Tootfinder

Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is finalizing $350M in funding led by Felicis at a $10B valuation; founded in 2023, Mercor manages 30K contractors (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/te…

A surge in AI company valuations is driving the popularity of special purpose vehicles, but some involve high fees, opaque structures, and layers of middlemen (Business Insider)
https://africa.businessinsider.com/mar

Investors warn AI FOMO could be fueling a risky bubble in companies like OpenAI and Anthropic
As AI valuations soar into the hundreds of billions, a parallel market of temporary financial shells is proliferating to meet investor FOMO, and many investors are starting to sound the alarm bells that it portends a bubble in the AI gold rush

A similar trend is reported in Italy. Is violent crime becoming more violent and international? Is "someone" (a state actor perhaps?) flooding the black market with weapons?
Overall violent crime has been falling for decades pretty much everywhere in Europe so it's interesting to see these trends

The lameassedness of A.I. marketing; it's not just the people on Hacker News who only know the waitlist as a marketing tactic -- it's Microsoft too
#microsoft #marketing #ai

A paradox I think about:
If advertising doesn’t work - why is that the business model nearly every internet business defaults to?
If advertising online is so lucrative, why are marketing departments all over failing to meet targets and struggling to show any results?
Everything is ads and none of it is working. And I’m just a lone marketer screaming in this forest of nonsense hoping some tree falls and hears me.

Email: Indian crypto exchange WazirX plans to resume operations on October 24, following a court-approved restructuring, after hackers stole $230M in July 2024 (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/10/2

WazirX Latest News: Users Can Start Trading on Friday After $230M Hack Comes to Close
That was the final step in a process that began after a massive security breach last year froze assets, shuttered withdrawals, and effectively took India’s oldest crypto platform offline.

Trump bought more than $100 million in bonds since January, filings show (Steve Kopack/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/trump-bought-bonds-companies-governments-rcna226024
http://www.memeorandum.com/250820/p47#a250820p47

Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival transformed how Hollywood does business, creating a pipeline for independent films to be shown around the world (Lukas I. Alpert/MarketWatch)
https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwat

Die Bundeswehr schließt einen Millionen-Deal mit #Google – Kritiker wie Kiesewetter, von Notz und Schönbohm warnen zurecht: Wer sicherheitskritische Systeme an US-Konzerne auslagert, macht sich erpressbar. Technologische Souveränität? Fehlanzeige. Statt „Fort Knox“-Marketing wäre Eigenständigkeit die sicherere Wahl. |
Abhängigkeiten bei der Bundeswehr: Scharfe Kritik an Deal mit Google-Clou…

Abhängigkeiten bei der Bundeswehr: Scharfe Kritik an Deal mit Google-Cloud
Der Beschluss der Bundeswehr, auf Cloud-Dienste von Google zu setzen, kommt bei Sicherheitspolitikern nicht gut an: Deutschland könne politisch erpresst werden.

Alphabet becomes the fourth company to reach a $3T market cap, joining Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple, after its stock jumped 4% on Monday (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/15/alphabet-3-trillion-market-cap.html

Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap
Google's parent company added hundreds of billions of dollars in value in September following a favorable ruling.