Monday, October 5, 2020
LinkedIn launches stories in India, undertakes other product upgrades
Uni, a new startup by PayU co-founder Nitin Gupta, announces $18.5M seed round led by Lightspeed and Accel for "building the modern age consumer credit card" (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
Uni, a new startup by PayU co-founder Nitin Gupta, announces $18.5M seed round led by Lightspeed and Accel for “building the modern age consumer credit card” — Even as close to a billion debit cards are in use in India today, only about 58 million credit cards are in circulation in the world's second most populous nation.
Researcher says that Macs with T2 chips are vulnerable to a variant of the checkm8 exploit, which could jailbreak certain iPhones and was unpatchable (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Researcher says that Macs with T2 chips are vulnerable to a variant of the checkm8 exploit, which could jailbreak certain iPhones and was unpatchable — Jailbreak involves combining last year's checkm8 exploit with the Blackbird vulnerability disclosed this August.
Spotify updates its iOS and Android apps to let users search for songs by lyrics, a feature Apple Music has had since 2018 (Michael Potuck/9to5Mac)
Spotify updates its iOS and Android apps to let users search for songs by lyrics, a feature Apple Music has had since 2018 — Spotify has rolled out a useful new feature today for iOS and Android that allows users to search for songs by its lyrics, something that Apple Music users have enjoyed for a couple of years.
Time series databases are hot, but will this spin on open source be cool?
Poco C3 to Launch in India Today: How to Watch Livestream
Kaspersky researchers spot malware embedded in UEFI firmware on motherboards of victims' devices, affecting diplomats working on issues related to North Korea (Andy Greenberg/Wired)
Kaspersky researchers spot malware embedded in UEFI firmware on motherboards of victims' devices, affecting diplomats working on issues related to North Korea — The tool attacks a device's UEFI firmware—which makes it especially hard to detect and destroy.
Infibeam Avenues signs deal to license ecommerce and payment software to Jio Platforms
Upcoming festive sales will see a significant jump in online shoppers: Survey
Online sellers eye big discounts to clear piled-up inventory
New investors may bring $150 million to Zomato table
Boom! Hacked page on mobile phone website is stealing customers’ card data
Enlarge / Computer hacker character stealing money online. Vector flat cartoon illustration (credit: GettyImages)
If you’re in the market for a new mobile phone plan, it’s best to avoid turning to Boom! Mobile. That is, unless you don’t mind your sensitive payment card data being sent to criminals in an attack that remained ongoing in the last few hours.
According to researchers from security firm Malwarebytes, Boom! Mobile’s boom.us website is infected with a malicious script that skims payment card data and sends it to a server under the control of a criminal group researchers have dubbed Fullz House. The malicious script is called by a single line that comprises mostly nonsense characters when viewed with the human eye.
When decoded from Base64 format, the line translates to: paypal-debit[.]com/cdn/ga.js. The JavaScript code ga.js masquerades as a Google Analytics script at one of the many fraudulent domains operated by Fullz House members.
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Months-old Uni raises $18.5 million seed round to expand India’s credit card market
Even as close to a billion debit cards are in use in India today, only about 58 million credit cards are in circulation in the world’s second most populous nation.
According to industry estimates, between 30 million to 35 million people in the country today have a credit card. Part of the reason why the vast majority of the population has not made the cut is because they don’t have a credit score — or if they do have an eligible credit score they don’t see any appeal in the paltry rewards most credit cards offer in the country.
The credit card industry in India appears to be stuck in a deadlock. Part of the reason why so few people in the country have a credit score is because banks and credit card companies are still relying on age-old methodologies to determine someone’s creditworthiness.
Most banks in India are only comfortable with issuing credit cards to individuals who have a full-time employment with one of a few hundred companies listed in their spreadsheets that they last updated years ago.
Through his new startup called Uni, Nitin Gupta wants to address some of these issues. And he is one of the few individuals in the country who is positioned to do it. He co-founded PayU India, and then ran ride-hailing firm Ola’s financial services business.
During his tenure at PayU, the startup established a dominance in the payments processing business in the country. And at Ola, he launched Olamoney Postpaid, a service that allows customers to pay for their rides at a later stage. Olamoney, which was valued at $250 million last year, is now one of the largest financial services businesses in the country.
Serious VCs are now willing to bet on Gupta’s new venture.
Nitin Gupta, a veteran in the financial services business, has co-founded Uni
On Tuesday, Uni announced it has raised $18.5 million in its seed financing round led by Lightspeed and Accel. The startup currently does not have a product, but it took Gupta only two months in the middle of a global pandemic to raise what is one of the largest seed financing rounds in India.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Gupta said at Uni he is joined by two more senior executives — Laxmikant Vyas and Prateek Jindal — who have stellar records in the financial services business.
He declined to reveal what exactly Uni’s product — or line of products — would look like, but suggested that Uni is building the modern age consumer credit card. “It would seem very obvious when it comes out, and people will wonder why nobody else thought of it,” he said, adding that he is working with multiple banks for partnerships.
The adoption of digital payments has grown exponentially in the country in the last five years, but the credit card business is still struggling to make inroads, he said, adding that he sees an opportunity to expand the credit card base to 200 million over the next five years.
Bejul Somaia, a Partner at Lightspeed India, said, “Nitin and Uni’s team are passionate about unlocking the power of financial services for millions of Indian consumers using new tech-powered solutions. We are excited about their mission and proud to support them from day one.”
Apple removed headphones and speakers from Bose, Logitech, and Sonos from its online store at the end of Sept., asked retail employees to do the same (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
Apple removed headphones and speakers from Bose, Logitech, and Sonos from its online store at the end of Sept., asked retail employees to do the same — - Apple is working on first over-ear headphones, smaller HomePod — Products from Sonos, Bose, Logitech pulled from online store
Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-worl...
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Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal : An interview with White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, a Peter Thiel protégé confirmed by ...
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