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Someone stole a piece of China’s new solar panel-paved road less than a week after it opened
Putting solar panels into our roads isn’t the craziest idea, but we may as well admit that it poses some unique challenges. For instance, people may want to walk away with pieces of it. That’s what happened in China, anyway, just five days after authorities took opened up what they claim is the world’s first solar panel-paved highway. Read More
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AR/VR startups raised $3 billion last year led by a few industry juggernauts
Tech companies working with augmented reality and virtual reality technologies raised more than $3 billion in venture funding in 2017. This data comes from analytics firm Digi-Capital and suggests that while the buzz surrounding the AR/VR space has tapered off, the sheer amount of cash getting pumped into the industry is continuing to surge. Read More
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A look back at the year that the Sub-Saharan African startup scene found its stride
African tech in 2017 was about the normalization of market events mostly absent even a decade ago. There were acquisitions, multiple investment rounds, lots of expansion, big strategic partnerships and some surprise failures. Africa is fast becoming home to a dynamic tech sector. Here’s a snapshot of the news that shaped that transition over the last year. Read More
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Dinghy picks up backing from Balderton for its flexible freelancer insurance
Insurtech was one of the big VC bets of 2017, and that looks set to continue into the new year as startups spot gaps in the insurance market.
Continuing this trend is Dinghy, a new startup that offers “flexible” insurance for freelance professionals, all delivered and managed through a mobile app. Read More
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Chinese game streaming platform Chushou raises Series D, adds Google as investor
Google has added Chinese mobile game livestreaming platform Chushou to its list of investments in Asia. The Beijing-based startup announced today that it has closed a Series D round, which Google joined as a new investor, that brings its total funding so far to over $120 million. Chushou’s previous investors Qiming Venture, Shunwei Capital and Alpha X Capital, also returned for this round. Read More
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Apple in good cheer over a billion-dollar Christmas and New Year on the App Store
The week after Christmas is a lazy one, but the App Store was working overtime. Apple triumphantly announced today that the late holiday season brought in more than a billion dollars in purchases on its mobile marketplace. Mapbox makes another acquisition to bolster its navigation toolkits
Mapbox, the SoftBank-backed developer of mapping applications that competes with Google Maps, TomTom and Here, has acquired the intellectual property and developers behind Mapzen’s Valhalla project in a bid to strengthen its navigation toolkits. Lea’s live event assistant for Messenger makes buying tickets easier
Buying event tickets online isn’t a great experience. Sites like Ticketmaster are the default, but are difficult to use and expensive. A startup called Lea wants to offer a more modern experience by combining event search, discovery, seat selection and payment all in a single application that works right in Facebook Messenger. Read More
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Google Cloud launches preemptible GPUs with a 50% discount
Google Cloud today announced the launch of preemptible GPUs. Like Google’s preemptible VMs (and AWS’s comparable spot instances), these GPUs come at a significant discount — in this case, 50 percent. But in return, Google may shut them down at any point if it needs these resources. All you get is a 30-second warning. You also can only use any given preemptible GPU for up to… Read More
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Salesforce wants to reach $60 billion revenue goal by 2034
We all know that Salesforce sets big goals. It just recently blew through its $10 billion goal just a few years after CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff had set it, but the company has no intention of simply stopping there, not by a long shot. In a slide posted on Twitter today from CTO and co-founder Parker Harris’s presentation to a group of analysts, the company revealed that it has… Read More
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