Month: October 2022

Jio Platforms has quietly launched its first laptop, entering into a new product category as the Indian telecom giant aggressively expands its offerings. The laptop, called JioBook, runs JioOS, a custom Android-based OS that has been “optimized for superior performance” and local languages support. The laptop, manufactured in India, is selling at 15,799 Indian rupees,
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Singapore-based Skuad helps companies hire employees in different countries while staying compliant with local employment regulations and processing cross-border payroll. The startup announced today it has raised $15 million in Series A funding. Skuad has signed up more than 350 employers so far, mostly from North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. This funding round, which
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The UK’s media watchdog, Ofcom, has published a debut report on its first year regulating a selection of video-sharing platforms (VSPs) — including TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, Vimeo and OnlyFans — following the introduction of content-handling rules aimed at protecting minors and others from viewing harmful user-generated video content online. As well aiming to shrink the risk
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The electric everything revolution is here, and with it an unprecedented demand for critical battery materials. The most precious of all? Lithium, the crucial ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that will power everything from your Tesla to your iPhone.  The problem is, extracting lithium is expensive, time-consuming, labor intensive and takes a serious toll on
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Hartbeat Ventures is taking in its first institutional investment from J.P. Morgan, comedian and entrepreneur Kevin Hart announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt. He made the announcement alongside J.P. Morgan’s head of digital investment banking and digital private markets Michael Elanjian and Hartbeat Ventures’ president and co-founder Robert Roman. Hartbeat Ventures, an early-stage VC firm with
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Last year, MaxAB, the food and grocery B2B e-commerce and distribution platform serving a network of traditional retailers across Egypt and Morocco, raised its $55 million Series A in two tranches; the latter accompanied its acquisition of the Morocco-based and YC-backed WaysToCap. The moves signaled MaxAB’s ambition to dominate Egypt’s and North Africa’s B2B retail
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Chief co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan started the company because they had experienced first-hand being women executives without a ton of support. They created a community of female leaders that is now 20,000 strong, with 60,000 sitting on waitlists, but just don’t call these women ‘girl bosses.’ The two women appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt
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More doom and gloom for smartphone manufacturers, as global smartphone shipments experience the third consecutive decline this year. Per numbers from Canalys, shipments dropped a lowly 9% last quarter, marking the worst Q3 for the category since 2014. Apple is a rare bright spot among the numbers, with some positive growth as the rest of
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Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration. “The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with
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After a whirlwind month of spewing racism, antisemitism and just straight oddities, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, announced his intention to buy right-wing extremist “free speech” platform Parler. Coincidentally, we’re sure, the app’s CEO is George Farmer, who is the husband of Kanye’s new best friend, conservative political pundit Candace Owens. In
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Meet NXgenPort, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based startup that’s looking to remotely monitor cancer patients in between doctor visits using a port catheter. NXgenPort, which presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is building an implantable chemo port that features added sensors and remote connectivity functions. The port combines chemo-port efficacy with sensor technology to measure
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