At its annual re:Invent conference, AWS announced re:Post, a new community-driven question and answer service designed to help AWS customers remove technical roadblocks. The new service is part of the AWS Free Tier. AWS says re:Post is driven by the community of AWS customers, partners, and employees. “AWS re:Post is an AWS-managed Q&A service offering crowd-sourced,
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The European Commission has given its clearest signal yet that it’s prepared to intervene over weak enforcement of the EU’s data protection rules against big tech. Today the bloc’s executive also had a warning for adtech giants Google and Facebook — accusing them of choosing “legal tricks” over true compliance with the EU’s standard of
Francois Nguyen Contributor Francois Nguyen, executive design director of product design at frog, is responsible for ensuring high standards of design excellence. With hybrid models taking off across many aspects of society, it’s clear that though they offer incredible flexibility, the boundary lines between work and personal life are becoming increasingly blurred and emotionally draining. Ritual has always been
If you bring up bad news about the price of technology stocks on Twitter, very helpful people will send you multi-year charts that put recent declines into historical context. Yes, thank you; I was not aware you could zoom out. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get
Mendel, a corporate spend management solution for enterprises in Latin America, announced today that it has secured $35 million in debt and equity. The Mexico-based startup closed the $15 million Series A round and $20 million debt financing after participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. ALLVP and Infinity Ventures, a firm founded by a
IRL, the SoftBank-backed social app and recent unicorn, is today announcing its first acquisition. The company is purchasing, for an undisclosed sum, the “digital nutrition” company AaBeZe Labs and its portfolio of IP with the goal of making IRL a healthier and more ethically designed social networking app. AaBeZe’s founders Michael Phillips Moskowitz, the former
The holiday shopping season kicked off last week with some lackluster results, but employers are still in dire need of workers. The tight labor market, driven in part by “The Great Resignation,” is highlighting the need for more tech-enabled tools for connecting employers with available workers. Shiftsmart, a New York-based labor management resource, is the
Paris-based VC firm Partech has announced the closing of the fundraising of its new growth fund. Partech Growth II is the firm’s second growth fund. And the team managed to raise $750 million. As a reminder, Partech Growth I was a smaller fund with €400 million under management, which represents $460 million at today’s exchange
SoftBank-based digital creation platform Picsart, which recently hit uniciorn status, announced today it’s acquiring the research and development company DeepCraft. The deal is a combination of both cash and stock and is in the seven-figure range, but the exact terms aren’t being disclosed. Picsart today offers a range of digital creation and editing tools aimed
Gozem, a super app that provides a host of services — including transport, e-commerce and financial services in Francophone Africa — has raised $5 million in Series A financing, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The Togo- and Singapore-based company received investment from AAIC, Thunes (TransferTo), Momentum Ventures (SMRT), Innoport Ventures (Schulte Group), CMC Ventures (National
1inch, a popular aggregator of decentralized protocols, has raised $175 million in what it calls a Series B funding round. It isn’t a traditional venture round as the company isn’t selling a stake in exchange for money. Instead, 1inch has sold $175 million worth of 1INCH tokens in a private token sales with institutional investors.
Less than 20% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. But LinkedIn, the largest professional social network globally, has so far catered only to this sliver of the population in the world’s second largest internet market. On Thursday, the Microsoft-owned service said it’s beginning to change that. LinkedIn has started to roll out support for Hindi
For even a casual observer of the tech industry, it’s been a good week for Bret Taylor: He was named board chair at Twitter on Monday, and yesterday, he became the co-CEO and co-chair at a SaaS company called Salesforce. From outward appearances, Taylor seemed extraordinarily well positioned to influence what goes on at Twitter
Civil society has been poring over the detail of the European Commission’s proposal for a risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence which was proposed by the EU’s executive back in April. The verdict of over a hundred civil society organizations is that the draft legislation falls far short of protecting fundamental rights from
Apple today released its anticipated annual list of the best apps and games of the year across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch. This year, children’s app maker Toca Boca won iPhone App of the Year for “Toca Life World,” and Riot Games’ “League of Legends: Wild Rift” was the iPhone Game of
Vijay Menon, a statistician by trade, began his career at Microsoft. It was there that he realized there was an astounding number of subscriptions that failed to renew or even go through to begin with due to payment-related issues. He became intrigued by the problem, and solving it. Ultimately in 2016 alone, he helped the
One day after announcing an amendment to its SPAC agreement, digital mortgage lender Better.com confirmed today that it is laying off roughly 9% of its nearly 10,000 person staff. Doing the math, that amounts to about 900 people. The company declined to comment beyond the following written statement from CFO Kevin Ryan: “A fortress balance
Meta (formerly Facebook) recently announced its plans to delay the rollout of end-to-end encryption across its messaging service until sometime in 2023, citing concerns from child safety advocates who warned the change would shield abusers from detection. Today, the company offered more details about how it plans to approach the need for harm prevention alongside
At its annual re:Invent conference, AWS today rolled out a slew of new features for SageMaker, the company’s managed service for building, training and deploying machine learning (ML) models. Swami Sivasubramanian, the vice president of machine learning at Amazon, said the new features aim to make it easier for users to scale machine learning in
It’s just over a year since the European Union’s executive proposed legislation aimed at encouraging widespread sharing and reuse of industrial data and protected public sector data-sets — such as health data, environment, energy, agriculture, mobility, finance, manufacturing, public administration and skills. Yesterday the bloc’s co-legislators reached agreement on the DGA after trilogue discussions —
Snapdragon’s G3x is Qualcomm’s fantastically exciting bid to embrace the gaming market — a brand new reach for the manufacturer, which introduces powerful GPUs, 5G-enabled connectivity, the ability to power external screens, immersive audio capabilities, haptic feedback and a slew of other features that handheld gaming manufacturers have had to cobble together from other sources.
Link management company Bitly announced Wednesday its acquisition of Germany-based QR code company Egoditor GmbH whose flagship product is the QR Code Generator. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but Toby Gabriner, CEO of Bitly, disclosed that it was a cash-and-stock deal that, when completed, will result in a combined company that has over
Didi’s U.S. IPO is one of several key moments of the recent regulatory shift inside China regarding its leading technology companies. The other is Ant’s IPO that never happened, pulled in the wake of criticisms of the Chinese government’s handling of newer technologies by the previously prominent Alibaba founder Jack Ma. It’s been a busy
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. Today? We discussed if the era of founder-led
Reddit is rolling out several new real-time features including voting and comment count animations, typing indicators, reading indicators and new comment indicators. The new features are rolling out globally across Reddit’s desktop, iOS and Android apps starting today. With this latest update, Reddit says voting will no longer be a static number on posts and
We spend such a tremendous amount of our resources growing, processing, transporting and selling food items. In a world where not everyone has enough to eat, it’s a disgrace that in the US, 30%-40% of food that is produced is never consumed. That’s the problem Spoiler Alert has set its crosshairs on. The company just
Goalsetter, a financial education platform for kiddos, has announced the close of a $15 million Series A financing round. The funding was led by Seae Ventures, with participation from Fiserv, Mass Mutual, Citizens Financial Group, Astia Fund, NBA stars Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony, and actors Anthony Anderson and Lance Gross. The startup was founded
UK equity crowdfunding business Seedrs – who’s merger with rival Crowdcube was earlier blocked by competition regulators – has been acquired by start-up investing platform Republic in a $100m deal.The move comes after Seedrs criticised the the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority earlier this year as stifling the UK’s potential to boost startups. Seedrs was
Spotify’s anticipated year-end retrospective, Spotify Wrapped, is rolling out today to consumers, artists and podcast creators. The experience offers Spotify users a look back at their year on Spotify, highlighting listening trends across both music and podcasts. Artists and creators, meanwhile, can check in on all the ways their fans listened. This year, Wrapped has
South African tech talent marketplace OfferZen is one of the beneficiaries of the growing global demand for tech workers: It confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised €4.5 million ($5.07 million) in Series A funding from South African investment company Base Capital. This is OfferZen’s first round of funding since Philip Joubert, Malan Joubert and Brett