Nigeria’s Lazerpay halts operations over funding issues. 2 other stories and a trivia

This line-up of stories will help you discover the latest happenings around the tech world, today

1. Nigeria’s Lazerpay halts operations over funding issues

Nigerian crypto and web3 company, Lazerpay, has halted its operations after its inability to raise funding.

This was contained in a statement from Njoku Emmanuel, founder, and CEO of Lazerpay on Friday.

Lazerpay, which debuted in 2021, functioned like Stripe except for cryptocurrency.

Ripples Nigeria gathered that the company laid off some of its employees last November after the proposed lead investor for its seed round withdrew its interest due to the “market conditions and disagreement on terms”.

“Despite our team’s tireless efforts to secure the necessary funding to keep Lazerpay going, we were unable to close a successful fundraising round,” Njoku said.

Njoku added that all Lazerpay merchants should use the bank or cryptocurrency payout options to remove their monies from the system no later than April 30.

Tech Trivia:Which word is synonymous with “bookmark?”
A. Page
B. Favorite
C. Firewall
D. Token
Answer: see end of post

2. Twitter now supports 10,000 characters for Blue subscribers

Twitter on Friday unveiled a new feature that enables Blue subscribers to send posts with 10,000 characters or more.

Read also:Tech-backed HR startup, Xobin, unveils AI feature to aid talent assessment

‘Twitter Write’ disclosed the new feature on its handle seen by Ripples Nigeria on Friday.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, also disclosed that the social media site would provide subscribers with access to long-form text and hours-long video.

Ripples Nigeria understands that this Twitter Blue subscribers feature will now support tweets with up to 10,000 characters in length with bold and italic text formatting.

“We’re making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! Starting today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting.”

We’re making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! Starting today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting.

Sign up for Twitter Blue to access these new features, and apply to enable…

— Twitter Write (@TwitterWrite) April 14, 2023

Musk also revealed that the Twitter monetization scheme is only right now accessible to users in the United States but is being expanded to other nations.

3. Amazon reveals suite to boost AI chatbots development

Amazon has revealed a suite of technologies to boost chatbot development amid AI competition between Microsoft and Google.

Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS disclosed the development in a statement on Friday.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), billed as the world’s biggest cloud computing provider, took a different approach in the race with AI.

AWS said it would offer a service called Bedrock that lets businesses customize what are called foundation models with their data to create a unique model.

“It’s unneeded complexity from the perspective of the user.

“Behind the scenes, we can abstract that away,” said Philomin.

The VP added that customers of the Bedrock service would be able to work with Amazon Titan, a set of the company’s proprietary foundation models, but it would also provide a menu of models provided by other businesses.

Trivia Answer: Favorites

While most Web browsers store saved webpage locations as bookmarks, Internet Explorer saves them as favorites.

By Kayode Hamsat

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