Praveen chintu

Egyptian proptech startup Nawy , which began life in 2016 as an AI-driven property listing has grown to offer brokerage services, supporting the closing of property deals. It is now looking for its next path of growth after connecting 40,000 buyers to sellers last year alone, winning the confidence of the Sawiris family – Egypt’s wealthiest family, who, earlier this month, led a $5 million seed round to support their growth. Nawy is now set to introduce in its catalog a mortgage service for pre-owned property, to serve a market that is predominantly shunned by traditional lenders. The startup’s co-founder and CEO, Mostafa El-Beltagy told TechCrunch that the mortgage financing plan is part of their strategy to introduce new products that are aligned with clients’ needs, ensuring sustainability for their business. The mortgage industry in Egypt is dominated by banks, most of which prefer to support buyers of new property over those seeking pre-owned ones. This leaves a financing gap...

Jamie Beaton Contributor Share on Twitter Jamie Beaton is the author of “Accepted! Secrets to Gaining Admission to the World’s Topic Universities,” and is CEO of Crimson Education , a university admissions consulting company. Silicon Valley loves to celebrate the cult of the dropout — the inspired entrepreneur who decides that traditional education isn’t for her because it teaches her nothing of relevance, slows her down, and, in a world of readily available information, no longer gates learning resources like it once did. Legendary advocates of the dropout cult range from Peter Thiel, whose Thiel Fellows program pays students to take a year out of college, to informal mascots like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who never completed their college degrees but actually vigorously advocate for higher education. My perspective on college admissions is informed by supporting thousands of ambitious students globally aiming to get into the world’s best universities and then see...

Day One Ventures — which, among other things, invested in Superhuman, Truebill, DuckDuckGo and others — is bringing on ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi as a partner focusing exclusively on climate tech. Sanghavi represents a goal for the fund to deploy 20% of its $50 million fund into early-stage companies focusing on solving climate issues. The firm has already invested in some climate-focused companies (including BluumBio and Living Carbon ). Day One invests at the earliest stages of companies — pre-seed, seed and Series A — and the “smart money” part of the equation is that the firm has deep PR experience, and helps the companies it invests in by supercharging their communications. “I think a part of my career has always been just when I’ve seen the next opportunity for personal growth, I’ve been a bit selfish. And I think I’ve taken that opportunity. And I’ve been really, really well rewarded for that in terms of just my own personal growth. The last stop I had was as the C...

The Russian government announced Friday that it will begin to “partially restrict” access to Facebook, according to an announcement from its internet regulatory agency Roskomnadzor. Russia claimed that it would implement the measures, which were not specified, after Facebook put its own restrictions on four Russian state-linked media outlets, the television network Zvezda, news agency RIA Novosti, and the websites Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru. “On February 24, Roskomnadzor sent requests to the administration of Meta Platforms, Inc. remove the restrictions imposed by the social network Facebook on Russian media and explain the reason for their introduction,” Roskomnadzor wrote, adding that Facebook “ignored” its requests. Meta Global Affairs VP Nick Clegg elaborated on the situation on Twitter, indicating that the Russian request came in response to either Facebook’s fact-checking practices or its policy of labeling of state-run media accounts. “Ordinary Russians are using @Meta’s apps t...

South Korea said on Friday that it plans to make a second attempt to launch its homegrown space rocket in mid-June, about eight months after its first flight ended in failure due to technical glitches. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/uEPeyUZ

I’m not sure precisely when the change occurred, but at some point Mobile World Congress became the smartphone show. It’s a fine thing to be in the world of tech trade shows — and certainly has a kind of outward-facing excitement that’s largely lacking in the world of cellular infrastructure. Big booths and flashy press conferences from mobile giants are precisely the kind of news-generating content that bring the eyes of the world onto what might otherwise be a trade-only event. Hardware companies got locked into an announcement cycle tied to these shows. CES is where you get the home electronics, the wearables, the dishwashers and, eventually, the cars. But MWC is all about the phones. But the last several years have had a profoundly cooling effect on the smartphone. Beyond the inevitable shift from novelty to necessity, smartphone sales were already on a downward trajectory before the global pandemic. Buying habits slowed as users grew less attached to the carrier upgrade cycle. A...

Apple has developed a new Siri voice, now available in the beta versions of its iOS 15.4 software, that doesn’t sound obviously male or female. The decision to introduce a gender-neutral voice is one that sees the tech giant taking yet another step away from the criticism that, historically, digital assistants have reinforced unfair gender stereotypes . Over the years, industry observers and experts argued how the creation of voice assistants with female-sounding names — like Alexa, Siri and Cortana — which also speak with female-sounding voices, implied that women should be the ones to do your bidding at any time and even take your abuse. A U.N. study additionally called out the female voiced-assistants and their submissive and sometimes even flirty and coy styles. More problematically, the decision to make so many of the virtual assistants female by default was likely driven by a lack of diversity in the teams responsible for building our everyday technology. That issue doesn’t ...