Why we need to reform the startup business model | Melanie Rieback | TEDxBerlin

Melanie Hui

As CEO, Melanie leads Luminate's team to implement the organisation’s strategy. She brings over 20 years of leadership experience to the role, with a career focused on advancing the rights and well-being of people around the world.Melanie has been with Luminate for five years leading the organisation’s work in Asia and most recently implementing a global strategy review. She was previously Vice President of the Chandler Foundation, where she played a pivotal role in launching the organisation, designing its grant-making strategy, identifying high-impact development grantees, and leading strategic engagements with other funders and partners. Prior to this, Melanie was Vice President at the Clermont Group, managing corporate communications for the multibillion-dollar investment firm dedicated to building companies that harness the goodness of business to create a better world. Earlier in her career, she launched and led the CleanWater Foundation, a safe water micro-franchise serving rural communities in Bangladesh. She also worked in external affairs at the World Bank and served as the Special Assistant to the Vice Chancellor of the Asian University for Women.

Meet the AI OnlyFans: How one startup raised millions to build an ‘erotic companions’ platform | Kai Nicol-Schwarz

Meet the AI OnlyFans: How one startup raised millions to build an ‘erotic companions’ platform --- When AI erotic companion startup Oh raised a $4.5m funding round in January, it had something few in the shadowy new sector could boast. A roster of named investors, publicly backing the company. VCs are often bound by “vice clauses”, which prohibit firms from investing in controversial products like pornography or weapons. As a result, startups working on ethically contentious products often rely on angel investors and family offices to stay afloat. But Oh, which generates NSFW adult content and conversations with both fictional characters as well as bots based on real people, has tapped into a group of seemingly less squeamish investors: crypto VCs. It’s drawn backing from the likes of Tangent, Kosmos Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Bodhi Ventures and Tagus Capital. “Raising money for a business like this from non-crypto VCs is very difficult,” says Oh founder and CEO Nic Young, who positions the startup as a “decentralised platform” and offers payments via crypto. “A lot of crypto VCs don’t have vice clauses — it’s more liberal and free.” Oh wants to use those fresh funds to build the “AI OnlyFans”, with plans to roll out autonomous scantily clad bots that can market themselves on social media and direct message users with spicy conversation starters. The biggest challenge? Convincing enough users it’s not that weird turning to AI when you’re looking for romance. https://lnkd.in/eRF7a5Dn

A European path out of Big Tech lock-in: Eurosky + the "Everything Account" idea (AT Protocol)

If you care as much about privacy, decentralization, and independence from Big Tech than having a 100% EU-made software stack, Eurosky might be worth…

Brennan Kenneth Brown (@brennan@social.lol)

Because $18 million dollars isn't enough for some people, I have *more* people and organisations of note to list as paying Omarchy patrons (there are over hundreds in total): - Axel Fontaine is the creator of Flyway, the widely used database migration tool he sold to Redgate in 2019. He's also submitted code to the Omarchy repo, both a funder and a hands-on contributor. - Marc Köhlbrugge is the founder of WIP and BetaList, fixtures of the indie-hacker/bootstrapper scene that Omarchy's ricing bullshit aesthetic is clearly courting. - ServiceStack is an established .NET web-services framework vendor, one of the patrons backing the project as a company rather than an individual. - Bertrand Janin is a longtime open-source developer (ex-Ramp, ex-Truveris) running his own small shop, Atelier Janin. - Pagecord, the blogging platform created by Olly. - Vincent Ritter, founder of Tinylytics and Scribbles, known for complaining about being offended by pronouns, being disappointed by more inclusive Apple emoji, disparaging "foreigners" who drive for Uber and play "foul rap music," and praising Elon Musk the day after he performed two Nazi salutes on camera. Manton Reece, of micro.blog, publicly defends him. - 9538-7874 Quebec inc. is one of at least a couple of numbered, unnamed Canadian corporations on the list. Bizarre shell companies with no public identity attached to them at all. Unsure about these. https://omarchy.org/patrons/

International Women’s Day 2026: 6 Top Tech Leaders On Investment Plans, AI, And The Keys To Success For Channel Partners

For International Women’s Day 2026, CRN gathered responses from the 2026 CEO Outlook report from some of the women leading the top tech companies today on how AI, platforms, and targeted infrastructure investments will shape this year.

Sovereign Tech Fund | Sovereign Tech Agency

With the Sovereign Tech Fund, we invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate. By targeting core digital infrastructure, our investments scale across many sectors and benefit a broad range of users. Improving the security, stability, and reusability of open software components directly enhances the productivity, competitive edge, and capacity for innovation of startups and small and medium-sized businesses.

» Apple, Carmen Sandiego, and the Rise of Edutainment The Digital Antiquarian

If there was any one application that was the favorite amongst early boosters of personal computing, it was education. Indeed, it could sometimes be difficult to find one of those digital utopianists who was willing to prioritize anything else — unsurprisingly, given that so much early PC culture grew out of places like The People’s Computer Company, who made “knowledge is power” their de facto mantra and talked of teaching people about computers and using computers to teach with equal countercultural fervor. Creative Computing, the first monthly magazine dedicated to personal computing, grew out of that idealistic milieu, founded by an educational consultant who filled a big chunk of its pages with plans, schemes, and dreams for computers as tools for democratizing, improving, and just making schooling more fun. A few years later, when Apple started selling the II, they pushed it hard as the learning computer, making deals with the influential likes of the Minnesota Educational Consortium (MECC) of Oregon Trail fame that gave the machine a luster none of its competitors could touch. For much of the adult public, who may have had their first exposure to a PC when they visited a child’s classroom, the Apple II became synonymous with the PC, which was in turn almost synonymous with education in the days before IBM turned it into a business machine. We can still see the effect today: when journalists and advertisers look for an easy story of innovation to which to compare some new gadget, it’s always the Apple II they choose, not the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. And the iconic image of an Apple II in the public’s imagination remains a group of children gathered around it in a classroom.

Bleeding edge

New York City, 2001. Fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO and discovers there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left of the tech bubble

Getting Started

Now more than ever privacy, impact, openness and cost matter.

Women, technology and AI: Five key takeaways for today’s world

To commemorate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February, we spoke with Tamuna Kvintradze, Chief of Staff at Women in Tech Global. Ms. Kvintradze offered valuable insights into the barriers that women and girls encounter in STEM, highlighted the critical importance of their participation, and underscored the need to amplify their perspectives within mainstream and social media.

Has technological innovation lost the plot? An interview with AI ethicist Dr. Shannon Vallor | Chicago Policy Review

Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. Professor Vallor’s research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. She is […]