Monday, April 6, 2020
Remove videos spreading Covid-19 lies: Govt to social media platforms
Interview with Masayoshi Son on WeWork and the role of the Vision Fund within SoftBank, says he expects 15 companies in the Vision Fund portfolio to go bankrupt (Alex Konrad/Forbes)
Interview with Masayoshi Son on WeWork and the role of the Vision Fund within SoftBank, says he expects 15 companies in the Vision Fund portfolio to go bankrupt — Covering venture capital, software and startups — Between the WeWork debacle and the coronavirus, the markets …
Inside two weeks of turmoil at SoftBank, as Masayoshi Son was forced to take drastic action, including share buybacks, to shore up confidence in his tech empire (Financial Times)
Inside two weeks of turmoil at SoftBank, as Masayoshi Son was forced to take drastic action, including share buybacks, to shore up confidence in his tech empire — How the Japanese billionaire was forced to take drastic action to shore up confidence in his tech empire
Telcos seek govt nod to self-KYC of new customers
GoDaddy is acquiring Neustar's domain name registry services business and renaming it GoDaddy Registry; Neustar has about 12M domains (Andrew Allemann/Domain Name Wire)
GoDaddy is acquiring Neustar's domain name registry services business and renaming it GoDaddy Registry; Neustar has about 12M domains — GoDaddy buys its first registry, implements governance model for conflicts of interest, and promises to keep domain prices in check.
Swiggy and Zomato settle for smaller cheques
Samsung forecasts Q1 2020 operating profit of $5.2B, up 2.7% YoY, beating analyst estimates, and consolidated sales of ~$44B; stock is up 3%+ (Saheli Roy Choudhury/CNBC)
Samsung forecasts Q1 2020 operating profit of $5.2B, up 2.7% YoY, beating analyst estimates, and consolidated sales of ~$44B; stock is up 3%+ — - Samsung said it expects 6.4 trillion Korean won ($5.23 billion) in first-quarter operating profit for 2020, up 2.7% from the 6.23 trillion won it posted for the same period a year earlier.
Supervised autonomous shuttles from Beep are being used to transport COVID-19 tests to the Mayo Clinic's processing location in Jacksonville, Florida (Sean O'Kane/The Verge)
Supervised autonomous shuttles from Beep are being used to transport COVID-19 tests to the Mayo Clinic's processing location in Jacksonville, Florida — Each shuttle is shadowed by a human driving a regular car — Autonomous shuttles are being used to move COVID-19 tests from a Jacksonville …
Agritech startup DeHaat raises $12M to reach more farmers in India
DeHaat, an online platform that offers full-stack agricultural services to farmers, has raised $12 million as it looks to scale its network across India.
The Series A financial round for the eight-year-old Patna and Gurgaon-based startup was led by Sequoia Capital India. Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO, and existing investors Omnivore and AgFunder, also participated in the round. The startup, which began to seek funding from external investors last year, has raised $16 million to date and $3 million in venture debt.
DeHaat (which means village in Hindi) eases the burden on farmers by bringing together brands, institutional financers and buyers on one platform, explained Shashank Kumar, co-founder and chief executive of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.
The platform helps farmers secure thousands of agri-input products, including seeds and fertilizers, and receive tailored advisory on the crop they should sow in a season. “We have built a comprehensive database of crop tests to offer advice to farmers,” he said.
DeHaat, which employs 242 people, also helps them connect with 200 institutional partners to provide farmers with working capital, and when the season is over, helps them sell their yields to bulk buyers such as Reliance Fresh, food delivery startup Zomato and business-to-business e-commerce giant Udaan.
DeHaat today operates in 20 regional hubs in the eastern part of India — states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand — and serves more than 210,000 farmers, said Kumar.
Shashank Kumar, Amrendra Singh, Adarsh Srivastav and Shyam Sundar Singh co-founded DeHaat in 2012
The startup has developed a network of hundreds of micro-entrepreneurs in rural areas that distribute agri-input goods to farmers from their regional hubs and then bring back the output to the same hub.
“We have an app in local languages and a helpline desk that farmers, many of whom don’t own a smartphone, use to reach out to us and explain their pain points and needs,” he said.
DeHaat does not charge any fee for its advisory, but takes a cut whenever farmers use its platform to buy agri-inputs or sell their crop yields.
The startup will use the fresh capital to extend its network to 2,000 rural retail centres, on-board more micro-entrepreneurs for last-mile delivery and reach 1 million farmers by June of next year, said Kumar. DeHaat is also working on automating its supply chain and developing more sophisticated data analytics, he said.
At stake is India’s agriculture market that is worth $350 billion and serves nearly 100 million small and independent farmers, said Abhishek Mohan, VP at Sequoia Capital India, the VC fund that writes more checks than anyone else in the country.
“This industry is on the brink of a massive transformation thanks to ease of regulation, farmers getting organized and increasing penetration of smartphones. DeHaat is leveraging these trends to build the next-gen product in agricultural supply chain,” said Mohan in a statement.
“The tipping point that led to Sequoia India’s decision to partner with them was the field visit, where the farmers expressed how proud they were to be associated with a platform they felt truly worked in their favour. This impact and deep brand loyalty stems from the leadership team’s razor-sharp focus, deep empathy and fine execution,” he added.
Boeing to re-fly uncrewed demo mission of their human spacecraft after first try met with errors
Boeing has confirmed what many suspected following the partial failure of their original Starliner capsule Orbital Flight Test (OFT) – the company will re-fly the mission, once again seeking to test and demonstrate the Starliner’s launch, flight, Space Station docking and landing capabilities prior to flying a version of the mission with actual astronauts on board.
In a statement, Boeing said that it “has chosen” to re-fly the mission, in order to “demonstrate the quality of the Starliner system.” The aim will be to do all the test objectives that were on the table the first time around, the statement continues, and this second flight will be flown “at no cost to the taxpayer,” which presumably means Boeing is eating the cost of the unplanned second attempt.
During the first OFT, the launch (aboard a ULA Atlas V rocket) went exactly to plan, but after the Starliner decoupled from the launch vehicle, it fired its own engines too early owing to a mission timer error, and expended more fuel than was planned without reaching its target orbit. NASA and Boeing decided to end the mission early rather than attempt a Space Station docking after putting the Starliner into a stable orbit, and found, then fixed a second error during the landing process.
Initially, both NASA and Boeing maintained that further investigation would be required before making a determination about whether another OFT mission would have to be flown. Representatives from both noted that the original OFT, while not successful in each of its goals, nevertheless did prove out the proper working of many aspects of the Starliner’s systems. Immediately following the launch and initial error, NASA and Boeing held a press conference in which NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine further noted that were astronauts on board, they likely could’ve saved the original mission goal of a docking via manual intervention.
No timeline has been given for the OFT re-flight, but it’s definitely going to impact the schedule for when Boeing will be able to fly its first astronauts aboard Starliner. Boeing and SpaceX are both participating in NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which aims to return human launch capabilities to U.S. soil via partners from private industry. SpaceX is now preparing for its first crewed demonstration mission, which is currently set to take place sometime in mid-to-late May.
Boeing’s aircraft operations are also encountering setbacks – but due primarily to COVID-19. The company announced it would be ending production of 787 airplanes at its South Carolina factory on Monday, which essentially mans that all of its commercial aircraft production capacity is currently paused.
Uber says its app will list job openings in delivery, food production, and grocery industries that its US drivers can access, amid slump in ride-hailing demand (Tina Bellon/Reuters)
Uber says its app will list job openings in delivery, food production, and grocery industries that its US drivers can access, amid slump in ride-hailing demand — (Reuters) - Uber Technologies Inc (UBER.N) said on Monday its app will list job openings in the delivery, food production …
Sunday, April 5, 2020
In Lockdown, Kanan Gill Shares a Trailer for His Netflix Special
UPPCL 2020 – Stenographer Gr III CBT Result & Cutoff Marks Released
Beware of 'smartphone pinky' syndrome
PitchBook: US startups raised $209B in 2024, up ~33% from 2023; AI startups raised $97B, the largest portion on record; VCs raised $76.1B, the lowest since 2019 (Sarah McBride/Bloomberg)
Sarah McBride / Bloomberg : PitchBook: US startups raised $209B in 2024, up ~33% from 2023; AI startups raised $97B, the largest portion ...
-
Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
-
Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
