Australian Fintech and Startups
Employment Hero raised $181m at a unicorn valuation and acquired KeyPay, a workforce management and payroll platform. Link
Bendigo bank, after acquiring Up, is looking to integrate home loans into their app, via Tic:Toc’s loan assessment capability. Link
Selfwealth is going to offer crypto within their app. Link
Last week into this week: Fintech Australia appointed a new CEO, Andrew Porter. Link
More Defi: App Tiiik wants is creating a defi savings and investment account, with a ~10% APY. I expected to see a lot more of these apps coming out this year (Block Earner is another that I have previously written about). Link
Big Tech
Coinbase had an absolute ripsnorter of an ad during the Superbowl - a QR code bouncing around the screen a la the old school DVD screensaver (and yes, it ends bouncing into the corner of the screen). The ad was so popular it crashed the website. Link
Potpourri
Nice read: Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas. Link
Trivia
(a) What virus is referred to in French & Spanish with the acronym VIH?
(b) I’m going to describe Shakespeare villains. Name the plays they are from. Lady BLANK convinces her husband to kill the King of Scotland. Cassius plots an assassination. Claudius kills his brother. Iago manipulates his boss into killing his wife. Shylock demands a literal pound of flesh.
(c ) What are the only two countries where you can’t buy Coca-Cola?
(d) I’m going to describe double letter countries. Name them. (All have the same letter twice in a row, not just two of the same letter anywhere.) The largest country by area. A collection of over 7,000 islands in the Pacific. An African country on both the Atlantic & the Mediterranean. A country of 24 million bordering Nigeria. A country whose official language is Catalan.
Trivia Answers
(a) HIV
(b) Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice
( c) Cuba and North Korea
(d) Russia, Phillipines, Morocco, Cameroon and Andora.
nb: revision in last week, IOWA was also a correct answer.
still the deadliest trivia of any newsletter on the Internet