Author: precious

Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) has expanded its team and media footprint by acquiring tech podcaster Erik Torenberg’s Turpentine podcast network and bringing him onboard as a general partner. The acquisition, announced on April 21, 2025, represents a strategic alignment of Torenberg’s network-building expertise with a16z’s media-centric approach to venture capital. Torenber’s Turpentin, founded in 2023, is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and other content covering technology, business culture, and future trends. At its core, the podcast focuses on interviewing VCs from different firms about their attitude and approach towards investing, as well as their strategies, with recent guests like Accel’s…

Popular social media platform and forum site Reddit experienced a major outage that affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide for circa one hour. Over 112,400 users reported access issues, consisting of error messages, failed connections, and inability to load content. The incident, which began around 11:20 a.m. ET and was resolved by 12:21 p.m. ET, is the second outage for the social media platform in 2025. The outage began when users started experiencing various issues accessing the Reddit platform. By 11:39 a.m. ET, Downdetector.com, an application that tracks service outages by collecting user reports, recorded that more than 112,400…

Year 2025 has already seen the emergence of 20 new tech unicorn startups despite the continued challenges they continue to experience in the venture capital market. A unicorn is a privately held startup company valued at $1 billion or more. As they have become more common in the past decade, companies or tech startups achieve the unicorn status through private funding rounds where venture capital firms, private equity investors, and other institutional investors provide capital in exchange for equity. These new minted unicorns span across multiple sectors and industries from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics to Healthcare and Satellite Technology,…

The European Union (EU) is set on fully enforcing its digital rulebook taken from its Digital Markets Act (DMA) on large companies that have presence in the region, regardless of whoever is in charge, or what their nationality may be, EU President Ursula von der Leyen tells Politico. Politico quoted von der Leyen, President of the Commission, saying “That’s why we’ve opened cases against TikTok, X, Apple, Meta just to name a few. We apply the rules fairly, proportionally, and without bias. We don’t care where a company’s from and who’s running it. We care about protecting people.” She further…

Over 200,000 messages from Black Basta, a notorious ransomware syndicate operating since 2022 and as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), have been exposed by a member in retaliation to how the syndicate targeted Russian banks. These messages, spanning through a year, contain tactics and secrets the syndicate used in carrying out their ransomware operations. In November 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Multi-state Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) in a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), announced the activities of Black Basta and called the group “a…

The world’s current most powerful rocket, SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft, has suffered another explosive setback, making it the second time the spacecraft has blown up this year, and the eighth test flight since its inception. This most recent failure unfolded during the eighth test flight when Ship 34, the upper stage of Starship, encountered an unfortunate malfunction. Minutes into the test flight, four of its six raptor engines shut down unexpectedly and prematurely, causing the spacecraft to lose altitude control. The launch vehicle began tumbling uncontrollably before exploding into a fireball that gradually broke apart with its descent, and with residents…

Amazon, in a bid to move the popular Echo Voice Command Alexa to a more secure cloud, has removed the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” feature on its Echo devices. In an email sent to Echo owners, Amazon explains that it is done to expand “Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud.” The “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” feature which was only enabled on 3 Echo devices — Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 — allowed for audio recordings to be processed locally on the phone,…

With confirmation from the US Government as well as Cisco Talos, the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor nicknamed Salt Typhoon Group is said to have carried out an intrusive campaign against Telecom Networks in the US. As reported by The Wall Street Journal last year, cyberattacks were launched against US telecommunication companies such as AT&T and Verizon. However, it wasn’t until this year the US CISA confirmed the attack to be part of the Salt Typhoon campaign. This was followed by Cisco Talos’ confirmation who says in their blog post that “the threat actor was able to gain access to core…

In a bid to “make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World,” U.S. President Donald Trump has taken to social media to announce the names of five new digital assets to be included in a new U.S. strategic reserve for Cryptocurrencies. He announced in a Truth post that the Presidential Working Group directed by the president’s executive order on digital assets — that was signed into action in January — had gone ahead in stockpiling digital currencies such as XR P, SOL, ADA for future use. In a follow-up post about an hour later, he announced the…

Paystack, a leading fintech in Africa has launched its first-ever consumer product, expanding its focus to providing business-to-consumer (B2C) solutions after a marathon of nine years providing only business-to-business (B2B) services.  CEO and Co-Founder Shola Akinlade announced the launch of the new transfer app named Zap at a company event on Monday. Zap, as Paystack’s first consumer app, is designed to offer fast, secure, and reliable bank transfers in Nigeria, by aggregating other bank accounts of a customer into one system. With the aggregation or linking of all accounts to Zap, customers can then fund their accounts easily and make…