Netflix gains 7.7 million new users

The “Harry & Meghan” and “Wednesday” series ensured customer growth. Also: Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile US becomes the target of a cyber attack and ChatGPT dominates insider talks in Davos.

Good morning! While you slept, work continued elsewhere in the digital scene.

The top topics:

Netflix-Co-founder Reed Hastings has announced his retirement. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters will become new CEOs. Hastings moves to head of the board of directors. The streaming service gained a surprising number of new users in the fourth quarter. The series “Harry & Meghan” and “Wednesday” ensured growth. The number of users rose by 7.66 to 231 million. Analysts had expected half of that because the portal was struggling with customer dwindling in 2022. Netflix shares are up 7% in after-hours trading. The streaming pioneer’s revenue was up 2 percent at $7.85 billion, in line with expectations. [Mehr bei Handelsblatt, CNBC und Techcrunch]

On the founding scene: Was against Berlin and Munich Köln as a start-up location has so far had no chance. The recent rise of the translation service DeepL to the unicorn could now change that. Our editor Maybrit Martschin was there and listened to what business developers and founders expect from DeepL’s success for the cathedral city [Mehr bei Gründerszene]

And here are the other headlines of the night:

The Compliments App Slay has raised a €2.5 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Accel, with 20VC and football star Mario Götze also present. Slay was started in 2022 by three Berliners and is similar to the messaging platform Gaswhich this week from Discord was acquired. Slay aims to balance social apps by letting users send positive comments. The compliments app is currently available in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK and claims to have over 250,000 registered users. [Mehr bei Techcrunch]

T-Mobile US has become the target of a cyber attack. 37 million postpaid and prepaid accounts have been affected by the data breach. On January 5, it was found that a third party had obtained data from TelekomThe group announced that the daughter tapped off without permission. T-Mobile US could not rule out that the incident could result in significant costs. The stock fell 2 percent in after-hours trading. [Mehr bei Handelsblatt und Reuters]

The insider tech talks at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos According to Axios, they increasingly revolve around the rise of artificial intelligence, especially the text generator ChatGPT. Even tech experts are surprised at how mature the technology is, according to the medium. Hanzade Dogan, President of the Turkish e-commerce company all here, pointed to the possibility for AI to drastically reduce the cost of expensive services. Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.aimeanwhile, warned that it is important to be mindful of the technology’s biases in data. [Mehr bei Axios]

The Irish regulator DPC has Whatsapp sentenced to a fine of 5.5 million euros. The reason is another violation of data protection regulations. In addition, the authority asked the messenger service to reconsider the use of personal data for advertising. In September 2021, the DPC had already imposed a fine of 225 million euros on Whatsapp. [Mehr bei Handelsblatt]

FTTthe native token of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, is up 24 percent in value in the last 24 hours. Previously, FTX CEO John J. Ray III said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that everything is “on the table” regarding the future of FTX, even a possible restart. Ray said he ordered an investigation to look into the reopening of the crypto exchange. He wanted to consider whether this would help repay assets to customers. [Mehr bei Wall Street Journal und The Information]

Our reading tip on Gründerszene: The layoffs in the startup scene hit employees hard. Also those who were involved in the success of the companies. What happens to theirs ESOPs? [Mehr bei Gründerszene+]

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Happy Friday!

Your Gründerszene editors