Tado, the German smart home energy startup, plans to go public via a SPAC at a €450M valuation

Tado, the German smart home startup that specializes in thermostats and more recently moved into flexible “time of use” energy tariffs based on loadshifting technology, is today announcing the next step in its life as a business. It’s going public by way of a SPAC deal. GFJ ESG Acquisition, a German SPAC entity focused specifically […]

Nigeria lifts ban on Twitter, says the social media giant has met conditions

The Nigerian government has lifted the suspension of Twitter operations more than six months after it first declared a crackdown on the social media giant in the country. Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, the director-general of Nigeria’s tech agency, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), made this announcement via a statement today. He was put in charge, […]

Twitter Spaces continues testing podcast-like features

Twitter has been working on Spaces Recordings, a feature that will let hosts share tweets with audio recordings of past Spaces. Now, when hosts share the recordings, they’re able to see how many listeners joined live, as well as how many people replayed the recording after the fact. we’ve been working on Spaces Recordings and […]

Finalsite ransomware attack forces 5,000 school websites offline

Finalsite, an internet software house that provides school districts with website design, hosting, and content management solutions, has been hit by a ransomware attack. Earlier this week, school districts whose websites are hosted by Finalsite discovered that they were no longer accessible or displayed errors. While at the time Finalsite blamed the issues on “performance difficulties” […]

Katie Haun is splitting off from a16z to launch her own crypto fund

Katie Haun, who co-led Andreessen Horowitz’s $2.2 billion crypto fund, is splitting off from the firm and taking a number of colleagues with her — including operating partner Rachael Horwitz — to start a new crypto-centric fund, Axios reports. Haun joined the firm in 2018 after a career as a federal prosecutor for the Justice […]

‘PayPal for Crypto’ wannabe Ramp raises $52.7M Series A round led by Balderton Capital

In the same way that PayPal and Stripe radically changed online payments by allowing any online service to embed payments, the race is on to have the same impact on crypto assets. To this end, players such as Wyre (raised $29.1M) and MoonPay (raised $555M) have risen to the fore. But in the Summer of […]

Apple quietly pulls references to its CSAM detection tech after privacy fears

Apple has quietly removed all references to its child sexual abuse scanning feature from its website, months after announcing that the new technology would be baked into iOS 15 and macOS Monterey. Back in August, Apple announced that it would introduce the feature to allow the company to detect and report known child sexual abuse […]

GoDaddy says data breach exposed over a million user accounts

Web hosting giant GoDaddy has reported a data breach with U.S. financial regulators, and warns that data on 1.2 million customers may have been accessed. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GoDaddy’s chief information security officer Demetrius Comes said the company detected unauthorized access to its systems where it hosts and manages […]

Google reorg moves AR, VR, Starline and Area 120 into new ‘Labs’ team

Google Labs is back, but this time around, it’s not a consumer-facing brand delivering a range of experimental products. Instead, it’s the internal name given to a new team at Google created under a reorganization that aims to gather the company’s many innovative projects and long-term bets under one roof. The new group will be […]