Radar.

A privacy-first assistant with $7.5m from Khosla Ventures is closing within a week, and the founder's note blames a flooded field and a capital window that shut. Ollie even held the SOC 2 audit. Privacy and compliance buy nothing with consumers when the model underneath is a commodity.

Framed as grocery consolidation, the $17bn deal looks more like a play for advertising, with Instacart booking over $300m of ad money last quarter and DoorDash past $1bn in 2024. Deals this size drew objections not long ago, and this one arrives under an administration that has waved similar mergers through. Lyft and Gopuff are the obvious next targets.

Disney hired 66 of Character.AI's 86 staff before the bankruptcy, agreed to pay them $180m over three years against a $20m licence for the technology, while the company was burning $8m to $9m a month. Any buyer chasing this platform is bidding for a team that mostly walked beforehand.

Anthropic's listing is grabbing the attention, but the rating on the $63bn of chip debt behind it is what I'm looking at. Imagine going to market with a high junk rating with a product that is currently dominating everything in its path. There's no truth to this AI bubble, right?

South Korea's Media and Communications Commission fined Google KRW 42.9bn ($32m) and Apple KRW 20.81bn ($15.6m) under the Telecommunications Business Act. Loose change against two of the richest firms on earth. It found the pair restricted external payment options and charged a 26% commission on third-party payments, and ordered both to allow external payment links and revise app review procedures. Apple also calculated commissions differently for domestic and overseas devs, and is reviewing its options. Apple and Google already offer alternative payments in the US and EU on differing terms.

A licensed Pokémon MOBA from Tencent's TiMi ends in March 2027, having arrived in 2021, and the only reason offered so far is the earlier withdrawal from Belgium and the Netherlands. Both markets left over loot boxes. A brand that strong should carry a live service, so I'm inclined to blame the Prize Machine design rather than the licence.

RAM-ageddon is not only causing challenges with personal computing. Consoles too are taking the hit with supply chain contraints as AI soaks up everything in it's path. Chip supply chains are already bought through 2029, so if I am a studio building the next-gen game for a new console, how am I going to make the economics work? I would not want a studio betting its plan on a hardware cycle.

Revenue rose 16% while payers fell by the same margin, so the business leans on spend per user rather than a growing crowd. More than 80% of its top 100 games by hours used AI tools. Discovery becomes the problem for developers because supply gets easier. Interestingly, over-18s are the fastest-growing cohort and monetise over 50% above under-18s in the US. Parents credit cards are getting less hammered as their children grow into earning adults. It goes to show that Roblox has built a platform that still resonates with their audience well after their demographic ages. It also shows that platforms like Roblox are not immune to the challenges of the game industry as a whole.