Welcome to the second space race. You can be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu. Last time, it was the Soviet Union and the United States vying to be the first to plant some flags. Now it’s a sprint to the lunar surface between America and China—alongside a host of varyingly friendly and rival nations—plus a…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Creativity issue The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But…
Small and medium businesses are the newest targets for cybersecurity attacks, with 1 in 3 breached last year. SMBs are becoming more proactive in detecting and stopping these threats, and today a startup called Cynomi is announcing $37 million in funding to meet that demand. Insight Partners and Entrée Capital are co-leading the round, with previous backers […]
Swedish Fintech startup Froda has secured a $22.7 million (€20m) Series B round led by Incore Invest, also based in Sweden. The move bucks the trend of a slight slowdown in investments into fintech, plus a further confirmation of the long-term trend towards the ’embedded finance’ model. Largely operating in northern European countries from Finland […]
A new play about OpenAI I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in…
The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago. I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things…