Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Redmi Note 9 Pro Next Sale on May 26 at 12 Noon
iPhone SE (2020) Goes on Sale in India Today at 12 Noon via Flipkart
RPSC Answer Key 2020 – School Lecturer Answer Key & Objections Released
Mark Zuckerberg worried about Chinese internet model spreading to other nations
Productivity tool Notion opens up its free tier to allow for the creation of unlimited notes and blocks (Casey Newton/The Verge)
Productivity tool Notion opens up its free tier to allow for the creation of unlimited notes and blocks — There's never been a better time to check out the collaborative note-taking app — Notion, the workspace and note-taking app, just became much more appealing to individual users.
AngelList India head Utsav Somani launches micro VC fund to back 30 early-stage startups
As investors get cautious about writing new checks to early stage startups in India amid the coronavirus outbreak, AngelList’s head in India is betting that this is the right time to back young firms.
On Wednesday, Utsav Somani announced iSeed, a micro VC fund to back up at least 30 startups over the course of two years. iSeed, which is not affiliated with AngelList, is Somani’s maiden venture fund.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Somani said he would write checks of $150,000 each to up to 36 early-stage startups in any tech category and enable his portfolio firms’ access to global investors and their knowledge pool. The fund will not participate in a startup’s follow-on rounds.
iSeed counts a range of high-profile investors, including Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, co-founders of AngelList, who are some of the biggest backers of the fund.
Others include founders of Xiaomi, Jake Zeller, a partner at AngelList and Spearhead, Sheel Mohnot, general partner at 500 Fintech, Brian Tubergen of CoinList, Deepak Shahdadpuri, managing director at DST Global, and Kavin Bharti Mittal of Hike.
AngelList launched syndicates program in India in 2018. The platform has been used for 140 investments in India since, including over 20 follow-ons in which firms such as Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital participated.
Somani has also been an angel investor in more than a dozen startups including BharatPe, a firm that it is helping small businesses accept online payments and access working capital, and Jupiter, a neo-bank.
“I like the work AngelList India and Utsav have done since the launch. He brings energy, access and judgement to the table — the things to look for in a first-time fund manager,” said Ravikant in a statement.
Micro VCs is becoming a popular trend in the United States. Ryan Hoover of ProductHunt, for instance, maintains Weekend Fund. Somani said he has appreciated how others have been able to institutionalize the angel investing practice. According to Crunchbase, U.S. investors raised 148 sub-$100 million VC funds in 2018.
Running a micro-fund by leveraging AngelList’s infrastructure has also eased the burden starting such a venture creates for an investor, he said.
Indian startups could use any fund that backs early startups. Early-stage firms have consistently struggled to find enough backers in India, according to data from research firm Tracxn.
And that struggle is now common across the industry. More than two-thirds of startups in the country today are on the verge of running out of all their money in less than three months, according to a survey conducted by industry body Nasscom.
Somani said he is optimistic that great companies will continue to be born out of tough times. He said even his investors were aware of the pandemic and still stood by the fund.
“If you look at the market, we are seeing a number of layoffs. These are the people who would be creating jobs for others in the years to come. Entrepreneurship might be the only option for them.
Zoom has suspended individual users from signing up in China as of May 1; individual free users can still join meetings hosted by registered customers (Yifan Yu/Nikkei Asian Review)
Zoom has suspended individual users from signing up in China as of May 1; individual free users can still join meetings hosted by registered customers — Company under scrutiny from both US and China as trade tensions flare anew — PALO ALTO, U.S. — California-based videoconferencing company Zoom …
Public policies in the age of digital disruption
We are witnessing a new wave of technological progress with enormous potential to profoundly transform our societies. Together with globalization, climate change, demographic transformations, and the risk of pandemics such as covid-19, digital disruption is generating far-reaching changes in the global economy. Economic growth is almost exclusively a feature of industrial revolutions and is relatively recent in human history. The social adaptation to the structural changes that technology has brought about has generally been slow, making it a reasonably smooth process. In the case of the digital revolution, however, there are already some signs of a much more abrupt disruption in businesses, markets and societies, reducing the time of response to deal with the new challenges. The success of this response will determine our societies’ capacity to improve productivity, create employment, and grow in an inclusive way.
The digital revolution does not call for heightened optimism about the ability of robots or of artificial intelligence to fully substitute us in our jobs while we enjoy more leisure and higher levels of income. Nor does it call for the pessimism of those who think we are heading for massive technological unemployment and bound to lose our livelihood to robots. There is no call for utopias or dystopias. As in previous industrial revolutions, there is nothing inexorable or predetermined about the effects of the digital revolution. Some societies will be successful because they will be able to make the most of the opportunities created by these changes to social welfare. At the other extreme, those countries which fail to adequately manage this process well may see an increase in unemployment and inequality, with sluggish or stagnant productivity. Well-designed public policies in four key areas will be required to strengthen the positive effects of technological change:
- Education and new digital skills. New occupations increasingly require a capacity for analytical reasoning, critical thinking, creativity, originality and initiative, personal leadership, social influence, and emotional intelligence. Language command, social and technical skills, along with the ability to manage and coordinate teams and projects, are also important. It is essential to continue learning and skills development , and public policies must ensure high-quality programs that meet these new needs and provide companies and workers the opportunity to continue their training and acquire new skills for the duration of their professional careers.
- Policies for a new labor market. It is essential to remove barriers to job creation, investment, innovation, and growth; to increase legal certainty in labor relations; to strike a balance between labor market flexibility and employment security for workers in the gig economy; to facilitate the financing of startups; and to simplify and improve labor regulations to make them more efficient.
- Competition and regulations in goods and services markets. As well as closing the digital divide, public policies should prevent new sectors and firms from gaining excessive market power that limits competition and innovation to the detriment of social welfare. Competition policies must be reshaped to closely monitor changing market conditions and ensure there is effective competition between firms. Measures that can be used to achieve this objective include the diffusion of technological advances and patents to facilitate the entry of new competitors and the financing of startups; the protection of consumer rights; access to small and medium-sized firms to big data, supercomputers, and cloud computing; and data sharing, when permitted by data owners.
- Equal opportunities and redistribution. The efficiency and quality of the welfare state and institutions is essential to guarantee equal opportunities first, and then provide a safety net for individuals facing unexpected adverse situations. Societies that are already doing better in terms of equal opportunities and ex-post redistribution have a head start when it comes to facing the challenges of digital revolution inequality.
Used wisely, new technologies can be placed at the service of these policies to identify new needs, design solutions, deploy measures quickly and efficiently, streamline processes, reduce costs and improve services, evaluate results, or select their beneficiaries.
There are reasons to be optimistic about the future, but only if our societies can properly manage the changes, promote economic growth, and provide a welfare state that adapts to new individual and collective needs. It is very likely that some countries will do this more successfully than others. The social impact of new technologies will depend on how the new challenges are managed. In this process of change, there is no trade-off between fairness and efficiency: societies that can design a welfare state that works more efficiently will make the most of new technologies to increase social welfare, while at the same time attaining lower levels of inequality and greater intergenerational equity.
Read the full article.
https://ift.tt/2LKKarg https://ift.tt/2zgUh4D'Way too late': Inside Amazon's biggest Covid-19 outbreak
Sources: Facebook will limit offices to 25% occupancy, put people on shifts, and require temperature checks and masks when it reopens workplaces in July (Bloomberg)
Sources: Facebook will limit offices to 25% occupancy, put people on shifts, and require temperature checks and masks when it reopens workplaces in July — - Company plans to put employees on shifts to reduce numbers — Grab-and-go meals, temperature checks, updated shuttles coming
Khatabook, which helps small Indian businesses digitize bookkeeping and accept payments online, raises $60M led by B Capital; source: startup valued at ~$300M (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
Khatabook, which helps small Indian businesses digitize bookkeeping and accept payments online, raises $60M led by B Capital; source: startup valued at ~$300M — Khatabook, a startup that is helping small businesses in India record financial transactions digitally and accept payments online with an app …
India’s Khatabook raises $60 million to help merchants digitize bookkeeping and accept payments online
Khatabook, a startup that is helping small businesses in India record financial transactions digitally and accept payments online with an app, has raised $60 million in a new financing round as it looks to gain more ground in the world’s second most populous nation.
The new financing round, Series B, was led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital. A range of other new and existing investors, including Sequoia India, Partners of DST Global, Tencent, GGV Capital, RTP Global, Hummingbird Ventures, Falcon Edge Capital, Rocketship.vc and Unilever Ventures, also participated in the round, as did Facebook’s Kevin Weil, Calm’s Alexander Will, CRED’s Kunal Shah and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
The one-and-a-half-year-old startup, which closed its Series A financing round in October last year and has raised $87 million to date, is now valued between $275 million to $300 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Hundreds of millions of Indians came online in the last decade, but most merchants — think of neighborhood stores — are still offline in the country. They continue to rely on long notebooks to keep a log of their financial transactions. The process is also time-consuming and prone to errors, which could result in substantial losses.
Khatabook, as well as a handful of young and established players in the country, is attempting to change that by using apps to allow merchants to digitize their bookkeeping and also accept payments.
Today more than 8 million merchants from over 700 districts actively use Khatabook, its co-founder and chief executive Ravish Naresh told TechCrunch in an interview.
“We spent most of last year growing our user base,” said Naresh. And that bet has worked for Khatabook, which today competes with Lightspeed-backed OkCredit, Ribbit Capital-backed BharatPe, Walmart’s PhonePe and Paytm, all of which have raised more money than Khatabook.
The Khatabook team poses for a picture (Khatabook)
According to mobile insight firm AppAnnie, Khatabook had more than 910,000 daily active users as of earlier this month, ahead of Paytm’s merchant app, which is used each day by about 520,000 users, OkCredit with 352,000 users, PhonePe with 231,000 users and BharatPe, with some 120,000 users.
All of these firms have seen a decline in their daily active users base in recent months as India enforced a stay-at-home order for all its citizens and shut most stores and public places. But most of the aforementioned firms have only seen about 10-20% decline in their usage, according to AppAnnie.
Because most of Khatabook’s merchants stay in smaller cities and towns that are away from large cities and operate in grocery stores or work in agritech — areas that are exempted from New Delhi’s stay-at-home orders, they have been less impacted by the coronavirus outbreak, said Naresh.
Naresh declined to comment on AppAnnie’s data, but said merchants on the platform were adding $200 million worth of transactions on the Khatabook app each day.
In a statement, Kabir Narang, a general partner at B Capital who also co-heads the firm’s Asia business, said, “we expect the number of digitally sophisticated MSMEs to double over the next three to five years. Small and medium-sized businesses will drive the Indian economy in the era of COVID-19 and they need digital tools to make their businesses efficient and to grow.”
Khatabook will deploy the new capital to expand the size of its technology team as it looks to build more products. One such product could be online lending for these merchants, Naresh said, with some others exploring to solve other challenges these small businesses face.
Amit Jain, former head of Uber in India and now a partner at Sequoia Capital, said more than 50% of these small businesses are yet to get online. According to government data, there are more than 60 million small and micro-sized businesses in India.
India’s payments market could reach $1 trillion by 2023, according to a report by Credit Suisse.
Facebook launches 'Shops' to showcase online stores
NYT says it will stop using third-party data to target ads in 2021, building a first-party data platform instead, starting with 45 proprietary audience segments (Sara Fischer/Axios)
NYT says it will stop using third-party data to target ads in 2021, building a first-party data platform instead, starting with 45 proprietary audience segments — The New York Times will no longer use 3rd-party data to target ads come 2021, executives tell Axios, and it is building out a proprietary first-party data platform.
Docs: Israeli AI chip startup Hailo is pursuing an urgent IPO via a SPAC merger at a valuation of less than $500M; it was last valued at $1.2B in 2024 (Meir Orbach/CTech)
Meir Orbach / CTech : Docs: Israeli AI chip startup Hailo is pursuing an urgent IPO via a SPAC merger at a valuation of less than $500M; ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
