An overview of telemedicine startups in the US, ranging from urgent care to fertility, that have raised significant capital over the past few years — Sick of that drive to the doctor's office and the anxiety that comes from waiting in their office as you grumble at the amount of time and cash …
Berlin-based FRIDAY, which offers digital car insurance with kilometer accurate billing, monthly terminability, and paperless administration, raises €75M — Berlin-based insurtech startup FRIDAY has raised €114 million in a combination of media-for-equity and equity financing.
Source: Airbnb is paying a little more than $400M for HotelTonight, with about half in cash and half in stock — So how much is Airbnb shelling out to acquire HotelTonight? The deal price was a little more than $400 million, with about half in cash and half in stock …
Appen, a crowdsourced data annotation startup, is acquiring rival Figure Eight for $175M in cash upfront and up to $125M more based on this year's performance — Appen just announced that it's acquiring Figure Eight in an all-cash deal that sees Appen paying $175 million upfront …
Researchers who claim to have discovered the Citrix breach say Iran-linked hackers stole at least 6TB of data, may have first gained access 10 years ago — The hackers are believed to have penetrated the software giant Citrix years ago and have remained inside the company's computer network ever since.
China-based online broker Futu closes up 28% on its first day of trading after raising $90M in a US IPO and selling $70M worth of stock via a private placement — Futu Holdings Ltd., the online Chinese broker backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd., jumped as much as 46 percent after raising $90 million in its U.S. initial public offering.
France overhauls French Tech Visa program, which now has no diploma requirements, accepts employee's immediate family, and is generally less onerous to acquire — The French government has unveiled a complete overhaul of the French Tech Visa for employees working for a tech company.
Source: Nvidia has outbid Intel for Mellanox and could announce a deal to acquire the Israeli chip maker for $7B+ in cash as early as Monday — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chipmaker Nvidia Corp is nearing a deal to acquire peer Mellanox Technologies Ltd for more than $7 billion in cash, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
Facebook sues two Ukrainian developers for enticing 60K+ users to install browser extensions that scraped personal info and injected ads into their News Feeds — Facebook has sued two Ukrainian men for allegedly using quiz apps to scrape Facebook users' private data and inject advertisements into their News Feeds.
How Foursquare, which tracks the location of millions via their smartphones and has 100K+ clients including Snapchat and Uber, makes sure its data isn't misused — It seems counter-intuitive that, in the thick of a backlash against Big Tech's data privacy abuses, Dennis Crowley …
In this month's parliamentary elections in Estonia, 44% of about 561K votes counted were cast online using the e-voting system, setting a new digital record — In this month's Estonian parliamentary elections, a whopping 44 percent of the ballot was cast using e-voting.
Nvidia offers bid for Israeli chip firm Mellanox: report — TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Nvidia Corp has submitted an offer to buy Israeli chip designer Mellanox, the Calcalist financial news website said on Sunday. — Nvidia is competing for Mellanox with Intel Corp, which has already offered $6 billion …
Google launches Bolo, an Android app for school children in India to improve reading and vocabulary skills in Hindi and English, using speech recognition — Google, which already dominates India's smartphone, search, and online video market, today launched a learning app for primary school children …
Ruhnn Holding, a Chinese e-commerce platform which operates online stores for social media influencers, files for a $200M IPO on Nasdaq — Ruhnn Holding, an Alibaba-backed Chinese e-commerce platform for social media influencers, has filed for a Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO) …
It’s impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation without a conversation about job loss. Opponent of these technologies criticize a displacement that could some day result wide scale unemployment among what is often considered “unskilled” roles. Advocates, meanwhile, tend to suggest that reports of that nature tend to be overstated. Workforces shift, as they have done for time time immemorial.
During a conversation at SXSW this week, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered another take entirely.
“We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she said in an answer reported by The Verge. “We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”
The response to an audience member’s question is a take that doesn’t too often get repeated in broader conversations about automation. Often times industry spokespeople will discuss technology’s potential to replace jobs that are deemed “dull, dirty and dangerous” — menial tasks that many roboticists will suggest no one really wants in the first place.
Ocasio-Cortez’s answer, on the other other hand, speaks to a viewpoint more in-line with her own Democratic Socialist views. It’s a suggestion that, if harnessed correctly, such technologies could one day liberate workers from a capitalist system where being a worker is inexorably tied to one’s identity and livelihood.
The newly elected Congresswoman elaborated on her position by pointing out the benefits that automation could bring to a society.
“We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in,” The Verge quoted Ocasio-Cortez as saying. “Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”
And Ocasio-Cortez cited Bill Gates’ suggestion (first floated in a presentation on Quartz) that a robot tax might be a way to make that vision real. “What [Gates is] really talking about is taxing corporations,” she reportedly said. “But it’s easier to say: ‘tax a robot.’”
Her response to the automation question has met with applause from some writers who have been notably prescient about the future.
“This [is] just such a shockingly intelligent thing for any politician to say,” novelist William Gibson said via tweet. It is, at very least, a fresh perspective on a well-trod topic and the kind of outlook that could breath some life in a vital conversation about our collective technological future.
Automation will have an unquestionably profound impact on jobs in the coming decades — we’ve already seen much of that already, for roles in places like warehouses. Every study on the subject acknowledges this, with jobs “destroyed” number in the tens of millions and above, while jobs “created” are often times a fraction of that massive number.
The congresswoman’s comments, however, suggest that, independent of those numbers, perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong the question all along.
Bloomberg : Sources: amid the Iran war, Asian bankers say rising power prices and energy security are becoming a bigger consideration in ...
