Good morning!
This Thursday edition of the newsletter features:
David Henshall is out as Citrix CEO
Caltech engineers have developed a creepy new robot
1.5 billion Facebook user’s data was found for sale online
Windows 11 is causing performance issues for some AMD chips
And Bitcoin is on the rise
It’s October 7, 2021.
1. South Florida Tech
Citrix Systems CEO David Henshall steps down (SF Business Journal)
David Henshall is no longer president and CEO of Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS), the Fort Lauderdale-based software firm announced late Wednesday. Henshall has been replaced by Bob Calderoni, chair of Citrix's board of directors. Calderoni was named interim president and CEO, effective immediately.
With more than $3 billion in revenue, Citrix is among South Florida's largest publicly traded companies. Henshall also stepped down from his position on Citrix's board of directors. Henshall initially joined the company in 2003 as its CFO. He was named president and CEO in 2017.
The move comes on the heels of New York-based activist investor Elliott Management Corp. reportedly disclosing a more than $1 billion stake in the company. Ajei Gopal also resigned from Citrix's board of directors, effective Oct. 4. He was a member of the board since 2017.
In March, it completed its $2.25 billion acquisition of San Jose, California-based Wrike. At the time, Henshall said bringing Wrike into the fold would enhance Citrix's cloud-based collaborative work platforms. Citrix reports the combined companies have 400,000 customers in 140 countries.
2. Robotics
Creepy new drone that walks and flies is a robopocalypse nightmare come true (Gizmodo)
A newly developed bipedal robot can seamlessly switch between walking and flying, and it’s the combination of these two skills that really set this futuristic machine apart. Introducing LEONARDO, or LEO for short. The name is an acronym for LEgs ONboARD drone, which nicely but insufficiently describes this robot. The Caltech engineers who built LEO designed the bot with both walking and flying in mind and developed specialized software to integrates its various components.
LEO weighs just 5.7 pounds (2.58 kg) and stands 2.5 feet (75 cm) tall. Like a bird, the robot uses its slender, multi-jointed legs to push off the ground and provide an assist during takeoff. LEO’s tilted electric thrusters are synched to these jumps. LEO walks as if on high heels, but these heels allow for balanced standing; should the conditions warrant, however, LEO’s propellers could always kick in to ensure further stability. Batteries, sensors, and the required processing power are packed into the robot’s torso, allowing for full autonomy and no clunky wires.
LEO is still a prototype—a kind of proof-of-concept to see if a bipedal flying robot can perform tasks that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for ground robots or aerial drones to accomplish on their own. In the future, a full-fledged version could be tasked with difficult or dangerous jobs, such as inspecting and repairing damaged infrastructure, installing new equipment in hard-to-reach places, or attending to natural disasters and industrial accidents.
3. Cybersecurity
Over 1.5 billion Facebook users’ personal data found for sale on hacker forum (TechRepublic)
It's been a bad few days for Facebook. An outage affected all of its sites (and Oculus products), testimony from a whistleblower this week could put the company back in the legal hot seat, and now it's come out that private and personal data from more than 1.5 billion Facebook users was found for sale on a hacker forum.
As reported by privacy research company Privacy Affairs, the data found for sale doesn't indicate that the seller actually broke into Facebook's systems, nor that its data tied to any other data breach. Instead, Privacy Affairs said that the data was allegedly obtained by scraping publicly available data shared by Facebook users.
The fact that the data stolen and for sale is publicly available shouldn't ease anyone's fears: That data can still be used to compromise users' security and privacy. In particular, the stolen data contains names, email addresses, locations, gender, phone numbers, and Facebook User ID information. Each bit of that data could clue an attacker into password challenge answers, allow them to intercept one-time login codes, phish, send scam text messages, and more.
While the potential for this particular set of data to be exploited may have lessened thanks to its removal from this particular forum, it's unknown if it could end up posted elsewhere or how many buyers may have already purchased some of it. There are a total of nearly three billion people on Facebook, which means that data pertaining to up to half of them could be in the hands of bad actors.
4. Windows 11
Windows 11 is causing performance issues for some AMD Ryzen processors (The Verge)
Windows 11 is officially out, but if you’ve got an AMD Ryzen processor, you might want to hold off on updating for a bit: the company is reporting that its chips might have issues with the new OS that could cause performance drops of up to 15 percent in some cases.
AMD and Microsoft have found two main issues. The first is that Windows 11 may cause L3 cache latency to triple. AMD says that the issue could cause 3–5% worse performance in most affected applications, while some games (AMD specifically calls out those “commonly used for eSports”) could see performance dips of 10–15%.
Windows 11 is also having issues with AMD’s “preferred core” technology, which usually aims to shift threads over to the fastest core on a processor. AMD warns that users could see performance issues on CPU-reliant tasks, specifically on processors with more than eight cores about 65W TDP.
AMD and Microsoft have already confirmed that they are “actively investigating these known issues for resolution via software updates.” The two companies promise that both a Windows update and a software update are planned for later this month to try and resolve those issues. But in the meantime, you might want to stick with Windows 10 until AMD and Microsoft sort things out.
5. BitKing
Bitcoin jumps to nearly 5-month high, topping $55,000 on Wednesday (CNBC)
Bitcoin jumped to a nearly five-month high above $55,000 on Wednesday, extending its rally from the previous day as institutions jumped in to try to catch the wave. Bitcoin rose as high as $55,499 earlier in the session. It’s up 13% this week alone and 87% for the year. Ether also rose 2.8% to $3,575.73.
The rally comes amid a series of small developments in Washington, D.C. that have provided some comfort to institutional investors keen to jump into cryptocurrencies. On Tuesday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said in a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee that he has no plans to ban cryptocurrency and that a ban would be up to Congress.
At the same time, stocks were falling as concerns about rising rates, higher inflation, the state of the reopening, and the debt limit dented investor sentiment. Bitcoin hasn’t proven itself to be a safe-haven asset — its price has tanked with the stock market several times before — but many still see it that way and it was holding up amid Wednesday’s equity market turmoil.
6. Funding, IPOs, M&As
🤖 TPG To Buy Majority Stake In Nintex: The deal is valued at more than $2 billion for the automation software firm.
📖 Udemy Files For U.S. IPO: The online learning platform has revealed a surge in revenue last year driven by the pandemic.
🔒 Orca Security Nabs $550 MIllion Series C: The Israeli security firm offers an agent-less platform for protecting cloud assets.
⚕️ Honor Rakes In $370 Million: Honor is a startup focused on in-home care for older adults.
🚘 Tekion Raises $250 Million Series D: The automotive retail platform headed by a former Tesla CIO has now tripled in value.
👩💻 Personio Seeks $200 Million: The Munich-based startup is a provider of HR software. It’s seeking a valuation of $6 billion.
☁️ Sure Gets $100 Million Series C: The insurance infrastructure startup is now valued at over $550 million.
👩💻 Buk Banks $50 Million Series A: The Chilean HR management platform is now valued at over $417 million.
🚘 Otonomo Buys Neura For $50 Million: Otonomo is buying the Israeli behavior analytics and mobility intelligence startup.
☁️ Adaptive Shield Gets $30 MIllion Series A: Tel Aviv-based Adaptive Shield has a SaaS security platform.
🧠 Neural Magic Brings In $30 Million: Neural Magic offers software for the growing edge AI market.
📈 Commonstock Lands $25 Million: The social media platform for investors has raised new funds.
🛴 Voom Raises $15 Million: Voom is an on-demand platform for specialized mobility insurance.
🚘 Wayve Secures $13.6 Million: Wayve is a Lidar-free self-driving startup based out of the U.K.
As always, please feel free to share questions, feedback, or requests for future newsletters.
Cheers!
Eric
#BeAmbitious