| The Week We All Got BeReal: A Brief History of a Social Media Platform’s Out-of-Nowhere Explosion | By Annie Goldsmith | If you know what BeReal is, you’re either a French teen or a U.S. college student, or you found out about it 10 minutes ago. The social media site—now the 28th most downloaded free app in the App Store—was founded by two French entrepreneurs in 2020, leaped to popularity in Europe last summer and has been catching fire on college campuses since the fall. But after a critical mass of campus newspapers began reporting on the social app du jour this spring, all of a sudden, in a Wordle-like combustion, BeReal blew up. The premise of the app is as simple as the description on its TikTok page: “No filters, No followers, No ads, No bullshit.” Once a day the entire BeReal network (estimated at 2.5 million daily active users, according to Apptopia) simultaneously receives a push notification, telling them it’s “Time to BeReal.” Users are then prompted to take a photo within the next two minutes and share it with their circle. The post includes two images from the phone’s front- and back-facing cameras. It doesn’t allow any editing or fancy filters. If you miss the two-minute window, you can still post later, but your shots are marked with a stamp—a modern-day scarlet letter—indicating their tardiness. Critically, users can only see their friends’ photos if they themselves post. The intended result is unfiltered social media, a strike against highly curated Instagram feeds and effortful, effect-filled TikTok videos. Whether BeReal will maintain its momentum is to be determined. It could become the next Snapchat or it could fizzle out, like Poparazzi, Dispo and Yik Yak before it. To understand its rapid rise, we’ve assembled a timeline: 18 months in the life of an out-of-nowhere social media phenomenon. |
 | | Can Peace Last Between Crypto’s Visionary Rivals? | By Margaux MacColl | Last October, an image appeared on Twitter of a crypto Mount Rushmore: a drawing of four men etched in stone, looking out onto a valley of trees. There was Dorian Nakamoto, rumored to be the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. There was the distinct, angular jawline of Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the world’s second most valuable blockchain behind Bitcoin, with a market cap of over $370 billion. And there were two other forefathers, whose faces were less immediately identifiable on the cartoon mountain. They are Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, who were catapulted to crypto fame last year when their blockchain, Solana, became a stunning success, reaching a market cap of $33 billion and winning over investors like Andresseen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. However, whether they truly belong on crypto’s Mount Rushmore is up for debate. Twitter stans have dubbed Solana an “ethereum killer”—a title CEO Yakovenko has actively refuted, saying his product wasn’t built to destroy or even directly compete with Ethereum. Rather, he engineered Solana out of a desire for record transaction speed and scalability, something Buterin’s brainchild didn’t target. Solana uses a novel method of validation Yakovenko thought up: proof of history, a way to time-stamp its superfast transactions. This method, when coupled with the widely used mechanism called proof of stake, has proven to be much faster and less energy intensive than Ethereum’s current architecture, proof of work, a security mechanism that requires the system’s servers to expend a significant amount of energy to confirm transactions. It’s also much cheaper, costing users a fraction of a penny to use—a sharp contrast to Ethereum, which can cost anywhere from a few dollars to $100 per transaction. Though Ethereum will switch to proof of stake within the year, Buterin himself admits that the blockchain will likely never get much faster or cheaper than it is now—which is why Solana and other blockchains are emerging as cheaper, faster alternatives. | |
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Elon Musk said he would "need to reconsider" his position as a Twitter shareholder if the company rejects his proposed $43B takeover offer. Musk has offered to buy Twitter outright for $54.20 per share, according to an SEC filing made public Thursday. In the past year, the stock has traded anywhere from $31.30 to $73.34. More: - Musk, who recently bought a 9.2% stake in the company, making him the largest shareholder, is expected to sell all his shares if the offer is declined.
- After acquiring the stake, Musk accepted a seat on Twitter's board of directors but later turned down the position. The move fueled speculation that Musk could offer to buy the entire company.
- In the SEC filing made public on Thursday, Musk wrote that he invested in Twitter because he believes "in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe," adding that "free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy."
- The filing cites a letter in which Musk told Twitter's chairman: "My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder."
- Twitter shares rose 9% to $49.90 in premarket trading Thursday.
- On Tuesday, a Twitter shareholder sued Musk in a federal securities class action lawsuit, saying he failed to disclose he had a stake greater than 5% within the appropriate time period, as required by the SEC.
BUSINESS INSIDER 
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| Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said production capacity will remain tight this year and the company can't keep up with demand. The Apple supplier and the world’s largest contract chipmaker said supply chain disruptions triggered by the pandemic have put constraints on its suppliers. It still expects its second-quarter revenue to be 37% higher than the same time last year. More: - On Thursday, the company reported Q1 net profit of 202.73 billion Taiwan dollars ($7B), a 45% increase from the same period last year. Its revenue grew 36% YoY to $17.5B.
- TSMC expects revenue in the range of $17.6B to $18.2B in Q2, a 37% jump from the same period a year before.
- The company forecasts continued growth, particularly in the high-performance computing (HPC) segment, which is expected to be its main revenue driver. Its chips for HPC are used in CPUs, GPUs, and self-driving vehicles.
- TSMC, which supplies chips to Apple, Nvidia, and AMD, among others, said the worldwide chip shortage will likely continue.
- The company said it's now working alongside chip equipment suppliers to address delivery constraints. It's planning to beef up production from next year.
REUTERS 
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| |  A MESSAGE FROM OUTSYSTEMS Do you feel the burden of technical debt yet? Learn to prevent it. Technical debt is an unfortunate side effect many organizations experience when their list of priorities grows too long. It’s a sign of too many projects and not enough time to finish them. The results are frequently felt by customers, a topic of discussion by annoyed executives, and a cause that feeds frustrated developers. Learn how to use low-code to develop applications faster on AWS. It can effectively eliminate technical debt, which satisfies users, and refocuses developers to rapidly create innovative solutions. This low-code platform in AWS Marketplace can improve your development process teaching you how to… - Code faster
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| Amazon will impose its first fuel and inflation surcharge on third-party sellers that use its fulfillment services. The average 5% surcharge, which is not permanent, is expected to be passed down to consumers amid soaring gas prices and inflation. More: - Close to 90% of Amazon's third-party sellers use Fulfillment by Amazon to warehouse and ship their products.
- Starting April 28, Amazon will begin charging an average of 24 cents more for every unit it stores and ships through the service in the U.S.
- In a message to merchants, Amazon said it has absorbed significant cost increases, whenever possible, to lower the impact on selling partners.
- The company expected a return to normalcy in 2022, "but fuel and inflation have presented further challenges," it said.
- On Tuesday, the Labor Department said that the U.S. consumer price index, a measure of inflation, reached 8.5% in March, its highest increase since December 1981. Gasoline prices are up 48% from the prior year.
BLOOMBERG 
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|  An NFT of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet has failed to garner high offers at an auction on OpenSea. Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought the NFT for $2.9M in 2021. He hoped to sell it for roughly $48M, but his highest offer as of Thursday was around $10,000. More: - Dorsey sold the NFT, or non-fungible token, in March 2021 for 1630.5825601 ETH (Ether), worth roughly $2.9M at the time.
- It was one of the highest prices paid for an NFT at the time. Dorsey pledged to donate his cut, or 95% of the proceeds, to nonprofit GiveDirectly's Africa response
- The buyer, Estavi, announced in a tweet last week that he intended to re-sell the NFT and donate half the proceeds ($25M or more) also to GiveDirectly.
- He initially sought $48M, but removed that price after initial offers were only in the low hundreds of dollars.
- As of Thursday, the highest offer was 3.3 ETH, worth about $10,048. That offer expires on April 21.
- Estavi, who lives in Malaysia and is CEO of blockchain company Bridge Oracle, was recently released from prison in Iran, where he was arrested during a trip last May on charges of “disrupting the economic system.”
COINDESK  |
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