The new tie-up with Stripe gives Klarna a big boost at a time when it's gearing up for a hotly anticipated initial public offering. Klarna confidentially filed to IPO in the United States in November. The company could fetch a valuation of as much as $20 billion, according to a Bloomberg News report out last year.
Klarna makes money from the fees that retailers pay on each transaction processed through its platform. In return for giving Klarna visibility as a payment option in its checkout tools, Stripe will get a share of the money Klarna makes from a given transaction.
"This is really significant for Klarna," David Sykes, Klarna's chief commercial officer, told CNBC, adding the company has already doubled the number of new merchants in the three months since it began implementing the new integration with Stripe in October.
"We added 100,000 new merchants in 2024 and we are already seeing that growth rate increase with this agreement." he added.
Analysts recently valued Klarna, which was founded in 2005, in the $15 billion range. At its peak during the pandemic-led surge in fintech stocks, the company attracted a valuation of $46 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 back in 2021.
In 2022, Klarna took an 85% haircut in a fresh round of funding that valued the firm at $6.7 billion.
The deal also has the potential to drive incremental revenue gains for Stripe, too.
BNPL proponents tout these plans as a way to increase the overall level of transactions, as shoppers can buy more items during a shorter term window and then pay them off over a longer timeframe.
A study Stripe ran last year found businesses offering BNPL as a payment method generated up to 14% more revenue from increased conversion and higher average order values.
"We've seen BNPL volume grow 172% last year on Stripe, which is much faster than other mainstream payment methods," Jeanne Grosser, chief business officer of Stripe, told CNBC, adding that the deal with Klarna was a "win-win" for both firms.
Stripe has long been speculated to be a near-term IPO candidate — for its part, though, the company says it's in no rush. The company, also a victim of a slump in fintech valuations, slashed its valuation to $50 billion in 2023 from $95 billion in 2021. The company's valuation reportedly rebounded to $70 billion, as part of a secondary share sale.
The GOES Health app was developed to help travelers in remote areas, but it's increasingly become a tool for people in areas hit by climate disasters.
For almost two years, Viktor Makarskyy has been working on an app that serves as a digital survival kit to help people in disaster zones, which are getting more numerous seemingly by the day given the pace of climate change.
He never imagined his work and personal life would collide in such a profound way.
On Wednesday night, Makarskyy was flying home to Los Angeles from an anniversary trip with his wife in the Cascade Mountains, in the Pacific Northwest. An evacuation order for the Sunset Fire had already been issued extending to just a few blocks from their apartment.
Makarskyy was terrified that the fire would reach their home before they could rescue their cat and collect critical belongings.
"It's one thing to see pictures online," Makarskyy told CNBC in an interview Friday, "it's another thing to see it out the plane window and to have this multisensory experience of your cabin smelling like smoke as you land. It was like entering a war zone."
Makarskyy is the head of technology at GOES, a startup founded in 2021 with a focus on providing critical health advice and services, mostly in remote areas. Aid workers and intrepid travelers can download the GOES Health app and get quick localized tips on how to deal with bug and animal bites, altitude illnesses, rashes and a host of other challenges.
Hikers can gauge hypothermia risk, and backpackers can plan out how to prepare for a heat wave or look up how to temporarily set a broken bone. All content is written or approved by wilderness medicine doctors, and everything can be accessed offline other than real-time weather and the app's wildlife risk index.
Increasingly, GOES, which stands for Global Outdoor Emergency Support, is becoming relevant in a much more widespread way, as people in urban environments have to deal with sudden disaster due to hurricanes, tornadoes and catastrophic fires. Since Jan. 6, a day before the LA fires broke out, GOES has seen about an 800% spike in usage in the area, and over the past two weeks the number of new users in California has tripled, the company said.
As of Monday, the massive blazes across LA had killed at least 24 people, obliterated whole neighborhoods and burned thousands of homes and structures. No cause has been identified for the largest fires.
Makarskyy said he uses GOES to check air quality, national alerts, wildfire preparedness guides and more. Back at home, he said, he was surprised to see that although one of the most widely used weather apps showed the air quality around Los Angeles International Airport to be "moderate," when he viewed a hyperlocal, more precise air quality measurement using GOES, it showed the air quality to be much worse.
"As the developer of this app, I knew it offered exact latitude and longitude," he said.
GOES is far from alone in seeing a spike in usage due to the rise in disasters. The Watch Duty app, founded in 2021 and developed by a nonprofit group, has become practically ubiquitous in the LA area since the fires erupted. It was the top free app on iOS for much of last week and was still in the top five on Monday, providing LA residents with a precise reading on where fires are burning and spreading, which neighborhoods are in evacuation zones and the location of power outages.
In a post on X on Friday, Watch Duty wrote, "Our systems remain 100% operational while our radio operators sleep in shifts and our engineers are throwing everything they have at it to sustain up to 100,000 requests per second with an average response time of <20 ms."
Watch Duty was developed by firefighters, dispatchers and first responders specifically to disseminate information related to fires. GOES, by contrast, stumbled into the fire safety market.
According to the GOES app's launch announcement in 2023, Dr. Grant Lipman, a former professor at Stanford Emergency Medicine and director of its wilderness medicine fellowship, started the company "after treating a hiker in critical condition due to a rattlesnake bite" and seeing the need "to make wilderness medicine more accessible."
GOES co-founder and CEO Camilo Barcenas spent years in the health-care space and worked for four years overseeing technology at the Stanford Adult Hospital. In 2019, he and his team began working on the GOES project, interviewing people in North America, South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East about what would have made them feel safer and more prepared when traveling off the grid.
Their realization, he said, was that health care was "so broken systematically," that the only way to improve is if people learn to take care of themselves first.
"We made this because we believe everyone should have this," Barcenas said. "The outdoors is changing, and we need to be able to understand what these risks are so we can do better."
Barcenas said that when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in September, he flew in to inform residents and aid groups about how they can use the platform. It's become increasingly clear, he said, how useful the app can be when climate disasters strike.
"The LA wildfires highlight an acceleration of what we've been tracking: the democratization of wilderness medicine for urban survival," Barcenas said. "When environmental emergencies strike, traditional emergency services and health-care facilities often become overwhelmed or inaccessible."
Before arriving back in LA, Makarskyy said, he prepared for his return by checking national alerts within GOES, such as high-wind advisories, air quality and the location of wildfires. Each alert came with access to content written by wilderness medicine doctors on preparation and mitigation techniques.
He read up on "what to do in breathing problem scenarios" related to those alerts. He said he learned that N95 masks are "the only thing that can protect against particulates that are that fine, that small."
"So rather than buying common surgical masks," Makarskyy said, "I went ahead and bought the right product for us to keep our lungs safe in this environment."
Makarskyy said he and his wife were fortunate not to have to evacuate. The fires were far enough away that they were safe but close enough that on Friday morning they woke up to ash coating their car. The closest fire had been contained. Their cat was safe with them.
The GOES app has some features that are free. Users can check on air quality and sunburn risk in their location and see if there's any extreme weather advisory. For premium access, which includes pocket safety guide information, subscribers pay $6 a month or $36 a year.
Barcenas said there are a lot of new features on the way and that the app has already evolved significantly since launching less than two years ago.
The NFL Wild Card Round was this past weekend...and the NFL playoffs were just like the regular season. Fans have been complaining throughout the regular season about quality of play in the NFL...and the playoffs were no different.
We discuss Wild Card weekend in the NFL. We explain why most of these blowouts can be blamed on young...inexperienced quarterbacks. We also explain why the Divisional Round should be better.
The NFL still has enough popularity that they can attract viewers in the playoffs even though they didn't watch in the regular season but that won't last forever....only until the viewers realize why they stopped watching the regular season.
OpenAI hasn’t provided an explanation for o1’s strange behavior — or even acknowledged it. So what might be going on?
Well, AI experts aren’t sure. But they have a few theories.
Several on X, including Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, alluded to the fact that reasoning models like o1 are trained on data sets containing a lot of Chinese characters. Ted Xiao, a researcher at Google DeepMind, claimed that companies including OpenAI use third-party Chinese data labeling services, and that o1 switching to Chinese is an example of “Chinese linguistic influence on reasoning.”
“[Labs like] OpenAI and Anthropic utilize [third-party] data labeling services for PhD-level reasoning data for science, math, and coding,” Xiao wrote in a post on X. “[F]or expert labor availability and cost reasons, many of these data providers are based in China.”
Labels, also known as tags or annotations, help models understand and interpret data during the training process. For example, labels to train an image recognition model might take the form of markings around objects or captions referring to each person, place, or object depicted in an image.
!summarize #timkaine #petehegseth #senate
Hi, @taskmaster4450le,
This post has been voted on by @darkcloaks because you are an active member of the Darkcloaks gaming community.
Get started with Darkcloaks today, and follow us on Inleo for the latest updates.
The new tie-up with Stripe gives Klarna a big boost at a time when it's gearing up for a hotly anticipated initial public offering. Klarna confidentially filed to IPO in the United States in November. The company could fetch a valuation of as much as $20 billion, according to a Bloomberg News report out last year.
Klarna makes money from the fees that retailers pay on each transaction processed through its platform. In return for giving Klarna visibility as a payment option in its checkout tools, Stripe will get a share of the money Klarna makes from a given transaction.
!summarize #nfl #minnesota #vikings
"This is really significant for Klarna," David Sykes, Klarna's chief commercial officer, told CNBC, adding the company has already doubled the number of new merchants in the three months since it began implementing the new integration with Stripe in October.
"We added 100,000 new merchants in 2024 and we are already seeing that growth rate increase with this agreement." he added.
Analysts recently valued Klarna, which was founded in 2005, in the $15 billion range. At its peak during the pandemic-led surge in fintech stocks, the company attracted a valuation of $46 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 back in 2021.
!summarize #gaming #politics
In 2022, Klarna took an 85% haircut in a fresh round of funding that valued the firm at $6.7 billion.
The deal also has the potential to drive incremental revenue gains for Stripe, too.
BNPL proponents tout these plans as a way to increase the overall level of transactions, as shoppers can buy more items during a shorter term window and then pay them off over a longer timeframe.
!summarize #china #taiwan #economy #war
A study Stripe ran last year found businesses offering BNPL as a payment method generated up to 14% more revenue from increased conversion and higher average order values.
"We've seen BNPL volume grow 172% last year on Stripe, which is much faster than other mainstream payment methods," Jeanne Grosser, chief business officer of Stripe, told CNBC, adding that the deal with Klarna was a "win-win" for both firms.
Stripe has long been speculated to be a near-term IPO candidate — for its part, though, the company says it's in no rush. The company, also a victim of a slump in fintech valuations, slashed its valuation to $50 billion in 2023 from $95 billion in 2021. The company's valuation reportedly rebounded to $70 billion, as part of a secondary share sale.
!summarize #bankofengland #centralbank #economy
Wildfires force Los Angeles app developer to use his own technology to navigate crisis
The GOES Health app was developed to help travelers in remote areas, but it's increasingly become a tool for people in areas hit by climate disasters.
For almost two years, Viktor Makarskyy has been working on an app that serves as a digital survival kit to help people in disaster zones, which are getting more numerous seemingly by the day given the pace of climate change.
He never imagined his work and personal life would collide in such a profound way.
On Wednesday night, Makarskyy was flying home to Los Angeles from an anniversary trip with his wife in the Cascade Mountains, in the Pacific Northwest. An evacuation order for the Sunset Fire had already been issued extending to just a few blocks from their apartment.
#wildfires #technology #losangeles #app #developer
Makarskyy was terrified that the fire would reach their home before they could rescue their cat and collect critical belongings.
"It's one thing to see pictures online," Makarskyy told CNBC in an interview Friday, "it's another thing to see it out the plane window and to have this multisensory experience of your cabin smelling like smoke as you land. It was like entering a war zone."
Makarskyy is the head of technology at GOES, a startup founded in 2021 with a focus on providing critical health advice and services, mostly in remote areas. Aid workers and intrepid travelers can download the GOES Health app and get quick localized tips on how to deal with bug and animal bites, altitude illnesses, rashes and a host of other challenges.
Hikers can gauge hypothermia risk, and backpackers can plan out how to prepare for a heat wave or look up how to temporarily set a broken bone. All content is written or approved by wilderness medicine doctors, and everything can be accessed offline other than real-time weather and the app's wildlife risk index.
Increasingly, GOES, which stands for Global Outdoor Emergency Support, is becoming relevant in a much more widespread way, as people in urban environments have to deal with sudden disaster due to hurricanes, tornadoes and catastrophic fires. Since Jan. 6, a day before the LA fires broke out, GOES has seen about an 800% spike in usage in the area, and over the past two weeks the number of new users in California has tripled, the company said.
As of Monday, the massive blazes across LA had killed at least 24 people, obliterated whole neighborhoods and burned thousands of homes and structures. No cause has been identified for the largest fires.
!summarize #byd #pricewar #china #ev
Makarskyy said he uses GOES to check air quality, national alerts, wildfire preparedness guides and more. Back at home, he said, he was surprised to see that although one of the most widely used weather apps showed the air quality around Los Angeles International Airport to be "moderate," when he viewed a hyperlocal, more precise air quality measurement using GOES, it showed the air quality to be much worse.
"As the developer of this app, I knew it offered exact latitude and longitude," he said.
GOES is far from alone in seeing a spike in usage due to the rise in disasters. The Watch Duty app, founded in 2021 and developed by a nonprofit group, has become practically ubiquitous in the LA area since the fires erupted. It was the top free app on iOS for much of last week and was still in the top five on Monday, providing LA residents with a precise reading on where fires are burning and spreading, which neighborhoods are in evacuation zones and the location of power outages.
!summarize #iran #economy
In a post on X on Friday, Watch Duty wrote, "Our systems remain 100% operational while our radio operators sleep in shifts and our engineers are throwing everything they have at it to sustain up to 100,000 requests per second with an average response time of <20 ms."
Watch Duty was developed by firefighters, dispatchers and first responders specifically to disseminate information related to fires. GOES, by contrast, stumbled into the fire safety market.
According to the GOES app's launch announcement in 2023, Dr. Grant Lipman, a former professor at Stanford Emergency Medicine and director of its wilderness medicine fellowship, started the company "after treating a hiker in critical condition due to a rattlesnake bite" and seeing the need "to make wilderness medicine more accessible."
!summarize #consciousness #mind
GOES co-founder and CEO Camilo Barcenas spent years in the health-care space and worked for four years overseeing technology at the Stanford Adult Hospital. In 2019, he and his team began working on the GOES project, interviewing people in North America, South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East about what would have made them feel safer and more prepared when traveling off the grid.
Their realization, he said, was that health care was "so broken systematically," that the only way to improve is if people learn to take care of themselves first.
!summarize #wildfires #winds #losangeles #california
"We made this because we believe everyone should have this," Barcenas said. "The outdoors is changing, and we need to be able to understand what these risks are so we can do better."
Barcenas said that when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in September, he flew in to inform residents and aid groups about how they can use the platform. It's become increasingly clear, he said, how useful the app can be when climate disasters strike.
"The LA wildfires highlight an acceleration of what we've been tracking: the democratization of wilderness medicine for urban survival," Barcenas said. "When environmental emergencies strike, traditional emergency services and health-care facilities often become overwhelmed or inaccessible."
!summarizae #weather #unitedstates
Before arriving back in LA, Makarskyy said, he prepared for his return by checking national alerts within GOES, such as high-wind advisories, air quality and the location of wildfires. Each alert came with access to content written by wilderness medicine doctors on preparation and mitigation techniques.
He read up on "what to do in breathing problem scenarios" related to those alerts. He said he learned that N95 masks are "the only thing that can protect against particulates that are that fine, that small."
"So rather than buying common surgical masks," Makarskyy said, "I went ahead and bought the right product for us to keep our lungs safe in this environment."
Makarskyy said he and his wife were fortunate not to have to evacuate. The fires were far enough away that they were safe but close enough that on Friday morning they woke up to ash coating their car. The closest fire had been contained. Their cat was safe with them.
The GOES app has some features that are free. Users can check on air quality and sunburn risk in their location and see if there's any extreme weather advisory. For premium access, which includes pocket safety guide information, subscribers pay $6 a month or $36 a year.
Barcenas said there are a lot of new features on the way and that the app has already evolved significantly since launching less than two years ago.
!summarize #foxxconn #china #bankruptcy #japan #iphone
!summarize #davidweiss #hunterbiden #joebiden #taxevasion
!summarize #relationships #dating
!summarize #nyjets #brianflores #coach #nfl
!summarize #nvidia #biden #chips
!summarize #nfl #ratings #playoffs
!summarize #russian #economy #poverty
The NFL Wild Card Round was this past weekend...and the NFL playoffs were just like the regular season. Fans have been complaining throughout the regular season about quality of play in the NFL...and the playoffs were no different.
We discuss Wild Card weekend in the NFL. We explain why most of these blowouts can be blamed on young...inexperienced quarterbacks. We also explain why the Divisional Round should be better.
The NFL still has enough popularity that they can attract viewers in the playoffs even though they didn't watch in the regular season but that won't last forever....only until the viewers realize why they stopped watching the regular season.
!summarize #insurance #companies #wildfires #rates
!summarize #groominggang #scandal #uk #rape
!summarize #tesla #juniper #ev #berlin
!summarize #fsd #tesla
!summarize #science #medicine
!summarize #dating #relationships
!summarize #fsd #jensenhuang #tesla #technology
!summarize #california #exodus #gavinnewsom
!summarize #kevinoleary #karanbass #losangeles #california
!summarize #losangeles #karanbass #mayor #gavinnewsom #california
!summarize #slingtv #entertainment
!summarize #russia #economy #war
!summarize #physics #coldfusion #science #energy
OpenAI hasn’t provided an explanation for o1’s strange behavior — or even acknowledged it. So what might be going on?
Well, AI experts aren’t sure. But they have a few theories.
Several on X, including Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, alluded to the fact that reasoning models like o1 are trained on data sets containing a lot of Chinese characters. Ted Xiao, a researcher at Google DeepMind, claimed that companies including OpenAI use third-party Chinese data labeling services, and that o1 switching to Chinese is an example of “Chinese linguistic influence on reasoning.”
!summarize #elonmusk #meaning #ai #robots
“[Labs like] OpenAI and Anthropic utilize [third-party] data labeling services for PhD-level reasoning data for science, math, and coding,” Xiao wrote in a post on X. “[F]or expert labor availability and cost reasons, many of these data providers are based in China.”
Labels, also known as tags or annotations, help models understand and interpret data during the training process. For example, labels to train an image recognition model might take the form of markings around objects or captions referring to each person, place, or object depicted in an image.
!summarize #ubisoft #whistleblower #activists #gaming