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
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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
Spain’s Jobandtalent, a “workforce marketplace”-cum-digital temping agency which uses AI to match workers to casual labor gigs in sectors like warehousing, ecommerce and logistics, has closed a $500 million Series E round of funding led by Kinnevik and with what it bills as a “significant” follow on by SoftBank VisionFund 2. Existing investors including Atomico,
Twitch introduced a new way for streamers to fight accounts that evade channel-level bans Tuesday. The automated tool is called “Suspicious User Detection” and can spot users trying to get around bans, giving anyone moderating a Twitch channel more recourse for dealing with potentially disruptive behavior before it starts. The company announced that the new
Rhys Spence Contributor Rhys Spence is head of research at Brighteye Ventures, a European edtech-focused fund, where he works with portfolio companies to help address priorities, with a focus on internationalization and HR. More posts by this contributor What we can learn from edtech startups’ expansion efforts in Europe The 2021 edtech avalanche has just
With key ESG reporting regulations such as the EU Taxonomy and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) covering more than 75 percent of European companies, across the EU and the UK, the regulatory environment is evolving fast. Non-financial data, such as carbon emissions, is catching up with financial reporting burdens. And it’s not just the
Google today announced the winners of its “Best of 2021” app awards, which highlight both the company’s and users’ picks for the best apps and games from the past year. This year, Google is expanding its awards lineup to include apps and games on tablets, Wear OS and Google TV, it says. Its U.S. winners
South Korea-based peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform PeopleFund announced today it has closed a $63.4 million (75.9 billion won) Series C round led by Bain Capital with participation from Goldman Sachs. Returning investors in the round include CLSA Lending Ark Asia and 500 Global. The latest funding brings the total raised by PeopleFund to about $83.6
Startups are often questions: What if we did things in a new way, instead of the way we have been? Massive is a good example of the genre: What if users could pay for apps or services not with money or attention, but with their spare compute power? The general concept of distributed compute power
Jack Dorsey was Twitter’s first CEO — and also its fourth. He led the platform from its launch in 2006 until he passed the torch to co-founder Ev Williams two years later. In 2015, Dorsey returned to the role after Dick Costolo’s stint, even though he was simultaneously serving as CEO of fintech platform Square.
There has been speculation for some time that Marc Benioff was ready to step back, perhaps take the same path as Jeff Bezos and move to chairman of the board. The scuttlebutt had it that Bret Taylor was in line for a promotion. Seems Benioff wasn’t ready to go out to pasture just yet, but
Longer-term energy storage is a drag, and a lot of battery tech has been focusing on “how quickly can we charge these batteries so I can drive my EV for another couple of hundred miles.” That’s a fundamentally different problem than trying to capture the power of the sun for 12 hours, before releasing the
It’s that time of year again. Analysts and journalists from across the globe have convened in Hawaii to witness Qualcomm announce its big chip news for the year. Just a few days of sun, surf, Snapdragons and summits. As promised, the latest version of the So Cal chip giant’s flagship SoC arrives with a rebrand