TLDR 2025-01-10

$37tn in B2B payments is about to move from legacy rails to instant payments. This means a big infrastructure shift is coming, and companies would be wise to prepare.

Join Rachel Pike (COO, Modern Treasury) and Erin McCune (Senior Partner, Bain & Company) for a live webinar, where they'll reveal key data points from Modern Treasury's latest State of Payment Operations report.

On the agenda:

📈 Strategies used by money-moving companies to modernize payments infrastructure

💳 How leading companies leverage faster payment rails

🤖 AI/automation applications in payments

Save your virtual seat →

xAI has released an iOS app for its Grok chatbot in the US. It can perform the same functions as the chatbot built into the X app. The company has been testing the app in a handful of countries since December. There is no word on when it might come to Android. xAI is also working on a dedicated website for Grok.

TikTok will argue its case before the Supreme Court today in a case that will decide whether the government can ban the platform if it doesn't sever ties with China. The US government wants to ban TikTok due to concerns about China's control over the app. TikTok says the ban violates its First Amendment right to free speech and that the US government's security concerns are too vague and hypothetical to justify an infringement of its rights. If TikTok is banned on January 19, people who don't already have the app on their devices will no longer be able to download it from Google or Apple app stores. The law also bars US internet hosting services and data-storage providers from supporting the app. There are workarounds, but they are limited.

Blue Origin is aiming to launch its first orbital rocket on Sunday. The launch was delayed due to rough seas in the Atlantic, where the company hopes to land its first stage booster on a ship. The rocket, New Glenn, will carry a prototype of Blue Ring, a US Defense Department funded spacecraft. The launch will mark Blue Origin's long-awaited entry into the orbital launch market and escalate the rivalry between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

SpaceX plans to test Starship's payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight, which could be launching as soon as January 13. The upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades. In addition to testing the payload deployment mechanism, SpaceX plans to fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster. Details about the upgrades on the new generation ship are available in the article.

Miguel Carranza, founder of RevenueCat, writes a post every year looking back over the last twelve months. 2024 was a good year for RevenueCat, possibly its best since 2020. While the journey was a lot rockier than Carranza had imagined, it was clear the company succeeded in its goals. The post discusses the company's performance last year, the lessons it learned (on culture, hiring, company building, and scaling as a founder), and its plans for the future.

The industry pivot to serverless compute hasn't really happened despite an appealing value proposition. Friction against serverless is caused in part by fatigue from the last paradigm shift to microservices. Caution in the industry is reasonable as a shift to serverless will amplify the same type of challenges that were caused by microservices, many of which still aren't fully resolved. The main incentive for broad serverless is financial, not technical, it is unlikely for someone from the engineering department to sponsor the idea.

There's a growing underground market connecting job seekers to anonymous company insiders willing to help them get a foot in the door. While a referral is not a guarantee of a job offer, it can substantially improve the odds. There are several sites available that let people get in touch with verified employees of their target employer to discuss job referral opportunities. Many companies say that this is completely fair practice, but others, like Google and Goldman Sachs, disagree.

'Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers' is an initiative started by the Linux Foundation that will provide funding and development support for industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community working on open Chromium projects. It will have an open governance model based on transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. Google has slowly loosened its control over the Chromium project over the years, allowing outside developers into its leadership, softening its stance on non-Google-derived features, and opening up its 'Goma' development scheme for Chromium.

Project Liberty is its partners plan to restructure TikTok to exist on an American-owned platform that prioritizes users' digital safety.

The gap between the chatbots consumers use and the systems that researchers are documenting is widening, making it harder for the public and policymakers to gauge AI's real progress.

Spotify has recently tweaked its platform to maximize subscription sales and to shift the incoming money to different sets of creators on the platform.

antirez, the author of Redis, who has been blogging extensively for over 20 years, discusses why he blogs, what lessons he's learned from blogging, the role of AI in blogging, and more.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt created an artificial intelligence startup called Hooglee to change the AI video generation and social media market.

Salesforce's Agentforce and other AI technology have increased the productivity of its engineering teams by more than 30%.