Sunday, April 26, 2020
OnePlus Warp Charge 30 Wireless Charger Price in India Tipped
How to Order Essential Goods on WhatsApp via JioMart
Reliance and Facebook pilot JioMart orders on WhatsApp
JioMart, an e-commerce venture run by India’s most valued firm, is testing an “ordering system” on WhatsApp, giving us the first peek at the collaboration between Facebook and Indian telecom giant Reliance Jio Platforms.
Users in Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan, three cities in Indian state Maharashtra, can use JioMart’s WhatsApp business account for grocery shopping.
They can initiate an order by texting “Hi” to +91-8850008000, which prompts a link that opens a mini store on the browser, allowing them to pick a range of grocery products including toothpaste, snacks, tea and coffee, rice, and cooking oil.
Once an order has been placed, which currently does not include a way to pay digitally, JioMart automatically assigns a neighborhood store to them.
A source familiar with WhatsApp and JioMart’s collaboration confirmed the move, but said the ordering system is currently at the pilot stage. More than 1,200 neighborhood stores are engaging in the pilot program.
JioMart, a joint venture between Reliance Retail, India’s largest retail chain, and Reliance Jio Platform, the biggest telecom network in India with over 385 million subscribers, is ensuring “hygiene and safety of staff,” “fair prices”, round-the-clock operational warehouses, and “daily supplies to the store.”
The testing gives us an early peek at how Reliance Jio Platforms wants to leverage WhatsApp’s unparalleled reach in India, where the Facebook-owned service has amassed over 400 million users.
Last week, Facebook announced it was investing $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms to secure a 9.9% stake of the Indian firm, which like Reliance Retail, is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, the most valued firm in India.
Ajit Mohan, a Facebook VP who oversees the company’s business in India, told TechCrunch in an interview that the two companies will explore ways to collaborate.
One of those collaborations may allow users to find local stores around them on WhatsApp, talk to store operators and place orders from within the Facebook-owned instant messaging service, he said last week.
“You can browse shops and talk to the shop owner. And ultimately, where we do want to take this flow is for you to be able to place your orders,” he said, adding that there is a chance that users might not be required to pay on WhatsApp, which started to test its payments service in India two years ago.
WhatsApp has yet to receive approval from New Delhi for a nationwide rollout of Pay in India. Local media reports claimed earlier this year that WhatsApp had started to expand Pay’s reach in the country in various phases. Facebook’s Mohan said last week that only 1 million WhatsApp users in India, same as before, have access to its mobile payment service.
Finnish VC Icebreaker launches second fund to continue backing “pre-founders” and pre-seed startups
Icebreaker.vc, the Finnish venture capital firm that backs “pre-founders” and pre-seed to seed-stage startups, has launched a second fund, with a first close of €50 million.
That’s already significantly larger than Icebreaker’s first fund (which closed at €20 million) and reflects the VC’s geographical expansion. In addition to Finland, where Icebreaker claims to be the most active institutional investor by number of deals, the firm is also active in Sweden and Estonia.
In an email exchange, Icebreaker co-founder and Partner Riku Seppälä told me that despite the coronavirus crisis, most of the firm’s LPs from Fund I have invested in this second fund, along with several new LP. “It’s great to see them take the same view as we are; things must go on and this is a great time to start building and investing in pre-seed-stage technology companies in Europe,” he says.
Seppälä also shared some of Icebreaker’s progress to date. He says that via “Fund I” the VC has invested in 38 companies over the last 3 years, which he believes means it has done the most pre-seed investments of any fund in Finland, Sweden and Estonia over that time period.
It typically invests between €150k and €800k in teams that have “deep domain expertise” and are building globally competitive tech companies.
“Within these 3 years and 3 months, we’ve invested €5.8 million in initial investments [with the remainder being deployed in later rounds] and the companies have managed to raise €28 million in total in private follow-on equity funding from investors in 21 rounds”.
Breaking this down further, Seppälä says that so far Icebreaker has a 65% success rate for companies being able to raise seed rounds. “90% of those within 18 months from our initial investment,” he tells me.
Examples of Icebreaker startups that have raised further funding include Hoxhunt (€2.5 million led by Dawn Capital), Kodit.io (backed by Speedinvest, Adevinta, FJ Labs and All Iron), Klaus (€1.7 million led by Creandum), Flowhaven (€4.75 million led by GFC), and Aibidia (€4.2 million led by GFC).
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Security firm ZecOps: iOS Mail app's old, unpatched bugs have been exploited against a US Fortune 500 firm, a Japanese telco exec, a journalist in Europe, more (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)
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Original Content podcast: ‘Ozark’ keeps building tension in season three
The Netflix crime drama “Ozark” might not be exactly what you think of when you hear the phrase “high octane.” While there are a few big explosions, there are far more scenes of people talking urgently to each other while filmed in muted tones.
A more apt description might be “high pulse rate.” Once you start following the story of Marty and Wendy Bird (played by Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, respectively), a Chicago couple who have relocated to the Ozarks to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel, you realize how dire their circumstances are, as they get pulled from one desperate conflict to another. And the occasional scenes of grisly violence reminds you of the fate that awaits them if they screw up.
The show has been repeatedly compared to “Breaking Bad” (we even made the comparison in our review of the first season), but by season three, “Ozark” seems to have a different moral arc; instead of giving viewers a straightforward descent into darkness, the show lives in murkier territory, with a sense of one bad choice leading — perhaps inevitably — to another.
In the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, two of your regular hosts are joined by Megan Rose Dickey to express our admiration, recap the season’s complex storylines and argue about whether the Birds’ increasingly cutthroat behavior is forgivable.
You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
1:00 “Ozark” season 3 review
28:00 “Ozark” season 3 spoiler discussion
Belgium-based Vertical Compute, a memory chip firm spun out of European VC firm Imec.xpand, raised a €20M seed led by Imec.xpand (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat : Belgium-based Vertical Compute, a memory chip firm spun out of European VC firm Imec.xpand, raised a €20M ...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
