This article was published on April 18, 2016

Weekly business update: Microsoft sues Justice Department, Amazon may buy airport, and more


Weekly business update: Microsoft sues Justice Department, Amazon may buy airport, and more

Forget about Apple and the FBI going pawn-for-pawn on the legal chessboard for the past few weeks – Microsoft is bringing the digital privacy fight to the government.

Last week, The New York Times reported that the immutable software behemoth is suing the Justice Department over its frequent use of gag orders. These directives prevent parties like Microsoft form informing their users when the government obtains a warrant to read emails.

In other (completely unrelated) news, digital marketing on social media is hard. For some companies that predate the digital-natives era, etiquette is still an elusive concept. KFC made a gaff last week by posting an ill-advised NSFW advert on Twitter. It was promptly deleted within an hour.
At Index we gather tech coverage into one platform for tech enthusiasts to keep up with the news and access that data. In this series, we fill you in at the start of every week on what’s been happening in Tech.

The overall picture

The <3 of EU tech

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Last week, Index logged 222 funding events from 28 different countries. The top 10 countries from North America and Europe in terms of number of rounds can be seen below:

top10_wk15

North America

This week in North America there were 118 investments made at a total of $1.72 billion in capital deployment. The biggest round hauled in by a startup went to Affirm, the San Francisco based fintech company. It received a $100 million Series D round led by Founder’s Fund. Check out the breakdown in series in North America below:

na_wk15

Europe

Europe saw 45 funding rounds for a total of $374 million. Lausanne based real-time analytics company Nexthink raised the biggest round with a $40 million Series E. Below you can see the breakdown of rounds for the week.

eu_wk15

A look back

In this section we look back at the past eight weeks of investment activity. We compare Angel, Seed, and Series A rounds in both regions. The charts show the fluctuations in average capital volume of the rounds.

AG_wk15

SA_wk15

Last week’s must-reads

Facebook officially launches its Messenger Platform developer chatbot API [The Next Web]

Twitter has outsized influence, but it doesn’t drive much traffic for most news orgs, a new report says [NiemanLab]

Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth [Bloomberg]

Facebook Has Seized the Media, and That’s Bad News for Everyone But Facebook [Wired]

Alibaba to Invest $1 Billion in E-Commerce Startup Lazada [The Wall Street Journal]

Sean Parker, a Facebook and Napster Pioneer, to Start Cancer Immunotherapy Effort [New York Times]

Facebook is opening up its ‘M’ AI platform as a bot engine for developers [The Next Web]

Over the Weekend

Amazon reportedly considering purchase of German Airport [Geekwire]

San Francisco wants to collect over $3.3M each year from Uber, Lyft drivers [Ars Technica]

Yahoo’s bidding price could get a big boost because of a business it has nothing to do with [Business Insider]

On-demand chef service Kitchensurfing shuts down [Re/Code]

Tune in next week for another update on the state of tech. If you can’t wait that long, consider signing up to the Index.co newsletter to get the week’s hottest tech news straight in your inbox!

 

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