TECH ROUNDUP: Bolt cautions drivers, passengers against offline trips

• Bolt has warned drivers and passengers to stop offline trips

• Peach Cars has raised $5 million

• A group of 17 music publishers have sued Twitter

• Eze Wholesale has raised $3.7 million

Bolt has warned drivers and passengers operating on its app to desist from using its platform to negotiate offline trips. According to the company, going on offline trips disables GPS tracking and such drivers are only putting themselves and their passengers in serious jeopardy.

B2B marketplace for electronic wholesalers, Eze Wholesale has raised $3.7 million in an oversubscribed seed round. “It’s almost every day we see someone getting scammed in one of these group chats where people are doing business. So we knew that a product like ours was essential in the market to keep these individuals safe,” co-founder, Joshua Nzewi said.

Also Read: TECH ROUNDUP: Twitter owes three months’ rent to its Boulder landlord

Kenyan automotive marketplace Peach Cars has raised $5 million in a seed round to grow the business, hire more talent and double down on R&D as it expands its tech solutions, according to a statement.

POLITICS

Nigeria’s inflation rate elevated further in May 2023, rising to 22.41% from 22.22% recorded in the previous month, which represents the fifth consecutive increase in the headline inflation rate.

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has inaugurated his administration’s first National Economic Council, of mostly politicians, with his VP, Kashim Shettima as the leader, as part of a move to show that his administration will take the economy seriously. The body also includes acting CBN Governor, Folashodun Shonubi, former state governors, top NNPC executives and others.

The Naira-to-dollar rate closed at N664.04/$1 at the I&E exchange market, representing a massive dip of 40.78% from the close of N471.67/$1 that was recorded in the last trading session on Tuesday 13th June 2023.

SOCIAL MEDIA 

Multichoice Nigeria has generated N277 billion (ZAR9.1 billion) in subscription revenue for the financial year ending on March 31, 2023, a 29% growth compared to the N177.5 billion (ZAR7.1 billion) recorded in the previous year contributing an overall revenue growth of 7%, amounting to ZAR59.1 billion.

Nigeria’s EFCC arrested not less than 258 internet fraudsters (Yahoo Boys) in May 2023, recovering nearly a billion naira and more than 30 exotic cars from them.

New data from Jumia has revealed that beauty products and mobile phones are the most ordered items by rural dwellers in the East African countries of Kenya and Uganda.

A staggering 59% of Africans trust digital news outlets “most of the time,” according to a new report from Reuters Institute. In Kenya is was 63% of the people surveyed who trust digital news outlets. In Nigeria and South Africa, it was 57% each. 

Over 45 Nigerian YouTube channels have more than 1 million subscribers, representing the most of any country on the African continent, a more than 50 per cent increase year on year. South Africa has 25 channels reaching the 1 million subscriber mark, and Kenya has over 14 channels boasting more than 1 million subscribers.

WORLD NEWS

A group of 17 music publishers have sued Twitter, accusing it of copyright infringement on about 1,700 songs, and is seeking as much as $250 million in damages. 

Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCunn said that current artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT do not have human-level intelligence and are not even as smart as a dog. “Those systems are still very limited, they don’t have any understanding of the underlying reality of the real world, because they are purely trained on text, massive amount of text. Most of human knowledge has nothing to do with language … so that part of the human experience is not captured by AI,” he said. 

Federal prosecutors asked a judge to remove five charges against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, including bribery of a foreign government official, after a Bahamas court ruling cast doubt on whether the U.S. government had followed the correct procedure for bringing the charges against him.

ENIGERIA NEWSPAPER