Elon Musk ‘making the rules’, ESA chief warns; Clearview’s face tech closer to US patent; Zomato invests in Curefit; Spider-Verse sequel’s first trailer out
Elon Muskis being allowed to “make the rules” himself for the world’s space tech industry, Josef Aschbacher, European Space Agency’s new chief, warns in an interview with Financial Times. Musk’s private space company SpaceX and the satellites unit Starlink have won regulatory approval in the US to send up tens of thousands of satellites into low-earth orbits, to provide satellite-based internet connections around the world. “Space will be much more restrictive [in terms of] frequencies and orbital slots,” Aschbacher said according to the Financial Times report, which is behind a paywall, but was also cited by other news sites. “You have one person owning half of the active satellites in the world. That’s quite amazing. De facto, he is making the rules. The rest of the world including Europe … is just not responding quick enough,” Aschbacher warned. Clearview AI is just certain administrative fees away from getting a US federal patent for its controversial facial recognition technology, Politico reports. The patent would be the first to cover a so-called ‘search engine for faces’ that crawls the internet to find matches, according to the report. Clearview’s software has already scraped billions of public images from social media to help law enforcement match images in government databases or surveillance footage. Critics say the company is doing this without the knowledge of consent of anyone. Now, some of those critics also fear that codifying Clearview’s work with a patent will accelerate the growth of these technologies before legislators or regulators have fully addressed the potential dangers, according to Politico. Curefit Healthcare, which operates the fitness platform Cultfit, has raised $145 million in a funding round led by food delivery company Zomato, Economic Times reports. Accel, South Park Commons, Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Curefit's co-founder Mukesh Bansal also participated in the round, according to ET. Curefit is now valued at about $1.5 billion, up from $800 million in March 2020, according to ET. Sense, an HR tech startup that helps some of the world’s largest staffing and recruitment agencies fill blue-collar vacancies quickly, has raised $50 million in series D funding, led by SoftBank, TechCrunch reports. The Silicon Valley startup, founded by Indian American entrepreneur Anil Dharni, has raised its valuation to $500 million in the process, according to TechCrunch. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One), is the title of the highly anticipated sequel to the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. This was revealed in the first trailer for the sequel that is out now from Sony Pictures. The surprise is that the upcoming adventures of Miles Morales will actually be a two-part affair, The Verge points out. According to the official description, the upcoming sequel will “transport Brooklyn’s full-time, friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man across the Multiverse to join forces with Gwen Stacy and a new team of Spider-People to face off with a villain more powerful than anything they have ever encountered.”