Meme joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin more than doubled in price in the last 24 hours, briefly hitting a high of US28c today, and currently sits around 80% up for the day Elon Musk’s favourite Twitter shout out has climbed nearly 300% for the week, putting it into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation for the… Read more »
Google and Google Australia misled consumers about its use of personal location data, according to Australia’s Federal Court in a landmark legal decision. Consumer watchdog the ACCC took Google to court in October 2019 over the use of location data collected through Android mobile devices between January 2017 and December 2018, in a world-first enforcement… Read more »
Zip Co. (ASX: Z1P) has raised another A$400 million via a seven-year unsecured convertible notes to fund its international expansion plans. The not-yet profitable BNPL’s latest raise follows a similar $1.5 billion raise by Afterpay (ASX: APT) via convertible notes due in 2026. Co-founder and COO Peter Gray said they were “very pleased with the… Read more »
Some weeks ago, a nine-year-old macaque monkey called Pager successfully played a game of Pong with its mind. While it may sound like science fiction, the demonstration by Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink is an example of a brain-machine interface in action (and has been done before). A coin-sized disc called a “Link” was implanted… Read more »
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone on a tear this afternoon, surging to record highs ahead of the direct listing of US crypto exchange Coinbase on the Nasdaq tonight. The listing is also good news for Westpac and its investment fund, Reinventure, which dropped $50 million investment in Coinbase back in 2015 and could be… Read more »
Canadian building management company BGIS will expand its Australian operations centre in Adelaide to monitor clients across the Asia Pacific. The global company plans to utilise the latest Internet of Things technologies in Adelaide, South Australia to remotely control buildings in other states and countries through internet-connected devices and sensors. This includes the monitoring and… Read more »
Business fintech DiviPay, an expense management platform has raised an additional $1.7 million in its series A, led by ANZ Bank’s venture capital arm, ANZi. The four-year-old startup previously raised $2.3 million in its series A in late 2019, once again led by ANZi, along with Seed Space ventures and former Pepper Money CEO Patrick… Read more »
Virtual reality startup Vantari VR, which has developed the medical version of a flight simulator for doctors, has scored a US$100,000 (A$131k) grant from US video games giant Epic Games, the company behind smash hit video game Fortnite. The Epic MegaGrants are designed to assist game developers and others use Unreal Engine, the commercial game engine… Read more »
The Commonwealth Bank’s venture scaling arm, x15ventures, has invested $1 million for a 26.7% stake in bill payments startup Payble, a subsidiary of listed IT company Identitii (ASX: ID8). Payble tackles late and failed bill payments before they happen, seeing the possibilities in open banking through Consumer Data Right (CDR) to tackle a problem with… Read more »
Over the past few years we’ve seen an explosion of agrifood technologies and Australian agricultural innovation. Part of this broad trend has seen investment in agrifood tech in Australia grow from US$29.9 million in 2017 to US$90.8 million in 2019, according to AgFunder. There has been a significant increase in capital investment into developing agrifood technologies,… Read more »
The journey for Melbourne fintech Assembly Payments is set to end with the company being merged into Ireland-based cross-border payments platform CurrencyFair by one of the company’s key backers Standard Chartered. The British banking multinational launched a Singapore-based joint venture digital payments company with Assembly Payments in early 2020. Standard Chartered said the merger was… Read more »
Shares in Australian fintech EML Payments (ASX: EML) jumped 5.8% today on news that it would acquire Irish open-banking platform Sentenial for €70 million (A$108.6m), plus an earn-out component of up to €40 million (A$62.1m). Sentenial, and its Open Banking brand Nuapay, operate in Europe via more than 1,750 banks, processing €45 billion in payments… Read more »
A man lost 17.1 bitcoin – worth $1.3 million today – in an Apple app store scam that serves as a warning to people wanting to track their cryptocurrency on smart phones. Over the course of a few years, Phillipe Christodoulou banked up the bitcoin, watching as its value started to climb last year, according the Washington Post.… Read more »
Australian design giant Canva has a staggering new valuation of US$15 billion (A$19.6bn) following a fresh US$71 million (A$93m) investment. That figure more than doubles the company’s last A$8.7 billion valuation in less than 12 months following an A$87 million raise in June 2020. In just 18 months, the privately-owned design startup has more than… Read more »
Over the long weekend reports emerged of an alleged data breach, impacting half a billion Facebook users from 106 countries. And while this figure is staggering, there’s more to the story than 533 million sets of data. This breach once again highlights how many of the systems we use aren’t designed to adequately protect our… Read more »
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