A popular puzzle game on Google Play Store has reportedly leaked players’ progress data. The game in question is Fruits Mania: Belle’s Adventure game, where players solve puzzles in an attempt to save the “poor fairies from the greedy raccoons.”
Month: December 2022
Apple App Store policies present 'conflict of interest', says Mark Zuckerberg
Amid the ongoing Elon Musk and Apple tussle, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has once again slammed the iPhone maker for its App Store content moderation policies that present “a conflict of interest”.
AI platform SwiftChat with Google introduces speech-based reading tool
SwiftChat’s Read Along bot will assist early learners aged 5–11 years in learning to read independently using their voice.
Google appeals huge Android antitrust fine to EU's top court
Google previously appealed to a lower tribunal, which slightly lowered the original 4.34 billion-euro penalty in a decision largely siding with the European Commission.
Google begins Stadia hardware refunds
As per the tech giant’s Stadia shutdown FAQ page, purchases of the Stadia controller, the Founder’s Edition, the Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages are all eligible for refunds.
Amazon to warn customers on limitations of its AI
Akin to lengthy nutrition labels, Amazon’s so-called “AI Service Cards” will be public so its business customers can see the limitations of certain cloud services, such as facial recognition and audio transcription. The goal would be to prevent mistaken use of its technology, explain how its systems work, and manage privacy, Amazon said.
Renault-Airbus partnership to develop new generation of electric batteries
Engineering teams from both companies will join forces to mature technologies related to energy storage, one of the main roadblocks for the development of long-range electric vehicles, Airbus said in a statement.
Nintendo cancels Smash World Tour 'without any warning'
The offer was made shortly after the Japanese gaming giant unveiled the Panda Cup, its only licenced tournament circuit for Super Smash Bros., in collaboration with esports company Panda.
Silicon Valley leaders welcome Elon Musk's management of Twitter
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was keen to see how Elon Musk’s management of content moderation on Twitter would fare, arguing it was good for platforms to take different approaches.
Web3 developer platform Fleek raises $25M led by Polychain Capital
Web3 developer platform Fleek has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Polychain Capital, the company shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
Additional investors in the round include Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Protocol Labs, Arweave, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO, and Argonautic Ventures.
The startup is aiming to build an interface and protocol layer “to make the base layer of web[3] services” like storage, hosting and billing, accessible to anyone, according to its website.
“Our main initial focus is the content delivery market,” Harrison Hines, Fleek co-founder, said to TechCrunch. “That’s what Fleek serves today and where we see a huge missing in the web3 infrastructure stack. It’s a problem with all web3 protocols.”
The content delivery market (CDM) is dominated by a few big players like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare, to name a few, Hines said. And while Fleek originally worked with Web 2.0 infrastructure providers like AWS and Cloudflare, it plans to launch its own Fleek Network in 2023 and provide web3 technologies like decentralization, while still achieving Web 2.0-like performance, Hines added.
“Our vision for Fleek Network at its core, it’s a decentralized edge network where anyone can run nodes and provide resources to the network,” Hines said. “The internet is moving to the edge now. Most of the biggest platforms are edge related.”
Hines defines the edge as moving content away from one central server location to moving a loose coupling of different infrastructure and cloud services closer to the end user.
Fleek hosts about 50,000 apps on its platform today, mainly within the Ethereum ecosystem, but also among other protocols, too, Hines noted. To date, all Fleek products are built on crypto protocols like Ethereum, Filecoin, Internet Computer, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Textile.
The fresh capital will be used to build out the Fleek Network and platform, while bringing on additional talent and growing its community, Hines said.
The startup will focus on building out in the web3 ecosystem first, but will later expand to Web 2.0 companies like video gaming platforms, streaming services or any platform with a lot of traffic, which is usually one of their biggest costs, Hines said. “In this market, where big companies are looking to cut costs, we do think Fleek Network can be an attractive solution and easier jump.”
The pricing on Fleek is “fluid so the metrics can be adjusted as it grows,” Hines said, but compared to Cloudflare, which charges about 5 to 15 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth, Fleek aims to remain below a penny per gigabyte, making it five to fifteen times less expensive.
“We’ve been trying to do this for years and there’s been a breakthrough in [the crypto ecosystem for] scalability and how to actually build these networks that gave us the confidence that we can do it and is on par with the scale, throughput and latency of existing web2 systems,” Hines said. “It was the perfect timing.”
Web3 developer platform Fleek raises $25M led by Polychain Capital by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch