With solid standard equipment and great driving dynamics, the Ford Escape is an affordable crossover with wide appeal.
Source: CNET
PlayStation, Apple, Fitbit, Instant Pot — get these deals while they’re hot.
Source: CNET
Appealing to tens of thousands of people each month isn’t easy, but the new Ford Escape pulls it off with aplomb.
Source: CNET
Black Friday begins a week early at Amazon with some of the best prices seen since Prime Day.
Source: CNET
India’s RazorPay, one of the largest payments processing firms in the country, today announced a range of new services aimed at startups, businesses, merchants and freelancers as the Bangalore-based firm expands the reach of its financial platform in the nation.
The startup, which raised $75 million from Ribbit Capital and others in June this year, today introduced a new kind of corporate credit card and some banking services for startups and SMEs, and a new payment option for individuals to quickly receive money from their clients.
All of these services are solving some major challenges faced by tens of millions of businesses in the country. Even as startups are increasingly getting acceptance in Indian homes, banks in the nation are still wary of offering some financial services to them. Most “unprofitable� startups today can’t get a corporate credit card from a bank in India, for instance.
For its corporate credit card, Razorpay will assess other factors such as the flows and collections to determine who is eligible, the Bangalore-based startup’s founders — Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar — told TechCrunch in an interview.
The new corporate credit card, issued by RBL Bank, will allow businesses to access credit between Rs 50,000 ($700) and Rs 25,00,000 ($34,800). If they are able to pay it back in within 50 days, they will avoid any interest.
Razorpay also announced it is launching current accounts service. “While personal banking ecosystem in India has scaled tremendously in recent years, business banking is still old school,� said Mathur. “Most processes are still manual, and there is no communication among your invoice, payroll, booking systems. People have to deal with spreadsheet files.�
To solve this, Razorpay has built a neo banking platform. “As a business, if you want to create a current account bank with a bank, we take care of it. Everything — your transactions, and payables — happens on Razorpay’s platform and you can manage them through a single dashboard,â€� he said.
As part of this platform — and also as a standalone offering — Razorpay is offering a payroll management service. “One of the most common challenges in a business is how they handle payrolls. Most of these payrolls work with different systems such as HR and accounting. Again, you have to create spreadsheet files and provide it to the bank which does the processing. What our goal is that we will provide one single platform to manage payments better,â€� Mathur added.
To work on this service, Razorpay said it has acquired payroll and HR management software firm Opfin for what a person familiar with the matter said “a couple of millions of dollars.� Razorpay founders declined to comment on the amount.
And last, Razorpay has launched a new payment option for unregistered businesses such as mom and pop stores and freelancers. Millions of individuals in India today engage in business with one another, corporate companies, and clients overseas. For them, there exists a very limited set of options to receive payments from others and do it at a real-time pace.
Razorpay may have an answer. The company has launched a service that will allow individuals or businesses to create and send a link through text or email to their clients and receive payment in real-time. When the client clicks on the link, a payment gateway loads up that supports a range of paying options. “We support 100 currencies, so a person can have their money delivered from any country,â€� Mathur said. Another startup — Bangalore-based Instamojo — offers a similar functionality.
The announcements today illustrate Razorpay’s aggressive expansion into India’s burgeoning financial services market. The startup generates about 70% of its revenue today from its core business of processing payments.
More than 600,000 businesses in India including giants such as airline Indigo, Bombay Stock Exchange, conglomerate Reliance, Sony, ride-hailing service Ola and budget hotel operator Oyo Rooms today use Razorpay’s payments processing service. The two founders said they want RazorPay to be the financial cloud for businesses.
In recent years, the company has launched lending and a range of other services. Together with neo-banking services, Razorpay’s Kumar said he expects to have these generate 40 to 45% of revenue.
Razorpay today competes with a handful of companies including Naspers-owned PayU and legacy firms such as BillDesk. The startup, which focused on payments for the first two and a half years, says that business has grown by 600-700% year-over-year.
“We crossed a billion dollar in payments processing in September 2017. Now we are doing 10 billion,” Mathur said. “Our goal with today’s announcements is to have 20 to 30% of our merchants join and use our current account platform.”
Source: TechCrunch
Well, I don’t think that was supposed to happen.
In what was one of the more surreal product launches I’ve seen, Tesla debuted its $39,900 Cybertruck pickup tonight. After running through some specs and hitting the truck’s door with a sledge hammer, Elon asked an on-stage companion (Tesla’s lead designer, Franz von Holzhausen) to demonstrate the strength of the Tesla “Armor Glass” by throwing a solid metal, baseball-sized ball at the driver side window.
It… did not go well.
While the glass didn’t completely shatter, it did appear to crack from edge to edge.
“Oh my [bleeping] God,” Musk laughs. “Well, maybe that was a little too hard.”
So they tried it again on the rear passenger window… and it cracked too. “Room for improvement,” Musk says with a shrug.
Was this a gag? A “Hah hah! Just kidding, here’s a test on the real glass!” sort of thing? Nope. Elon stood in front of the truck, two broken windows and all, and completed the presentation.
While no one would expect most standard windows to stand up to a test like this, even Elon seemed surprised by the results. “We threw wrenches, we threw everything.” he said on stage. “We even literally threw a kitchen sink at the glass, and it didn’t break. For a little weird reason it broke now, I don’t know why.”
“We’ll fix it in post,” he followed up with a laugh then moved on to talking about the car’s suspension. The video went private on Tesla’s YouTube channel about 30 seconds after the live stream was over.
And with that, the undeniable truth that is “live demos never work” lives on.
Source: TechCrunch
Elon Musk revealed Thursday evening the Tesla Cybertruck, a futuristic vehicle that seemed stripped straight out of a post-apocalyptic era movie.
The Tesla Cybertruck, which Musk unveiled in dramatic fashion and to the hoots and hollers of invited guests at the Tesla Design Center in Hawthorne, California, is made of cold-rolled steel, armored glass that did crack in one demonstration and adaptive air suspension.
When the vehicle first came out people cheered and gasped. Some wondered out loud if this was really the cybertruck Musk had been promising. Others seemed disappointed it wasn’t a more market-ready truck. But as Musk began rolling through the specs — first the body, then the performance and finally the price — the enthusiasm in the crowd began building.
By the time Musk uttered “one more thing,” the crowd was frenzied and fully committed to the ride he was taking them on. And then an ATV rolled out onto the stage and the crowd went wild.
Later, while hundreds stood in line for a chance to take a two-minute ride in the cybertruck, the most common phrase from invited guests was “It’s growing on me.” Whether it will “grow on them” is unclear. All of the invited guests at the event, and those watching online, will have a couple of years (at least) to decide if it’s grown on them enough to buy.
Tesla will offer three variants of the cybertruck. The cheapest version, a single motor and rear wheel drive model, will cost $39,900, have a towing capacity of 7,500 pounds and more than 250 miles of range. The middle version will be a dual-motor all-wheel drive, have a towing capacity of more than 10,000 pounds and be able to travel more than 300 miles on a single charge. The dual motor AWD model is priced at $49,900.
The third version will have three electric motors and all-wheel, a towing capacity of 14,000 pounds and battery range of more than 500 miles. This version, known as “tri motor” is priced at $69,900.
Musk touted the acceleration of the Cybertruck as well, showing a video at one point of the truck beat a Porsche 911 off the line. Musk said the “tri motor” version can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 2.9 seconds. The single motor rear wheel is the slowest off the line with a 0 to 60 mph acceleration of less than 6.5 seconds.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed Thursday, November 21, 2019, the Tesla Cybertruck.
Tesla said customers can put down a $100 deposit. They’ll be able to complete their configuration as production nears in late 2021. Tri Motor AWD production is expected to begin in late 2022.
Musk has talked about producing an all-electric pickup truck for years now. In December, Musk resurrected the idea, saying that Tesla might have a prototype to unveil in 2019.
Musk mentioned on Twitter the desire to produce a pickup truck in April 2017, before the first Model 3 sedans had been handed over to customers and the CEO had entered production hell. At the time, Musk tweeted that a pickup truck would be unveiled in 18 to 24 months.
If Tesla were to hit that mark it would be bringing its electric truck to market after GM and Rivian have started delivering their products.
Rivian is expected to begin vehicle production of its electric R1T pickup truck in the second half of 2020. GM CEO Mary Barra said Thursday during an investor conference that the automaker plans to bring an electric pickup truck to market in 2021. Ford also is planning an electric F-150 truck.
It’s unclear how much demand there will be for electric pickup trucks. However, the demand for gas- and diesel-powered trucks is growing. Large trucks account for 14.4% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 12.6% in 2015, according to Edmunds.
Midsize trucks accounted for 3.7% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 1.5% in 2014.
Automakers are keen to tap into that growth since trucks and SUVs, which tend to have higher profit margins than sedans. And those margins could continue to increase if automakers can keep costs down.
The average transaction price of a full-size truck (gas and diesel) crossed $50,000 for the first time in September, and continues to climb, according Jessica Caldwell, the executive director of insights at Edmunds. The average transaction price of a full-size truck was $50,496 in October, and a midsize truck was $36,251.
Source: TechCrunch
The all-electric Cybertruck will offer up to 500 miles of range and start at less than $50,000.
Source: Wired
It’s November. We’re eleven years into a bull run. And a protracted trade war with China — not to mention the impeachment proceedings — is causing some nervousness about what next year will hold.
Little wonder that venture firms, which have been writing checks faster than ever in recent years, are also stocking up on dry powder. In the last 10 days alone, some of the many firms to announce new funds include Boldstart Ventures, Drive Capital, .406 Ventures, CAVU Venture Partners, Unusual Ventures, Northzone, Kindred Ventures, EQT Ventures, Inspired Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.
Newly in the same company is Next Coast Ventures, a firm that just closed on $130 million in fresh capital commitments to pursue a thematic approach and that is focused for right now on the future of work, the rise of digital natives, the death of traditional retail and the ways that ubiquitous connectivity is changing marketplaces.
It’s the second fund for the firm, which closed its debut fund with a very respectable $85 million, thanks in large part to the backgrounds of its two managing directors. Michael Smerklo previously bought a technology services company called ServiceSource that he ran for 12 years and eventually took public. His co-founder, Thomas Ball, previously spent more than a decade with Austin Ventures.
Interestingly, for many years, Austin Ventures was the only game in town in Austin, but that has changed meaningfully since it announced in 2015 that it wouldn’t be raising more capital. Not only has Next Coast just gathered up more capital, but so have numerous other regional firms this year. In April, for example, we reported on the newest, $105 million, fund raised by LiveOak Ventures. Meanwhile, Silverton Partners, one of the city’s most active investors, is zeroing in on a new $120 million fund just one year after closing a $108 million fund, and several other firms — including ATX Ventures and Quake Capital — are trying to raise sizable new funds.
As for Next Coast, some of its many current bets include Everlywell, a company that sells tens of in-home diagnostic tests and that closed on $50 million in funding earlier this year, and AlertMedia, a cloud-based mass notification system that aims to streamline notifications across devices and platforms and which raised $25 million in Series C funding back in January. (You can check out a longer list of its investments here.)
The firm has also seen five companies in its portfolio sell to acquirers (all for undisclosed terms). While one has yet to be announced, the other four are OnRamp, a cloud hosting company that sold last year to a data and IT company called LightEdge; the personal finance startup Clarity Money, which sold to Goldman Sachs last year; the wardrobe tech company Finery, which sold to Stitch Fix in September; and the smart oven maker Brava, which just yesterday disclosed that it’s being acquired by Middleby, an industrial equipment company.
We were in touch yesterday with Smerklo to learn how Next Coast’s new and bigger fund might differ from its predecessor, and the answer seems to be: not much. He said check sizes will increase, from a range of $3 million to $7 million into Series A-stage companies to more like $5 million to $10 million at the upper end.
He also suggested that Next Coast remains as committed as ever to uncovering and funding talent regionally, something that’s getting easier all the time, evidently. “Austin’s entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem is absolutely booming,” Smerklo wrote us via email. “It’s never been cheaper to start a company, and places like Austin with a high quality of life, growing available capital and a strong entrepreneurial spirit will continue to be a hotbed for founders and tech talent.”
Source: TechCrunch
Dos nuevos estudios revelan la presencia de sendos materiales tÃpicamente asociados a la preservación de compuestos orgánicos y biofirmas en forma de microfósiles. Ambos materiales se encuentran en el cráter Jezero, justo el lugar donde aterrizará la misión de la NASA
Source: MIT