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All of a sudden, WoW players are in revolt, and its competitors are having a boom. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2WvFhuP

Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business’ stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range , and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can see the long-term value in a mission-driven, technology-powered education concern; the company’s IPO carries extra weight considering the historically few edtech companies that have listed. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can see the long-term value in a mission-driven, technology-powered education concern; the company’s IPO carries extra weight considering the historically few edtech companies that have listed. For those that want the entire story of Duolingo, from origin to messy monetization to historical IPO, check out our EC-1 . It has dozens of interviews from executives, investors, linguists and competitors. F

Security vulnerabilities in two domestic electric car chargers were discovered by researchers. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/37anQSF

Elon Musk reiterated on Friday that he doesn't want to be Space X or Tesla boss. What's going on? from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3BZzLkw

Security vulnerabilities in two domestic electric car chargers have been discovered by researchers. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3C2rIDp

Jason Dressel Contributor Share on Twitter Jason Dressel is president of History Factory , which helps companies use their history and heritage to enhance and transform strategy, positioning, marketing and communication. Every week over the past three and a half years, an average of three CEOs have exited tech companies in the U.S. That tally is higher — in good times and bad — than in any of the other 26 for-profit sectors tracked by executive search firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas . You’d think tech companies should be the paradigm of how to prep for leadership transitions, since they operate in such a constant state of flux. They’re far from it. A change of command is one of the most delicate moments in the life cycle of any organization. If mishandled, the transition from one CEO to the next can result in a loss of market valuation, momentum and focus, as well as key personnel, customers and partners. It may even become that turning point when an organization b

This year, livestream viewers in China are projected to spend more than $60 billion on digital shopping experiences that let them interact with influencers in real time. Promoting everything from cosmetics to food, social media stars use Taobao, TikTok and other platforms to livestream products and take questions from the audience. On Taobao’s Single’s Day Global Shopping Festival in 2020, livestreams racked up $6 billion in sales, twice as much revenue as the year prior. Sensing a trend, Western startups are getting in on the action, with companies like Whatnot and PopShop.Live raising rounds to build out their infrastructure. Looking forward, Alanna Gregory, senior global director at Afterpay, says she foresees four major trends : Networks SaaS streaming tools Host discovery and outreach tools Host marketplaces and agencies “For brands, SaaS streaming tools will be the most impactful way to take advantage of livestream commerce trends,” Gregory writes in an Extra Crunch gu

I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an “internet identity” for $425,000 . “I hate the universe,” she texted. Sure, the universe would be better if people with a spare $425,000 spent it on mutual aid or something, but minutes later, we were trying to figure out what this whole Yat thing was all about. And few more minutes later, I spent $5 (in USD, not crypto) to buy , an emoji string that I think tells a moving story about my caffeine dependency and sensitive stomach. I didn’t think I would be writing about this when I made that choice. Kesha’s Yat URL on Twitter On the surface, Yat is a platform that lets you buy a URL with emojis in it — even Kesha (y.at/ ), Lil Wayne (y.at/ ), and Disclosure (y.at/ ) are using them in their Twitter bios. Like any URL on the internet, Yats can redirect to another website, or they can function like a more eye-catching Linktree . While users could purchase their own

Raj Yavatkar Contributor Share on Twitter As CTO, Raj Yavatkar is responsible for charting Juniper Networks ' technology strategy through the execution of the company’s innovations and products for intelligent self-driving networks, security, mobile edge cloud, network virtualization, packet-optical integration and hybrid cloud. Software developers and engineers have rarely been in higher demand. Organizations’ need for technical talent is skyrocketing, but the supply is quite limited. As a result, software professionals have the luxury of being very choosy about where they work and usually command big salaries. In 2020, the U.S. had nearly 1.5 million full-time developers, who earned a median salary of around $110,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics . Over the next 10 years, the federal agency estimates, developer jobs will grow by 22% to 316,000. But what happens after a developer or engineer lands that sweet gig? Are they able to harness their skills

Outvio , an Estonian startup that provides a white-label SaaS fulfillment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers in Spain and Estonia, has closed a $3 million early-stage financing round led by Change Ventures. Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco) and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn). Several angels also joined the round, including James Berdigans (Printify) and Kristjan Vilosius (Katana MRP). This is the startup’s first institutional round of funding after bootstrapping since 2018. Online retailers usually have to use a number of different tools or hire expensive developers to create in-house shipping solutions. Outvio offers online stores of any size a post-purchase shipping setup, which seeks to replicate an Amazon-style experience where customers can also return packages. Among others, it competes with ShippyPro , which runs out of Italy and has raised $5 million to date. “We can give any online store all the tools needed to off

In the last decade, high-quality design has become a necessity in the software space. Great design is a commodity, not a luxury, and yet, designing beautiful products and finding great designers continues to be a struggle for many entrepreneurs. At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong walked us through some of the ways founders should think about design. Tong was involved in product and brand design at some of the biggest brands in tech, including IDEO, IFTTT, Pinterest and more. He’s now a partner at Design Fund. Tong explained how to think about brand as more than a logo or a social media presence, what design means and the steps that come before focusing on the pixels, and gave guidance on when entrepreneurs should hire third-party design agencies or bring on full-time talent. Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups. Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody. Reputation “The purest treasure mortal time

Robinhood priced at $38 per share this week, opened flat and closed its first day’s trading yesterday worth $34.82 per share, or a bit more than 8% underwater. The company posted a mixed picture today, falling early before recovering to breakeven in late-morning trading. It wasn’t the debut that some expected Robinhood to have . The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. To close out the week, we’re not going to noodle on banned Chinese IPOs or do a full-week mega-round discussion. Instead, let’s parse some notes from a chat The Exchange had with Robinhood’s CFO about his company’s IPO and go over a few reasonable guesses as to why we’re not wondering how much money Robinhood left on the table by pricing its public offering lower than it closed on its first day. Let’s not be dicks about it. The time for Twitter jokes was yesterday. We’ll put our thinking caps on this morning. Why Ro

The tech companies will require vaccination for returning in-office employees as Covid-19 cases rise in US from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3lbLAho

Chilean startup Xepelin , which has created a financial services platform for SMEs in Latin America, has secured $30 million in equity and $200 million in credit facilities. LatAm venture fund Kaszek Ventures led the equity portion of the financing, which also included participation from partners of DST Global and a slew of other firms and founders/angel investors. LatAm- and U.S.-based asset managers and hedge funds — including Chilean pension funds — provided the credit facilities. In total over its lifetime, Xepelin has raised over $36 million in equity and $250 million in asset-backed facilities. Also participating in the round were Picus Capital; Kayak Ventures; Cathay Innovation; MSA Capital; Amarena; FJ Labs; Gilgamesh and Kavak founder and CEO Carlos Garcia; Jackie Reses, executive chairman of Square Financial Services; Justo founder and CEO Ricardo Weder; Tiger Global Management Partner John Curtius; GGV’s Hans Tung; and Gerry Giacoman, founder and CEO of Clara, among ot

Hello and welcome back to  Equity , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We were a smaller team this week, with  Natasha  and  Alex together with Grace and Chris  to sort through a week that brought together both this quarter’s earnings cycle, and the Q3 IPO rush. So, it was just a little busy! Before we get to topics, however, a note that we are having a lot of fun recording these live on Twitter Spaces. We’ve found a hacky way to capture local audio and also share the chats live. So, hit us up on Twitter so you can hang out with us. It’s fun – and we may even bring you up on stage to play guest host. Ok, now, to the Great List of Subjects: Robinhood went public! Yep, at long last, it is done. The company priced at $38 per share, the low end of its range , and had a medium-weak day of trading once it started to float. In short, Robinhood seems to have deftly priced its IPO, leaving zero fat on the table. So, it is no

By the time Porter co-founders Trevor Shim and Justin Rhee decided to build a company around DevOps, the pair were well versed in doing remote development on Kubernetes. And like other users, they were consistently getting burnt by the technology. They realized that for all of the benefits, the technology was there, but users were having to manage the complexity of hosting solutions as well as incurring the costs associated with a big DevOps team, Rhee told TechCrunch. They decided to build a solution externally and went through Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch, where they found other startup companies trying to do the same. Today, Porter announced $1.5 million in seed funding from Venrock, Translink Capital, Soma Capital and several angel investors. Its goal is to build a platform as a service that any team can use to manage applications in its own cloud, essentially delivering the full flexibility of Kubernetes through a Heroku-like experience. Why Heroku? It is the hosting plat

Catch is working to make sure that every gig worker has the health and retirement benefits they need. The company, which is in the midst of moving its headquarters to New York, sells health insurance, retirement savings plans and tax withholding directly to freelancers, contractors or anyone uncovered. It is now armed with a fresh round of $12 million in Series A funding, led by Crosslink, with participation from earlier investors Khosla Ventures, NYCA Partners, Kindred Ventures and Urban Innovation Fund, to support more distribution partnerships and its relocation from Boston. Co-founders Kristen Anderson and Andrew Ambrosino started Catch in 2019 and raised $6.1 million previously, giving it a total of $18.1 million in funding. It took the Catch team of 15 nearly two years to get approvals to sell its platform in 38 states on the federal marketplace. Anderson boasts that only eight companies have been able to do this, and three of them — Catch included — are approved to sell b

Jen Copestake looks at some of the best technology news stories of the week. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2VoRaCw

Environmentalists have criticised the gas-fired mine but the company says it offsets its emissions. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2WuEASt

The tech giant says third quarter sales growth will be slower as customers return to physical shops. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3zO0puH

The star says box office takings for Black Widow were hit when it was streamed at the same time. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2VjG7u6

Didi shares surged by almost 50% in pre-market trade after a report that it planned to go private. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3i8qJK6

Bacteria, fungus and enzymes can all digest plastic, but can they work at a useful commercial scale? from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3rFNhFj

Aron Solomon Contributor Aron Solomon, J.D., is the head of Strategy for Esquire Digital and the editor of Today’s Esquire . He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was the founder of LegalX, a legal technology accelerator. On Tuesday, the Open Cap Table Coalition announced its launch through an inaugural Medium post . The goal of this project is to standardize startup capitalization table data as well as make it far more accessible, transparent and portable. For those unfamiliar with a cap table, it’s a list of who owns your company’s securities, which includes your company shares, options and more. A clear and simple cap table should quickly indicate who owns what and how much of it they own. For a variety of reasons (sometimes inexperience or bad advice) too many equity holders often find companies’ capitalization information to be opaque and not easily accessible. This is particularly important for the small percentage