TechNigeria: A weekly digest of what went down in Nigeria’s tech space

Twitter, BrandmyDP, SunFi, OpenAI, PayPal, Baidu, Google were some of the names that made the headlines in the tech ecosystem this week.

A Nigerian design-as-a-service (DaaS) startup, BrandmyDP, has crossed a new milestone after deploying its design custom solution for some leading secondary schools in Nigeria.

Also, a Nigerian clean tech startup, SunFi, has secured $2.325 million in seed funding.

Let’s get into details.

American microblogging platform, Twitter, has announced intent to share revenue from advertisements with content creators.

The CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, made the announcement in a tweet seen by Ripple Nigeria on Saturday.

According to Musk, the opportunity will be opened to subscribers of Blue Verified. In the statement, Musk clarified that revenue from ads that appear on a creator’s reply threads, will be shared.

Video-sharing app, Instagram, is allegedly considering to charge users for verification, similar to paid verification earlier rolled out by Twitter under new owner, Elon Musk.

Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer and reverse engineer, hinted on the possibility on made on Friday.

Alessandro may be right, again, this time as he has previously identified several new Instagram features before their public release.

Twitter Blue, under Elon Musk, has expanded into six new countries as it brings back Spaces curation.

The Microblogging platform updated the six countries on its website, as seen by Ripples Nigeria on Friday.

With the addition of Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, there are now 12 regions where users can subscribe to the subscription plans.

Read also:Instagram to develop paid verification service. 2 other stories and a trivia

A Nigerian clean tech startup, SunFi, has secured $2.325 million in seed funding.

The startup’s CEO, Rotimi Thomas, disclosed the funding in a statement on Friday.

The startup claims it connects people and businesses who want solar energy access to payment plans that match their needs.

A South African digital lender, Lulalend, has secured $35 million series B.

Trevor Gosling, co-founder & CEO of Lulalend, confirmed the funding in a statement on Thursday.

The company offers short-term loans to small and medium-sized enterprises, which are frequently unable to access working cash.

Microblogging platform, Twitter, announced a new way for suspended accounts to appeal.

Read also:Proptech startup, AtarCloud, secures $1.3m Seed Round. 2 other stories and a trivia

The Elon Musk-owned company disclosed this on Twitter Safety handle, seen by Ripples Nigeria on Thursday.

Recall that Elon Musk promised to grant “amnesty” to suspended and previously banned accounts when he assumed control of Twitter.

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Plus, a premium subscription plan at $20/month.

This was contained in an announcement on the company’s official Twitter handle seen by Ripples Nigeria on Thursday.

OpenAI bills itself as an AI research and deployment company that is focused on ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

A Nigerian design-as-a-service (DaaS) startup, BrandmyDP, has crossed a new milestone after deploying its design custom solution for some leading secondary schools in Nigeria.

The Founder of BrandmyDP, Tunde Moses Aguda, disclosed this in a statement seen by Ripples Nigeria on Wednesday.

He said about 285,000 custom images had been generated on the platform, 47, 000 higher than the 237,000 images recorded in November 2022.

Egyptian fintech startup, MNT-Halan, has secured $400 million in equity and debt financing.

The digital bank, which was created to bank the unbanked, confirmed the funding in a statement on Wednesday.

Ripples Nigeria gathered that the investment included $140 million from two recent securitized bond issuances and $260 million in equity financing.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has developed a method to determine whether a text was produced by a human or AI-generated, including from ChatGPT.

The company revealed the development in a release on Wednesday.

The new tool comes barely two months after ChatGPT caught public attention.

Coca-Cola Al Ahlia Beverages, Coca-bottler Cola’s distributor in the UAE, has struck an agreement with Emerge, a joint venture (JV) between Masdar of the UAE and EDF of France on a new solar project.

Mohamed Akeel, Chief Executive Officer of Coca-Cola Al Ahlia Beverages, confirmed the partnership in a statement seen by Ripples Nigeria on Wednesday.

Ripples Nigeria understands that the partnership is expected to birth a 1.8-megawatt (MWp) solar photovoltaic (PV) plant for its Al Ain facility.

An American payment company, PayPal, has announced intent to cut down about 7% of its workforce to meet its current realities.

According to the company, the need for the trimming is in response to “the challenging macro-economic environment.”

PayPal will make the cuts over several weeks, with some of its organisations affected more than others, a statement from the company revealed.

Chinese search giant, Baidu Inc., has announced its intent to launch a new app to rival American owned ChatGPT.

According to the search engine company, the new artificial intelligence, like the Elon Musk-owned ChatGPT, will be able to understand and respond in conversational language to users.

ChatGPT, which was developed by OpenAI LLC, a company partly owned and managed by the Elon Musk team, operates as a large language model AI that can understand and answer complex natural language questions in a conversational way that sounds very human to users.

American tech giant, Google, has launched a new AI tool, MusicLM, that helps users generate musical notes from text inputs.

The tool, which was created by a team of Google researchers, is similar to ChatGPT, which turns text command into a story or DALL-E that generates images from written prompts.

According to the team, the AI program can be deployed to “turn text input into seconds, and even minutes-long music, as well as turn, hummed melodies into other instruments.”

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