Technology
IRL social app founder charged with fraud
While enterprise capitalists and other technocrats are on vacation or attending the Olympics in Paris, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its lawyers have their hands full this summer.
For the second time this week — and no less than the fourth up to now few months — the SEC has charged the founder of a venture-backed company with fraud.
The SEC said Wednesday it has charged Abraham Shafi, the founder and former CEO of a social media startup generally known as IRL, with allegedly defrauding investors. The agency alleges that Shafi made false and misleading statements concerning the company’s growth and concealed that he and his fiancée, Barbara Woortmann, made extensive use of company bank cards to pay for private expenses.
IRL was positioned as a viral social media app that gained popularity through the pandemic, but there was one small problem: Its thousands and thousands of users were fake. IRL, which began as a social calendar app and built a messaging-based social network to turn out to be the “WeChat of the West,” was shut down in June 2023 after an internal investigation by company management found that 95% of the app’s users were “automated or bot-based.”
Before IRL collapsed, Shafi had raised $200 million in enterprise capital. The startup’s last round—a $170 million Series C led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 2—made IRL a unicorn with a valuation of $1.17 billion. The problems and concerns soon followed.
The SEC said in its grievance Wednesday that Shafi portrayed IRL as a viral social media platform that organically attracted a purported 12 million users. Instead, IRL spent thousands and thousands of dollars on ads that offered incentives to download the IRL app, in response to the SEC.
The SEC alleges that Shafi hid those expenses. The grievance also alleges that Shafi didn’t speak in confidence to investors that he and Woortmann had charged a whole bunch of hundreds of dollars to the corporate’s bank cards for clothing, home furnishings and travel.
“As we alleged, Shafi exploited investors’ appetite for pre-IPO technology investments and fraudulently raised approximately $170 million by lying about IRL’s business practices,” said Monique C. Winkler, director of the SEC’s San Francisco regional office. “Investors in this space should remain vigilant.”
Earlier this week, the SEC charged BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji with fraud and unregistered securities offering, alleging that he used the pseudonym “DiamondHands” to avoid regulatory scrutiny while raising greater than $257 million in cryptocurrency. BitClout, a high-profile cryptocurrency startup, was backed by high-profile enterprise capitalists reminiscent of a16z, Sequoia, Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Winklevoss Capital.
In June, the SEC charged Ilit Raz, CEO and founder of now-shuttered AI recruiting startup Joonko, with defrauding investors of no less than $21 million. The agency accused Raz of creating false and misleading statements concerning the number and quality of Joonko’s customers, the variety of candidates on the platform and the startup’s revenue.
The agency has also been going after enterprise capital firms in recent months. In May, the SEC charged Robert Scott Murray and his firm Trillium Capital LLC with fraud for manipulating the stock price of Getty Images Holdings Inc. by announcing a bogus offer from Trillium to purchase Getty Images.
Technology
US medical device giant Artivion says hackers stole files during a cybersecurity incident
Artivion, a medical device company that produces implantable tissue for heart and vascular transplants, says its services have been “disrupted” resulting from a cybersecurity incident.
In 8-K filing In an interview with the SEC on Monday, Georgia-based Artivion, formerly CryoLife, said it became aware of a “cybersecurity incident” that involved the “compromise and encryption” of information on November 21. This suggests that the corporate was attacked by ransomware, but Artivion has not yet confirmed the character of the incident and didn’t immediately reply to TechCrunch’s questions. No major ransomware group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
Artivion said it took some systems offline in response to the cyberattack, which the corporate said caused “disruptions to certain ordering and shipping processes.”
Artivion, which reported third-quarter revenue of $95.8 million, said it didn’t expect the incident to have a material impact on the corporate’s funds.
Technology
It’s a Raspberry Pi 5 in a keyboard and it’s called Raspberry Pi 500
Manufacturer of single-board computers Raspberry Pi is updating its cute little computer keyboard device with higher specs. Named Raspberry Pi500This successor to the Raspberry Pi 400 is just as powerful as the present Raspberry Pi flagship, the Raspberry Pi 5. It is on the market for purchase now from Raspberry Pi resellers.
The Raspberry Pi 500 is the simplest method to start with the Raspberry Pi because it’s not as intimidating because the Raspberry Pi 5. When you take a look at the Raspberry Pi 500, you do not see any chipsets or PCBs (printed circuit boards). The Raspberry Pi is totally hidden in the familiar housing, the keyboard.
The idea with the Raspberry Pi 500 is you could connect a mouse and a display and you are able to go. If, for instance, you’ve got a relative who uses a very outdated computer with an outdated version of Windows, the Raspberry Pi 500 can easily replace the old PC tower for many computing tasks.
More importantly, this device brings us back to the roots of the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi computers were originally intended for educational applications. Over time, technology enthusiasts and industrial customers began using single-board computers all over the place. (For example, when you’ve ever been to London Heathrow Airport, all of the departures and arrivals boards are there powered by Raspberry Pi.)
Raspberry Pi 500 draws inspiration from the roots of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a non-profit organization. It’s the right first computer for college. In some ways, it’s a lot better than a Chromebook or iPad because it’s low cost and highly customizable, which inspires creative pondering.
The Raspberry Pi 500 comes with a 32GB SD card that comes pre-installed with Raspberry Pi OS, a Debian-based Linux distribution. It costs $90, which is a slight ($20) price increase over the Raspberry Pi 400.
Only UK and US keyboard variants will probably be available at launch. But versions with French, German, Italian, Japanese, Nordic and Spanish keyboard layouts will probably be available soon. And when you’re in search of a bundle that features all the things you would like, Raspberry Pi also offers a $120 desktop kit that features the Raspberry Pi 500, a mouse, a 27W USB-C power adapter, and a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable.
In other news, Raspberry Pi has announced one other recent thing: the Raspberry Pi monitor. It is a 15.6-inch 1080p monitor that’s priced at $100. Since there are quite a few 1080p portable monitors available on the market, this launch is not as noteworthy because the Pi 500. However, for die-hard Pi fans, there’s now also a Raspberry Pi-branded monitor option available.
Technology
Apple Vision Pro may add support for PlayStation VR controllers
According to Apple, Apple desires to make its Vision Pro mixed reality device more attractive for gamers and game developers latest report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
The Vision Pro was presented more as a productivity and media consumption device than a tool geared toward gamers, due partly to its reliance on visual and hand controls moderately than a separate controller.
However, Apple may need gamers if it desires to expand the Vision Pro’s audience, especially since Gurman reports that lower than half one million units have been sold to this point. As such, the corporate has reportedly been in talks with Sony about adding support for PlayStation VR2 handheld controllers, and has also talked to developers about whether they may support the controllers of their games.
Offering more precise control, Apple may also make other forms of software available in Vision Pro, reminiscent of Final Cut Pro or Adobe Photoshop.
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