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After announcing that they were launching a managed blockchain service late last year, Amazon Web Services is now opening that service up for general availability . It was only about five months ago that AWS chief executive Andy Jassy announced that the company was reversing course on its previous dismissal of blockchain technologies and laid out a new service it would develop on top of open source frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum . AWS launches a managed blockchain service “Customers want to use blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum to create blockchain networks so they can conduct business quickly, with an immutable record of transactions, but without the need for a centralized authority. However, they find these frameworks difficult to install, configure, and manage,” said Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS, in a statement. “Amazon Managed Blockchain takes care of provisioning nodes, setting up the network, ...

SoftBank Vision Fund has its pedal to the metal in more ways than one. On stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference yesterday, the CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisors, Rajeev Misra, reportedly disclosed plans to double the size of the investment arm from 400 employees to 800 employees over the next 18 months. That’s a lot of people  — especially considering that last September, one of its managing directors, Jeffrey Housenbold, told us that the organization employed 86 people across offices in Tokyo, London, and San Carlos, Ca. Then again, much has happened in the seven months since that sit-down. For one thing, SoftBank — which had been flying its managing directors back and forth to China to kick the tires on potential deals — decided to start assembling an investment team to be based in China and managed by Eric Chen, a former Hong Kong-based managing director at private equity firm Silver Lake who’d joined the firm in March of last year. The firm also announced in N...

Rappi represents a new era for Latin American technology startups. Based in Bogotá, Colombia, the on-demand delivery startup has taken the region by storm, attracting a record amount of venture capital funding in mere months. Today marks the beginning of a new round of explosive growth as SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant and prolific Silicon Valley tech investor, has confirmed a $1 billion investment in the business. The king-sized financing comes two months after SoftBank announced its Innovation Fund , a new pool of capital committed to spending billions on the growing tech ecosystem in Central and South America. VC funding in Latin America catapulted to new heights in 2018. Startups located across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and more have secured nearly $2.5 billion since the beginning of 2018, according to PitchBook, up from less than $1 billion invested in 2017. SoftBank plans to transfer the Rappi investment to the Innovation Fund “upon the fund’s establishment,”...

YouTube wants to have half of the featured videos in its trending tab come from streams originating on the company’s own site going forward, according to the latest quarterly letter from chief executive Susan Wojcicki. The letter, directed to YouTube’s users, is meant to help ease concerns the site’s biggest stars have over copyright challenges, advertising policies and video monetization — along with their shrinking presence on the site’s trending feature. YouTube’s biggest contributors are worried that their footprint on the trending tab is shrinking as the company favors “safer” content coming from other, more traditional, media like repurposed television clips, movie trailers, and music videos. It’s been a rough quarter for YouTube. The company had to deal with yet another child predator scandal, which prompted the company to completely shut down comment sections on most videos featuring minors.  YouTube disables comments on videos with kids after reports of predatory...

Matt Miesnieks Contributor Matt Miesnieks is a partner at Super Ventures . More posts by this contributor Why the YouTube of AR won’t be YouTube The product design challenges of AR on smartphones The martial arts actor Jet Li turned down a role in the Matrix and has been invisible on our screens because he does not want his fighting moves 3D-captured and owned by someone else. Soon everyone will be wearing 3D-capable cameras to support augmented reality (often referred to as mixed reality) applications. Everyone will have to deal with the sorts of digital-capture issues across every part of our life that Jet Li avoided in key roles and musicians have struggled to deal with since Napster. AR means anyone can rip, mix and burn reality itself. Tim Cook has warned the industry about “the data industrial complex” and advocated for privacy as a human right. It doesn’t take too much thinking about where some parts of the tech industry are headed to see AR ushering in a dy...

Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm known for early bets in Twitter, Etsy and Tumblr, has $450 million in capital commitments to plow into the next generation of technology startups. The capital, which comes in just above the $429 million USV filed to raise earlier this year, is divided across two new funds: $200 million for its 2019 Core Fund and $250 million for the 2019 Opportunity Fund. The two funds are larger than their predecessors, which both closed on $175 million in 2016. USV is expanding its partnership to manage the new funds. The firm announced today the hiring of Gillian Munson as a partner. Munson was most recently the chief financial officer at XO Media, a business responsible for several brands, including wedding planning site The Knot. Additionally, USV has promoted Nick Grossman, the firm’s former general manager of special projects, to partner. Grossman focuses on cryptonetworks and blockchain technology. Founded in 2003 by  Fred Wilson and...

  We’ve known for a while now that Apple was going to be putting more of an emphasis on services. As the technical leaps from one iPhone/iPad/Mac generation to the next become less dramatic, product revenue has started to shrink; in response, the company is focusing on driving forward on things like the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and its soon-to-launch games and video offerings. This shift is already playing out in the company’s financials . While product sales dipped a bit year-over-year — down from $51.3B in the quarter that ran from January to March 2018 to $46.6B in the same quarter of 2019 — revenue from the services business climbed from $9.9B to $11.5B. In this fiscal Q2 quarter of 2018, Apple’s total revenue came in at roughly $61.1B; in the same quarter of 2019, it dipped to $58B. This works out to services accounting for 16.1% of Apple’s revenue in fiscal Q2 2018, but nearly 20% in fiscal Q2 2019. Apple CFO Luca Maestri says services now account for “o...