Praveen chintu

Bungie, the studio responsible for the creation of Halo and Destiny , two of the gaming world’s biggest franchises, has been acquired by Sony. It’s part of a consolidation and turf war being waged as the next generation of gaming (and the metaverse, whatever that is) builds up steam. The news was announced by both companies Monday morning (with industry sleuth Jason Schreier reporting early ) and the deal valued at $3.6 billion . That may be just a fraction of Microsoft’s recent $60B Activision Blizzard acquisition, but Bungie is no less a legend in gaming. Beginning as a Mac-focused studio in the ’90s with forgotten classic FPS Pathways Into Darkness and the influential Marathon , Bungie threatened to change the balance in power in the gaming world with Halo, which was intended to serve as the moment Apple took gaming seriously. Even Steve Jobs got in on the hype. But then Microsoft announced it was buying Bungie and making Halo an exclusive to its new Xbox console — seemingly ...

T-Mobile US Inc will fire corporate employees who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by April 2, according to an internal company memo posted on the blog The T-MO Report. It follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Jan. 13 that blocked President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccination-or-testing mandate for large businesses. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/tBC3cNuow

French startup Pennylane has raised a $57 million Series B round (€50 million) from existing investors, such as Sequoia Capital, Global Founders Capital and Partech. The startup wants to replace legacy accounting solutions in France — and in Europe. If you’re an accountant, you might be familiar with tools like Cegid and Sage. Essentially, Pennylane wants to overhaul these tools and modernize the tech stack of accounting firms. Pennylane connects directly with third-party services that hold valuable information. For instance, you can get banking statements in the Pennylane interface, import receipts from Dropbox and get billing information from Stripe. And because it’s an online platform, accounting firms can use Pennylane collaboratively. Clients can also access the platform to centralize receipts, create invoices and automate some tasks. Instead of sending information back and forth with spreadsheets and photo attachments, both clients and accounting firms can interact directly ...

In October, 2021, Microsoft released Windows 11 to the masses and now a new data has revealed that more people are upgrading to Windows 11. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/QyIDLGuE0

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Niklas Adalberth’s Norrsken Foundation is in the news again barely two months after opening its Norrsken House in Kigali , Rwanda, which plans to accommodate thousands of entrepreneurs by next year. This time, the foundation has teamed up with thirty unicorn founders and a couple of seasoned venture capital and private equity investors to launch a $200 million fund targeted at African startups. The fund, dubbed the Norrsken22 African Tech Growth Fund , has reached its first close of $110 million, per a statement seen by TechCrunch. It’s the latest fund launched by Norrsken after closing €125 million impact fund for European startups last March. Hans Otterling , a partner at Northzone, a U.K.-based early VC firm that led the investment in Adalberth’s previous company Klarna, is Norrsken’s founding partner alongside the Klarna co-founder. Making up the firm’s investment are the general partners Natalie Kolbe , the ex-global head of private equity at Actis, a private equity fun...

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Most of the websites related to educational institutions, government services, job searches and many others also need images of a certain dimension. Therefore people have to struggle to resize the dimensions of their images in order accordingly. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/oV2YF75CI

Spotify’s Joe Rogan headache is about to get a lot worse. Earlier this week, musician Neil Young announced that he would pull his music from the streaming service to protest Spotify’s relationship with Joe Rogan , who the company brought under its wing in an exclusive $100 million deal two years ago . In a post to her website on Friday, Joni Mitchell announced that she would “stand with Neil Young” and remove her catalogue from the streaming platform. “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.” As one of the world’s most famous and most well-respected living musicians, Mitchell’s decision to abandon Spotify over Rogan is bound to turn some heads. And unlike Young, she didn’t have an existing beef with the service over its stream quality. Rogan’s podcast, the Joe Rogan Experie...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. The market is down. The party is over. And Peloton of X startups aren’t too happy right now. As tech stocks take a hit, the big question on my mind is how a dip in market performance impacts early-stage startups. There’s the obvious argument here that startups have been preparing for a re-correction, and that market highs were knowingly unsustainable, but just because expectations exist doesn’t mean that ripple effects float away. Despite investor’s outward rationalization, the red, or millennial pink , flags are not going unnoticed, with some firms lowering revenue expectations even at the earliest stages . On Equity this week, Alex and I interviewed Bessemer growth partner Mary D’Onofrio , who admitted that her expectations for exit multiples have changed, and that the IPO window is mostly closed. The stocks may be sane, but that’s still kind ...

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports . App Annie says global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5% reaching 230 billion in 2021 and mobile ad spend grew 23% year-over-year to reach $295 billion. In addition, consumers are spending more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users su...

Elise King Contributor Share on Twitter Elise King is program director of Human Ventures ’ entrepreneur-in-residence program and is a member of the firm’s investment team. At Human Ventures , we have a fund for pre-seed and seed-stage investments, a venture studio and an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program. Through this work, we’ve discovered a lot about how different founders fulfill their journey of customer discovery and product-market fit. One of the largest challenges for pre-seed and seed stage founders is determining where to start: There are a million things to do. What should you do at each stage? We interviewed three founders from our portfolio, all of whom ran discovery experiments to find their product-market fit at different stages of their company’s development. Here’s what they had to share: Pre-MVP/customer discovery phase: Tiny Organics Tiny Organics is a plant-based baby and toddler food company on a mission to shape childrens’ palates so they’l...

Global smartphone shipments had already begun to shrink ahead of 2020, though two years of a pandemic and the resulting supply chain and chip constraints certainly didn’t help the overall figures. According to a pair of reports from Counterpoint Research and IDC , however, the market finally experienced growth last year for first time since 2017. Counterpoint puts the overall year-over-year growth at 4%, with a slightly more optimistic 5.7% from IDC. Both firms, however, point to a decline for Q4, at 6% and 3.2%, respectively. The decline was to be expected, of course, given continued chip shortages, which have been having an outsized impact on smaller manufacturers with less leverage over the supply chain than firms like Apple and Samsung. Both firms put Samsung at top spot for the year, with a 6% increase, and Apple taking the No. 2 spot. The firms also echo a recent report from Canalys that had Apple winning the quarter. Apple confirmed those sentiments with an excellent quarte...

I could spend hours discussing early-stage startup operations and community-based marketing, but deal flow is my blind spot. But when investment banking firm UBS picked up financial robot-advisor Wealthfront for $1.4 billion in an all-cash deal this week, I noticed. “At those prices, the company’s exit price is a win in that it represents a 2x or greater multiple on its final private valuations,” wrote Alex Wilhelm in The Exchange. “But its exit value is also parsable from a number of alternative perspectives: AUM, customers and revenue,” he added. Examining each of those factors in turn, Alex found that the deal is more than just a “next-gen push” intended “to reach rich young Americans,” as some headlines suggested. This exit will help other fintechs set expectations, but it should give a mental boost to anyone who thinks they’re too late to start up in this space. Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members Use discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- ...