FTX reportedly used $10 billion of customer funds to prop up its owner’s trading firm

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Basically rule number one of what not to do with your customers’ money. | Illustration: The Verge Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda Research reportedly owes his crypto exchange FTX $10 billion after taking loans funded by deposits from FTX customers, according to The Wall Street Journal. As economist Frances Coppola pointed out to the Journal, … Read more

Pitch Deck Teardown: Syneroid’s $500K seed deck

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Syneroid recently raised a $500,000 round of funding to bring something halfway between microchips and dog collars to market. The company is finding some interesting slices of the market, but the deck, overall, leaves a few things to be desired. We learn more from mistakes than from perfection, so I figured it’d be a great … Read more

Who’ll get the last laugh over Musk toying with Twitter’s veracity?

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Twitter’s painstakingly layered infosphere looks to be light-speeding back to chaotic noise under new owner Elon Musk. The billionaire is no fan of meritocratic signals nor, it seems, a friend to genuine information — preferring anyone pay him $8/m to have their account on his microblogging social network badged with a check-mark that looks like … Read more

Wearables might be able to screen for premature birth

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Whoop’s new study shows changes in heart rate variability ahead of delivery. | Image: Whoop Monitoring changes in heart rate in pregnant people may be a way to screen for people who will deliver prematurely, according to new data from researchers working at wearable company Whoop. Preterm birth is risky and can lead to health … Read more

Google Play to pilot third-party billing in new markets, including U.S.; Bumble joins Spotify as early tester

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Google today announced it’s expanding its user choice billing pilot, which allows Android app developers to use other payment systems besides Google’s own. The program will now become available to new markets, including the U.S., Brazil and South Africa, and Bumble will now join Spotify as one of the pilot testers. Google additionally announced Spotify … Read more

Amazon previews its new delivery drone, the MK30

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Following this morning’s debut of the Sparrow bin picking robot, Amazon just unveiled MK30, the latest iteration of its delivery drone. The system is the successor to the MK27-2, which is set to debut limited deliveries to residents in Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas. The MK30, which is set for a 2024 debut, is … Read more

Now anyone can hail a Waymo robotaxi in downtown Phoenix

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Waymo has opened up its fully driverless ride-hail service in downtown Phoenix to members of the general public. Previously, the company had only been operating a commercial service with no safety driver behind the wheel for participants in its “trusted tester” program. The expansion in Phoenix is yet another sign of Waymo’s accelerated push towards … Read more

Read Elon Musk’s first email to Twitter employees

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Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Elon Musk sent his first email to Twitter employees on Wednesday evening, warning of a “challenging economic climate” ahead and the need for the company to launch Twitter Blue verified subscriptions to help “survive the upcoming economic downturn.” After laying off half of Twitter’s workforce and … Read more