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Supported By
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Good morning!
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Today we begin with a new report that shines a light on what the last days of Lazerpay which shut down a few weeks ago were like. The report alleges that the startup struggled to build a business in part due to a gross lack of experience from the young founder Emmanuel Njoku.
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Sources accuse the company of faulty marketing strategies that focused mostly on the Twitterati and ignored other social media platforms, including LinkedIn. A source who blames the marketing strategy said, ”It was just weird to see a B2B crypto startup doing most of its marketing on Twitter instead of Instagram or LinkedIn, where most businesses are.”
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The quote underscores the activities of a company that came to Twitter prominence, raised money and forgot that its business was not for Twitter, but for the real human founders who spent hundred of thousands poaching top writers to become their ghostwriters, helping them retweet and dump sharp tooth commentary on Twitter.
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Another report reveals that TikTok or at least its employees have a folder, sort of for customers who consume LGBTQ content.
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Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext.
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Summary of the news
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- South African telecoms operator Rain says it is now a 4G mobile network
- South African Broadcasting Corporation has refuted the claim that South Africans will start to pay for car radio licences or risk jail time
- Elon Musk said that Twitter will purge accounts that have not been active
- Former TikTok employees say that some of their colleagues tracked users who watch LGBTQ content
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Ecosystem
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- At its tail end, Lazerpay struggled to be self-sufficient, an investor alleges. The investor said that Lazerpay's founder Emmanuel Njoku had raised money at a 5 million valuation, then a 3 million valuation and was back raising money at a 15 million valuation three months later, underscoring the struggles of the company to be self-sufficient. One source said that the marketing strategy focused heavily on Twitter maligning LinkedIn. (TechCabal)
- South African telecoms operator Rain says it is now a 4G mobile network and not a data-only service provider. (WeeTracker)
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Upgrade your business to a global business. Accept international payments in USD and get settled in USD. Get a bouquet of payment solutions that meet your every need when accepting payments in and from Africa. The world is waiting for you.
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Policy
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- South African Broadcasting Corporation has refuted the claim that South Africans will start to pay for car radio licences or risk jail time. SABC said it did not make any public pronouncements about car radios licences. (TechCabal)
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Social Tech
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- Elon Musk said that Twitter will purge accounts that have not been active for years. "We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop." (Twitter)
- Amazon Studios said that it will license its original content to third parties for the first time after it launched a new Amazon MGM Studios Distribution arm. (Variety)
- Former TikTok employees say that some of their colleagues tracked users who watch LGBTQ content. TikTok doesn’t ask users to disclose their sexual orientation, but it catalogued videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the former employees said. The collection of information, which could be viewed by some employees through a dashboard, included a set of affiliated users who watched those videos, and their ID numbers, they said. (Wall Street Journal)
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Global News
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- Western Digital said in a press release that it was hacked and some customers' data was stolen. “As a precautionary measure to secure our business operations, the Company proactively disconnected our systems and services from the public Internet," the company said. (TechCrunch)
- The chief executives of five leading EU tech groups have called for the European Commission to amend proposed data-sharing legislation, saying the new rules would force them to give up trade secrets and hand a competitive advantage to China. (FT)
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Latest in funding
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Polygon is a decentralised Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly Apps with low transaction fees without ever sacrificing security.
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Other stories we are following
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