Wang

Enterprise

Incorporating Affinity: Enhancing Canva’s Competitive Edge Against Adobe’s Creative Suite

Canva has typically targeted the beginner for their products, but company co-Founder Cliff Obrecht sees the acquisition opening the door to more advanced users. “Canva needed products with more complex capabilities to go up against Adobe,” Wang told TechCrunch. In a blog post on the Affinity website, CEO Ashley Hewson tried to allay customer fears about the change. “In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. With Affinity, Canva gains 3 million users worldwide along with 90 employees who will be joining the company.

Dylan Williams
March 26, 2024

Uncategorized

GitHub Token Breach: Mintlify Announces Customer Data Compromise

Documentation startup Mintlify says dozens of customers had GitHub tokens exposed in a data breach at the start of the month and publicly disclosed last week. Mintlify helps developers create documentation for their software and source code by requesting access and tapping directly into the customer’s GitHub source code repositories. These private tokens allow GitHub users to share their account access with third parties apps, including companies like Mintlify. “The targets of this attack were GitHub tokens of our users,” Wang told TechCrunch by email. We are currently working with GitHub and our customers to uncover if any of the other tokens were used by the attacker,” Wang said.

Kira Kim
March 18, 2024

Crypto, Fintech

Ex-Gaming Entrepreneurs Secure $2.5M in Funding for NFT Marketplace in Effort to Keep Users, Even During Non-Profitable Periods

Former web3 gaming founders raise $2.5M for their NFT marketplace to retain users even when there ‘isn’t money to be made’Even though NFT sales volume is still down 88% from 2022 all time-highs (and down 38% year-to-date), Pallet Exchange is building a new type of NFT marketplace focused on user retention. “It’s cool if there’s a lot of financial innovations happening, but at the same time we saw there’s pain points from a user experience,” Li said. It’s using social media tactics like in-app messaging that lets people interested in the same NFT collections engage with each other on its marketplace. That’s when Seiyans, an Sei-based NFT collection fueled by meme culture, capitulated the new blockchain and marketplace into the talk of the crypto world. Down the line, Pallet plans to look into working with big partners in the art marketplace and create a separate marketplace for those creators.

Ava Patel
March 14, 2024

Crypto

“Revolutionizing the Internet: Taiko Secures $37M to Pioneer Web3 Infrastructure Free from Censorship”

Convinced that the infrastructure layer for truly decentralized social apps was lacking, he decided to fill the void, leading to Taiko’s inception in March 2022. A truly decentralized social networkFor Wang, Taiko provides a critical building block for a social network that is truly owned by users. The ideal decentralized social app, despite its greater technical challenges, could allow: “1. Censorship resistance… and thus, freedom of speech.”One of the greatest challenges facing decentralized social apps is content quality and safety. Each relayer can then filter content that reflects the “unique perspectives” of the underlying decentralized social network, thereby attracting diverse user bases.

Dylan Williams
March 2, 2024

Uncategorized

How Guac, Powered by Y Combinator, Uses Machine Learning to Forecast Grocery Sales

Poor grocery demand forecasting is responsible for more waste than you might expect. It’s not only bad for the environment — food waste is a major source of carbon emissions — but costly for grocers. Per Retail Insights, food and grocery retailers lose up to 8% of revenues through inadequate inventory availability. “Food waste and food security are issues that Jack and I care deeply about, and we were really excited about an opportunity to actually address food waste at its core,” Wang said. But Wang says that Guac is differentiated both by its dedication to transparency and its intense fine-tuning of forecasting models.