Austin-based Praetorian, which provides cybersecurity solutions for the enterprise, raises $10M Series A from McKinsey and Bill Wood Ventures — Praetorian, an Austin-based cybersecurity company, announced this morning a $10 million Series A round of funding. — A few things stood out to me about this round.
Facebook's NPE Team releases Hobbi, a photo and video sharing app designed for documenting personal projects and hobbies — Facebook is adding another app to its group of experimental projects from the NPE Team, an initiative it announced last year focused on rapidly trying out new ideas in social to see how users react.
Enlarge (credit: NASA/JHU APL/SWRI/Roman Tkachenko)
Following its successful rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was sent on towards a smaller object out in the Kuiper Belt. As it shot past, the spacecraft captured images of a small world consisting of two very distinct lobes, with properties that scientists found a bit confusing. But details would have to wait, as the combination of distance and power budget meant that transmitting much of New Horizons' data back to Earth was a slow process.
The wait for that data is now over, as the high-resolution imagery is now available, and scientists have used it to try to better understand the formation and structure of what is now known as Arrokoth (named for the Powhatan word for "sky"). While the data doesn't answer every question we might have about Arrokoth, it does give us some very good ideas about how such a strange structure could have formed.
New Horizons was the fastest probe as launched from Earth (others have since picked up more speed thanks to gravity assists), and Arrokoth is very small, meaning the probe had to get rather close before it could be imaged in any detail. That left a narrow window for gathering data during the flyby, but the papers released today details just how narrow it was. As little as two days before the closest pass, Arrokoth was still showing up as a single pixel in New Horizons' cameras. It didn't grow larger than 10 pixels until about a half day before. So the vast majority of the data comes from a window that's just 12 hours wide.
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Xiaomi launches 5G flagships Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro, with 6.67" 90hz displays and 108MP cameras; Mi 10 Pro comes with 10x hybrid zoom and 20MP ultrawide angle lens — The Xiaomi Mi 10 and Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro are finally official with four cameras apiece and Snapdragon 865.
California Supreme Court rules that Apple violated CA law by not paying employees for time during mandatory bag and iPhone searches at the end of their shifts — Listen — Apple Inc. violated California law when it failed to pay employees for time they spend waiting for mandatory bag …
Enlarge / Maat Mons, one of the volcanoes of Venus, in a model created with radar data from the Magellan mission. (credit: NASA/JPL)
NASA scientists must not have had an easy decision this winter as they considered more than a dozen intriguing concepts for Discovery-class missions to explore the Solar System.
But decide they did, selecting four missions for additional study and refinement on Thursday. NASA said the proposals were chosen based on their potential science value and feasibility of development plans, through a competitive peer-review process.
Each of the mission teams will now receive $3 million from NASA to finalize its proposals over a nine-month period. After this, NASA will likely select two missions to proceed into development and toward launch later in the 2020s. Discovery missions have a cost cap of $450 million.
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Enlarge / WUHAN, CHINA - FEBRUARY 13 2020: Medical personnel check the conditions of patients in Jinyintan Hospital, designated for critical COVID-19 patients, in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020. (credit: Getty | Barcroft media)
Case tallies of the ongoing coronavirus epidemic appeared to dramatically spike overnight, rising from over 45,000 global cases on Wednesday to over 60,000 Thursday. But the startling rise of nearly 15,000 cases in one day is basically “an artifact of the reporting” officials at the World Health Organization explained Thursday.
Starting yesterday, health officials in China’s Hubei province—the epicenter of the outbreak—began reporting the “clinically diagnosed” cases that have been tallied throughout the whole outbreak, rather than only laboratory confirmed cases.
The difference is that now—in Hubei only—trained medical professionals are allowed to diagnose patients as being sick with the new coronavirus based on chest imaging, rather than waiting for lab tests to confirm an infection. The chest images can detect signs of lower respiratory infection in the lungs, a sign of the disease caused by the new coronavirus, which WHO officially dubbed COVID-19, or “coronavirus disease 2019.”
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Simsim, a social commerce startup in India, said on Friday it has raised $16 million in seven months of its existence as it attempts to replicate the offline retail experience in the digital world with help from influencers.
The Gurgaon-based startup said it raised $16 million across seed, Series A and Series B financing rounds from Accel Partners, Shunwei Capital and Good Capital. (The most recent round, Series B, was of $8 million in size.)
“Despite e-commerce players bandying out major discounts, most of the sales in India are still happening in brick-and-mortar stores. There is a simple reason for that: Trust,” explained Amit Bagaria, co-founder of Simsim, in an interview with TechCrunch.
The vast majority of Indians are still not comfortable with reading descriptions — and that too in English, he said.
Simsim is taking a different approach to tackle this opportunity. On its app, users watch short-videos produced in local languages by influencers who apply beauty products or try out dresses and explain the ins-and-outs of the products. Below the video, the items appear as they are being discussed and users can tap on them to proceed with the purchase.
“Videos help in educating users about the category. So many of them may not have used face masks, for instance. But it becomes easier when the community influencer is able to show them how to apply it,” said Rohan Malhotra, managing partner at Good Capital, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Influencers typically sell a range of items and users can follow them to browse through the past catalog and stay on top of future sales, said Bagaria, who previously worked at the e-commerce venture of financial services firm Paytm.
“This interactiveness is enabling Simsim to mimic the offline stores experience,” said Malhotra, who is one of the earliest investors in Meesho, also a social commerce startup that last year received backing from Facebook and Prosus Ventures.
“The beauty to me of social commerce is that you’re not changing consumer behavior. People are used to consuming on WhatsApp — and it’s working for Meesho. Over here, you are getting the touch and feel experience and are able to mentally picture the items much clearer,” he said.
Simsim handles the inventories, which it sources from manufacturers and brands, and it works with a number of logistics players to deliver the products.
“Several Indian cities and towns are some of the biggest production hubs of various high-quality items. But these people have not been able to efficiently sell online or grow their network in the offline world. On Simsim, they are able to work with influencers and market their products,” said Bagaria.
The platform today works with more than 1,200 influencers, who get a commission for each item they sell, said Bagaria, who plans to grow this figure to 100,000 in the coming years.
Even as Simsim, which has been open to users for six months, is still in its nascent stage, it is beginning to show some growth. It has amassed over a million users, most of whom live in small cities and towns, and it is selling thousands of items each day, said Bagaria.
He said the platform, which currently supports Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and English, will add more than a dozen additional languages by the end of the year. In about a month, Simsim also plans to start showing live videos, where influencers will be able to answer queries from users.
A handful of startups have emerged in India in recent years that are attempting to rethink the e-commerce market in the nation. Amazon and Walmart, both of which have poured billions of dollars in India, have taken a notice too. Both of them have added support for Hindi in the last two years and have made several more tweaks to their platforms to expand their reach.
Xiaomi is all set to unveil the Mi 10 series today. It is expected to announce the Mi 10 Pro alongside the Mi 10. The launch will take place through an “online-only broadcast” today. Mi 10 will be the successor to the Mi 9 that was launched last year. While Xiaomi hasn’t revealed any teasers for the Mi 10 Pro, Mi 10 is confirmed to run on Qualcomm’s latest silicon, have a quad rear camera setup and a 90Hz refresh rate.
The launch event will start at 2 PM CST Asia, that is, 11;30 AM IST, through the official Xiaomi account on Weibo. Stay tuned to Digit for the latest coverage.
As for the specifications of the Mi 10, it will feature a 90Hz curved AMOLED display that will have a single hole-punch design. Moreover, it will have a 180Hz touch sampling rate and support HDR10+ standard. The handset will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset, as announced by Xiaomi at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit in December. Further, Mi 10 is teased to have support for 8K video recording and dual stereo speakers. The handset will include a 108MP primary camera.
The Mi 10 is confirmed to pack a 4500mAh battery. It may support 50W wired Flash Charge technology as well as 30W wireless charging and 10W reverse wireless charging. It is likely to come with 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth, dual-frequency GPS, NFC, and an infrared (IR) blaster. It is also said to have up to 16GB RAM.
The Mi 10 is claimed to be priced at CNY 4,200 (approx Rs 43,000) for the 8GB + 128GB variant. The 8GB + 256GB model may be priced at CNY 4,500 (approx Rs 46,000).
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Enlarge / Huawei sign displayed at CES 2020 in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)
Chinese vendor Huawei has provided a longer response to US allegations of spying, claiming that it doesn't have the spying capability alleged by the US and pointing out that the US itself has a long history of spying on phone networks.
"As evidenced by the Snowden leaks, the United States has been covertly accessing telecom networks worldwide, spying on other countries for quite some time," Huawei said in a six-paragraph statement sent to news organizations. "The report by the Washington Post this week about how the CIA used an encryption company to spy on other countries for decades is yet additional proof." (That Post report detailed how the CIA bought a company called Crypto AG and used it to spy on communications for decades.)
Huawei's latest statement came in response to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday quoting US officials as saying, "We have evidence that Huawei has the capability secretly to access sensitive and personal information in systems it maintains and sells around the world." The US has been sharing its intelligence with allies as it tries to convince them to stop using Huawei products, but still hasn't made the evidence public.
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Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter : Disney, Fox, and WBD say they have agreed to discontinue their Venu Sports streaming joint venture...
