Meditation app Calm’s brilliant and hilarious marketing campaign that saw it sponsoring CNN’s coverage of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election results this week seems to have paid off for the business. The app, which today offers mindful meditations, peaceful sounds and sleep stories, had flashed on screen during CNN’s “Key Race Alert” coverage, reminding users […]
WhatsApp, which began testing its payments service in India with 1 million users in early 2018, can finally start to expand the feature to more users in the world’s second largest internet market. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the widely popular UPI payments infrastructure, said on Thursday evening that it […]
The race is on to build more efficient chip technology for faster and less power-intensive computing, and today an innovative startup that’s built one solution based on in-package optical interconnect (optical I/O) technology is announcing a round of growth funding from a number of strategic investors that speaks to how its approach is getting traction. […]
Google and Walmart have a new challenge ahead of them as they race to expand the reach of their payments apps in India: They won’t be permitted to grow beyond a limit. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the widely popular UPI payments infrastructure, said Thursday evening that it will enforce […]
Almost on command after we asked yesterday if a rash of technology IPOs were about to land, news broke that Airbnb plans to drop its S-1 filing early next week with a December roadshow. The document will be of intense interest for shareholders — as well as public investors who hope to purchase shares in the […]
How-to videos have been some of the most popular content on YouTube over the years, and now, to grow engagement and the pool of users that it appeals to, the upstart video app TikTok is getting in on the action, too. After launching a dedicated “Learn On TikTok” hashtag (#LearnOnTikTok) earlier this summer with a […]
Nvidia is bringing Fortnite back to iPhones and iPads, according to a report from the BBC. The British news service is reporting that Nvidia has developed a version of its GeForce cloud gaming service that runs on Safari. The development means that Fortnite gamers can play the Epic Games title off of servers run by […]
Atlanta-based Kobiton, a mobile testing platform that allows developers and QA teams to test their apps on real devices, both on their own desks and through the company’s cloud-based service, today announced that it has acquired Mobile Labs, another Atlanta-based mobile testing service. To finance the acquisition of its well-funded competitor, Kobiton raised a $14 […]
Arriving seven years after the Xbox One first launched, the new Microsoft Xbox Series X console lands in a different world and a very different Xbox ecosystem. Microsoft is embracing subscription bundling with its Game Pass service and cloud-streaming with xCloud, nevertheless they are still committed to building huge metal boxes with tremendous power designed […]
The UK’s data watchdog is facing a legal challenge after it took the decision to quietly close a complaint against the adtech industry’s high velocity background trading of personal data. The legal challenge was reported earlier by Politico. The original complaint — challenging the adtech industry’s compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — […]
As we’ve seen, some startups are pivoting to re-model themselves for the radically different world of the COVID-19 pandemic. But others literally turned out to have a business model which, although they could never have realized it at the time, might have been (almost) tailored-made for this era. A fascinating example of this is SaaS […]
SpaceX is set to launch the U.S. Space Force’s GPS III Space Vehicle 04 today from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This launch was all set to take off back at the beginning of October, but was scrubbed in the final seconds. Today’s launch window spans 15 minutes, and opens at 6:24 PM […]
Despite being relatively new to market, this investment category has quickly become one of the most active. It has also become one of the most confusing.
Osome, a Singapore-headquartered business assistant app that digitizes accounting and compliance tasks, has raised $3 million. An extension of Osome’s seed round, the new funding was led by XA Network and AltaIR Capital. The startup currently has about 4,500 SME clients across Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, founder and chief executive officer Victor […]
Citysocializer, previously a platform for promoting real-world socializing in cities, has relaunched, becoming something akin to a ‘Get Your Guide for virtual events’. Just as other startups have pivoted to ‘lean in’ to current circumstances, this startup has turned its attention to how people can monetize their skills and passions from home doing the COVID-19 […]
The Public Investment Fund, which has this year invested $1.5 billion in Mukesh Ambani’s telecom venture Jio Platforms and more than half a billion dollars in his fiber-optic business, has returned to back yet another empire built by India’s richest man. The sovereign wealth fund is investing $1.3 billion in Reliance Retail for a 2.04% […]
Facebook recently announced that WhatsApp passed the whopping milestone of 100 billion messages sent per day, but not everyone wants those chats to stick around forever. Now, Facebook’s wildly popular messaging app with 2 billion users is adding a feature to give people more control on how their words and pictures live within the app. […]
German fintech startup Vivid Money has raised a $17.6 million Series A funding round (€15 million). Ribbit Capital is leading the investment. Today’s funding round gives Vivid Money a valuation of $117 million (€100 million). Vivid Money is quite a young startup as the company started accepting customers just a few months ago. Built on […]
While short videos are what drive ByteDance’s revenues and give the Chinese startup international recognition, the firm is expanding into numerous new areas like other tech giants to fuel growth. It’s dabbled in enterprise software and online learning, and the news came this week that ByteDance will invest in one of China’s largest e-book readers […]
On the same day that the U.S. officially withdrew from the global pact to reduce emissions that cause climate change, presidential contender Joe Biden committed that he would rejoin the Paris Agreement if elected. In a tweet late Wednesday, Biden wrote, “Today, the Trump Administration officially left the Paris Climate Agreement. And in exactly 77 […]
