Praveen chintu

French startup Ankorstore has raised a $29.9 million Series A round (€25 million) with Index Ventures leading the round. Existing investors GFC, Alven and Aglaé are also participating. Ankorstore is building a wholesale marketplace that connects independent shop owners with brands selling household supplies, maple syrup, headbands, bath salts, stationery items and a lot more. That list alone should remind you of neighborhood stores that sell a ton of cutesy stuff that you don’t necessarily need but that tend to be popular. The company works with 2,000 brands and 15,000 shops. And the startup isn’t just connecting buyers and sellers as it has a clear set of rules. For instance, the minimum first order is €100, which means that you can try out new products without ordering hundreds of items at once. By default, Ankorstore withdraws the money 60 days after placing an order. Brands get paid upon delivery. And of course, buying from several brands through Ankorstore should simplify yo...

Theodoric Chew, co-founder and chief executive officer of mental health app Intellect Intellect , a Singapore-based startup that wants to lower barriers to mental health care in Asia, says it has reached more than one million users just six months after launching. Google also announced today that the startup’s consumer app, also called Intellect, is one of its picks for best personal growth apps of 2020 . The company recently closed an undisclosed seed round led by Insignia Ventures Partners. Angel investors including e-commerce platform Carousell co-founder and chief executive officer Quek Siu Rui; former Sequoia partner Tim Lee; and startup consultancy xto10x’s Southeast Asia CEO J.J. Chai also participated. In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners principal Samir Chaibi said, “In Intellect, we see a fast-scaling platform addressing a pain that has become very obvious amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that pairing clinically-backed protocols with an efficient mobile-f...

Nearly all of China’s largest internet firms have established a presence in online grocery. Just this week, news arrived that Alibaba co-led the $196 million C3 funding round of Nice Tuan , the two-year-old grocery group-buying firm’s fourth round year to date. People in China shop online for almost everything, including groceries. At first, grocery e-commerce appears to have caught on mainly among the digitally-savvy who have grown reliant on the convenience of e-commerce and don’t mind paying a bit more for delivery. Many elderly shoppers, on the other hand, still prefer visiting traditional wet markets where ingredients are generally cheaper. Now tech companies in China are scrambling to capture grocery shoppers of all ages. A new business model that’s getting a lot of funding is that of Nice Tuan, the so-called community group buying. In conventional grocery e-commerce, an intermediary platform like Alibaba normally connects individual shoppers to an array of merchants and offe...

from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3lrK6Mq

AWS today opened its re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement : the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud. These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview. They won’t come cheap, though. The target audience here — and the only one AWS is targeting for now — is developers who want cloud-based build and testing environments for their Mac and iOS apps. But it’s worth noting that with remote access, you get a fully-featured Mac mini in the cloud, and I’m sure developers will find all kinds of other use cases for this as well. Given the recent launch of the M1 Mac minis , it’s worth pointing out that the hardware AWS is using — at least for the time being — are i7 machines with six physical and 12 logical cores and 32 GB of memory. Using the Mac’s built-in networking options, AWS connects them to its Nitro System for fast network and storage access. This means you’ll also be able to attach AWS block storage to these instances, for example. U...

Google recently added a similar feature called Nearby Sharing that allows Android smartphone users to do that same task without any hassle. However, things get much more complicated when it comes to sharing photos and videos from an iPhone to Android or vice-versa. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2Vp7aAQ

The Trump administration is poised to add China's top chipmaker SMIC and national offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, according to a document and sources, curbing their access to U.S. investors and escalating tensions with Beijing weeks before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3fRmOOU

British telecommunications firms must not install new Huawei 5G kit after September 2021, the government said, as part of a plan to purge the Chinese firm's equipment from high speed mobile networks. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3lwuDLq

Facebook Inc said it would buy customer service startup Kustomer, as the world's largest social network adds tools to attract more sellers to its platforms. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3fTZ64F

Bitcoin soared to a record high against the dollar, as its 2020 rally steamed ahead, boosted by increased demand from both institutional and retail investors that saw the virtual currency as a safe-haven and a hedge against inflation. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3qj0rXo

The pandemic has made it all but impossible for a retail company without an online presence to survive. Yet while companies heavily dependent on foot traffic like J.Crew and Sur la Table have filed for bankruptcy this year, companies that are expert in e-commerce have thrived, including Target and Walmart. Amazon alone now attracts roughly one quarter of all dollars spent online by U.S. shoppers. Unfortunately, as more shopping moves online, fraud is exploding, too. The problem is such that startups working with enterprises — flagging transactions for banks, for example — are raising buckets of funding . Meanwhile, one New York-based startup, Fakespot , is taking a different approach. It’s using AI to notify online shoppers when the products they’re looking to buy are fake listings or when reviews they’re reading on marketplaces like Amazon or eBay are a fiction. We talked earlier today with Kuwaiti immigrant Saoud Khalifah about the four-year-old business, which got started in h...

from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2JeiWMh

ITMO University's bioinformatics researchers have developed an algorithm that helps to assess the influence of genes on processes in the human body, including the development of disease. The research was published in BMC Bioinformatics. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/39sLxYI

Scientists of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) with international collaborators have proposed direct magnetic writing of skyrmions, i.e., magnetic quasiparticles, and skyrmion lattices, within which it is possible to encode, transmit, process information and produce topological patterns with a resolution less than 100 nanometers. This has applications for miniaturized post-silicon electronics, new topological cryptography techniques and green data centers, potentially reducing the load on the Earth's ecosystem significantly. A related article appears in ACS Nano. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/33wluvZ

An international study led from the University of Turku, Finland, discovered phosphorus and fluorine in solid dust particles collected from a comet. The finding indicates that all the most important elements necessary for life may have been delivered to the Earth by comets. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/3mpc2Sx

In hidden pockets around the world, tiny creatures consume toxins and wait for their day to again rule the Earth. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/3fPzwxA

Drugmaker Moderna has completed its initial efficacy analysis of its COVID-19 vaccine from the drug’s Phase 3 clinical study, and determined that it was 94.1% effective in preventing people from contracting COVID-19 across 196 confirmed cases from among 30,000 participants in the study. Moderna also found that it was 100% effective in preventing severe cases (such as those that would require hospitalization) and says it hasn’t found any significant safety concerns during the trial. On the basis of these results, the company will file an application for emergency use authorization (EUA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday. Seeking an EUA is the next step towards actually beginning to distribute and administer Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, and if granted the authorization, it will be able to provide it to high-risk individuals in settings where it could help prevent more deaths, such as with front-line healthcare workers, ahead of receiving a full and final regulato...

Apple’s marketing of iPhones as ‘water resistant’ without clarifying the limits of the feature and also having a warranty that excludes cover for damage by liquids has got the company into hot water in Italy. The Italian competition authority (AGCM) has informed the tech giant of an intent to fine it €10 million for commercial practices related to the marketing and warranty of a number of iPhone models since October 2017, starting with the iPhone 8 through to the iPhone 11, following an investigation into consumer complaints related to its promotion of water resistance and subsequent refusal to cover the cost of repairs caused by water damage. In a document setting out the AGCM’s decision dated towards the end of October — which was made public today (via Reuters ) — the regulator concludes Apple violated the country’s consumer code twice because of what it characterizes as “misleading” and “aggressive” commercial practices. Italian consumer watchdog hands down €15M in fines to ...

The UK government has squeezed the timetable for domestic telcos to stop installing 5G kit from Chinese suppliers, per the BBC , which reports that the deadline for installation of kit from so-called ‘high risk’ vendors is now September. It had already announced a ban on telcos buying kit from Huawei et al by the end of this year — acting on national security concerns attached to companies that fall under the jurisdiction of Chinese state surveillance laws. But, according to the BBC, ministers are concerned carriers could stockpile kit for near-term installation to create an optional buffer for themselves since it has allowed until 2027 for them to remove such kit from existing 5G networks. Maintaining already installed equipment will also still be allowed up til then. UK U-turns on Huawei and 5G, giving operators until 2027 to rip out existing kit A Telecommunications Security Bill which will allow the government to identify kit as a national security risk and ban its use...

International students have arrived in Australia for the first time since the country shut its borders to curb coronavirus in March, with a charter flight touching down in Darwin on Monday. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/37jkqNh

Australian firefighters are struggling to control a massive bush fire that already destroyed 40 percent of the UNESCO world heritage-listed Fraser Island before a heatwave hit Monday. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2KSLbk0

Thousands have fled the scene of a rumbling Indonesian volcano that burst to life for the first time in several years, belching a massive column of smoke and ash, the disaster agency said Monday. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/3lnr0qK

If you were to choose a word that rose above most in 2020, which word would it be? from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/3fPJHlT

A brightly burning meteor was seen plunging from the sky in wide areas of Japan, capturing attention on television and social media. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/3mmiNEM

Italy's antitrust authority said on Monday it had fined Apple 10 million euros ($12 million) for "aggressive and misleading" commercial practices regarding its iPhones. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3llEP9k

The Trump administration is poised to add China’s top chipmaker SMIC and national offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, according to a document and sources, curbing their access to US investors and escalating tensions with Beijing weeks before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2HR11dP

from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3q6ANFk

Digital banking platform Solarisbank will enter a string of new European markets next year, CEO Roland Folz told Reuters, as it became the first German bank to shift its entire operation into the cloud. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3fSJLRR

A unique stage of planetary system evolution has been imaged by astronomers, showing fast-moving carbon monoxide gas flowing away from a star system over 400 light years away, a discovery that provides an opportunity to study how our own solar system developed. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2VeE0Vh

Food delivery apps have been a big deal this year for consumers stuck at home and unable (or unwilling) to go to restaurants or grocery stores; and for investors who are eyeing the opportunity to back rising stars to help them grow. Today came the latest development in that story: HungryPanda , which makes a Mandarin-language app specifically targeting Chinese consumers outside of China, has raised $70 million to continue its global expansion in delivering food from Chinese restaurants and Asian grocery stores targeting the Chinese diaspora. Estimates put the number of Chinese people living abroad (counting students and first-generation immigrants, and counting those living outside of the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau) at around 50 million , with most of them concentrated in other Asian countries, so that is a specific target for the startup. Longer term, there are tens of millions more people if you consider second-, third- and further generations of people, although that wi...

We are now into the all-important holiday sales period, and new numbers from Gartner point to some recovery underway for the smartphone market as vendors roll out a raft of new 5G handsets. Q3 smartphone figures from the analysts published today showed that smartphone unit sales were 366 million units, a decline of 5.7% globally compared to the same period last year. Yes, it’s a drop; but it is still a clear improvement on the first half of this year, when sales slumped by 20% in each quarter , due largely to the effects of Covid-19 on spending and consumer confidence overall. That confidence is being further bolstered by some other signals. We are coming out of a relatively strong string of sales days over the Thanksgiving weekend, traditionally the “opening” of the holiday sales cycle. While sales on Thursday and Black Friday were at the lower end of predicted estimates, they still set records over previous years. With a lot of tech like smartphones often bought online, this co...

"After losing 80% of the workforce for two days, we were really dumbstruck as orders poured in, we hired 12,300 people in 16 days - through this we demonstrated the power of resilience," he said. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/36lUiC1

British telecommunications firms must not install new Huawei 5G kit after September 2021, the government said on Monday, as part of a plan to purge the Chinese firm's equipment from high speed mobile networks. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3ll7Lyf

SMIC , one of largest chip makers in the world, is among several companies that the Department of Defense plans to designate as being owned or controlled by the Chinese military, reports Reuters . Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order , set to go into effect on January 11, that would bar U.S. investors from buying securities from companies on the defense blacklist. In a statement to Reuters, SMIC said it continues “to engage constructively and openly with the U.S. government” and that it “has no relationship with the Chinese military and does not manufacture for military end-users or end-uses.” The largest semiconductor maker in China, SMIC holds about 4% of the worldwide foundry market, estimates market research firm TrendForce. Its U.S. customers have included Qualcomm, Broadcom and Texas Instruments. There are currently 31 companies on the defense blacklist . SMIC is one of four new companies that the Department of Defense plans to add, according ...

Primer , the U.K. fintech that wants to help merchants consolidate their payments stack and easily support new payment methods in the future, has raised £14 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Accel, who I understand were quite proactive in persuading Primer to take the VC firm’s money. The young company wasn’t actively fund-raising, having quietly raised £3.8 million in funding announced in May . Instead, the team was heads down building out the product and wooing potential customers by holding technical workshops and in-depth interviews over Zoom with 100 merchants — activity that didn’t go unnoticed. Also participating in the Series A are existing investors: Balderton, SpeedInvest and Seedcamp, who were joined in the round by new backer RTP Global. Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel, will join Primer’s board. Founded by ex-PayPal employees – via PayPal’s acquisition of Braintree — Primer wants to offer one payments API to (hopefully) rule them all, with the expli...

Thanks I’m giving for the start of the first big online season. Yes, the pandemic has put in place a gigantic move to the digital for our immediate and accelerated future. We all know how this plays out in the required state of things pre-vaccine. But there’s an undercurrent not so hidden there of a dynamic answer to my wife’s stubborn question: Where’s my Jetpack? She’s a child of the 60s, a post-Beatles time of imploding dreams and dashed expectations. James Bond got to fly a Jetpack, but the telltale burned gasoline exhaust made the effect an artifact of what wasn’t going to happen. In an electric decade and noise-canceling AirPods, maybe it’s more likely to surface than not, but if so, what’s the next Jetpack? My vote is for the electric newsletter, a notification engine that knows what I’m tracking, projects the trends circulating my core peers, and invests proactively in the products we want to accelerate. It’s a self healing economy, a research coordinator, a humor and media...

London HQ’d Firstminute Capital has announced its second early-stage venture fund of $111m (£87m). Founded and cornerstoned in 2016 by Brent Hoberman CBE (best known as co-founder of lastminute.com and MADE.com), together with Spencer Crawley (formerly of Goldman Sachs), this new fund comes after the first fund of $100M, giving Firstminute $211M assets under management, investing across Europe and the US at the seed stage. Firstminute’s team of 18 is based in London, Stockholm and Berlin and now has plans to open an office in LA next year. Of note is the fact that its LPs now number 70 founders of billion-dollar businesses as investors, and that Firstminute is being so open. VCs typically do not reveal much information about LPs. Hoberman has clearly also leveraged his position as founder of the Founders Forum group which runs events and activities for European tech founders. The fact that so many founders – largely drawn from the ranks of European startups – have invested is unus...

South Africa's telecoms regulator ICASA said on Friday all licensees wishing to use until March 31 temporary spectrum granted during lockdown will be required to pay the prescribed license fees. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3mxCV77

Florida's waters may be protected from offshore drilling but the Bahamas plans to start looking for oil in less than a month at an exploratory well just 150 miles off the coast of the Sunshine State. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/39DkM4b

In the winter of 1969-70, Philadelphia had an average temperature of 30.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Last year, the average was 39.4. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/3qbslEV

Sydney recorded its hottest November night as Australia's largest city suffered through a weekend heatwave that saw daytime temperatures peak above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2HPdBdz

Following years of public outcry and campaigning by American pop star Cher, the "world's loneliest elephant" embarked Sunday on a mammoth move from Pakistan to retirement in a Cambodian sanctuary. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/33rYOgs