In the latest move by Russia to censor Western Internet services since it started a war by invading Ukraine, Google has confirmed that Russians are having problems accessing its news aggregator service, Google News, in the country. This follows an earlier report by the Interfax news agency which said the service had been blocked by
Month: March 2022
Twenty years ago, getting a human genome sequenced was a billion-dollar, international project. Today, you can get your dog’s genome sequenced by the end of the month for a few bucks. It speaks to the speed with which genetics has permeated our lives, but despite massive improvements to the technology, the process can still be
Dating app giant Match Group, already home to Tinder, Match, OkCupid, Hinge and others, is today launching the latest addition to its dating services lineup with Stir, an app designed exclusively for single parents. With the new release, the company aims to address the 20 million single parents in the U.S. who are under-served by
French startup Weglot has closed a $50 million Series A funding round (€45 million) from Partech. The company has built a translation solution for websites. It helps you add more languages to your site without a lot of tweaking and without having to switch to a different CMS or e-commerce platform. And this is key
For founders who want to work with people like them, New Era Capital Partners will fit that bill. Gideon Argov, Ran Simha and Ziv Conen were all building businesses before coming together at New Era. Simha is an engineer by trade, but went into finance at Lehman Brothers and a hedge fund before taking a
Instagram today is making a chronological feed available to all users, as earlier promised, alongside another new feed-filtering option that will allow you to scroll through posts from your favorite accounts. The features had been launched into limited testing starting in January but will now reach Instagram’s global user base by the end of the
Not-for-profit search engine Ecosia has started funnelling a portion of the profits it generates from serving ads against users’ searches into startups in the renewable energy space. This is in addition to the €350 million WorldFund which Ecosia recently incubated and launched last year to back climate-focused startups. To be clear, Ecosia is also continuing
Astronomer has grown quite a lot since we briefly profiled the company back in 2017. At that time, the scrappy data analytics company had scooped up $3.5 million in funding to develop its tool for what happens after you’ve collected a bunch of data, namely assembling and organizing it so the data can be analyzed.
Just as sea breezes propel sailboats across the sea on Earth, solar radiation might one day be able to propel spacecraft between the stars. Or at least that’s the hope of French startup Gama. The aerospace company was founded in 2020 by Louis de Gouyon Matignon, Thibaud Elziere and Andrew Nutter, whose goal is to
The first DJI Mavic turned the world of consumer drones on its head when it was released back in late-2016. The compact, foldable design launched a million copy cats around the world — including a number under the drone giant’s own umbrella. Compact certainly isn’t the first word that comes to mind in the enterprise
South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, which supplies electric vehicle batteries to Tesla, Lucid Motors, General Motors and Proterra, said on Thursday it is investing $1.4 billion (1.7 trillion KRW) to build a cylindrical battery plant in Queen Creek, Arizona. The move is a clear indication that LG Energy is increasing its presence in the United
I would put window washing fairly high (so to speak) on the list of jobs it makes sense to automate. Certainly the gig qualifies as both dirty and dangerous — and surprisingly, doesn’t come with all that much in the way of hazard pay. That’s something you would think might come standard with a job
The Yuga Labs investor deck from February is a fascinating document, bringing together gaming, a new currency, and an ever-growing pool of digital assets that can be bought and sold by fans of Yuga’s well-known NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club. I ran through the deck last night and again this morning to get a
Twitter has been spotted working on making TweetDeck a premium feature through its Twitter Blue subscription service. According to reverse app engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who searches the code of mobile apps to spot features and upcoming changes in development, the social media giant is currently working on the addition to Twitter’s premium offering, adding
Vertical farming has long done a very good job with a very thin sliver of the agricultural marketplace. Specifically, years of advancements in hydroponics and greenhouse farming have made it possible to grow a fine head of lettuce and other leafy greens under the glow of LED lighting. Now, suddenly, everyone wants in on the
Google Cloud today launched its Suspend/Resume feature for virtual machines into general availability. Before it launched this feature as an alpha a couple of years ago, the only option developers had were to stop and start instances. With Suspend/Resume, the experience is more akin to closing and opening the lid on your laptop, Google argues.
Apple has been fined again in the Netherlands over an antitrust order related to dating apps. The order requires it to allow local dating apps to be able to use third-party payment technologies if their developers wish, rather than being locked to only being able to use Apple’s in-app payment API for iOS. Since January,
This week, Nvidia, a company best known for its high-powered graphic processing units (GPUs) debuted a platform for the development of AI-powered medical devices. The device, called Clara Holoscan MGX, provides computing power allowing medical sensors to process multiple data streams in parallel, train AI algorithms, and visualize biology in real time. Clara Holoscan MGX,
Say what you will — Nothing knows how to tease a teaser. In the hardware startup’s defense, it noted that this morning’s event would be a “roadmap” reveal, specifically referring to another device coming to its lineup, without offering much in the way of information on said product. The company has, however, confirmed the much-rumored
Tome co-founders Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, former Instagram and Facebook product leads, are applying their creative spins to the dreaded slide deck. It’s true that the slide deck hasn’t been improved upon so much in the past 30 years, though many startups have given it a-go over the years, including 9Slides, Swipe, and more
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. We had an illness on the team, so instead of recording our usual Wednesday deep-dive, we reached into our recent archives and pulled the audio from a Twitter space we did the other
Instagram is expanding product tagging to everyone in the United States over the next few months, the company announced on Tuesday. Prior to the expansion, only creators on Instagram could tag products from businesses in their posts. Now, all U.S. users will be able to tag products from businesses that are set up for Instagram
We’ve been shipping things across the oceans for centuries, and the world’s supply chains increasingly rely on diesel-powered megaships big enough to block entire channels by themselves. How do you decarbonize this monolithic industry? FleetZero thinks it can with electric vessels making short hops all the way around the Pacific, while relying on smaller ports
Scratchpad began life as an easy way to add information to Salesforce by acting as a layer that sits on top of the popular CRM application, but the startup’s founders knew it needed to be more than sales utility, and today it announced a new capability that makes Scratchpad a central workspace for sales people
A lot of the startups you tend to hear about in the world of fintech are building solutions for consumers and businesses. Today, a startup that’s aiming to serve the biggest financial services users of them all — the big banks themselves and how they move money — is announcing a big round of funding
Mining is one of the oldest industries out there, but it has increasingly embraced high-tech methods as demand has increased. Plotlogic uses hyperspectral imaging, a technique generally found in labs and satellites, to add a new layer of data and automation to these crucial but often dated operations. Hyperspectral imagery is basically a photo that
FedEx has been working on a new feature for its consumer mobile app that would seemingly allow it to better compete with the popular Shop app by Shopify. One of the bigger selling points for Shopify’s Shop is how it allows users to track their purchases and shipments from across services, including not only Shopify,
As the use of aircraft like drones, electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles and uncrewed aerial vehicles take off, Japanese startup Terra Drone wants to make sure trafficking the skies doesn’t get overlooked. “Our airspace is going to get more crowded than ever, but most companies today are concentrating only on hardware development,” said Terra
At the end of “Planet of the Apes” (1968), the human protagonist realizes that the alien world he crash-landed upon is actually post-apocalyptic Earth. For many first-time founders in fundraising mode, the current market correction for publicly-traded tech companies has been similarly jarring. Once investors started shaving value from high-flying stocks, it changed the game
Twitch is updating its appeals and reporting processes, following through on product updates the company promised late last year. The biggest change is the introduction of a new portal where users facing account suspensions can appeal those rulings and monitor the progress of their requests. While Twitch deals with its fair share of users with