Clubhouse

Millions of eyes will be on the Super Bowl kickoff Sunday. And there may be a kickoff of a different sort that same day, where small businesses, wrestling with the pandemic's headwinds and challenges, may begin their digital payments journeys.As announced this week, on Feb. 7, which of course is Super Bowl Sunday, Visa’s Authorize.net will partially waive its transactional fees and completely waive its monthly gateway account fees to reduce the costs for smaller businesses based in North America that want to accept digital payments. Visa has said those costs can approach $10,000 for smaller firms.Michele Herron, senior vice president, strategy, marketing and SMB segment leader at Visa, told Karen Webster that the promotion would help companies move more fully online to meet their customers’ payment preferences and expectations. In its announcement, the company said that, in partnership with the NFL, the payment management platform would waive the gateway fee (which is charged monthly) for the life of these new accounts, and transactional fees will be waived for the first 100,000 transactions.The promotion comes as the pandemic has altered the very way small businesses interact with their end customers. The payments network said that 82 percent of small- to…

Good morning, Today’s top story is the latest episode in the battle between the government of India and Twitter over tweets and accounts related to the farmer protests. Twitter could face legal action if it ignores this one, officials have told ET. And following yesterday's news that Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO later this year, we look at what the decision could mean for the company's business in India, and why his successor Andy Jassy has been known as the most important person in tech for much of the past decade. Elsewhere, an audio-only social media platform is making all the right noises among inhabitants of India's startup ecosystem. Here’s a look at the top tech news to start your day. 1. Twitter vs GoI: the gloves are coming off The government of India has issued a notice to Twitter, warning the firm to comply with its order to block certain accounts and tweets related to the growing farmer protests (into which Rihanna unwittingly waded on Tuesday). The warning came two days after Twitter blocked around 200 high-profile accounts in India in response to the government’s request, only to lift the restriction just hours later. Twitter later…

The popular voice-based app Clubhouse has become one of the hottest trends among social media platforms, with celebrities signing on. Names like 21 Savage, Ne-Yo, and Lakeith Stanfield have hopped on the app, but fans of Cardi B are wondering why it’s taking so long for her to get on Clubhouse. https://archive.vn/o/jOZ66/https://twitter.com/iamcardib/status/1357047747451359232 The rapper took to Twitter on Wednesday to respond to why she hasn’t signed up, saying, “People keep asking me to join clubhouse knowing damn well my mouth gets me in trouble.” To anyone who’s spent any time on Clubhouse, Cardi is right to be wary. In recent months, a number of artists, including Mulatto, Meek Mill, and Kevin Hart, have been brewed controversy with things they’ve said on the app. While a Clubhouse appearance is unlikely from the Bronx rapper, one thing fans can definitely expect from her is new music. She recently announced that her first song of the year, and follow-up to her recent No. 1 single “WAP,” would arrive at the end of the week. The track is titled “Up” and will most likely appear on her highly-anticipated sophomore album, set to drop later this year. Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx…

Three years have passed since the launch of the UK’s Open Banking initiative. On 13 January 2018, the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) came into force, enabling regulated third-party providers to access a customer’s bank account information (with their consent). This was a significant milestone for the UK’s financial market. Open Banking was designed to increase competition and innovation in a sector traditionally dominated by large financial services companies. Banking APIs would break down the barriers standing in the way of data sharing, and enable new providers and technology companies to enter the market, offering better services for customers, and at lower prices. With technology at the heart of the initiative, the UK’s Open Banking system signalled a transition of power to the consumer. Soon, banking customers would have a plethora of options to choose from when it came to shopping around for the best deals. Given that we are entering the fourth year of Open Banking, now is the right time to reflect on the achievements already made, and what’s in store for the future of the initiative. Greater collaboration Collaboration has not always been a strong suit of the financial services sector, but the introduction of Open Banking…

In the early hours of Monday morning, Elon Musk ‘broke’ Clubhouse. by Jonny Stanton (Image: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images) Sign in to continue Register Don't have an account? Complete easy registration and receive: Limited Article Views (Excludes Subscriber Only Content) Select Newsletters (Excludes Subscriber Only Bulletins) Register Now Register FREE Limited free articles a month Limited number of free email bulletins Register Now Subscribe To receive full access to PRWeek's content subscribe today and receive: Unlimited Access to PRWeek content Daily Breakfast Briefing Breaking News Alerts Weekly Online Edition Agency Business Report Weekender Edition PRWeek Magazine Full Archive Access Subscribe Options Become a subscriber From £75 per quarter Unrestricted individual access to prweek.com PRWeek Daily News (subscriber-exclusive email bulletin) Exclusive access to Power Book and Top 150 UK Consultancies/Agency Business Report content PRWeek magazine delivered Choose a Package Need to activate your subscription? Need to activate your Subscription

Topline Online stock trading platform Robinhood has seen its review score on Google’s mobile app store plummet to a one-star rating out of five for the second time in less than a week, as irate users flooded the app with negative reviews in retaliation to its decision to curb the trading of several popular but volatile meme stocks like GameStop and AMC last week, highlighting how anger over the incident still persists among online traders. Robinhood's app has been hit with a spate of negative reviews by irate users. ASSOCIATED PRESS Key Facts At the time of publishing, Robinhood has a 1.1-star rating out of five from over 310,000 reviews on Google Play Store, after slipping down to a similar number last week. The score had shot back up to 4.3 stars after Google threw out more than 100,000 reviews in an action against what it called “coordinated or inorganic reviews,” without offering any further details. Google is unlikely to intervene this time though as it told The Verge that the new reviews are compliant with Google’s policies, and won’t be removed. The trading app is doing much better review-wise on the Apple iPhone’s App Store where it holds a…

If you’ve been following latest information about Resident Evil Village, the subsequent sport in the hit horror online game franchise, you’ll have heard about Lady Dimitrescu, a really tall lady / probably-vampire who has turn into very popular. Seriously, she’s tall — simply have a look at this GIF from Sony. Lady Dimitrescu towers over the different girls / probably-vampires in this scene. Lots of people have questioned precisely how tall Lady Dimitrescu is, apparently, and Kotaku’s Ash Parrish even went to nice lengths to estimate that Lady Dimitrescu is 96 inches tall (8 feet). On Monday night, although, the official Resident Evil Twitter account revealed that Parrish wasn’t even shut. If you embody her hat and excessive heels, Lady Dimitrescu formally stands at an enormous 2.9 meters tall, which equates to a peak of roughly 9 ft and 6 inches, in accordance with Tomonori Takano, Resident Evil Village’s art director. Your love for Lady Dimitrescu is loud and clear. Here’s a message from our RE Village artwork director Tomonori Takano, together with a really curious reality you’ll have questioned about: pic.twitter.com/Lj4m5pN2dJ — Resident Evil (@RE_Games) February 2, 2021 That sounds terrifyingly tall to me — I’m practically six ft…

8:10 AM PST 2/1/2021 by Natalie Jarvey The audio-only, invite-only hangout has been embraced by Hollywood, especially Black creatives: "The exclusiveness has given them that buzzy start." After a year of no film premieres or in-person awards shows, Hollywood is turning to a new venue to have the kind of spontaneous conversations with strangers that they once had in line at the bar. Clubhouse, an app for audio-only conversations, has over the past few months become a popular hangout spot for a number of top filmmakers, actors and influencers. On a recent December evening, director Barry Jenkins was on Clubhouse talking about his work on 2018's If Beale Street Could Talk. At the same time, in another virtual room, Ava DuVernay was listening to a live performance of the Lion King musical, while Tiffany Haddish was part of a conversation titled "I Love Black Unicorns," an allusion to the title of her memoir. "Clubhouse is this perfectly timed outlet for creativity, and it's new enough that it feels like there's this opportunity," says writer, comedian and podcaster Baratunde Thurston, who regularly hosts conversations on Clubhouse. Less than a year old, Clubhouse was founded by a pair of Silicon Valley veterans,…

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and make sure to check out last week’s main episode and companion chat about Robinhood. This morning we ran into quite a lot of the same material, with Robinhood back in the news and the stock market looming large. Here’s what we talked about: American stocks are set to rise, bitcoin is flat and meme-stocks are mixed. In India, news is out that a new law could ban Bitcoin (whatever that means), and this morning India forced Twitter to take down some accounts that had been critical of government policy. That’s a pretty bad look. And it comes as we see a coup in Myanmar leading to a decline in internet connectivity; there is a clear link between authoritarianism and a desire for internet control. Robinhood’s CEO went on Clubhouse, where he was interviewed by Elon Musk about…

Facebook. Instagram. Snapchat. Is a nine-month-old audio chat app called Clubhouse about to join those mighty social media giants?That is the bet placed by Andreessen Horowitz, the blue-chip venture capital firm that last week invested a reported $100 million (£73 million) in the nascent company at an eye-watering $1 billion valuation. The injection, led by Uber executive-turned-investor Andrew Chen, is a doubling down for Andreessen.Chen led an initial funding round in May that valued Clubhouse at $100 million even though it was a mere weeks old with just two employees: co-founders and former Google engineers Paul Davison and Rohan Seth.Why all the excitement? Clubhouse allows people to drop into “rooms” where chat topics range from spivvy cryptocurrency schemes to art, media, politics