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Virtual dates and video speed dating: Dating.com Group launches a $50 million corporate venture fund 

The dating startup world is notorious for few exits, and a similarly slim number of buyers. There’s Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, and there’s Spark Networks, which owns Christian Mingle, JSwipe, Jdate and Zoosk. Dating.com Group also owns a slew of dating brands, like Dil Mil, a dating app for South Asians. […]




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LinkedIn’s making its recruitment tools free to those fighting the coronavirus pandemic

Like many other websites at the moment, the career-oriented networking platform LinkedIn has seen a big boost in traffic as a result of people being asked to work from home and stay indoors overall to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with a bump of 55% more conversational activity between existing connections in recent weeks. […]




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LinkedIn has no plans to make COVID-19 related layoffs from now until end of fiscal year

LinkedIn has no plans to make COVID-related layoffs until at least the end of June 2020, the professional network has confirmed to TechCrunch. This announcements comes after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s pledge last month to have no significant layoffs for the next 90 days. Other business leaders such as Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan […]




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Y Combinator graduate H1 closes on $12.9 million for its professional healthcare database

Just months after graduating from Y Combinator, H1 Insights, the LinkedIn for the healthcare industry, has raised $12.9 million in a new round of funding. “It’s a better way to connect the ecosystem,” says co-founder Ariel Katz. The company already has more than 8 million profiles for healthcare professionals in its database and is generating […]




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Apple said to be working on modular, high-end, noise-cancelling over-ear headphones

Apple is said to be developing its own competitors to popular over-ear noise-cancelling headphones like those made by Bose and Sony, Bloomberg reports, but with similar technology on board to that used in the AirPod and AirPod Pro lines. These headphones would also include a design with interchangeable parts that would allow some modification with […]




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Indian smartphone market grew by 4% in Q1, but projected to decline by 10% this year

India has emerged as one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the last decade, reporting growth each quarter even as handset shipments slowed or declined elsewhere globally. But the world’s second largest smartphone is beginning to feel the coronavirus heat, too. The Indian smartphone market grew by a modest 4% year-over-year in the quarter […]




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Rode’s new white Wireless GO and accessories extend the flexibility of the most versatile creator mic

Sound industry leader Rode has done an amazing job keeping up with the needs of the fast-moving creator industry, supporting YouTubers, podcasters and Instagram and Tik Tok media mavens with a host of new products at impressive price points. The Rode Wireless GO mic system might be the most impressive of these, taking the quality […]




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Knowde could make billions building the digital marketplace for the $5 trillion chemicals industry

Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-Iraq war, they first settled in Houston where employers welcomed the senior Amin-Jahaveri’s experience. Houston in the 80s was dominated by the petrochemicals industry and […]




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Amazon, Flipkart, Ola and Uber begin to resume their services in India

E-commerce firms Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart, and ride-hailing giants Ola and Uber are partially resuming their services in India after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government eased some restrictions late last week to revive economic activity that’s been stalled since the stringent stay-at-home orders were imposed across the nation in late March. The companies said in […]




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AWS launches the $995 Elemental Link for streaming video to its cloud

AWS today announced the launch of the Elemental Link, a small hardware device that makes it easy to connect a live video source to the AWS Elemental Media Live service for broadcast-grade live video processing in the cloud. The $995 Link, which weighs in at less than a pound, is meant to allow Media Live […]




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Apple opens access to mobility data, offering insight into how COVID-19 is changing cities

Apple is providing a data set derived from aggregated, anonymized information taken from users of its Maps navigational app, the company announced today. The data is collected as a set of “Mobility Trends Reports,” which are updated daily and provide a look at the change in the number of routing requests made within the Maps […]




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Daily Crunch: iPhone sales decline in Q1

Apple’s earnings show the impact of COVID-19, NVIDIA’s top scientist shares an open source ventilator design and Amazon anticipates big spending in the coming months. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 1, 2020. 1. iPhone sales are down, ahead of uncertain times for the industry Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s […]




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An already struggling smartphone market takes a big hit from COVID-19

Quarter after quarter, familiar stories have appeared. The smartphone market, once seemingly bulletproof, has suffered. The list of factors is long, and I’ve written about them ad nauseam here, but the CliffsNotes version is: costs are too high, innovation is too incremental and most people already own a device that will be plenty good for […]




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Apple awards $10 million to rapidly scale COVID-19 sample collection kit production

Apple has awarded $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a company focused on producing sample collection kits for testing COVID-19 to hospitals in the U.S. The money comes from the fund that Apple established to support the development and growth of U.S.-based manufacturing, but is particularly notable because to date, the […]




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Apple and Google release sample code, UI and detailed policies for COVID-19 exposure-notification apps

Apple and Google are providing additional resources for developers working with the first version of their Exposure Notification API, the development tools the companies have created and are working on in order to provide a cross-platform way for public health agencies to notify individuals of a potential exposure to a person with a confirmed case […]




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UK’s coronavirus tracing app strategy faces fresh questions over transparency and interoperability

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service . Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) […]




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Google Podcasts finally gets listener analytics

For all of its strengths, Google hasn’t exactly led the way in podcasting. After years of letting third-party developers dominate the category on Play, the company finally introduced its own Podcasts app. Since then, however, it’s been largely eclipsed by Spotify as second place to Apple’s longstanding efforts. Google Podcasts is finally available on iOS […]




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Discover is Facebook’s new effort to help people access websites for free — but with limits

Facebook has a new connectivity app called Discover to help those who can’t afford to get online access information on the web. The service, available through mobile web and Android app, allows users to visit any website in text format (no video, images, audio and other elements that eat up large amounts of data) and […]




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Apple awards $10 million to rapidly scale COVID-19 sample collection kit production

Apple has awarded $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a company focused on producing sample collection kits for testing COVID-19 to hospitals in the U.S. The money comes from the fund that Apple established to support the development and growth of U.S.-based manufacturing, but is particularly notable because to date, the […]




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How will coronavirus change the world? — Parlia launches to help you find out

“Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite?” Google that phrase and you will get thousands of results. It just goes to show that, to a large extent, the “Q&A” model is broken on the internet. Where once Yahoo Answers and Quora were considered the bright young things of Web 2.0’s “Read/Write Web,” today there is only the […]




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Australian companies head to stock market in biggest rush since ’09

Companies lean heavily on equity in effort to dent blow from coronavirus




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Business feels the fear in Australia-China trade dispute

Canberra’s call for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus has provoked threats from Beijing




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Sony chief: mobility is the next megatrend

Tech Scroll Asia, your guide to the billions made and lost in Asia tech




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Alibaba buys half of Singapore skyscraper

Chinese ecommerce giant to help expand 50-floor Axa Tower




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Emirates-owned Dnata threatens to pull out of Australia

Catering and ground-handling company excluded from Canberra’s coronavirus support scheme




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Nintendo collects lockdown power-up as sales shift online

Jump in downloads helps Japanese video game group score 41% rise in profit




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HSBC accuses collapsed oil trader ZenRock of ‘suspicious’ dealings

Bank alleges collapsed Singaporean company raised money through duplicate invoices




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Trump’s erratic China policy undermines western unity

Washington’s stance is alarming US allies when a joint approach is needed




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Uber Eats delivers, Reliance Jio, future of fashion

A collapse in global car-booking demand was offset by a surge in food delivery at Uber




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It’s the end of globalism as we know it (and I feel fine)

For the most part, its unravelling ought to be of deep concern. But we need a new social compact




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Franklin Templeton tussles with India regulator after freezing funds

US asset manager apologises following comments by company’s president over debt rules




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Swiss watches: time to recalibrate

As with other industries reeling in the wake of the pandemic, watchmakers were facing battles long before the virus struck




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Sergio Moro, the Brazilian ‘Judge Dread’ who brings down presidents

The taciturn lawyer’s corruption-busting career has also paved a path to power




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Argentina misses deadline for debt restructuring deal

Bondholders await government’s next move as fears of default intensify




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Annoushka looks to resume China growth as lockdown lifts

Founders plan for further expansion in Wuhan and beyond




li

Saudi sitcom breaks taboos on homosexuality and Israel

Popular programme is sparking debate about social change during holy month of Ramadan




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Belarus holds military parade despite coronavirus risk

President Lukashenko under fire from neighbouring countries for lax approach to pandemic




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Run:AI brings virtualization to GPUs running Kubernetes workloads

In the early 2000s, VMware introduced the world to virtual servers that allowed IT to make more efficient use of idle server capacity. Today, Run:AI is introducing that same concept to GPUs running containerized machine learning projects on Kubernetes. This should enable data science teams to have access to more resources than they would normally […]




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Enterprise companies find MLOps critical for reliability and performance

Machine learning ops focuses on the ML model and datasets, as opposed to code. Data engineers run MLOps, but it’s likely that the specialized role of MLOps engineer will come about soon.




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Dtex, a specialist in insider threat cybersecurity, raises $17.5M

A lot of enterprise cybersecurity efforts focus on malicious hackers that work on behalf of larger organizations, be they criminal groups or state actors — and for good reason, since the majority of incidents these days come from phishing and other malicious techniques that originate outside the enterprise itself. But there has also been a […]




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Box makes quick decision to add new collaboration capabilities in face of pandemic

When the shutdown began six weeks ago, the powers that be at Box sat down for a meeting to discuss the situation. They weren’t in the same room of course. They were like everyone else, separated by the virus, but they saw this as a key moment for Box as a company. They had been […]




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Harbr emerges from stealth to help build online data marketplaces

Harbr co-founder Anthony Cosgrove has been working with data for over 15 years, so he has an inkling of some of the problems associated with pulling data together in a way that makes it easy for others to consume, whether internally or externally. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he decided to start a company to […]




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Robots To Eat All The Jobs? Hackers, Policy Wonks Collaborate On A Basic Income Createathon This Weekend

In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman have spoken up in favor of a universal basic income that would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce […]




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Airbnb Pledges Transparency, Education To Fight Commercial Hosting, But Provides Little Detail

In response to calls for stronger action on hosts that aren’t casual users, Airbnb said it would start sharing some data with governments and getting hosts to agree to a policy of listing only their permanent homes. Here’s what Brian Chesky said in a post today: Today, we’re taking the next step to turn these principles into […]




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To Go After Local Neighborhood News And Marketplaces, Hoodline Raises $1.6M

One of the most sought-after, but never quite dominated, frontiers in online media and marketplaces has been centered on local communities. Hoodline, a San Francisco-based startup, is trying to tackle this with a unique focus on news about neighborhood retail corridors. The startup has built up a network of news on about two-dozen neighborhoods across San Francisco as a sort of Trojan horse into a larger platform of hyperlocal listings and markets.




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Regalii, A Startup In NYC’s Washington Heights, Uncovers Where Immigrants’ Remittances Really Go

It’s not a converted industrial warehouse in Brooklyn. Or a stately, century-old building in the Flatiron. But YC-backed Regalii’s atypical office location up in the Dominican-heavy Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan has given it plenty of insights into its working-class immigrant customer base. The startup, co-founded by several Latino founders who personally knew the hassles of sending money home, […]




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Townsquared Raises $5.3M To Expand A Nextdoor-Like Experience For Local Retail, Small Businesses

Even though Rohit Prakash was a dual MD and PhD researching optogenetics at Stanford University, his entrepreneurial itch kept returning him to his family’s small business roots. He and his co-founder Nipul Patel began researching the travails of small business owners, interviewing countless entrepreneurs, trying to figure out what their risks were or what caused […]




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Bucket, A Travel Planner That Automatically Creates Recommendation Lists, Expands Nationwide

Early Facebook employee and longtime travel aficionado Julia Lam began studying consumer travel habits over a year ago to see how people planned their vacations and business trips. What she found was that people were often using a mess of Chrome tabs and text files. So she started Bucket with former Facebook engineer John Sichi […]




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Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before

“Capitalists both in the Old World and the States, even now, have but little faith in California. They regard this country and everything relating to it as one grand bubble, liable to burst at any moment…. This is how it should be. The wealth of California is thereby passing into the hands of young, active, […]




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AngelList Raised $163M For Startups in 2015, Up 56% Year-Over-Year

AngelList, the online platform that had made itself indispensable to early-stage startups for fundraising and recruiting, said it closed out last year having raised $163 million online on behalf of 441 companies. That’s about 56 percent higher than the year before in 2014. About 40 percent of the deals were private rounds and institutional funds were in about 40 […]