Global Tech Roundup: Facebook is now a trillion-dollar company

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The first week of July has been a fund filled one. From VC fundraising to initial public offerings (IPOs) and startup acquisitions, the whole tech industry was stocked with impressive news.

Below we have curated some of the major stories around the globe you might have missed.

Facebook hits $1 trillion market cap

Facebook has surpassed the $1 trillion market capitalization mark for the first time ever. The social network giant hit $355.64 per share and a market cap of around $1.008 trillion by close of trade on Monday, 28th June.

The social media company’s stock rose by over 4% after a federal court dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against the social media company. The judge found the FTC did not provide enough evidence that Facebook holds a monopoly power.

Global Tech Roundup: Facebook is now a Trillion Dollar company

The Federal Trade Commission’s 2020 antitrust lawsuit had alleged Facebook used illegal anticompetitive practices to maintain a monopoly in social networking.

Facebook held its initial public offering in May 2012, debuting with a market cap of $104 billion. Now it’s worth over $ 1 trillion.

With the latest milestone, the company becomes the fifth US company to surpass $1 trillion in market value, joining Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Duolingo files to go public

Popular language learning app, Duolingo has officially filed to go public. The company was last valued at about $2.4 billion so the IPO is expected to raise its valuation over that number especially after it reported a 129% revenue growth in 2020.

Co-founded by the inventor of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, and Severin Hacker, the language learning company has seen significant growth since its establishment. It has raised $183.3 million in venture capital investment.

Global Tech Roundup: Facebook is now a Trillion Dollar company

In its S-1 filing, the company provided a placeholder $100 million figure for the funds it expects to raise. It is expected that Duolingo will kick off the Q3 2021 IPO season.

Duolingo plans to list on the NASDAQ stock exchange using the ticker symbol, DUOL.

TikTok increases max video length to 3 minutes

TikTok is expanding to allow for longer videos. The company has announced that it will roll out the option to create videos of up to 3 minutes in length.

This is up from the 60 seconds in max length, after initially expanding from 15-second clips.

TikTok said it decided to expand its max video length based on feedback it heard from its creator community.

“For some kinds of content, creators wanted more time and flexibility when filming — like when they were filming cooking demos, beauty tutorials, educational content and comedic sketches,” the company explained

SpaceX lands first stage onshore for first time in 2021

This week, SpaceX launched 88 satellites into orbit. This is the 20th Falcon 9 launch in 2021 and the first launch this year to feature the first stage returning to land onshore, rather than on a drone ship at sea.

The first stage booster separated at around 3:34 PM ET and returned to Cape Canaveral and successfully landed around eight minutes after liftoff.

Global Tech Roundup: Facebook is now a Trillion Dollar company

As this was SpaceX’s 20th launch this year (and 127th mission to date), the company will probably surpass last year’s record of 26 launches.

The load included 85 satellites for external customers, as well as three Starlink satellites. The Transporter launches are part of the company’s rideshare business model. 

Discord acquires augmented reality startup Ubiquity6

Gaming chat app giant, Discord has acquired augmented reality startup Ubiquity6 for an undisclosed sum.

The AR startup had raised $37.5 million from a series of top investors including Benchmark, First Round, Kleiner Perkins and Google’s Gradient Ventures.

Global Tech Roundup: Facebook is now a Trillion Dollar company

Established in 2017, Ubiquity6’s aim was to build an app that would be the central way mobile phone users would browse augmented reality content.

In late 2019, the startup launched Displayland, which aimed to gamify the process of 3D scanning physical environments with a smartphone’s camera.

However, mass adoption was hampered by a mobile AR market. Recently the company pivoted from augmented reality to building a desktop platform that allowed users to play simple online party games together remotely.

You can check out other news that happened during the week here. Have a nice weekend!!

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