Sunday, May 8, 2022

South Korean startup Bucketplace, known for its home decorating app Ohouse, raises a $182M Series D, sources say at a post-money valuation of around $1.4B (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

Kate Park / TechCrunch:
South Korean startup Bucketplace, known for its home decorating app Ohouse, raises a $182M Series D, sources say at a post-money valuation of around $1.4B  —  During the worst days of the pandemic, when people were stuck at home and starving for some form of entertainment beyond streaming …



After halting Android app and subscription purchases in Russia over sanctions, Google Play now also blocks "downloading of paid apps and updates to paid apps" (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
After halting Android app and subscription purchases in Russia over sanctions, Google Play now also blocks “downloading of paid apps and updates to paid apps”  —  Google is now blocking Russian users and developers from downloading or updating paid applications from the Google Play Store starting Thursday due to sanctions.



Opinion: Apple has the technical chops to safely open up its NFC chip for third party payments apps, and the main reason it is not doing it is the revenue (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Opinion: Apple has the technical chops to safely open up its NFC chip for third party payments apps, and the main reason it is not doing it is the revenue  —  Apple's latest antitrust battle is all about Apple Pay and how the company reserves the tap-to-pay feature for its own service.



Profile of AltStore, which has been downloaded 1.5M times since its launch in 2019, as it rolls out a curated section to make sideloading apps on iOS easier (Jared Newman/Fast Company)

Jared Newman / Fast Company:
Profile of AltStore, which has been downloaded 1.5M times since its launch in 2019, as it rolls out a curated section to make sideloading apps on iOS easier  —  The best way to install apps from outside Apple's App Store was only made possible because Riley Testut wanted to play Pokémon on his iPhone.



Some tech workers in Latin America advocate for Spanish-language training and a Spanish programming language, even as the best IT jobs still require English (Leo Schwartz/Rest of World)

Leo Schwartz / Rest of World:
Some tech workers in Latin America advocate for Spanish-language training and a Spanish programming language, even as the best IT jobs still require English  —  Non-English speaking devs are getting more coding jobs than ever — but Spanish can only get them so far.  —  • MEXICO CITY, MEXICO



Sleuth, an AI-powered tool that integrates with software development toolchains to measure developer productivity, raises a $22M Series A led by Felicis (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Sleuth, an AI-powered tool that integrates with software development toolchains to measure developer productivity, raises a $22M Series A led by Felicis  —  As knowledge workers including software engineers shifted to remote work during the pandemic, executives expressed a concern that productivity would suffer as a result.



A wave of top AI researchers returned from the US to China in the past year, driven by better pay, quality of life, and a more restrictive US immigration system (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

Zijing Wu / Financial Times : A wave of top AI researchers returned from the US to China in the past year, driven by better pay, quality ...