Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Vivo U20 vs Vivo U10: What's the Difference?
Kasada, which has developed tech to fight bot-powered attacks, says it has closed $7M Series A, which includes funding from its newest investor In-Q-Tel (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
Kasada, which has developed tech to fight bot-powered attacks, says it has closed $7M Series A, which includes funding from its newest investor In-Q-Tel — Kasada, an anti-bot startup we profiled earlier this year, has raised $7 million in its Series A with In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm …
This debut venture firm, backed by an Argentine conglomerate, is investing $60 million in far-flung U.S. startups
Nico Berardi considers himself to be a citizen of the world, with a penchant for travel and a wide range of interests. Unlike many other VCs, who’ve increasingly specialized their mandates as the market has grown more crowded, Berardi is nearly as wide-ranging in his approach to venture capital, too.
Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s paying off. At least, Berardi’s venture firm, Animo Ventures, has been investing a $60 million debut vehicle since closing it in July of last year.
It’s an impressive, surprising, amount for someone raising a fund for the first time, but then, Berardi’s trajectory into the world of venture capital hasn’t been completely straightforward, either. To wit, Berardi grew up in Argentina, where his professional life began at a community-focused nonprofit Techo, a kind of Habitat for Humanity focused on Latin America. He was so good at his development job, in fact, that he was moved to Miami as the CEO of Techo’s U.S operations.
It was there, over his six year career with the organization, that he was first introduced to the world of investing. Specifically, encouraged by several board members who were angel investors — and aided by some backing from the Knight Foundation — Berardi left the nonprofit world in 2014 to launch a still-active angel investor group called Miami Angels that funnels around $3.5 million into roughly 10 local companies each year.
In quick succession, he then applied to and was accepted into the tuition-based Kauffman Fellows Program, fell in love with a medical student in Boston, and headed to Harvard Business School to be closer to her, spending his summers with the Boston (and San Francisco-based) early-stage firm Resolute Ventures.
He imagined he’d land in San Francisco afterward, to work with Resolute. But when that medical student — now his wife — wound up landing a job back in Miami, he headed there instead and decided to launch his own venture firm. Enter Animo, a Latin word that means with intention or purpose and also, notes Bernardi, “sounds international.”
The latter matters because while Berardi is the sole general partner of the firm, he’s running it with two colleagues, neither of whom lives in the U.S. One of these is partner Antonio Osio, a native Mexican who was running his own firm, Capital Invent, when he first met Berardi through Kauffman Fellows. (“I poached him,” says Berardi.) They also have an operations partner in Caro Acevedo, who worked with Berardi as his COO at Techo and who still lives in Argentina.
As for the money, Berardi says it “mostly comes from Latin America and Europe,” including from anchor investor Techint. It’s a 60,000-person Argentine conglomerate that owns steel, construction, oil, gas, and healthcare businesses around the world and whose CEO, Paulo Rocco, sees Animo as a way to put the company’s resources into new materials sciences and manufacturing technology and machine learning startups, says Berardi.
“We want to make a dent in the universe, and there aren’t a lot of Latinx investors around and we want to carry that flag,” he offers.
To date, Animo has announced 12 deals, all in the U.S., including six investments in New York and six others in other places, including Scottsdale, Az.; Toronto, Ontario; Miami; and Richmond, Va.
Notably, Animo does not have plans to invest in Latin American companies, though it has backed a number of Latin American founders in the U.S. “I think every investor has their own set of biases,” says Berardi. “Our diversity numbers point in that way, but it hasn’t been a conscious effort. That’s just who we are.” He suggests that a much bigger focus for the firm is using its connections in “tier one ecosystems” like San Francisco and New York to “help [founders] outside the bubble enter it.”
Berardi does say there are a few things Animo won’t consider. “We stay away from FDA-regulated stuff because we don’t understand it well enough and therefore can’t be useful.” Mostly, however, he’s open to anyone and everyone who appreciates hard work, he suggests. “We’re younger, we’re hungry. We work 100-hour weeks and travel like crazy people.”
To underscore his point, Berardi tells a story about Intello, a SaaS operations platform that helps companies manage their SaaS spend, usage and compliance data and an Animo portfolio company. The startup had rented a booth at a conference organized by Okta, the publicly traded identity and access management company. “They didn’t have enough people to man the booth,” says Berardi, “and I was in town, so I was like, ‘I’ll man the booth with you in a cloud suit.’ They thought I was joking and I made an idiot of myself, but it drew a lot of people to the booth.”
Pictured above from left to right, Animo founders Nico Berardi, Caro Acevedo, and Antonio Osio.
Honor V30 and V30 Pro 5G smartphones launched with 40MP triple rear camera
Honor has officially launched the Honor V30 and V30 Pro at an event in Beijing, China. Both the smartphone will be available for pre-order in China on December 5 and there is no information on when the devices will be available internationally. Both the V30 and V30 Pro boast of 5G connectivity and are the first Honor 5G phones to be launched. Both smartphones come with five cameras - 2 on the front and 3 on the back and are powered by the Kirin 990 chipset under the hood.
The Honor V30 and V30 Pro sport a 6.57-inch LCD display with a Full HD+ resolution. The fingerprint sensor on the smartphones is on the side, much like the Samsung Galaxy S10e. When it comes to optics, both smartphones have three cameras at the back. The cameras are housed in a slight bump. Both the V30 and V30 Pro house a 40MP Sony IMX600 sensor with Dual OIS and laser AF as the main sensor. However, it must be noted that the V30 Pro has a faster f/1.6 lens when compared to the f/1.8 lens on the V30. Next up is an 8MP telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom, f/2.4 aperture and OIS. This module is identical between the two smartphones. Last but not least, is the ultrawide camera. The Honor V30 has a 12MP f/2.2 sensor whereas the V30 has an 8MP f/2.4 sensor.
At the front, both the smartphones have a dual-camera setup. It is a punch hole camera design and because there are two sensors, it has an oval shape. The smartphones house a 32MP main selfie cam that boasts of Super Night Mode accompanied by an 8MP ultra wide-angle camera that has a 105-degree FoV.
Under the hood, both the smartphones have the Kirin 990 SoC, but there is a slight difference between the two. The Honor V30 sports the basic 7nm Kirin 990. This chipset is accompanied by the Balong 5000 modem. The V30 Pro, on the other hand, sports the 7nm+ Kirin 990 with an integrated modem. Both the devices support 5G and are the first smartphones from the house of Honor to do so. The devices will run on Android 10 out of the box with Honor’s Magic UI 3.0.1 overlaying it. The devices also have GPU Turbo and Kirin Gaming+ 2.0 to enhance the users gaming experience.
Both V30 and V30 Pro will support 40W Honor SuperCharge. In addition, the V30 Pro also supports 27W Super Wireless Charge. When it comes to battery capacity, the Honor V30 has a 4,200mAh battery and the V30 Pro has 4,100mAh.
Coming to the pricing and availability, the Honor V30 will be priced at CNY 3,299 (Rs 33,500 approx. directly converted) for the 6/128 GB variant and the 8/128 GB variant is priced at CNY 3,699 (Rs 37,700 approx. directly converted).
The 8/128 GB variant of the Honor V30 Pro is priced at CNY 3,899 (Rs 40,000 approx. directly converted) whereas the 8/256GB variant is priced at CNY 4,199 (Rs 43,000 approx. directly converted).
As for availability, there is no word on when the devices will hit the international market. But they will go on pre-order in China starting December 5 with a flash sale taking place seven days later. The smartphones will be available in Orange, Pearl White, Blue and Black colour options.
https://ift.tt/2KVfUtM
Amazon announces new Alexa emotions for developers to let Alexa respond to questions from US users with a "happy/excited" or a "disappointed/empathetic" tone (Jay Peters/The Verge)
Amazon announces new Alexa emotions for developers to let Alexa respond to questions from US users with a “happy/excited” or a “disappointed/empathetic” tone — Alexa is also getting a radio DJ-like voice — You might hear a little more emotion from Alexa's vaguely-robotic voice …
Ola Begins Signing Up Drivers in London as Uber Gets Banned
Aadhaar Excludes Homeless and Transgender People, Study Shows
Samsung Galaxy S11+ Renders Highlight Rectangular Penta Camera Setup
Oppo Hopes Localised Features on ColorOS 7 Will Give It a Leg-Up Over MIUI
You can take my Dad’s tweets over my dead body
Editor’s note: Drew is a geek who first worked at AOL when he was 16 years old and went on to become a senior writer at TechCrunch. He is now the VP of Communications for venture equity fund Scaleworks.
There are a few ways that people use Twitter, but for the most part the ones who have pushed the social platform into the national lexicon are regular users who like to communicate with each other using the thing. They’re the ones who use it a lot. They’re the ones who make Twitter go.
Now, mind you, I’m an extreme case. I share a lot. I’ve shared my cancer diagnoses, my stem cell treatment, new jobs, my wedding. And the loss of my father Barry.
Today, Twitter announced that it will reclaim dormant accounts. That is, if you haven’t logged into yours for a long time, it is considered inactive and will be included in the reclamation process.
At first I thought that was pretty cool. There are a ton of accounts that get squatted on, forcing new users to use crappy AOL-like names, such as Joe583822. No fun at all. And these accounts aren’t even in use! As in not active.
No big deal.
But then I saw this:
My heart sank. And I cried. You see, I didn’t think about this. It is a big deal.
My father’s Twitter account isn’t active. He passed away over four years ago. My Dad was a casual tweeter at best. He mostly used it because I, well, overused it. And it was charming. Once in a while he’d chime in with a zinger of a tweet and I’d share it humbly with the folks who kindly follow me.
He got a kick out of that, and so did I. I still do. I still read his tweets, and from time to time I still share them with you. It’s my way, odd or not, of remembering him. Keeping his spirit alive. His tweets are timestamped moments that he shared with the world.
And Twitter is sweeping them up like crumpled-up paper and junk in a dustbin.
Surely, my father isn’t the only person who has passed away and left a Twitter account unkept — or, as the company puts it, “inactive.” I can think of a few others. And I get even more upset at the thought of their thoughts disappearing. I might not remember everyone we’ve lost, but not being able to recall something they’ve said or shared in the past is depressing.
When people ask me why I use Twitter so much, it’s mostly because I see the platform as a living organism. It’s not perfect. In fact, it’s awful sometimes. Lately, a lot of times.
During events and during holidays it’s almost as if that tiny little app on my phone has a pulse. And a heart. Because of course it does: It’s full of human beings with feelings and real thoughts. That’s what makes Twitter Twitter.
And just because someone’s pulse no longer beats doesn’t mean their thoughts no longer matter.
I sincerely hope that Twitter didn’t think about this first and reverse course. Perhaps they’ll offer a way to memorialize an account. I don’t have my dad’s login. I can’t “wake up” his account to keep it safe. I am truly sad at the thought of losing some of his quirky nerdy tweets.
Especially this one:
My dad thought I was the only person on the damn site and I never corrected him or schooled him on Twitter. He used it the way he wanted to, and that reminds me of the person he was. If you take that away from me, then what is Twitter anyway?
Facebook allows you to memorialize someone’s page and that’s pretty great. Unfortunately, my father’s page was deactivated and deleted without my having been consulted. By the time I realized it was gone, Facebook told me there was nothing it could do. It was really traumatizing for me and my other family members. So many interactions there, thoughts, smiles. A timeline. No, a time capsule.
Just gone. Like my dad.
Big tech companies are good at a lot of things, but what they seem to lack is collective empathy and heart. When humans use the things you build and you stop treating them like humans, but rather like bits and bytes and revenue dollars, you’ve given your soul away. And maybe it’s just me getting older, but I’ve had about enough of it.
To quote the late great Barry Olanoff:
Think about it, Twitter. Do better. Because every time you make me question your humanity, I’m one step closer to not being that whale of a user that helped get you here in the first place.
ETtech Top 5: Law to monitor state’s tech surveillance, Govt’s EV push & more
Tatas pump in more to CLiQ and grow
Facebook Buys Studio Behind Hit VR Game Beat Saber
HP Inc. beats with Q4 revenue of $15.41B, up 0.3% YoY, says its personal systems business, which includes PCs, contributed $10.43B in revenue, up 4% YoY (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
HP Inc. beats with Q4 revenue of $15.41B, up 0.3% YoY, says its personal systems business, which includes PCs, contributed $10.43B in revenue, up 4% YoY — Enrique Lores speaks at the HP Media Day at the 70th Cannes Film Festival at Majestic Barierre on May 22, 2017, in Cannes, France.
Over 40K Audible books are marked as having been made with an AI "virtual voice", saving authors hundreds or thousands of dollars per title on narration costs (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg : Over 40K Audible books are marked as having been made with an AI “virtual voice”, saving authors hundreds or ...
-
Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
-
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget : An adapted excerpt from the book “Your Computer Is on Fire”, on how voice assistants like Siri and Alexa al...
