A week's worth of tech news that takes you 5 minutes to read

Welcome to this week's Sunday Download! What we do is simple: give you a week's worth of tech news in 5 minutes or less so you can stay informed and up to date on the latest technology news and trends.

In return, we ask that you share it with a friend or colleague instead of keeping the Smartology goodness all to yourself. While greed may be good on Wall Street, sharing is caring here at Smartology. 🤝

Lots of stuff to go through this week, so let's not waste any (more) time. Highlights of this week's issue include:

• SVB Collapses

• Chat-GPT goes enterprise

• Lunar Data Centers?

Total read time: 4 minutes and 19 seconds. Let's goooooo! 🚀

When the bank has no money

Dominating tech headlines this week is the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) dumpster fire. A perfect storm of investment irresponsibility and rising interest rates resulted in the bank's announcement that it will report a $1.8 billion loss relating to the sale of securities. VC firms urged companies in their portfolio to withdraw funds from SVB (classic run on the bank)

Once the run started, customers found moving money from the bank difficult after SVB stopped trading and asked personnel to work from home. This prompted the FDIC to step in and shut down SVB on Friday. Regulators are now in custody of the bank's deposits.

Who is SVB? While relatively unknown outside of Silicon Valley, SVB was among the top 20 American commercial banks, with $209 billion in total assets at the end of last year, according to the FDIC. They're easily the most widely used bank in the tech space.

With this collapse and freeze, dozens of tech companies (both publically traded and privately) cannot access their money.

Violating HIPPA

Cerebral, the telemedicine business which gained fame during the COVID-19 outbreak, has admitted that it shared the confidential health information, including mental health evaluations, of over 3.1 million patients in the United States with advertising and social media behemoths like Facebook, Google, and TikTok. Cerebral exposed the security flaw in a federal government filing this week. According to Cerebral, it did not disclose social security numbers, bank information or credit card numbers...just private medical records.

Enterprise GPT

OpenAI's viral, AI-powered chatbot technology, ChatGPT, is now available in a more enterprise-friendly form. Microsoft announced this week that ChatGPT is now broadly accessible via the Azure OpenAI Service. The company's fully managed, corporate-focused service aims to provide businesses access to OpenAI's technologies while providing additional governance and compliance capabilities. Clients already "Microsoft-managed customers and partners" are now eligible to apply for privileged access.

Anxiety is in the blood

Indiana University School of Medicine researchers have created a validated blood test to objectively evaluate an individual's degree of anxiety, the intensity of their current anxiety, and which therapy are appropriate. MindX Sciences' physicians are actively developing the test for widespread usage. The test might predict a person's likelihood of acquiring anxiety in the future and assess how hormonal changes may affect their anxiety. Combined with other tests, the new test gives a more comprehensive picture of a patient's mental health and might be used to build new, customized anxiety therapies based on biomarkers.

Data Centers on the Moon?

The cloud computing firm Lonestar Data Holdings has secured $5 million to develop data centers on the lunar surface for safe data storage and edge processing. Remote data storage on the Moon will reduce energy usage and digital pollution issues created by Earth-based data centers. The lunar data centers built by Lonestar will first be utilized for distant data storage, disaster recovery, and commercial and private Lunar exploration assistance. This year, the business plans to launch a small data center box to the lunar surface that weighs approximately 2 pounds and has a capacity of 16 gigabytes.

Twitter brought down by one man

On Monday, Twitter users encountered a number of glitches, including error messages and graphics that did not load. The business later claimed this was due to discontinuing free access to the Twitter API, which terminated third-party clients and significantly reduced academics' capacity to investigate the network. The firm is developing a new paid API for developers, but just one engineer is working on it. An engineer performed a configuration modification that damaged the Twitter API, resulting in the failure of internal tools and public-facing APIs.

Spotify tries to be Insta, TikTok, and YouTube all in one

Spotify is unveiling a new look to help consumers discover new material. The makeover uses visuals and vertical scrolling to improve discoverability within the Spotify ecosystem. In addition, Spotify's new design separates podcasts and music while providing more room for both. When you launch the app, you'll see a collection of album and playlist covers, auto-playing video podcasts, and Instagram-style photographs with further information about related playlists. The article contains examples of the new design.

Rapid Fire

• Leaked audio of Google Cloud CEO: "The game isn't over in the first minute"

• Amazon Return-To-Office tug of war

• Microsoft makes Outlook for Mac free to use

• Google CEO defends desk-sharing policy because many offices are a "ghost town"

• Ring launches high-res, battery powered doorbell

• Tesla under investigation after steering wheels fall off cars

• Epic Games launching self published game store

• Bing hits 100 million active users

• Apple launches streaming service for classical music

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