Sunday, May 3, 2020
How to Watch Star Wars Movies in the 'Machete Order'
PE firm Silver Lake announces it will invest $747M in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms, giving it a valuation of $65B, weeks after Facebook invested $5.7B (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
PE firm Silver Lake announces it will invest $747M in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms, giving it a valuation of $65B, weeks after Facebook invested $5.7B — Weeks after Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms, private equity firm Silver Lake is following suit.
Flaws in Salt, a server automation and management tool, have been exploited to breach servers belonging to Ghost blogging platform, DigiCert, and LineageOS (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
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Silver Lake to invest $747M in India’s Jio Platforms
Weeks after Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms, private equity firm Silver Lake is following suit.
Silver Lake announced on Monday it will be investing 56.56 billion Indian rupees (about $746.8 million) in the top Indian telecom operator Jio Platforms, giving it a valuation of $65 billion.
Reliance Jio, which began its commercial operation in the second half of 2016, upended the local telecom market by offering bulk of 4G data and voice calls for six months to users at no charge. Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries (India’s most valuable firm by market value), has amassed 388 million subscribers in the period, becoming the nation’s top telecom operator.
“Jio Platforms is one of the world’s most remarkable companies, led by an incredibly strong and entrepreneurial management team who are driving and actualizing a courageous vision. They have brought extraordinary engineering capabilities to bear on bringing the power of low-cost digital services to a mass consumer and small businesses population. The market potential they are addressing is enormous, and we are honored and pleased to have been invited to partner with Mukesh Ambani and the team at Reliance and Jio to help further the Jio mission,” said Egon Durban, co-chief executive and managing partner at Silver Lake, in a statement.
In a statement, Mukesh Ambani, who oversees Reliance Industries, said, “Silver Lake has an outstanding record of being a valuable partner for leading technology companies globally. Silver Lake is one of the most respected voices in technology and finance. We are excited to leverage insights from their global technology relationships for the Indian Digital Society’s transformation.”
In the company’s earnings call last week, Ambani said several firms had expressed interest in buying a stake in Jio Platforms.
More to follow…
US travel reservations giant Sabre abandoned a $360M deal to acquire Florida-based Farelogix on Friday after a UK anti-trust watchdog prohibited it (Diane Bartz/Reuters)
US travel reservations giant Sabre abandoned a $360M deal to acquire Florida-based Farelogix on Friday after a UK anti-trust watchdog prohibited it — WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. travel technology firm Sabre Corp (SABR.O) and software firm Farelogix Inc said on Friday that they would terminate …
The job cuts keep coming at WeWork
Classplus raises $9M to grow its Shopify-like platform for teachers and coaching centers in India
An India-based startup that has built a Shopify-like platform for coaching centers to accept fees digitally from students, and deliver classes and study material online has received the nod — and capital — from a number of high-profile investors.
The business-to-business startup, called Classplus, said on Monday that it has raised $9 million in its Series A financing round led by RTP Global, a prolific investor in early stage startups. Existing investors Blume Ventures, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Spiral Ventures, and Strive also participated in the round, said the two-and-a-half-year-old startup.
As dozens of firms bet on hundreds of millions of students — and their parents — to embrace digital learning apps, Classplus, also backed by Times Internet, believes that tens of thousands of teachers and coaching centers that have gained reputation in their neighborhoods are here to stay.
“We are serving these hyperlocal tutoring centers that are present in nearly every nook and cranny in India. Anyone who was born in a middle-class family here has likely attended these tution classes,” said Mukul Rustagi, co-founder and chief executive of Classplus, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“These are typically small and medium setups that are run by teachers themselves. These teachers and coaching centers are very popular in their locality. They rarely do any marketing and students learn about them through word-of-mouth buzz,” he said.
Rustagi described Classplus as “Shopify for coaching centers.” Like Shopify, the service does run a marketplace that offers discoverability to these teachers or coaching centers. Instead, it offers a way for these teachers to leverage its tech platform to engage with customers (in this case, students).
Classplus has on-boarded more than 3,500 coaching centers on its platform, said Rustagi, more than 500 of which started using the service in the month of April after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government ordered to shut down schools and other public gatherings in a bid to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease.
Coaching centers use Classplus to digitally communicate with students, deliver video classes and other study material, and accept payments. These coaching centers can engage with their students through Classplus’ mobile app and the website. “Joining the platform is as easy as signing up for a team collaboration app. The whole process takes less than 30 minutes,” said Rustagi.
“According to the Global Teacher Status Index by the Varkey foundation in 2018, India was among the top-10 in the world in respecting teachers, though was in the last-10 in paying them. Classplus is liquidating this imbalance by empowering tutors with full-stack mobile solutions, while maintaining and further improving the high reputation of tutors. We are happy to back the company with this important mission, and have Classplus as our first edutech bet in India,” said Kirill Kozhevnikov, a partner at RTP Global, in a statement.
The startup, which employs about 200 people, aims to have 10,000 coaching centers join its platform by the end of the year. It has a sales team and other members in about 70 cities in India currently. Classplus also plans to introduce additional features for coaching centers on its platform.
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This man assembled his own covid antibody tests for himself and his friends
In Portland, Oregon, earlier this spring, a programmer named Ian Hilgart-Martiszus pulled out a needle and inserted it into the arm of social worker Alicia Rowe as she squinted and looked away. He was testing for antibodies to the coronavirus. He’d gathered 40 friends and friends of friends, and six homeless men too.
As a former lab technician, Hilgart-Martiszus knew how to do it. Despite extensive debate over the accuracy of blood tests for coronavirus antibodies and how they should be used, by March anyone with a credit card and some savvy could order “research only” supplies online and begin testing.
“I am just doing it at home. This is total citizen science,” he says. Pretty much everyone who has had the sniffles or a fever in the last few months wants to know if was really covid-19.
On April 6, Hilgart-Martiszus posted results of what he dubbed the nation’s “first community serum testing” survey for covid-19, complete with figures and a description of how he did it. He’d beaten out big medical centers by weeks. His data indicated one positive case and three suspected ones.
The DIY effort put him, for a few days, into the forefront of the search for antibodies, blood proteins which form in response to covid-19 and are a telltale indication you’ve been infected. There are now dozens of surveys under way by blood banks and hospitals, and Quest Diagnostics has an online portal where people can try to make an appointment for a blood draw. A physician still has to approve the order.
Just one month ago, though, this type of information was hard to come by. Hilgart-Martiszus, annoyed by criticism of President Trump’s coronavirus response by what he calls the media “echo chamber,” figured that he would try to “fill the void” with actual data. He adds that he is skeptical of big government and “political officials comfortably receiving a salary and advocating to keep the economy closed.”
The mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, he slams as #trashyted.
Hilgart-Martiszus, whose day job is in real-estate planning for a sporting goods chain, first built a computer dashboard in March to predict hospitalizations in Oregon. He emailed a copy to his boss, who told him the company didn’t want to be involved.
By then, though, Hilgart-Martiszus was developing bigger plans. By March, scientific supply companies had begun advertising kits to probe human blood serum for antibodies to the distinctive “spike” protein on the virus. He paid $550 each to get some from the Chinese supplier GenScript.
Most research is carried out by universities or companies under a firm framework of rules. Two weeks after Hilgart-Martiszus posted his results, for instance, his old employer, Providence Health Care services, announced its own much larger serum study, drawing blood from 1,000 people in one day, according to news reports. While Hilgart-Martiszus’s study didn’t have the bells and whistles, or any kind of approval, he couldn’t resist reminding them who was first: “Looks like my old research institute will publish the second antibody study in Oregon. Can’t wait to see how their results compare.”
In Oregon drawing someone else’s blood is legal for anyone who knows how, says Charles “Derris” Hurley, a former pharmacist who says he fronted Hilgart-Martiszus $2,000 to purchase testing supplies. “I said, ‘Let’s go ahead and try this—if we learn something we learn something, and if we don’t we don’t,’” he says. “We are of the attitude that everyone should be tested.”
To take part in the project, Hurley drew blood from his wife, Jan Spitsbergen, a PhD microbiologists who tends zebrafish at Oregon State University, and she drew his. “She was a lot better at it,” he says.
Hilgart-Martiszus used the most accurate kind of antibody test, called an ELISA, which requires some equipment and know-how. He put the blood from his volunteers into special tubes, letting it clot for about 45 minutes. Next he spun it in a centrifuge for 10 minutes and used a pipette to suction off the serum, a clear liquid where the antibodies would be. Then he added dilution buffer and let it incubate with the chemicals he’d bought online on a plastic plate with 96 wells. The liquid would change color if antibodies were present.
To measure the readout from the wells, he needed a machine to scan the plate, which he managed to borrow from a nearby university. This particular test looks for IGG antibodies, a type that would be expected to appear about two weeks after infection.
In 40 tests, it was Hurley whose blood showed the strongest signal for antibodies to the virus—many times higher than anyone else’s. “If you look at Ian’s printout, I am the one that stands out like a sore thumb,” says Hurley.
It was the potential explanation for a mystery ailment Hurley suffered in mid-December. He’d come down with an unusual cold. He felt fatigued and had red eyes. Then his wife got sick in January and stayed in bed for two weeks. Plus, they’d had a Chinese exchange student living with them at the time. “We started talking more and more—‘We need to have some kind of test, something is wrong,’” he recalls.
Hurley believes he had covid-19, but if he did, that would mean the illness was circulating in the US a month earlier than is widely known (the first official American case was recorded in January near Seattle). As of May 2, the Oregon Health Authority says, there have been 2,579 cases and 104 deaths in the state, making it among those least affected.
Hurley says his positive result is not enough for him to resume his normal routine. “I follow social distancing,” he says. “I guess I want to have more verification and have some idea how long immunity lasts.”
Hilgart-Martiszus asked everyone to tell him if they’d been sick. That included Rowe, the social worker from Portland. “I had a cold in February, and I really hoped that I had gotten it out of the way, but no such luck.” She came up negative.
Demand for antibody tests remains high. After Hilgart-Martiszus posted his results to the web, “he was inundated with requests from all over the world,” says Spitsbergen. A hospital wanting to test its medical staff reached out to him. So did a fire department wanting to test 100 people.
With all the new attention, Hilgart-Martiszus says he’s trying to play by the rules and is not collecting any more blood at the moment. He’s instead working with Oregon State University to create a larger, more formalized study, with approval from an ethics board. He launched a crowdfunding campaign and a website where he’s developing plans to let anyone send in blood for testing.
“I told the first group, don’t take this as a clinical diagnosis—it’s not. It’s research,” he says. “I just pushed it out there.” Now he’s telling people he can’t test them right away, at least until he gets his paperwork in order. “It sucks to wait to help people,” he says, “but with all of the regulations, it’s too risky to test strangers.”
https://ift.tt/2KSrghF https://ift.tt/2KTwh9RFitbit may launch 4G smartwatch for kids later this year: Report
It looks like Fitbit is planning to launch a new wearable that is aimed at kids. According to a report by Engadget, the company plans to launch a kids smartwatch with 4G connectivity later this year. It further adds that in order to do so, the company has acquired Hong Kong-based startup, Doki Technology that made a kids smartwatch with video calling functionality.
Engadget’s report further adds that a few weeks back, Doki had notified customers that its devices, namely the dokiWatch, dokiWatch S and dokiPal would be disconnected from July 1 onwards. However, it was noted that there was no mention of Fitbit in the mail.
It should be noted that if Fitbit does make a wearable for kids, it will not be the first time it does so. The company already offers devices for children under its Ace range. However, they aren’t exactly smartwatches. The acquisition of Doki should augment that category as it the start-up not only features a self-built platform, but also offers top of the line features like safety tracking, video calling, and voice calling. The report notes that the company’s last smartwatch, the DokiPal, came with a ‘Doki SIM’ that offered unlimited data in over 509 countries for $9.99 a month.
If Fitbit does release a 4G smartwatch for children, it should have the market pretty much all to itself. Almost all major brands that release wearables tend to focus on adults instead of children. So there might be a market for a wearable that parents can you to track and keep in touch with their kids. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t attempts at making one. A few years ago, Alcatel launched the Movetime kids smartwatch that was said to offer a talk time up to two hours with charging time of nearly one hour. The smartwatch claimed to has a standby time of up to four days. The smartwatch is dustproof and supports calling function along with connectivity options like Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS. Alcatel Movetime sports a 96 x 64 pixels OLED display and weighs 40 grams.
https://ift.tt/2yoYPFv
Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions (Gleb Bryanski/Reuters)
Gleb Bryanski / Reuters : Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in i...
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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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