The device, rumored to be an update of the classic phone, will stand apart from the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X.
Source: CNET
Unless you’re married to MacOS, there’s good reason consider the 730S over Apple’s pricier portable.
Source: CNET
The social network says the new feature will help friends meet up for real-life events.
Source: CNET
YouTube’s filters won’t catch every disturbing video, but it does offer settings to better control what kids watch online. Here’s how to use them.
Source: Wired
These disaster insurers don’t want to hear your story. They just want to drop a flat cash payout, no matter how much—or little—you suffered.
Source: Wired
French startup Mirakl raised a $70 million funding round. Bain Capital is leading the round with existing investors 83North, Felix Capital and Elaia Partners also participating.
If you’ve bought a few products from a third-party seller on an e-commerce website that isn’t Amazon or Alibaba, chances are you’ve used Mirakl in the past. The company has built a solution to manage the marketplace of your e-commerce platform.
While Mirakl doesn’t have a ton of customers, each customer is very valuable. The company has worked with some of the biggest names in e-commerce so that they could add a new revenue stream with a marketplace. Examples include Best Buy in Canada, Walmart in Mexico, Office Deport and Darty.
The startup also lets you create B2B marketplaces for bulk selling and other complicated transactions. Sellers can set minimum and maximum quantities and customize their listings.
In 2018, the startup managed to add 60 customers and launch 37 marketplaces — it doubled the gross merchandise volume compared to 2017. And it’s true that marketplaces are attractive. You can greatly increase your sales without any physical infrastructure investment as third-party sellers handle logistics.
Behind the scene, Mirakl has developed connectors that work with multiple e-commerce platforms. After setting up Mirakl, your third-party sellers will also get their own on-boarding back end. And Mirakl continuously helps you when it comes to maintaining a certain level of quality and handling orders.
More recently, Mirakl has developed a catalog manager so that you can more easily manage product listings. It lets you get product information, merge product listings and moderate your platform in general. Any e-commerce website can use it, not just websites that operate a Mirakl marketplace.
The company has also launched a services marketplace so that you can upsell your customers before they check out with extended warranties and insurance products from third-party companies.
Mirakl works with global B2B platforms as well as retail websites that usually operate in a country or a handful of countries. 30 percent of retail clients are French, 30 percent are American and 40 percent are from the rest of the world. The startup charges an upfront fee as well as a monthly subscription that varies according to the success of your marketplace.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to do more of the same, at a bigger scale. Mirakl will expand the team, expand to new countries and improve its product offering.
Source: TechCrunch
Fortnite, the world’s most popular game right now with some 200 million players, has just announced that its much anticipated Season 8 is available.
For those of you who don’t play Fortnite, the title takes on an episodic approach with new features, tools and maps released every few months. That keeps things fresh, gamers engaged and the money flowing since each new season offers a Battle Pass which costs around $10 and unlocks a load of goodies, including skins and emote dance moves.
Season 8 is pretty much what the leaks this week suggested. The theme is pirates with new skins that include a gigantic banana suit, pirates and snakes, and pirate cannon is a new weapon that’s been added. Cannons can dish out 100 damage when there’s a direct hit, or administer 50 damage of those in the impact area — it can also be used to fire players to new locations.
The map is also a major Fortnite focus, and Season 8 has added lava to the existing volcano. Stepping on lava gives players one damage point per touch while there are volcanic vents that can be used to send a player or vehicle into the air using a gust of hot air. There’s also a range of treasure to be found inside pirate ships, another new addition which is where the cannons can be found.
On the gaming playing side, the major addition is ‘Party Assist’ mode which lets players bring their friends into Fortnite’s daily or weekly challenges. Those challenges are important to players since they unlock treasures, including skins, and, in fact, those who played Season 7 could earn a free Battle Pass for Season 8 by completing the right challenges. That might have saved a few million parents $10.
(By the way, if you’re struggling to load the game, that’s because scheduled maintenance kicked off at 4am EST in preparation for the new season launch — you can find more info on the status page here.)
Those are the main additions, though game-maker Epic Games has chucked in a few little touches — including extending the somewhat comical ‘infinite dab’ feature from 11 hours to 12, meaning that your character will keep dancing a little longer when left in the lobby.
I can’t help but think Season 7 was a greater leap — since the addition of planes and ziplines really changed how players get around — but we’ll have to see how the gaming public reacts. This time around, a lot of the focus is on skins and emotes, rather than features.
A recent report suggested Fortnite’s revenue had dipped in January, but that was pretty unfair because its the month that followed a surge in spending around the December Battle Pass and also, more generally, a surge around the Christmas holidays.
Sources told us recently Epic Games banked $3 billion in profit across its entire business in 2018, thanks in particular to Fortnite, and it needs to keep its season releases compelling if that streak is to continue. There’s a lot riding on Season 8, particularly as credible rivals emerge.
Source: TechCrunch
Looking for a high-paying, in-demand job as a programmer? Learning to code for blockchain applications is the way to go, according to a survey from the job placement organization, Hired.
In a survey of 98,000 developers on the company’s platform, Hired assessed the kinds of jobs that are most in-demand; the languages that companies are most interested in hiring for; and the top average salaries for careers in several major technology markets including London, New York, Paris, and San Francisco.
The results — as they say — may surprise you.
Actually, they probably won’t. Across the industry demand for blockchain engineers and security engineers have increased the most, according to Hired’s data. Companies requesting programmers with blockchain experience shot up a whopping 517% in 2018 from 2017, while company searches for security engineers were up 132% over the year ago period, according to the company’s data.
Across all geographies, the jobs with the highest paying salaries, on average, were divided among security engineers, search engineers, blockchain engineers, natural language processing engineers, machine learning engineers, and gaming engineers, according to the data from Hired.
Here’s the breakdown for San Francisco. 
“In New York, San Francisco and Toronto, blockchain engineers are among the top three highest paid,” Hired chief executive Mehul Patel, wrote in a blog post about the data. “When you zoom into salary data for software engineers in key tech hubs, it also speaks to how much talent needs fluctuate from city to city. For example, gaming engineers are the highest paid group in New York, while demand for natural language processing engineer salaries are soaring in Toronto.”
Despite increasing demand, blockchain skills still aren’t top of mind among developers, according to the survey. Only 12% of the programmers surveyed on Hired’s platform said that they were most interested in learning about the technology.
That disconnect also applies to the coding languages that are most in-demand and the number of developers who have experience programming in the language.
Candidates who know the programming language Go are the most in-demand, according to the Hired report, but when surveyed, only 7% of developers said they primarily work with it.
Other languages, like Scala, Ruby, Typescript and Kotlin are also highly valued by employers but have lower penetration rates among the developer community. Globally, Go is the most popular programming language that employers are looking for, while in San Francisco and Toronto there’s higher demand for Typescript experience, the Hired report indicated.
Source: TechCrunch
Nigerian fintech startup TeamApt has raised $5.5 million in capital in a Series A round led by Quantum Capital Partners.
The Lagos based firm will use the funds to expand its white label digital finance products and pivot to consumer finance with the launch of its AptPay banking app.
Founded by Tosin Eniolorunda, TeamApt supplies financial and payment solutions to Nigeria’s largest commercial banks — including Zenith, UBA, and ALAT.
For Eniolorunda, launching the fintech startup means competing with his former employer, the later stage Nigerian tech company Interswitch.
The TeamApt founder is open about his company going head to head not only with his former employer, but other Nigerian payment gateway startups.
“Yes, we are in competition with Interswitch,” Eniolorunda said. But he also said that the Nigerian fintech startups Paystack and Flutterwave—both of which facilitate payments for businesses— are competitors as well.
TeamApt, whose name is derivative of aptitude, bootstrapped its way to its Series A by generating revenue project to project working for Nigerian companies, according to CEO Eniolorunda.
“To start, we closed a deal with Computer Warehouse Group to build a payment solution for them and that’s how we started bootstrapping,” he said. A project soon followed for Fidelity Bank Nigeria.
TeamApt now has a developer team of 40 in Lagos, according to Eniolorunda, who spent 6 years at Interswitch as developer and engineer himself, before founding the startup in 2015 .
“The 40 are out of a total staff of about 72 so the firm is a major engineering company. We build all the IP and of course use open source tools,” he said.
TeamApt’s commercial bank product offerings include Moneytor— a digital banking service for financial institutions to track transactions with web and mobile interfaces—and Monnify, an enterprise software suite for small business management.
TeamApt worked with Sterling Bank Nigeria to develop its Sterling Onepay mobile payment app and POS merchant online platform, Sterling Bank’s Chief Information Officer Moronfolu Fasinro told TechCrunch.
On performance, TeamApt claims 26 African bank clients and processes $160 million in monthly transactions, according to company data. Though it does not produce public financial results, TeamApt claimed revenue growth of 4,500 percent over a three year period.
Quantum Capital Partners, a Lagos based investment firm founded by Nigerian banker Jim Ovia, confirmed it verified TeamApt’s numbers.
“Our CFO sat with them for about two weeks,” Elaine Delaney said.
TeamApt’s results and the startup’s global value proposition factored into the fund’s decision to serve as sole-investor in the $5.5 million round.
“The problem that they’re solving might be African but the technology is universal. ‘Can it be applied to any other market?’ of course it can,” said Delaney.
Delaney will take a board seat with TeamApt “as a supportive investor,” she said.
TeamApt plans to develop more business and consumer based offerings. “We’re beginning to pilot into much more merchant and consume facing products where we’re building payment infrastructure to connect these banks to merchants and businesses,” CEO Tosin Eniolorunda said.
Part of this includes the launch of AptPay, which Eniolorunda describes as “a push payment, payment infrastructure” to “centralize…all services currently used on banking mobile apps.”
The company recently received its license from the Nigerian Central Bank to operate as a payment switch in the country.
On new markets, “Nigeria comes first. But we’re also looking at some parts of Europe. Canada is also hot on list,” said Eniolorunda. He wouldn’t specific a country but said to look for a TeamApt expansion announcement by fourth quarter 2019.
TeamApt joins several fintech firms in Africa that announced significant rounds, expansion, or partnerships over the last year. As covered by TechCrunch, in September 2018, Nigeria’s Paga raised $10 million and announced possible expansion in Ethiopia, Asia, and Mexico. Kenyan payment company Cellulant raised $53 million in 2018, targeted to boost its presence across Africa. And in January, Flutterwave partnered with Visa to launch the GetBarter global payment product.
The fintech space has also been the source of speculation regarding the continent’s first tech IPO on a major exchange, including Interswitch’s much anticipated and delayed public offering.
TeamApt’s CEO is open about the company’s future intent to list. “The project code name for the recent funding was NASDAQ. We’re clear about becoming a public company,” said Eniolorunda.
Source: TechCrunch
A NetEase employee who was recently let go confirmed with TechCrunch that the company had fired a large number of people spanning multiple departments, including ecommerce, education, agriculture (yes, founder and executive officer Ding Lei has a thing for organic farming) and public relations, although downsizing at Yanxuan, its ecommerce brand that sells private-label goods online and offline, had started before the Lunar New Year holiday.
Multiple Chinese media outlets covered the layoff on Wednesday. According to a report from Caijing Magazine, Yanxuan fired 30-40 percent of its staff; the agricultural brand Weiyang got a 50 percent cut; the education unit downsized from 300 to 200 employees; and 40 percent of NetEase’s public relations staff was gone.
A spokesperson from NetEase evaded TechCrunch’s questions about the layoff but said the company is “indeed undergoing a structural optimization to narrow its focus.” The goal, according to the person, is to “boost innovation and organizational efficiency so NetEase can fully play to its own strengths and adapt to market competition in the longer term.”
NetEase CEO Ding Lei pictured picking Longjing tea leaves in Hangzhou. Photo: NetEase Yanxuan via Weibo
Oddly, ecommerce and education appear to be some of NetEase’s brighter spots. The company singled them out alongside music streaming during its latest earnings call as the three sectors that saw “strong profit growth potential” and “will be the focus of [the company’s] next phase of strategic growth.” The staff cuts, then, may represent an urgency to tighten the purse strings for even NetEase’s rosiest businesses.
The shakeup fits into market speculation about company staff cuts to save costs as China copes with a weakening domestic economy. JD.com, a rival to Alibaba, is firing 10 percent of its senior management to cut costs, Caixin reported last week. Ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing plans to let go 15 percent of its staff this year as part of a reorganization to boost internal efficiency, though it’s adding new members to focus on more promising segments.
Alibaba took an unexpected turn, announcing last week that it will continue to hire new talent in 2019. “We are poised to provide more resources to our platforms to help businesses navigate current environment and create more job opportunities overall,” the firm said in a statement.
2018 was a tough year for China’s games companies of all sorts. The industry took a hit after regulators froze all licensing approvals to go through a reshuffle, dragging down stock prices of big players like Tencent and NetEase. These companies continue to feel the chill even after approvals resumed, as the newly minted regulatory body imposes stricter checks on games, slowing down the application process altogether and delaying companies’ plans to monetize lucrative new titles.
That bleak domestic outlook compelled NetEase to take what Ding dubs a “two-legged” approach to game publishing, with one foot set in China and the other extending abroad. Tencent, too, has been finding new channels for its games through regional partners like Sea’s Garena in Southeast Asia.
NetEase started in 1997 and earned its name by making PC games and providing email services in the early years of the Chinese internet. More recently the company has intended to diversify its business by incubating projects across the board. It has so far enjoyed growth in segments like music streaming and ecommerce (which is reportedly swallowing up Amazon China’s import-led service) while stepping back from others such as comics publishing, an asset it is selling to youth-focused video streaming site Bilibili.
Source: TechCrunch