met Daniel Farina, who previously was instrumental in building Heroku PostgreSQL.
Citus Data wouldn’t have been possible without,” Cubukcu said.
“Fifteen years ago, all those service [that are on the Ubicloud roadmap] did not have open-source data plane components.
These days, for the core services, all of those now have good open-source alternatives, barring maybe one or two,” he said.
The company currently has 10 employees, split between San Francisco, Amsterdam (where the Citus Data team built a small engineering team during the team’s Microsoft days) and Istanbul.
The big storyLast week, I wrote about two startups — Sunset and SimpleClosure — that help other startups shut down raising capital.
It was a deep dive into how and why this business has become one that is so sought after by investors.
I also covered Stripe’s tender offer that resulted in a 30% higher bump in valuation — to $65 billion — for the payments giant.
She emphasized, though, that the company had not made any cuts as a consequence of launching this AI assistant.
Embat, a Spanish fintech which does what they call “real-time treasury management,” closed a financing round of $16 million Series A led by Creandum.
