PM Modi designates Jan 16 National Startup Day; Facebook faces $3 bln UK lawsuit; Wordle’s unexpected consequence

India has its own National Startup Day now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in online interaction with several startups over the weekend, designated January 16 as the country’s startup day. He called on entrepreneurs to “innovate for India and innovate from India.” The government is focused on institutionalising innovation, reducing silos, and assisting innovators, he tweeted later. India gets National Startup Day India has its own National Startup Day now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in online interaction with several startups over the weekend, designated January 16 as the country’s startup day. Later, in a series of tweets, Modi said that “this is India’s techade,” and the government would focus on institutionalising innovation, reducing silos and assisting innovators. India’s startups are changing the rules of the game. They are the economic backbone of the new India, he said, and called on entrepreneurs to “innovate for India and innovate from India.” Facebook could face a $3 billion class-action suit in the UK Facebook will face a £2.3 billion ($3.14 billion) class-action suit in Britain on behalf of the 44 million users of the social networking platform from Meta—previously called Facebook—BBC reports. Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, the competition expert seeking to sue Facebook, alleges that Meta accessing UK users personal data in return for the free use of Facebook is an unfair price. She intends to bring the case to the country’s Competition Appeal Tribunal. Facebook "abused its market dominance to impose unfair terms and conditions on ordinary Britons, giving it the power to exploit their personal data”, Lovdahl Gormsen tells BBC. FTX sets up a $2 billion venture fund to invest in crypto startups FTX, a crypto derivatives exchange, has set up a $2 billion fund to invest in crypto-industry startups, Amy Wu, who heads the fund, said in a tweet. FTX Ventures is one of the industry's largest funds and the full funding came from FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, CoinDesk reported, citing Wall Street Journal, which broke the news. Investments from the fund could be as low as $100,000 and as high as hundreds of millions of dollars. Wu, who joined FTX this month from Lightspeed Venture Partners, said the fund could deploy all of the money by next year, depending on whether it gets the right opportunities. In October, FTX raised $420.7 million and was valued at $25 billion, according to CoinDesk. Wordle’s un-intended consequence leads to money for charity Even as Apple cracks down on fakes of the suddenly popular browser-only free word puzzle game, Wordle, a developer who had created an unrelated app five years ago, with the same name, started seeing a spike in downloads, which he attributed to the popularity of the browser-based one, Gamespot reports. Since his app was monetised, developer Steven Cravotta—who had stopped working on it—contacted the developer of the popular browser-based game, Josh Wardle, and they decided on giving away the money from the older app to charity. And Boost! West Oakland, a charity focused on after-school tutoring and mentoring for kids in the area, is the beneficiary, according to Gamespot. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

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Every week day, Forbes India's Hari Arakali, Editor - Tech & Innovation, brings you his take on one piece of tech news that caught his attention, covering everything from big tech to India's growing tech startup ecosystem.