Intro

Good morning and welcome to the future 👋

The summer holidays have arrived and, beginning next week, we’ll be taking a short break. Don’t worry though, we’ll be back soon with more of the latest happenings!

Today’s update is 324 words, 1.6 minutes

Snippets

🚀 Hot tech job market: Do you work in tech? Even if you believe you are well compensated, now might be the right time to look around. Salaries are increasing fast, and some firms aren’t doing a great job of ensuring that pay for their long-term, loyal employees keeps pace. Dive Deeper →

🛑 Oh oh… : Israel is attempting to minimize the impact of the Pegasus spyware scandal. It seems the Moroccan intelligence service spied on several French officials using the software. Now France is demanding an explanation. Dive Deeper →

🤖 AI fails to catch Covid: When Covid-19 hit Europe in March 2020, it threw hospitals into a health catastrophe that no one understood. International research teams stepped up and created hundreds of prediction tools. The result? None of them made a positive difference, in fact some were potentially hazardous. Dive Deeper →

Startup of the day

Xooa, Denver (USA)

Source: Xooa

What’s the deal:Xooa is a low-code application development platform that lets companies build blockchain apps extremely fast. Launched in 2017, it has raised $1.7M in recent funding.

Why does it matter: Xooa reduces the cost of adding blockchain features, allowing users to develop blockchain projects efficiently and quickly. Customers of any expertise level are able to build blockchain apps — NFT marketplaces, for instance — on the cloud, through a user-friendly and streamlined interface. It offers low-code tools, API gateways, solution templates for popular blockchain use cases, and other powerful features, to create an up to 10x times faster time-to-app and a 95% shorter learning curve.

Our take: Xooa offers secure record keeping, fast international transfers, NFT marketplaces and countless features, and users can really benefit from its tamper-proof blockchain system. However, enterprise clients tend to be a bit reluctant to rely solely on startups for new technology features, which could be an issue for Xooa’s growth strategy.