HMD Global has done much-needed work for Nokia to return back into the mobile battlegrounds with their much appreciated Android One de facto and solid build quality for a considerable price. Their latest device, the Nokia X7 was released in China a while back with a rumoured global released on the 5th of December. With an event quoted “#expectmore” scheduled on 5th of December in Dubai, Nokia teased us with 3 new devices, rumoured to be the Nokia 2.1 Plus, 8.1 (X7 in China) and the Nokia 9 or Pureview. The trio of a budget, an upper mid-range and a…
Author: geekfenceblogger
Salad startup and retailer Sweetgreen recently raised a $200 million Series H round led by Fidelity that valued the company at more than $1 billion. This round brings Sweetgreen’s total amount of funding to $365 million. With this additional $200 million in funding, Sweetgreen is setting its eyes on other food categories and looking to expand its delivery offerings. Sweetgreen is also looking at using blockchain technology to create more transparency in the supply chain. “As a company we are focused on democratizing real food,” Sweetgreen co-founder and CEO Jonathan Neman said in a statement. “Our vision is to evolve from a…
Heyday, a startup aiming to make facials more affordable and personalized, announced today that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. I first wrote about the company a year ago, when it raised its $3 million seed round. At the time, co-founder and CEO Adam Ross said his goal was to offer something that sits between expensive, high-end facials and “random little places that are generally cheap in a bad way.” (Heyday pricing starts at $65 for a 30-minute session.) The company currently operates six brick-and-mortar locations — it started in New York City but recently opened its…
Today, Google’s YouTube VR app arrives on the $199 Oculus Go, bringing the largest library of VR content on the web to Facebook’s entry-level VR device. YouTube brings plenty of content in conventional and more immersive video types. It’s undoubtedly the biggest single hub of 360 content and native formats like VR180, though offering access to the library at large is probably far more important to the Oculus platform. One of the interesting things about Oculus’s strategy with the Go headset is that gaming turned out to be the minority use case following media consumption. If you find it hard…
The second wave of Internet-era travel companies has captured the attention of venture capitalists. In the last five years, travel companies have raised more than $1 billion in venture capital funding. That includes short-term rental startups, travel and tourism apps, marketplaces for “experiences” and other travel or hospitality tech platforms. Airbnb, a $38 billion company and an anomaly in the category, has raised $3 billion in that same time frame, according to PitchBook. In the last few months alone, aspiring Concur-competitor TripActions and travel activities platform Klook entered the “unicorn” club with large venture rounds that valued both of the…
PayPal has shut down several accounts, including those for far-right group the Proud Boys and their founder, Gavin McInnes, for the promotion of “hate, violence, or other forms of intolerance.” Several anti-fascist groups were also banned as part of the same wave of policy enforcement. PayPal confirmed the bans to TechCrunch, which were first reported by BuzzFeed News. The Proud Boys are a right-wing organization that has until recently managed to avoid being labeled a hate group. However, the group’s increasing prominence, involvement in violent altercations and clear ties to white nationalism have earned it that dubious designation on a…
PressLogic, a Hong Kong-based social media content and data analytics startup, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A+ round from Meitu, developer of the popular Chinese selfie app. PressLogic will use the funds to launch its new lifestyle brand GirlStyle and enter e-commerce with its proprietary algorithms, which predict what topics will trend on social media among specific groups. The new round brings PressLogic’s total raised to $15 million. Meitu first acquired a minority stake in PressLogic last year. After launching a data-analytics service for social media managers called MediaLens in 2016, founders Ryan Cheung and…
China’s JD.com has made it clear recently that it’s venturing into artificial intelligence and automation. Every few months over the past year, the online retailer – China’s second-largest by transactions after Alibaba – has unveiled new products based on cutting-edge technology: for example drone delivery, self-driving trucks, fully automated warehouses, to name a few. Most of these technologies are still in their testing phase and JD’s ever expanding technology investment is already eating into its profitability. In the second quarter, the retail titan’s technology expenses were up over 70 percent year-over-year for the third consecutive quarter, costing the company 2.8 billion yuan,…
Facebook has pulled the plug on 30 accounts and 85 Instagram accounts that the company says were engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher revealed the latest batch of findings in a late-night blog post Monday. “On Sunday evening, U.S. law enforcement contacted us about online activity that they recently discovered and which they believe may be linked to foreign entities,” said Gleicher, without naming the law enforcement agency. “We immediately blocked these accounts and are now investigating them in more detail.” The company didn’t have much more to share, only that the Facebook Pages associated with…
Computers make life a lot easier with their ability to accomplish complex tasks with a simple command. Such as deleting and sending a file into oblivion by just pressing an innocent looking key on the keyboard and sending it to recycle bin. You then emptied the recycle bin as well to reduce load on your computer. But what if you realize, a moment too late, that you still needed that file? Or what if one of the drives you had saved some data in is corrupted and you lose the data? On moments like these, the computer becomes a source…