Europe

Internet-based sexual exploitation of minors in Kenya was found to be more rampant on Facebook than on any other site, according to the newly released Disrupting Harm report – making the tech giant’s platform exceedingly unsafe for children. The report by Interpol, UNICEF’s Office of Research – Innocenti and End Violence against Children, found that

Companies snapping up merchants selling on Amazon to build in more e-commerce economies of scale into the model are on a rapid pace of growth at the moment, fueled in no small part by giant infusions of money from the world of venture capital. In the latest development, Berlin’s Razor Group — one of the

Is this the beginning of the end for the hated tracking cookie consent pop-up? A flagship framework used by Google and scores of other advertisers for gathering claimed consent from web users for creepy ad targeting looks set to be found in breach of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A year ago the IAB

More fuel for social audio: Berlin-based social audio startup Beams, which is building a platform for sharing and consuming short-form audio recordings — as a sort of bite-sized/deconstructed and/or collaborative podcast format which it bills as “audio-based social media” — has doubled its seed funding, adding another $3 million to close out the round at

The UK’s recently appointed secretary of state for digital, Nadine Dorries, has signalled she wants to take a tougher line on social media platforms than her predecessor — telling a parliamentary committee she’s looking at speeding up the application of criminal sanctions for breaches of incoming UK online safety legislation. A provision to hold named

QuintoAndar is taking its first steps out of Brazil to open a technology hub in Lisbon, Portugal aimed at attracting technology talent across the pond. Co-founder and CEO Gabriel Braga made the announcement at Web Summit 2021 going on this week in Lisbon. The new office will serve as its first in Europe and will be

Google has responded to allegations contained in a recently unsealed US antitrust lawsuit that it worked covertly to stall European Union privacy legislation that could have blasted a huge hole in its behaviorial advertising business. Per the US states’ suit, a couple of years after a European Commission proposal to update the EU’s ePrivacy Directive

Companies like Slack and Asana stormed into the world of tech to steal a march on incumbents like Microsoft in providing a new wave of point solutions to make it easier for workers respectively to chat with each other, plan projects and more. Now another startup is announcing a massive round of funding for a

It’s fairly simply: Softwood grows a lot faster – in ‘sustainable’ forests – than hardwood. The latter is often found in bio-diverse old-growth forests like, um, the Amazon. So if you could make softwood behave like hardwood, you’d not only access more sustainable wood for construction, you’d also protect hardwood forests from destruction. Plus, you

Spain’s on-demand delivery platform Glovo has announced what it’s calling “The Couriers Pledge” — an initiative which commits its business to setting a new — “fairer” — social rights standard for its gigging couriers. The self-defined “standard” covers earnings, safety, communication and support for development opportunities.  Glovo says the commitments will (eventually) apply to couriers

Earlier this year European startup Sundayraised $100 million in a Series A raise led by US investors Coatue and DST Global, just five months after launching. The proposition was relatively simple and pretty much tailor-made for the Covid-19 era: diners scan a QR code to download an app, and then split the bill between friends

Surveys have long been used by marketing teams and other business decision makers to learn how customers tick. But they can be costly to put together, hard to run at scale, and, at the end of the day, are only as credible as the data that gets put into them. Today, a London startup called

Last year we covered Adtech startup Admix’s $7 million Series A funding. The London-based company brings ads to games, e-sports, virtual reality, and augmented reality. In-game advertising at scale, where advertisers can bid programmatically through traditional ad-buying platforms, rather than relying on an ad agency model, remains an enormous area, largely under-exploited. Today Admix is

While software development frameworks make developing software faster and easier than ever, pre-deployment testing gets more and more complex by the day. Over the past decade, Testlio has grown exponentially and positioned itself as an “Elance for Software Testing.” In addition to its own team of 150 or so, the company now commands an army

You might have previously thought that Ecosia was a nice-to-have search engine that planted trees when you punched-in a search term. Lovely. How nice. But no. Ecosia’s founders and the network around it are far more serious about climate change than that superficial assessment might suggest. Last year in March 2020, just before the world

Frances Haugen, one of (now) multiple Facebook whistleblowers who have come forward in recent years with damning testimony related to product safety, gave testimony in front of the UK parliament today — where, in one key moment, she was invited to clarify her views on end-to-end encryption following a report in the British newspaper the

Make way for yet another ‘quick-commerce’ player in Europe’s heavily heating on-demand grocery space: Pop Market is a Greek startup which launched last week in Athens — taking orders via and app and touting 15min delivery times and a curated selection of “thousands” of items (including fresh fruit and vegetables). The seed round, which Pop

Meet Hera, a new calendar app that wants to turn the calendar into the main work interface. Hera helps you schedule meetings more easily with natural language processing and lets you share availabilities in an email or any messaging app. The startup is also going to build integrations with your other work tools so that

With the pandemic turning us into delivery experts, consumers have also switched on to meal-kits on droves, given that it combines both delivery and home cooking. But many meal kits can be inflexible. The Kitchenful startup in Germany realized this and so it allows users to browse recipes from food bloggers and have personalized meal

FlixMobility, the $3 billion-German transportation startup that has doubled down on long distance buses and slowly and quietly gobbled up transit lines and operations across Europe, today announced a big move to raise its game in the U.S. The company announced that it is acquiring Greyhound Lines, the iconic U.S. bus network, from UK-based owner

Station F, the big startup campus located in Paris, is launching an online component called Launch by Station F. With this new program, entrepreneurs from anywhere can get started and learn all the basics to start a company. Launched in 2017, Station F is a massive building that used to be a rail freight depot.

Marginalized communities, survivors of abuse, politicians, law enforcement – they all use encrypted communications to keep their information safe. But the encryption of the kinds of services you and I use every day – from messaging to confidential internal company communications – is increasingly under threat by governments globally. The reasons are sometimes understandable, such

Portuguese VC Faber is launching a new fund, Faber Blue Pioneers I, to invest in early-stage startups – primarily from Portugal and Southern Europe – developing innovative “deep tech solutions” around ocean sustainability and climate action, The fund will have an initial target of €30 million, including funding from Portugal Blue as well as impact-driven

Spinal surgery is not for the faint of heart at the best of times, but Intelligent Implants raised €7.5 million ($8.7 million) to make spinal surgery less of a pain in the backside. The company’s smart implants’ first application is in spinal fusion surgery — where two or more vertebrae are permanently connected to improve

With the Climate Crisis looming, lots of companies want to do their part. But asking customers to “offset the CO2 emission of this delivery” is usually a hammer to crack a nut. There is very little transparency around carbon offsets. Plus, smaller companies want to access high-quality carbon credits, but calculate their impact at a

European Union lawmakers are mobilizing support for a ban on tracking-based advertising to be added to a new set of Internet rules for the bloc — which were proposed at the back end of last year but are now entering the last stretch of negotiations ahead of becoming pan-EU law. If they succeed it could have

Facebook has reached a multi-year agreement to pay French publishers for resharing their content on its platforms, it announced today. The social media giant said the licensing agreement with the Alliance of national and regional newspapers “means that people on Facebook will be able to continue uploading and sharing news stories freely amongst their communities,

A large number of UK tech ‘unicorns’ have been in complex markets where policy and regulation really matters. But regulated markets (fintech, healthtech etc), or markets where regulation is still emerging (e.g. lab-grown meat) are, well, HARD. Founders have to navigate policy-makers, regulators and even politicians. To it’s interesting that today a new VC is

360Learning has raised a $200 million funding round from Sumeru, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Silver Lake Waterman. And this time, the name of the startup describes quite well what it does. 360Learning lets you learn from your peers with an easy-to-use platform that lets you create and share courses with your peers. Existing investors

Facebook — or whatever name the tech giant picks for a reportedly looming rebrand of its data-mining empire as it seeks to teleport its business into the metaverse to escape the unending cavalcade of toxic publicity its execs generate — has a new ‘bad behavior’ badge to sport: It’s just been fined nearly $70 million