Connected newsletter: Dogpatch matches founders as Flender flounders
Connected at the Business Post is your source for the news that matters in technology and innovation, all told from an Irish perspective
Finding the right co-founder is critical to success for any start-up so there is likely to be plenty of interest in Dogpatch Labs’ latest initiative, which gets under way this month.
Founders, described as the State’s first tech talent accelerator, aims to match individuals from different backgrounds, and with different skill sets, to build new high-impact digital start-ups. It will be fascinating to see what emerges from the programme.
Talking of start-ups, Web Summit on Thursday announced that Richard Forde is rejoining the company as its new VP of start-up relations. Also joining is Sebastian Hamilton, former head of public affairs at Revolut, and previously group editor of the Irish Daily Mail.
In other local news, peer-to-peer network Flender was forced to hastily backtrack this week after its plan to introduce new fees caused anger among users.
Declan Ganley’s Rivada Networks is set pay about $180 million (€166.3 million) to satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital in the second half of this year, analysts have been told.
UrbanVolt, the smart energy company, announced a new €26 million investment to bring total funding to date to €200 million.
Weekly Newsletter
If you would like to receive the Connected newsletter automatically in your inbox every week, please sign up here
Tech giants were once again hitting the headlines this week with Microsoft announcing plans to unbundle Teams from its software suites in a bid to avoid further European Union antitrust scrutiny.
Elsewhere, Apple revealed plans to unveil the iPhone 15 line and its next-generation smartwatches with a big event in San Francisco in a fortnight’s time.
ChatGPT’s parent OpenAI launched an enterprise version of its popular AI chatbot. The announcement comes as news emerged the company is nearing $1 billion in annual revenues.
Talking of AI, Google said this week it is adding artificial intelligence tools from companies including Facebook-parent Meta Platforms and Anthropic to its cloud platform.
The company formerly known as Twitter has incurred redundancy costs of €12.7 million at its Irish-headquartered international business. It also warned of a possible “material impairment” at the social media platform following its takeover by Elon Musk last year.
Impairments were also the name of the game for EML, the Australian fintech, which owns Irish businesses, Prepaid Financial Services (PFS) and Sentenial. The company this week recorded a tax impairment of AUS$258.9 million (€153.7 million), due to the units.
All the best
Charlie
The anticlimactic death of the streaming wars (Wired)
Productions are grinding to a halt and streaming services are leaning hard on ad-supported models. The result of all this disruption might just be everything old being new again.
AI is killing the grand bargain at the heart of the web. 'We're in a different world.' (Business Insider)
Content owners are wising up to their work being freely used by Big Tech to build new AI tools
