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Sorare, the web3 gaming company, sees 13% reduction in workforce amidst declining interest in NFT fantasy sports.

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NFT fantasy sports startup Sorare lays off 13% of staff, as web3 gaming continues to sputter Sorare is not completely shuttering its New York office but is shifting more employees to ParisWeb3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February. The company will backfill most of these laid-off roles in Paris, according to Julia, with plans to hire more than 20 roles in the next six months. Sorare is not shutting down its New York office. Sorare saw $200 million in user transaction volume in 2023, a source familiar with the situation said. Web3 gaming startup Mythical Games raised nearly $300 million in venture money before holding three rounds of layoffs.

Transforming Satellite Imagery Visualization with Innovative Geospatial Data Startup

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Today, the startup emerged from stealth with the Fused platform, and $1 million in pre-seed funding. It takes data, fed from satellites, sitting in storage repositories and runs it through its platform to make it usable. The platform is essentially a middleware processing layer that helps turn the geospatial data into something more consumable. It consists of several open source pieces and a serverless processing engine. They can then transfer this data to other programs for further analysis or create data visualizations based on the data.

Ubicloud’s Quest: Creating an Open-Source Rivalry to AWS

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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.

“Unlock the Power of Community on Mastodon with Newsmast’s Curated Experience”

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Newsmast also credits the Mastodon app and Mozilla-backed startup Mammoth for the inspiration around Communities. In addition, Newsmast offers a system where anyone can build their own Mastodon server with a selection of communities they’ve curated. Users could then connect to that server in place of the Newsmast server within the Newsmast app. Later this week, Newsmast will also open up its API to developers, which means your preferred Mastodon app could integrate with Newsmast’s Communities, too, for a more seamless experience. (In fact, some Mastodon users were confused why Newsmast’s accounts were following them and boosting their content, without understanding the larger purpose.)

The Unintended Leak of Mercedes-Benz Source Code: A Consequence of a Published Password Error

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Mercedes-Benz accidentally exposed a trove of internal data after leaving a private key online that gave “unrestricted access” to the company’s source code, according to the security research firm that discovered it. The London-based cybersecurity company said it discovered a Mercedes employee’s authentication token in a public GitHub repository during a routine internet scan in January. According to Mittal, this token — an alternative to using a password for authenticating to GitHub — could grant anyone full access to Mercedes’s GitHub Enterprise Server, thus allowing the download of the company’s private source code repositories. “The GitHub token gave ‘unrestricted’ and ‘unmonitored’ access to the entire source code hosted at the internal GitHub Enterprise Server,” Mittal explained in a report shared by TechCrunch. It’s not known if anyone else besides Mittal discovered the exposed key, which was published in late-September 2023.

“Construction Companies to Benefit from Bulk Exchange’s $4.5M Boost for Material Sourcing Needs”

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Bulk Exchange, a startup building a marketplace that lets construction companies and contractors buy and dispose materials in bulk, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. If Bulk Exchange can get enough providers on to its platform, estimators may be able to execute their work more quickly. Second, once contracts are signed, Bulk Exchange can convert estimates into sales by linking buyers and sellers on the platform. Instead, Bulk Exchange intends to charge for its services similar to a SaaS model. If Bulk Exchange can scale and collect lots of data, it could have a second business and revenue stream in time.

Qdrant, a startup focused on open source vector database, secures $28M in funding

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Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital. The vector database realm is hot. In recent months we’ve seen the likes of Weaviate raise $50 million for its open source vector database, while Zilliz secured secured $60 million to commercialize the Milvus open source vector database. We are proud to share that this new X AI feature just announced by @elonmusk is powered by the Qdrant Vector Database. Right, using a Vector Database, powered by Qdrant.

Chronosphere Expands Observability Platform with Acquisition of Calyptia

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Chronosphere, a startup that offers a cloud native observability platform, today announced that it has acquired Calyptia. “With observability data growing by orders of magnitude, companies are ill-equipped to manage the costs and scale of this deluge, forcing their teams to make trade-offs. Teams are especially challenged to handle log data which is prohibitively expensive to move and store,” said Martin Mao, CEO and co-founder of Chronosphere. Chronosphere also notes that it will continue Calyptia’s engagement with the open source Fluent Ecosystem. “Calyptia joining the Chronosphere team is excellent news for everyone who is invested in the future of open source cloud native technology,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Mirantis Reinstates Old CEO as New Chief Executive

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Mirantis, the enterprise infrastructure startup that has gone through its share of evolutionary cycles since it launched back in 1999. That has included a number of leadership changes, including a CEO swap in 2018 which saw co-founder and CEO Alex Freedland step down and co-founder Adrian Ionel taking on the CEO role (after Ionel and Freedland had first swapped CEO roles back in 2015). But now, in another twist to this story, Freeland is coming back as CEO while Ionel is stepping down effective January 11. “Once again, we are in the middle of one of the most exciting periods in the history of computing, more than ever led by open source innovation. Ionel will transition to an advisor role.

“Maximizing Start-Up Success: 5 Key Strategies for Effective LLM Deployment”

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In fact, an April 2023 Arize survey found that 53% of respondents planned to deploy LLMs within the next year or sooner. The H100 GPU from Nvidia, a popular choice for LLMs, has been selling on the secondary market for about $40,000 per chip. One source estimated it would take roughly 6,000 chips to train an LLM comparable to ChatGPT-3.5. That source estimated that the power consumption to run ChatGPT-3.5 is about 1 GWh a day, or the combined daily energy usage of 33,000 households. Power consumption can also be a potential pitfall for user experience when running LLMs on portable devices.