Category: Uncategorized

Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft Edge now automatically generates image labels for screen readers on Windows, macOS, and Linux, improving the experience for blind and low vision users  —  Ideal for blind or low vision web users  —  More than half of the images on the web are missing alt text, according to Microsoft.

FinSMEs: Avive, which is building a connected, data-sharing response service for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest emergencies, raises a $22M Series A  —  Avive Solutions, Inc., a San Francisco, CA-based developer of an intelligent AED and connected response platform for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest …

The James Webb Space Telescope has sent back its clearest image yet

The final draft of legislation designed to protect people from “harmful content” online goes before Parliament today, but critics warn it is likely to have unintended negative consequences

Robotic legs with an unconventional design inspired by flightless birds can run 300 per cent more efficiently than the same device would if designed traditionally

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: PayPal expands its services to allow users to send money into Ukraine and temporarily waives fees for customers sending funds to Ukrainian PayPal accounts  —  PayPal is expanding its services to allow its users to send money to Ukrainians, the company announced on Thursday.

PYMNTS.com: New York-based online insurance marketplace Policygenius raises a $125M Series E, bringing its total funding to $225M  —  Policygenius has raised $125 million in new growth capital, the InsurTech firm announced in a news release Thursday (March 17).  —  The company, based in New York City …

Andrew Hayward / Decrypt: Bored Ape Yacht Club’s $APE token hit a peak of $39.40 per token during its airdrop, but later sank as low as $7.50  —  ApeCoin, the Ethereum token built for the expanding Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT ecosystem, launched this morning and rapidly rose in value before shedding much of its […]

Reuters: Sources: Alibaba and Tencent are planning to cut tens of thousands of jobs combined this year as companies try to cope with China’s regulatory crackdown  —  Alibaba Group (9988.HK) and Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) are preparing to cut tens of thousands of jobs combined this year …

Kate Park / TechCrunch: Tokyo-based mobile banking app Kyash raises a $41M Series D from Block, Greyhound, and others; report says it is Block’s first investment in Asia  —  Kyash, a Tokyo-based mobile financial app, has raised $41.2 million (4.9 billion JPY) Series D funding.  —  The round comes from a number …

Dan Taylor / Tech.eu: Grocery delivery app Getir raises a $768M Series E at an $11.8B valuation led by Mubadala with Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and others participating  —  Confirming earlier rumours, Getir has reined in $768 million at a decacorn valuation of $11.8 billion.

Tiny sensors that can drift in the breeze like dandelion seeds can help record environmental signals across a wide area

Robotic legs that mimic flightless running birds like emus and use just two motors per leg can run more efficiently than more complex devices

TechCrunch: Sources: Yandex is in negotiations to sell its media unit, including Yandex News and personal recommendations site Yandex Zen, possibly to social network VK  —  Sources say the company is seeking a media exit as top exec hit with sanctions over propaganda charge

Wall Street Journal: French cloud service OVHcloud files an antitrust complaint about Microsoft with the European Commission; sources say complaint focuses on Microsoft’s licensing  —  France’s OVHcloud has filed a complaint that Microsoft is abusing its position to hurt competition

Lucas Matney / TechCrunch: Bored Ape Yacht Club launches ApeCoin, or the $APE token, with 1B in total supply, and forms the ApeCoin DAO, whose founding members include Alexis Ohanian  —  Even among the fastest-growing crypto startups, Yuga Labs has had a particularly explosive year.  —  The startup is behind …

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: Wasoko, formerly Sokowatch, a Kenya-based B2B marketplace that offers a BNPL service to retailers, raises a $125M Series B, source says at a $625M valuation  —  Informal retail is king in Africa, with hundreds of billions of dollars of consumer goods are sold through its channels yearly.

Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk: Treehouse, which provides DeFi data analytics, raises an $18M seed led by an “undisclosed large fintech investor”, with Binance and others participating  —  Treehouse aims to provide retail investors the infrastructure needed for them to make informed decisions on their DeFi positions

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: SpaceFill, which helps companies build flexible logistics networks in Europe by offering warehouse space and a SaaS monitoring tool, raises $27M led by NGP  —  French startup SpaceFill has raised a $27 million funding round (€25 million) led by NGP Capital with Maersk Growth …

Brian Heater / TechCrunch: Bear Robotics, which develops food service robots that aim to reduce the workload of human waitstaffs, raises a $81M Series B led by IMM  —  One of the most interesting things about following food robotics startups over the past couple of years is tracking all of the different tasks companies …

FinSMEs: Akeneo, which makes product experience management and product information management software, raises a $135M Series D led by Summit Partners  —  Akeneo, a Nantes, France- and Boston, MA-based provider of product experience management (PXM) and product information management (PIM) solutions, raised $135M in Series D funding.

Kris Holt / Engadget: Google Domains comes out of beta in 26 countries, seven years after launch; the service now supports over 300 domain endings  —  Seven long, long years ago, Google started offering users a way to buy a domain without having to deal with a host provider.  Now, Google Domains is at last […]

An amateur army of hackers formed by the Ukrainian government is bringing down the websites of Russian government departments and national banks

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: France-based Doctolib, a booking service for doctors and medical workers, raises €500M in equity and debt led by Eurazeo at a €5.8B valuation  —  French startup Doctolib has announced that is has raised a new funding round.  With this round, the company has reached a valuation …

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Germany-based Staffbase, a communications service for internal teams to send messages and measure their impact, raises a $115M Series E at a $1.1B valuation  —  The Covid-19 pandemic, with its by-product of social distancing to help reduce the spread of infection, led to many organizations working …

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat: ChannelEngine, which helps brands manage their products and inventory across multiple third-party marketplaces, raises a $50M Series B led by Atomico  —  ChannelEngine, a platform that helps brands manage their products and inventory across multiple third-party marketplaces, has raised $50 million in a series B round of funding.

Michael Kan / PCMag: Microsoft brings its DirectStorage API from Xbox to Windows to improve game load times and graphics details, after promising it in September 2020  —  “Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage,” Microsoft says.  “This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times …

Jon Fingas / Engadget: Israel’s National Cyber Directorate says the country has recovered from a large-scale DDoS attack on Monday, which took down several government websites  —  Israel appears to be recovering from a large-scale cyberattack.  According to Haaretz and Kan’s Amichai Stein, attackers took …

Bloomberg: Gauntlet, which offers a financial-risk modeling platform for crypto lending, raises a $23.8M Series B at a $1B valuation led by Ribbit Capital  —  Gauntlet, a financial-risk modeling platform for crypto lending, raised a new round of funding that pushed its valuation to $1 billion.

The war in Ukraine is the subject of much online disinformation and propaganda but fact-checking organisations are tracking down how social media posts spread and debunking them

Jing Yang / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Tencent is facing a record fine after Chinese regulators found WeChat Pay flouted anti-money-laundering rules and had other regulatory lapses  —  China’s central bank found regulatory breaches and lapses during a recent inspection of the ubiquitous payments network

Gary Marcus / Nautilus: A look at the limitations of deep learning, and how “neurosymbolic” approaches to AI could offer a way forward for developing artificial general intelligence  —  Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning …

Debby Wu / Bloomberg: Foxconn is halting operations at two of its Shenzhen sites, one of which produces iPhones, after the government imposed a lockdown in the city till March 20  —  Apple Inc. supplier Foxconn is halting operations at its Shenzhen sites, one of which produces iPhones, in response to a government-imposed lockdown on […]

Reuters: Clearview AI’s CEO says that Ukraine has started using the company’s service for free to identify Russian troops, combat misinformation, and identify the dead  —  Ukraine’s defense ministry on Saturday began using Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology, the company’s chief executive told Reuters …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Thoughts on newly announced iPhone SE, iPad Air, and Mac Studio, and an in-depth look at the M2 chip, Mac Pro, iMac Pro, and Apple’s future display plans  —  Here are my thoughts on Apple’s new iPhone SE, iPad Air and Mac Studio, as well as an in-depth look at the […]

Lara Putnam / Wired: Research: 23 of the top 30 search results for the numbers 11, 12, 13 on Facebook were groups targeting children of those ages, including with sexual references  —  The platform can be quicker at recommending groups built around child predation than it is to remove them.

DNA becomes disordered inside cancer cells, and playing GENIGMA on your smartphone will help researchers discover the dangerous forms DNA can fold into, says Layal Liverpool

Rest of World: Behind the rise of Kuaishou’s short-form video app Kwai in Brazil, where it has amassed 45M+ monthly active users by appealing to people with blue collar jobs  —  Kuaishou is chasing novela creators and working-class users in Latin America to keep up with the competition.

Benjamin Goggin / NBC News: A look at growing online meth communities on Zoom, Reddit, and others as they attract little attention from content moderators, worsening the addiction problem  —  In December, Paul went home for the holidays.  Like many people, he hadn’t seen his family for almost a year.

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: Stilt, a provider of financial services to immigrants, raises a $14M Series A and $100M in debt and launches an API to help fintechs offer credit building tools  —  Stilt, which started its life as a provider of financial services for immigrants, has raised $14 million in Series A funding […]

Casey Newton / Platformer: Interview with CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman on social networks’ responsibility to open up, including by doing and sharing their own research  —  CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman on social networks’ responsibility to open up  —  Brandon Silverman knows more about how stories spread on Facebook than almost anyone.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Twitter updated its iOS app to let users swipe between the algorithmic Home and reverse chronological Latest timelines but users can’t make Latest the default  —  You won’t be able to default to the chronological timeline  —  Twitter is rolling out a change that, frustratingly …

Dust drastically lowers the output of solar panels, but applying an electric field to the panels can make dust particles repel each other and disperse

Bojan Pancevski / Wall Street Journal: People are sending news about Ukraine to Russians using a website that randomly selects from a list of ~20M phone numbers and ~140M email addresses in Russia  —  Website developed by hackers is new initiative in West’s battle to counter Russia’s propaganda campaign

Financial Times: Sources: Chinese brands have cut their smartphone shipments to Russia in half since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because of the ruble’s collapse and sanctions  —  Currency and sanctions stop China’s companies from taking advantage of exodus of western brands

Scott Stedman / Forensic News: An investigation into OnlyFans owner Leo Radvinsky, who has attracted law enforcement scrutiny amid reports of wage theft and potential underage sexual activity  —  The first digital trace of Leo Radvinsky dates back to 1997 when Radvinsky, then just 15-years-old, acted as a webmaster …

Reuters: Sources: India’s market regulator has tightened scrutiny of IPO-bound firms after Paytm’s IPO debacle, worrying startups which fear delays in listing plans  —  India has tightened scrutiny of IPO-bound firms by questioning how key internal business metrics are used to arrive at valuations …

Victoria Song / The Verge: Mark Bernstein, a prominent Russian Wikipedia editor, is detained in Belarus for “distributing fake anti-Russian information” after being doxxed on Telegram  —  The editor was doxxed on Telegram prior to the arrest  —  The Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption of Belarus …

Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge: Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club, acquires NFT collections CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs, along with 400+ CryptoPunks and 1.7K+ Meebits  —  Yuga Labs now controls three of the most valuable NFT collections on the market  —  Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club […]

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Uber will add a temporary $.45-$.55 surcharge per trip for US and Canada riders, and $.35-$.45 for Uber Eats due to higher gas prices; fees will go to drivers  —  – Uber is adding a surcharge on fares and deliveries in the U.S. and Canada in response to surging gas prices, […]