Ireland 🇮🇪 Fines Instagram For Over $400 Million 🚨
Scott D. Clary | Daily Business, Tech & Finance Newsletter
Scott D. Clary
September 06, 2022
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Here’s whats happening:
- Ireland fines Instagram for over $400 million
- CVS to acquire Signify Health
- Solar Foods seeks to change industrial animal farming
- ERP start-up Tailor raises $4.3 million
- Binance plans to halt all deposits and withdrawals of Ether (ETH) and Wrapped Ether (wETH)
Ireland 🇮🇪 Fines Instagram For Over $400 Million 🚨
The authorities in Ireland have imposed a $402 million fine on Instagram after investigating the company’s management of children’s data.
Key Points:
- Ireland’s data privacy regulator tracked business accounts of teenagers on Instagram and saw that the company was making their email addresses and/or phone numbers public.
- The investigation began in 2020 and focused on accounts run by 13 to 17-year-olds.
- The regulator imposed a record fine of 405 million euros ($402 million) on Instagram for its data privacy practices.
What is Instagram doing?
The photo & video sharing platform updated its settings over a year ago and has since released new features to keep teens safe; however, it’s unclear how much of it is working.
Instagram claims to disagree with how the fine was calculated. Hence its parent company Meta Platforms is planning to appeal the file, hoping to get some relief from the fine.
CVS to Acquire Signify Health
Pharmacy giant CVS Health has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Signify Health for a record value of approximately $8 billion.
The deal:
- Last month, Signify announced its decision to explore strategic alternatives.
- CVS would acquire Signify Health for $30.50 per share in cash.
- The acquisition marks a big push by CVS into the in-home healthcare space.
Why is CVS acquiring Signify Health?
The company, which has nearly 10,000 stores nationwide, thinks that acquiring Signify will advance its long-term strategy by providing a platform for growth in value-based care.
Why does this matter?
The deal comes at a time when companies like Amazon and Walgreens, among others, are moving further into the healthcare sector.
Earlier in July, Amazon announced it was acquiring primary-care provider One Medical for about $3.9 billion.
What’s next?
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2023, pending regulatory and shareholder approval.
Solar Foods Seeks to Change Industrial Animal Farming 💡
Industrial biotech startup Solar Foods is working towards bringing a novel protein to market.
What is the product about?
- The company wants to offer a nutritious, sustainable alternative to animal-derived proteins.
- The product called Solein is basically an edible bacteria, a single-cell microbe grown using gas fermentation.
The making of Solein needs only a few ‘ingredients’: Air, water, and energy (electricity). This means that there is no requirement for huge agricultural land to be given out to produce this future foodstuff.
The product could be made in factories located in remote areas or inside cities and urban centers.
What does this mean?
Solar Foods aims to tackle the environmental costs of livestock-based meat production — unsustainable land & water use, climate-heating emissions, and animal welfare concerns with its product.
And if you can manufacture huge amounts of nutritious meals without the need to deforest huge land masses and slaughter livestock to produce the food, then it could do wonders to humanity.
ERP Start-Up Tailor Raises $4.3 Million 💰
Tailor, a Japanese-based enterprise resource planning start-up, has raised $4.3 million in its seed funding.
The investors:
The funding was raised from Y Combinator and Global Brain.
What is Tailor going to do with the money?
With the seed money, Tailor will enhance its product capability and developer onboarding features.
The company is also planning to launch in the US next year. The Japanese startup currently has one customer and ten employees but plans to double its headcount to 20 employees by the end of this year.
About Tailor:
Founded in 2021, Tailor provides a headless ERP platform, meaning an ERP without a front end, instead delivering data from back-office systems like finance and procurement to other applications via API.
Tailor’s API-first approach should make it easier for enterprises to integrate with another third-party SaaS tool and help users build their tailor-made internal tools faster.
Binance plans to halt all deposits and withdrawals of Ether (ETH) and Wrapped Ether (wETH) 🔴
When? 🤔
The crypto exchange is planning to halt transactions on selected networks starting September 6 at 2:00 am UTC in anticipation of Ethereum’s Merge event.
In addition, the crypto exchange also plans to remove USDC as a tradable asset from its platform.
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