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- Saudi Money Makes a Big Splash in Video Games
Saudi Money Makes a Big Splash in Video Games
Plus: Trump Media shares surged 49%
Cash Nut
July 16, 2024
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In Today’s Edition
Zero to Billions: The Startup on the Verge of the Biggest Tech Exit in Years
Saudi Money Makes a Big Splash in Video Games
Apple’s focus on India is paying off
Trump Media shares surged 49%
Apple releases iOS 18 public beta for iPhone
YouTube Music is testing an AI-generated radio feature
Immunotherapy Is Changing Cancer Treatment Forever
🚀Startups Nuts
Cloud cybersecurity company Wiz was founded four years ago by four former Israeli military officers. It grew quickly to become the dominant company in cloud cybersecurity and is headed toward the largest exit for any tech startup since Rivian's $77 billion initial public offering in November 2021. Google is looking to acquire the company for a $23 billion sale price. The deal will likely draw scrutiny from antitrust regulators in the US and EU.
Other News
Halo Industries, a Santa Clara, Calif., laser manufacturing tech platform for semiconductors, raised $80m in Series B funding.
Standard Bots, a Glen Cove, N.Y., robotic automation startup, raised $63m in Series B funding.
Partior, a blockchain payment network, raised $60m in Series B funding
44.01, a London developer of carbon mineralization tech, raised $37m in Series A funding.
Tapi, an Argentinian payment processor, raised $22m in Series A funding.
Alvys, a Solana Beach, Calif., logistics operating platform, raised $20.5m in Series A funding.
🏭Business Nuts
The Saudi government plans to invest $38 billion in video games by 2030 through its Public Investment Fund. It is holding the inaugural Esports World Cup this month in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Many of the world's largest video game companies and influencers have quietly partnered with the Saudis. Photos from the event, which will run for eight weeks, are available in the article.
Other News
Macy’s is ending negotiations on a ~$6.9B buyout with Arkhouse Management and Brigade Capital Management, citing uncertainty over financing.
Burberry, the luxury retailer’s stock dropped 16%+ Monday morning after reporting a 21% sales drop in the 12 weeks through June 29, suspending dividend payments, and replacing its CEO.
Apple’s focus on India is paying off Its revenue in the nation is up 33% YoY. Still, only 3.5% of India’s 690m smartphones are iPhones and the Indian market accounts for just 2% of Apple’s total sales.
Taylor Swift broke her own 11-week record with “The Tortured Poets Department” album entering its 12th week atop the Billboard 200 chart. The album has 3B streams and just shy of 5m sales in the US.
AT&T reportedly pays $300K ransom to hacker group to delete stolen data following the company's second major breach in three months.
Amazon kicks off Prime Day 48-hour sale today; this year's Prime Day expected to set record in US online spending, with an estimated $14B in total sales.
Trump Media shares surged 49% on its first trading day following an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
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📱Tech Nuts
The iOS 18 public preview is now available. The update allows users to put icons anywhere on the home screen, change app icon color, add lock screen shortcuts for apps other than camera and flashlight, and more. It has a more customizable Control Center menu and a redesigned Photos app. The update will only run on iPhones released in 2018 or later.
Other News
Google will soon release a tool to create video recordings inside a presentation when you drop in a Google Slides or Docs.
YouTube Music is testing an AI-generated radio feature and adding a song recognition tool.
Anthropic has doubled the max output token limit for Claude 3.5 Sonnet from 4096 to 8192 in the Anthropic API. A much-needed upgrade for longer writing and coding use cases. This is a beta feature only in API and console but with Anthropic’s current shipping speed, expect it to come to claude.ai soon.
SpreadsheetLLM uses a Chain of Spreadsheet framework that can decompose spreadsheet reasoning into a table detection-match-reasoning pipeline.
🎁Miscellaneous
The human immune system is very good at attacking anything it registers as a disease - if it could be turned against cancer, it could eliminate tumors more thoroughly than surgery and more durably than chemotherapy. Scientists have managed to modify T cells to react to cancer as if it were a virus and destroy it. The therapy has been used to remove glioblastomas, a common type of brain cancer with a median time of diagnosis to death of just over a year.
💡What else are we reading and seeing?
a16z investment thesis and market map
Sequoia Capital offers to buy Stripe shares from investors
What your brain is doing when you’re not doing anything
3 exercises to boost your emotional intelligence
What role can psychology play in impact investment?
😎Fun Fact
On this day: In 1995, Amazon launched as an online bookseller. Founder Jeff Bezos initially named the service “Cadabra” (short for “abracadabra”) but renamed it after someone misheard it as “cadaver.”
🔥 Few tools many people are finding useful
Shadow - Your personal bot-free AI meeting assistant
Fluent - Learn a new language by speaking with AI
Jobright - Your AI job search copilot
Brick Photos - Turn your picture into a brick photo
Blocks by AutoGPT - Build and deploy agents with increased reliability and less confusion
🐦Joke of the Day
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