For a while, there have been talks about revamping the outdated 2007 Act of Nigeria’s information and technology body, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). Earlier this year, in March, the director-general Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi proposed the realignment of the Act with “tenets and ideals of the fourth Industrial Revolution” and Nigeria’s Digital Economy […]
News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls to make ends meet. There’s just one problem: the open internet which allowed readers to range over the entire thought of humanity has […]
It’s not even half a year since crypto exchange Bitpanda announced a $170M Series B — when, back in March, Austria’s first unicorn was being valued at $1.2 billion. Today it’s topping that: Announcing a $263M Series C, led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with the fintech startup now valued at a whopping $4.1BN — […]
Fitness platform Ultrahuman has officially announced a $17.5 million Series B fund raise, with investment coming from early stage fund Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Utsav Somani’s iSeed fund. A number of founders and angel investors also participated in the Bangalore-headquartered startup’s Series B, including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer, […]
Many Southeast Asian digital businesses run into obstacles when seeking early-stage growth financing. They might not want to sell equity in their company, but often struggle to secure working capital loans from traditional financial institutions. That’s where Singapore-based Jenfi comes in, providing revenue-based financing of up to $500,000 with flexible repayment plans that co-founder and […]
EV startup Canoo has hired hundreds of employees and is homing in on a production date, but critical milestones including landing a battery supplier remain, according to the company’s second quarter earnings report. Canoo’s earnings report comes just a few weeks after the company’s first investor relations day when it named Dutch company VDL Nedcar […]
After meeting an ignominious end in 2017, the anonymous gossip app once popular with college students lives again. Yik Yak returned to the iOS App Store on Monday (sorry, Android users) under new ownership, inspiring a fresh round of interest in the long-dead social network. 📣 ICYMI: After a 4 year hiatus, Yik Yak is […]
South Korea’s LG Energy Solution has entered into a six-year agreement with an Australian mining company for cobalt and nickel, securing a stable supply of key minerals to make electric vehicle batteries. LG Energy, a subsidiary of LG Chem, will purchase 71,000 dry metric tons of nickel and 7,000 dry metric tons of cobalt from […]
T-Mobile has confirmed “unauthorized access” to its systems, days after a portion of customer data was listed for sale on a known cybercriminal forum. The U.S. cell giant, which last year completed a $26 billion merger with Sprint, confirmed an intrusion but that it has “not yet determined that there is any personal customer data […]
As more fintech companies find their way to higher and higher valuations in both the private and public markets, expect to see more legacy banks and lenders be gobbled up by newer entrants.
Twitter’s ambitious upstart decentralized social media working group “bluesky” took an important step Monday as the social media company appointed a formal project lead who will direct how the protocol develops moving forward. Crypto developer Jay Graber was tapped by Twitter to helm the initiative, which the company hopes will eventually create a decentralized social […]
Spin users planning trips in 84 cities, towns and campuses across the U.S., Canada, Germany and Spain will be able to view Spin's electric scooters and bikes on the app while planning their trip.
Tinder announced this morning that in the “coming quarters,” users will be able to verify their ID on the app. This feature was first rolled out in Japan in 2019, where Tinder users must verify that they are at least 18 years old. Aside from places like Japan, where this is mandated by law, ID […]
We must eventually find a halfway point between those with valid concerns about the anonymity crypto assets provide and those who see regulation as prohibitively restrictive on crypto.
Pearson, a London-based publishing and education giant that provides software to schools and universities has agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misled investors about a 2018 data breach resulting in the theft of millions of student records. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement on Monday after the agency found […]
Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers. The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond […]
Blue Origin, the space company helmed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is taking NASA to court. The company filed a complaint with a federal claims court on Monday over the agency’s decision to award a lunar lander contract solely to rival company SpaceX. The complaint, which Blue Origin successfully petitioned to have sealed, says NASA’s evaluation […]
Six years ago, I sat in the Google self-driving project's Firefly vehicle — which I described, at the time, as a "little gumdrop on wheels" — and let it ferry me around a course in Mountain View.
