The English(?) chap who invented Wordle has made a few million!
Way back in October 2021, Wordle, an online word guessing game with a new challenge available daily, registered less than 5,000 visits a day to its site.
By January 2022, traffic had skyrocketed to more than 45 million!
More than 900,000% increase in less than four months.
The New York Times noticed, acquiring Wordle from its creator for a price “in the low seven figures”. The NYT says that the game will remain free and the format will not be changed.
We shall see.
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The CEOs of Tesla and Square touched off one of the year’s best crypto spats, picking a fight with the powerful VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey threw some spicy tweets at Web3.
His outburst drew in many other prominent figures, including Elon Musk.
Two of the biggest names in crypto and Silicon Valley—Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Square CEO Jack Dorsey— took to Twitter on Monday night to fire shots at Web3 and the powerful venture capital firm that has done most to promote it.
“You don’t own ‘web3’. The venture capitalists and liquidity providers do. It will never escape their incentives.”
Jack Dorsey
One of the major tech titans of our generation is drawing the red line: You’re either with #Bitcoin & real meaningful change, or you’re marketing hype & buzzwords.https://t.co/XZQOzjkqyJ
The metaverse has been the talk among science fiction fans for years, but it’s becoming more real as a point of discussion among the engineers who could potentially build it.
Individual users are playing a significant role in directing developments.
The internet is now a ubiquitous technology. So, when a company promises to build its next iteration – i.e., the embodied internet or the metaverse – it is sure to raise some vital questions.
How will this new internet experience called the metaverse change our lives? Will it impact businesses and how we work? And, most importantly, who is building this new internet that will connect over a billion users by 2031?
Meta puts the Zuck front and centre. But, will that be how it pans out?
Anyone who thinks the Zuck is going to have an easy walk into the leadership ranks hasn’t been watching developments. Roblox, is the maker of the platform for user-generated content (UGC) that went public at a $41 billion valuation earlier this year.
Roblox has 43 million daily active users, and it is building the plumbing to turn its virtual world platform into something more like the metaverse, with users leading the way.
Max Boot in the Washington Post. “One of Vladimir Putin’s pseudo-justifications for his war of aggression was the supposed fear that Ukraine would join NATO. That was… Read more: Putin’s Defeats Mount Up – As Do The Bodies
Robert Bailey: “The most notoriously wrong modern prophet of Malthusian doom is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. My public crusade against Malthusian stupidity began with my 1990 Forbes… Read more: Malthus Lite
And now, it is going global – as part of the Spotify platform.
Global digital audio leader Spotify cited Whooshkaa’s world-class technology as the reason for its first Australian acquisition.
With more than 381 million monthly listeners and more than €1 billion in ad revenue this year, Spotify will allow Whooshkaa to access a large and fast growing global market.
Ecstatic Whooshkaa founder, Robert Loewenthal is over the moon:
Since 2016, we’ve worked hard alongside countless Aussie podcasters to build and re-imagine the future of digital audio.
No false modesty here – I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built with Whooshkaa. In five years we’ve grown, learned, pivoted, and innovated. Our current team is nothing short of astounding.
We’ve worked long days, nights, and weekends with talented individuals, businesses, schools, and media organisations to drive podcasting in Australia, with many high points along the way. Hedley Thomas’s The Teacher’s Pet for example, launched on Whooshkaa in 2018, has been downloaded more than 60 million times worldwide.
We’ve led the way on text-to-speech, speech-to-text, connected home integration, ad technology with dynamic insertion for all, enterprise grade private podcasting tools and more. Sport, comedy, business, crime, conversation, education, music, current affairs – Whooshkaa has welcomed and supported all.
Since 2016, we’ve worked hard alongside countless Aussie podcasters to build and re-imagine the future of digital audio.
Robert Loewenthal
Proud as we are of our laurels, we’re not resting on them. Our business is thriving. And by adding the power and vision of Spotify, we can propel the industry-leading tech and service you know and love to even greater heights.
The best is yet to come.
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The real reason China is pushing “digital sovereignty” in Africa.
YINKA ADEGOKE, writes in Rest of World about the deepening tech-telecoms relationship between China and nearly every African country and, crucially, what it portends for the economic future of the continent.
Beijing is aiming to dominate African cyber industries and, most likely, incorporate them behind the Great Firewall of China.
Digital disruption of Australia’s universities is being accelerated by pandemic impacts.
TEQSA – Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality & Standards Agency – says the pandemic is accelerating many of the trends and changes that were already occurring in Australia’s increasingly digitally disrupted higher education system.
Less of this …
The strongest shift is to blended and online delivery of programs.
Prior to the pandemic hundreds of thousands of international students came to Australian campuses for face-to-face learning. Now universities and other tertiary educators are developing hybrid models using digital, offshore and third party arrangements.
More of this …
This has been driven by the desire to support and retain students who have been unable to enter Australia, but it is also being viewed as an opportunity to reach additional cohorts of students.
The strongest shift is to blended and online delivery of
programs.
However, as with all shifts in business models, risks are heightened, particularly related to the rigour of third-party arrangements, the management of agents, the quality of the courses and of the student experience.
The pandemic has created financial pressures for tertiary institutions which are creating additional threats to the quality of higher education and the integrity of the sector.
TEQSA is already seeing increased competition for students and admission practices which may undermine generally accepted tertiary standards for transparency.
When Oz PM Morrison, wisely or not, decided to run point for Donald Trump, demanding an investigation of the Chinese origins of Covid-19, Beijing reacted badly.
An anti-Australian trade war was launched – which more than a year later – is intensifying, not being relaxed.
Behind the scenes tens of thousands of Chinese hackers launched their own online ‘popular war’ against Australian government departments, universities, companies and non-governmental organizations.
Bloomberg
The hackers are using bots to launch tens of thousands of ongoing attacks.
While mainstream journalists on Newscorp outlets and government outlets like the ABC trade punches over half century old domestic political disputes, the ongoing Chinese attacks have attracted little attention.
America’s Bloomberg news wire has done the work most Australian journalists have ignored.
Aussie Arts & Letters 
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