Quick news №20

Hide Your Summertime Sadness —  new News Run On Air! How can you yearn for such a time when there are so many interesting events around? Let's cheerfully and happily run through them to get a charge of news endorphins.

Heading “Cryptocurrency Bulletin”. The global level of NFT sales over the past seven months exceeded its own indicators of last year 165 times, amounting to $2.8B. Non-fungible tokens not only minimize the risks of investing in traditional cryptocurrencies, but also have an ever-expanding scope — you can read more in our article.

Along with the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges, the number of fraudulent resources associated with this area is also growing. “Kaspersky Lab” shared the results of its work in this area, and among other things, its experts named the most common schemes for deceiving users. These are fake crypto exchange sites, phishing pages for stealing private keys, and fake video card sales.

Speaking of the latter, Nvidia's CEO predicted a shortage of new RTX 3000 graphics cards in the first half of next year. Think miners again? Not really: it is expected that gamers and e-sportsmen, who were unable to purchase a video card last year due to home fans of cryptocurrencies, will create increased demand for them in early 2022 and, as a result, a deficit.

The gaming market not only causes a shortage of video cards, but also pleases us with interesting deals. So last week it became known about the acquisition of the Russian game studio from Velikiy Novgorod SmartPhone Labs by the Swedish developer Embracer Group. The amount was not disclosed; the purchase of the Novgorod studio will allow the Swedish company to gain a foothold in the Eastern European market.

Another M&A deal took place in the EdTech area: Skyeng acquired online programming school for children “Kodium”. The deal, the details of which were not disclosed, is expected to accelerate Kodium's business growth and allow Skyeng to strengthen its position as one of the key players in the online education market in Russia.

The third deal without public details: Ukrainian startup Obimy raised investments from business angel Olya Nikitova at an estimate of $2M. The startup is developing applications for communication and maintaining emotional connection between relatives. The previous project estimate was three times less.

But with the round of the Qase cloud platform, everything is known: $500 000, seed round, S16VC as a lead investor, FinSight Ventures and ExpoCapital as participants. The company develops software testing solutions for software development companies: this market is expected to reach $60B by 2026.

We conclude our run with a curious exploration of the Stack Overflow forum for programmers. They surveyed 82,000 IT people to find out what programming languages ​​they like and don't like to work with. Spoiler alert: Python is only in 6th place. Research results on the link. 

Have a productive week!