This mobile gadget puts a stabilized, drone-style camera into a handheld grip, enabling you to shoot super-smooth video as you walk, run, ski, or skydive.
Source: Wired
The once-thriving resort city of in Mexico has become a somewhat lawless place. It is, in many ways, a perfect yet imperfect place for crypto-loving anarchists to gather each year.
Source: Wired
No humans will be onboard this time, but SpaceX hopes this trip will show it can be trusted with people’s lives.
Source: Wired
The judge set a March 2020 trial date, according to the Associated Press.
Source: CNET
Will Apple or Google come out on top?
Source: CNET
We’ve spent six months with these premium phones from Apple and Google. Here are some things to keep in mind if you’re choosing between the two.
Source: CNET
Amazon has confirmed it’s retired physical stick-on Dash buttons from sale — in favor of virtual alternatives that let Prime Members tap a digital button to reorder a staple product.
It also points to its Dash Replenishment service — which offers an API for device makers wanting to build Internet connected appliances that can automatically reorder the products they need to function — be it cat food, batteries or washing power — as another reason why physical Dash buttons, which launched back in 2015 (costing $5 a pop), are past their sell by date.
Amazon says “hundreds” of IoT devices capable of self-ordering on Amazon have been launched globally to date by brands including Beko, Epson, illy, Samsung and Whirlpool, to name a few.
So why press a physical button when a digital one will do? Or, indeed, why not do away with the need to push a button all and just let your gadgets rack up your grocery bill all by themselves while you get on with the importance business of consuming all the stuff they’re ordering?
You can see where Amazon wants to get to with its “so customers don’t have to think at all about restocking” line. Consumption that entirely removes the consumer’s decision making process from the transactional loop is quite the capitalist wet dream. Though the company does need to be careful about consumer protection rules as it seeks to excise friction from the buying process.
The ecommerce behemoth also claims customers are “increasingly” using its Alexa voice assistant to reorder staples, such as via the Alexa Shopping voice shopping app (Amazon calls it ‘hands free shopping’) that lets people inform the machine about a purchase intent and it will suggest items to buy based on their Amazon order history.
Albeit, it offers no actual usage metrics for Alexa Shopping. So that’s meaningless PR.
A less flashy but perhaps more popular option than ‘hands free shopping’, which Amazon also says has contributed to making physical Dash buttons redundant, is its Subscribe & Save program.
This “lets customers automatically receive their favourite items every month”, as Amazon puts it. It offers an added incentive of discounts that kick in if the user signs up to buy five or more products per month. But the mainstay of the sales pitch is convenience with Amazon touting time saved by subscribing to ‘essentials’ — and time saved from compiling boring shopping lists once again means more time to consume the stuff being bought on Amazon…
In a statement about retiring physical Dash buttons from global sale on February 28, Amazon also confirmed it will continue to support existing Dash owners — presumably until their buttons wear down to the bare circuit board from repeat use.
“Existing Dash Button customers can continue to use their Dash Button devices,” it writes. “We look forward to continuing support for our customers’ shopping needs, including growing our Dash Replenishment product line-up and expanding availability of virtual Dash Buttons.”
So farewell then clunky Dash buttons. Another physical push-button bites the dust. Though plastic-y Dash were quite unlike the classic iPhone home button — always seeming temporary and experimental rather than slick and coolly reassuring. Even so, the end of both buttons points to the need for tech businesses to tool up for the next wave of contextually savvy connected devices. More smarts, and more controllable smarts is key.
Amazon’s statement about ‘shifting focus’ for Dash does not mention potential legal risks around the buttons related to consumer rights challenges — but that’s another angle here.
In January a court in Germany ruled Dash buttons breached local ecommerce rules, following a challenge by a regional consumer watchdog that raised concerns about T&Cs which allow Amazon to substitute a product of a higher price or even a different product entirely than what the consumer had originally selected. The watchdog argued consumers should be provided with more information about price and product before taking the order — and the judges agreed. Though Amazon said it would seek to appeal.
While it’s not clear whether or not that legal challenge contributed to Amazon’s decision to shutter Dash, it’s clear that virtual Dash buttons offer more opportunities for displaying additional information prior to a purchase than a screen-less physical Dash button. So are more easily adaptable to any tightening legal requirements across different markets.
The demise of the physical Dash was reported earlier by CNET.
Source: TechCrunch
This hasn’t been a good week for challenger bank Revolut . The company, which offers digital banking services and is valued at $1.7 billion, confirmed today that embattled CFO Peter O’Higgins has resigned and left the business.
The startup and O’Higgins have been under pressure after a Daily Telegraph report that revealed that Revolt switched off an anti-money laundering system that flags suspect transactions because it was prone to throwing out false positives.
According to the Telegraph, the system was inactive between July-September 2018, which potentially allowed illegal transactions to pass across the banking platform. Revolut did not contact the Financial Conduct Authority to inform the regulator of the lapse, Telegraph reporter James Cook said.
O’Higgins, who joined the company from JP Morgan three years ago, made no mention of the saga in his resignation statement:
Having been at Revolut for almost three years, I am immensely proud to have taken the company from £1m revenue to £50m revenue during this time. However, as Revolut begins to scale globally and applies to become a bank in multiple jurisdictions, the time has come to pass the reigns over to someone who has global retail banking experience at this level. My time at Revolut has been invaluable and I’m so proud of what myself and the team have achieved. There is no doubt in my mind that Revolut will go on to build one of the largest and most trusted financial institutions in the world.
In a separate statement received by TechCrunch, Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky said that O’Higgins had been “absolutely pivotal to our success.”
The resignation caps a terrible few days for Revolut, which was the subject of a report from Wired earlier this week that delved into allegations around its challenging workplace culture and high employee churn rate.
“Former Revolut employees say this high-speed growth has come at a high human cost – with unpaid work, unachievable targets, and high-staff turnover,” wrote guest reporter Emiliano Mellino, citing the experiences of numerous former employees.
Those incidents included prospective staff being told to canvass for new customers as part of the interview process. The candidates were not compensated for their efforts, according to Wired. Revolut later removed the demands from its hiring processes.
Revolut is headquartered in the UK, where it launched its service in the summer of 2015. Today, it claims over four million registered users across Europe — it is available in EEA countries — although it plans to extend its presence to other parts of the world are taking longer than expected.
The company said last year it aims to launch in Singapore and Japan in Q1 of this year — so far neither has happened — while it also harbors North American market plans. Entries to the U.S. and Canada were supposed to happen by the end of 2018, according to an interview with Storonsky at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, but they also appear to have been delayed.
Revolut is generally considered to be the largest challenger bank in Europe, in terms of valuation and registered users, but other rivals include N26, Monzo and Starling. Even Transferwise, the global remittance service, now includes border-less banking features and an accompanying debit card.
Source: TechCrunch
Hyundai’s high-potency hatchback favors performance over creature comforts to carve out an interesting niche.
Source: CNET
The Nordic Web Ventures, the ‘pre-seed’ investment firm founded by Neil Murray in late 2017, has raised a second fund to continue backing very early-stage startups within the Nordic ecosystem.
The remit of the new “Fund II” is largely unchanged from the first fund, promising to write the first cheque of between $50,000 and $75,000 for the most promising founders in the region.
In total, the size of The Nordic Web Ventures’ second fund is $1.5 million, which should see it have enough capital to make another 20 or more investments across the next 18-24 months, making the firm one of the most active investors in the region. Existing portfolio startups from Fund I include Engaging Care, TPH, Uizard, Meeshkan, SafetyWing, Confrere.
In addition to an all-star investor line up of Fund I LPs who are returning for a second bite — such as Index’s Martin Mignot, Point Nine’s Christoph Janz, and Philipp Moehring and Andy Chung of AngelList — Fund II sees a number of new LPs join. Most notably, perhaps, Skype and Atomico founder Niklas Zennström has invested, in addition to Atomico partner Sophia Bendz, who was previously an exec at Spotify and is already a very active angel investor in the Nordics and beyond.
Revealing that The Nordic Web Ventures plans to raise a much larger fund in the future, Murray tells me the plan for Fund II is to “fundamentally change” the early-stage landscape in one of Europe’s most interesting regions. He says the fund is also a great example of how Europe’s investment landscape is changing, with individuals from major European venture capital firms invested, as well as receiving backing “from some of the Nordic’s most successful entrepreneurs”.
Cue a statement from Atomico’s Sophia Bendz: “Neil and I share the same passion for entrepreneurship and both care a lot about the early stage ecosystem… The Nordic Web Ventures can, through their LP networks and expertise, provide dealflow, hands-on support and advice for Nordic pre-seed and seed companies, something that is super helpful for the founders and that’s what it’s all about in the end, being valuable to the entrepreneurs in a meaningful and relevant way”.
To that end, I’m also told that having raised Fund II, The Nordic Web publication and The Nordic Web Ventures will merge into a single entity, with The
Nordic Web’s core focus moving forward “to support and strengthen the Nordic ecosystem through investment, analysis and community”.
Source: TechCrunch