Vodafone and Microsoft agree to a 10-year, $1.5B deal to develop AI, digital payments, IoT, and other businesses; Vodafone will use OpenAI for customer service (Thomas Seal/Bloomberg)
Vodafone and Microsoft agree to a 10-year, $1.5B deal to develop AI, digital payments, IoT, and other businesses; Vodafone will use OpenAI for customer service (Thomas Seal/Bloomberg)
How Spotify’s on-the-ground work in Nigeria, like hiring local staff, contributed to the success of Afrobeats, which grew 550% on Spotify between 2017 and 2022 (Damilare Dosunmu/Rest of World)
Despite nine years of music industry growth thanks to streaming, companies like Spotify and UMG are tightening payouts or laying off employees (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)
Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority grants OKX Middle East a license, allowing the crypto exchange to offer its services to retail clients in the UAE (Federico Maccioni/Reuters)
Global smartphone shipments declined 3.2% YoY to 1.17B units in 2023; Apple gained the top spot for the first time with 234.6M, followed by Samsung with 226.6M (IDC)
HashKey, which operates a licensed Hong Kong crypto exchange, raised a ~$100M Series A at a $1.2B+ valuation; sources: OKX Ventures is among the lead investors (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)
Elon Musk says he would rather build AI products outside of Tesla if he doesn’t have ~25% voting control in the company; Musk currently owns 12%+ of Tesla (Edwin Chan/Bloomberg)
