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As the crypto market continues to slog through a fundraising winter, Lightspeed Faction, a blockchain-focused venture capital firm, is betting big on the space. The firm has launched its inaugural $285 million fund, its co-founders exclusively told TechCrunch. Faction will focus mainly on early-stage blockchain projects raising seed or Series A rounds. Before launching publicly, […]

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End-to-end encrypted messaging app, Signal, is getting closer to launching a much anticipated feature that will allow users to share only a username in order to connect with other users, rather than having to reveal the phone number linked to their account, as is the case now. Other secure messaging platforms, such as Telegram and […]

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OpenAI has confirmed that a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is behind “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools. ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing sporadic outages for the past 24 hours. Users who attempted to access the service have been greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now,” and […]

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Snaptrude — a startup aiming to compete against traditional platforms in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) design sector, including Autodesk, Trimble and Nemetschek — with its modern approach and cloud-based offering, has raised $14 million in a Series A round, just 10 months after announcing its seed funding. With Foundamental and Accel leading the […]

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While refurbished device marketplaces like Back Market have raised substantial amounts in funding (Back Market reached a $5.7B valuation last year after a D round) and Raylo in the UK provides leases for electronics (it’s raised raised $180.6M from the likes of Octopus Ventures and Channel 4 Ventures), the device leasing services for small businesses […]

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Omegle, an online service that allowed individuals to connect and chat with strangers, has shut down after 15 years citing growing misuse of the platform, including in committing “unspeakably heinous crimes.” The site, founded in 2009 by a then 18-year-old programmer and high school student Leif K-Brooks, was bootstrapped throughout its existence. Though it waned […]

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Bob Iger said Wednesday that Disney “would like to stay” in India and is considering its options in the world’s most populous country even as its crown jewel streamer Hotstar struggles to contain subscribers loss. Hotstar lost 2.8 million subscribers in the quarter ending September, widening its overall loss to about 23 million in a […]

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The UK’s newly empowered Internet content regulator has published the first set of draft Codes of Practice under the Online Safety Act (OSA) which became law late last month. More codes will follow but this first set — which is focused on how user-to-user (U2U) services will be expected to respond to different types of illegal […]

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Lyft is introducing a “more affordable sort of higher-end ride” in an attempt to offer ride-hail products that customers actually want, CEO David Risher said Wednesday during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. The move comes after Lyft has been successful, by some metrics, in regaining market share from Uber by slashing its ride-hail fares. In […]

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