Saturday, April 30, 2022

iQOO Neo6 SE's display detailed ahead of May 6 launch

iQOO will unveil the Neo6 SE on May 6 in China, and the company has already confirmed its key specs through social media teasers, with the latest one detailing the smartphone's display. The iQOO Neo6 SE will pack a Samsung-made E4 OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, 1,200Hz touch sampling rate, and 1,300 nits peak brightness. The display is HDR10+ certified and also has a punch hole in the center for a selfie camera of unknown resolution. iQOO didn't reveal the panel's resolution and diagonal, but previous rumors claimed the Neo6 SE will sport a 6.62" FullHD+ screen - the same as the...



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Perceptron: AI mixes concrete, designs molecules, and thinks with space lasers

Welcome to Perceptron, TechCrunch’s weekly roundup of AI news and research from around the world. Machine learning is a key technology in practically every industry now, and there’s far too much happening for anyone to keep up with it all. This column aims to collect some of the most interesting recent discoveries and papers in the field of artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.

(Formerly known as Deep Science; check out previous editions here.)

This week’s roundup starts with a pair of forward-thinking studies from Facebook/Meta. The first is a collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that aims at reducing the amount of emissions from concrete production. Concrete accounts for some 8 percent of carbon emissions, so even a small improvement could help us meet climate goals.

This is called “slump testing.”

What the Meta/UIUC team did was train a model on over a thousand concrete formulas, which differed in proportions of sand, slag, ground glass, and other materials (you can see a sample chunk of more photogenic concrete up top). Finding the subtle trends in this dataset, it was able to output a number of newformulas optimizing for both strength and low emissions. The winning formula turned out to have 40 percent less emissions than the regional standard, and met… well, some of the strength requirements. It’s extremely promising, and follow-up studies in the field should move the ball again soon.

The second Meta study has to do with changing how language models work. The company wants to work with neural imaging experts and other researchers to compare how language models compare to actual brain activity during similar tasks.

In particular, they’re interested in the human capability of anticipating words far ahead of the current one while speaking or listening — like knowing a sentence will end in a certain way, or that there’s a “but” coming. AI models are getting very good, but they still mainly work by adding words one by one like Lego bricks, occasionally looking backwards to see if it makes sense. They’re just getting started but they already have some interesting results.

Back on the materials tip, researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab are getting in on the AI formulation fun. Using a dataset of quantum chemistry calculations, whatever those are, the team created a neural network that could predict material properties — but then inverted it so that they could input properties and have it suggest materials.

“Instead of taking a material and predicting its given properties, we wanted to choose the ideal properties for our purpose and work backward to design for those properties quickly and efficiently with a high degree of confidence. That’s known as inverse design,” said ORNL’s Victor Fung. It seems to have worked — but you can check for yourself by running the code on Github.

View of the top half of South America as a map of canopy height.

Image Credits: ETHZ

Concerned with physical predictions on an entirely different scale, this ETHZ project estimates the heights of tree canopies around the globe using data from ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites (for optical imagery) and NASA’s GEDI (orbital laser ranging). Combining the two in a convolutional neural network results in an accurate global map of tree heights up to 55 meters tall.

Being able to do this kind of regular survey of biomass at a global scale is important for climate monitoring, as NASA’s Ralph Dubayah explains: “We simply do not know how tall trees are globally. We need good global maps of where trees are. Because whenever we cut down trees, we release carbon into the atmosphere, and we don’t know how much carbon we are releasing.”

You can easily browse the data in map form here.

Also pertaining to landscapes is this DARPA project all about creating extremely large-scale simulated environments for virtual autonomous vehicles to traverse. They awarded the contract to Intel, though they might have saved some money by contacting the makers of the game Snowrunner, which basically does what DARPA wants for $30.

Images of a simulated desert and a real desert next to each other.

Image Credits: Intel

The goal of RACER-Sim is to develop off-road AVs that already know what it’s like to rumble over a rocky desert and other harsh terrain. The 4-year program will focus first on creating the environments, building models in the simulator, then later on transferring the skills to physical robotic systems.

In the domain of AI pharmaceuticals, which has about 500 different companies right now, MIT has a sane approach in a model that only suggests molecules that can actually be made. “Models often suggest new molecular structures that are difficult or impossible to produce in a laboratory. If a chemist can’t actually make the molecule, its disease-fighting properties can’t be tested.”

Looks cool, but can you make it without powdered unicorn horn?

The MIT model “guarantees that molecules are composed of materials that can be purchased and that the chemical reactions that occur between those materials follow the laws of chemistry.” It kind of sounds like what Molecule.one does, but integrated into the discovery process. It certainly would be nice to know that the miracle drug your AI is proposing doesn’t require any fairy dust or other exotic matter.

Another bit of work from MIT, the University of Washington, and others is about teaching robots to interact with everyday objects — something we all hope becomes commonplace in the next couple decades, since some of us don’t have dishwashers. The problem is that it’s very difficult to tell exactly how people interact with objects, since we can’t relay our data in high fidelity to train a model with. So there’s lots of data annotation and manual labeling involved.

The new technique focuses on observing and inferring 3D geometry very closely so that it only takes a few examples of a person grasping an object for the system to learn how to do it itself. Normally it might take hundreds of examples or thousands of repetitions in a simulator, but this one needed just 10 human demonstrations per object in order to effectively manipulate that object.

Image Credits: MIT

It achieved an 85 percent success rate with this minimal training, way better than the baseline model. It’s currently limited to a handful of categories but the researchers hope it can be generalized.

Last up this week is some promising work from Deepmind on a multimodal “visual language model” that combines visual knowledge with linguistic knowledge so that ideas like “three cats sitting on a fence” have a sort of crossover representation between grammar and imagery. That’s the way our own minds work, after all.

Flamingo, their new “general purpose” model, can do visual identification but also engage in dialogue, not because it’s two models in one but because it marries language and visual understanding together. As we’ve seen from other research organizations, this kind of multimodal approach produces good results but is still highly experimental and computationally intense.



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Affirm’s CTO talks transparency and the tech that makes BNPL possible

BNPL is not a new concept; it’s just taken off in recent years and become far more mainstream.

Buy now, pay later lets people do exactly what its name suggests — buy something and pay for it later. The difference between BNPL and credit cards is that rather than charge the full amount of a purchase on a card, consumers can choose to pay for an item in installments.

However, there are some that argue BNPL is just another form of debt, which could lead to a discussion on whether companies that enable it are doing it responsibly. In the case of Affirm, one of the space’s largest players, co-founder Max Levchin (who also founded PayPal) has been vocal about what he describes as a “mission-based” approach.

Ukraine-born Levchin started Affirm in January 2012. The fintech went public in 2021, and while it’s trading considerably lower than its 52-week-high (which stock isn’t?), Affirm is today valued at nearly $9 billion, and its executives remain bullish on the company’s future.

TechCrunch sat down with Libor Michalek, president of technology at Affirm, to understand just how the company differentiates itself from its plethora of competitors, what is unique about its technology and strategy, and why he thinks using BNPL is much better than using a credit card to pay for purchases.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

TC: I grew up in the era of layaways, where you could pay in installments for an item but had to wait to take it home. So when I heard about BNPL, I was intrigued. In your view, what makes Affirm stand out?

We have this notion of a vertically integrated stack where we are able to handle the full touchpoint — that really gives us a lot of visibility into the customer, in the transaction, and that lets us underwrite accurately.

Libor Michalek: Our main focus is doing right by the customer. And that really translates into this idea of aligning our interests with that of the customer. So if they get the unexpected or unwanted, then we share in the negative outcomes.

The second pillar for us is building modern technology that enables us to do this. How do you deliver a financial product with no late fees, with no gimmicks and no deferred interest tricks? It’s really the ability to have access to real-time data, deliver it on the phone and do it at e-commerce sites in real time, and then bringing all that together to make real-time decisions and deliver those decisions clearly to the customer.

Another advantage we have is the scale of our merchant network. We work with 170,000 merchants, which enhances our ability to provide access to à la carte credit wherever the customer might want it and need it.

I recently learned that Affirm (and other BNPL players) do charge interest at times, but often at a lower rate than traditional credit card providers. Tell us more about how those decisions are made — how do you decide who is charged interest, and who isn’t?

For us, the most important and biggest difference is that unlike a credit card, the customer knows how much interest in dollars they’re going to pay for that purchase. There’s no way for them to pay more for that purchase, and they will know it upfront before they click.

We’ll communicate it to them obviously, as an interest rate as we’re legally required to, but also in dollars and cents. A lot of times people get surprised when I tell them that a $1,000 purchase at 15% for a year actually translates to $83 because of the amortization schedules. A calculator on our website lets you play with all of those numbers.

I think the transparency part is pretty key, because I feel like with credit cards, you do run that risk of — depending on how long it takes you to pay or what your minimum payments are — how much you pay in interest potentially ranging wildly. With us, it’s a fixed amount that’s communicated to the customer upfront.

And even if they miss a payment, there are no late fees and nothing gets tacked on in any way that would ever result in a different outcome. In fact, if they pay early, the number can be lower, but it won’t ever exceed the figure we give them.

How many people are usually able to use BNPL through Affirm without being charged interest?



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Honor Play 30's specs revealed as it gets MIIT certified

Honor unveiled the Play 30 Plus last December in China, and it may announce the vanilla version soon, which has been certified by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). The Honor Play 30 (VNE-ANOO) is listed on the Chinese certifying authority's website with most of its specs, including a 2.2GHz octa-core processor, 6.51" HD+ TFT screen, and a battery with a rated capacity of 4,900 mAh. The smartphone has four RAM (4/6/8/12GB) and three storage (64/128/256GB) options, and it also supports storage expansion up to 512GB via microSD card. Honor Play 30...



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India seizes $725 million assets from Xiaomi unit over illegal remittances

India’s anti-money laundering agency said on Saturday it has seized assets worth about $725 million from Xiaomi India for breaching the country’s foreign exchange laws in a major blow to the Chinese phone maker that commands the Indian smartphone market.

The Indian Enforcement Directorate said it had seized bank accounts of Xiaomi India after finding that the company had remitted $725 million to three foreign-based entities “in the guise of royalty” payments.

“Such huge amounts in the name of royalties were remitted on the instructions of their Chinese parent group entities,” it said. The amount remitted to “other two US-based unrelated entities” were also for the “ultimate benefit of the Xiaomi group entities,” the agency added.

The directorate, which has been investigating Xiaomi as well as several other Chinese firms since December, said Xiaomi has “provided misleading information to the banks while remitting the money abroad.”

Xiaomi, which has yet to comment, commanded 23% of India’s smartphone market share in the quarter that ended in March this year, according to market research firm Counterpoint. Its former India head, Manu Jain, was summoned by the directorate earlier this year for questioning over tax related compliances.

The company has taken a hit in its popularity in recent years following India’s ban on Chinese apps over national security concerns. For optics measures, Xiaomi rebranded several of its shops in India two years ago with “Made in India” banners in a move that analysts said was the company’s attempt to distance itself from its Chinese parent firm.

The company earlier this week updated its smartphone, smart TV and tablet lineups in India.



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If the earliest investors keep going earlier, what will happen?

There’s a clash happening in the early-stage market.

In one world, late-stage investors are reacting to tech stonk corrections by clamoring toward the early-stage investment world, forcing seed investors to go even earlier to defend ownership and potential returns. This trend was underscored by firms like Andreessen Horowitz launching a pre-seed program months after launching a $400 million seed fund. Even more, Techstars, an accelerator literally launched to help startups get off the ground, debuted a fund to back companies that are too early for its traditional programming.

While all that is going on, early-stage investors are enduring a valuation correction and portfolio markdowns. Some are admitting that they’re telling portfolio companies to refocus on cash conservation, profitability and discipline, not just growth.

Let’s pretend these two vastly different worlds are in the same universe: Early-stage investors are getting more disciplined and cash rich, but at the same time, the earliest investors are going earlier. Investors are pushing founders to be lean but also green, but at the same time, offering them $10,000 to take PTO for a week and try their hand at entrepreneurship. Growth, gross margin and burn are the new top priorities for CEOs, but at the same time, venture capitalists are clamoring to offer more funds, earlier, in newly invented subcategories of early-stage investment.

The tension between these two worlds looks different depending on if you’re a Stanford founder starting a SaaS company, or if you’re a bootstrapped, first-time entrepreneur trying to disrupt agtech. Regardless, the growing spotlight, and discipline, on the early stage just makes me wonder one broad thing: What’s left for early-stage investors to focus on?



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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4's battery size leaks

Last November, we heard the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 arriving this year will have the same battery capacity as the Galaxy Z Flip3. But, a new report by Dutch publication GalaxyClub claims the Galaxy Z Flip4 will pack a slightly larger battery. The publication says that the Galaxy Z Flip4 (SM-F721) will come with two batteries, having model codes EB-BF721ABY and EB-BF722ABY. The former is referred to by Samsung internally as a "sub battery" and is the larger of the two with a rated capacity of 2,400 mAh, while the latter is the main battery having a rated capacity of 903 mAh. Samsung...



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Honor Magic4 Lite review



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nubia Red Magic 7 Pro goes on sale in international markets

The nubia Red Magic 7 Pro launched in China in February is now available for purchase in global markets. The international model has 16GB RAM on board and two color options - Obsidian and Supernova. The former comes with 256GB storage and the latter with 512GB storage, priced at $799/£679/€799 and $899/£759/€899, respectively. The Red Magic 7 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC and runs Android 12-based RedMagic OS 5.0 out of the box. It also comes with a dedicated gaming chip called Red Core 1 to handle audio, RGB lighting, and haptic feedback, allowing the Qualcomm silicon...



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Friday, April 29, 2022

Canalys: Honor was the top smartphone maker in China in Q1 this year

The smartphone market in China is in flux and different analysts report slightly different details. Shipments for the first quarter of the year fell by 18% compared to Q1 2021, which Canalys attributes to a market correction after the “abnormal” first quarter of last year. “There is usually a sequential decline in demand and production in Q1, though China’s smartphone market has been underperforming for nearly three years,” writes Canalys Analyst Amber Liu, so these results should not be surprising. Analyst Toby Zhu warns smartphone makers to plan stock allocation carefully and to...



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iQOO 9 review



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Realme GT Neo3 begins global rollout, Pad Mini join is

The Realme GT Neo3 was launched today in India, starting its global rollout. Both of the phones editions came are here - 80W and 150W - and its price starts from INR 29,999 or about $390/€370. The event also saw the arrival of the Realme Pad Mini to the Asian country with its 8.7” screen and Unisoc chipset. The price of the Dimensity 8100-powered GT Neo3 is exclusive for May 4, when Realme is celebrating its birthday. After that, the GT Neo3's 80W charging and 5,000mAh battery version will be INR 36,999 ($485/€460) with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. The 150W variant comes with a...



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More TradFi in DeFi as Sienna Network launches SiennaLend, a private crypto lending platform

It was last year that we covered the $11.2M fundraise for Sienna Network, the ‘privacy decentralized’ startup. The network is built on the Secret Network, which allows asset holders to switch to privacy-oriented tokens. Privacy-based financial blockchain projects are crucial if “DeFi” is to work properly, otherwise normal financial transactions – which are normally private in the traditional finance world – will struggle to take off.

Sienna is among several other blockchain startups trying to prevent “front-running”, where transactions on Ethereum can be preempted by someone else simply by them paying a higher transaction fee – just like trumping a trade on the stock market by paying a higher fee to a broker.

Sienna Network has now launched its private crypto lending platform, dubbed SiennaLend. The company claims that crypto users can use the platform to earn interest on their crypto and also borrow crypto from the platform – all privately. The platform will compete in this space with Uniswap and PancakeSwap, but claims to have more features than both.

SiennaLend is (obviously) built on top of the Secret Network, which affords – claims the company – greater security and safety compared to open and non-private blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and others.

SiennaLend’s pitch to the market is that its lower gas prices will make it more attractive to small investors.

“Paying a transaction fee of $150 to make a loan of $200 makes little sense and this is another major benefit for SiennaLend. Gas fees are counted in cents rather than dollars as the scalability of the blockchains are much higher. We have spent 15 months in stealth, fine-tuning this absolute game-changer for crypto and its ascendance to the next level of mainstream finance,” Monty Munford, Chief Evangelist, Sienna Network, said in a statement.

Sienna Network says “Personal Identifiable Information (PII)” means users can “backtrack” and see their wallet possessions and trading history via their wallet address. It will also offer loans against collateral, as would happen with traditional lending, by allowing users to deposit into a pool and choose to earn interest or borrow based on that deposit. The idea is that traders can defend against the current market volatility more easily.

Lending protocols like this in DeFI are widely observed to be taking off, despite market volatility, because they offer more reassurances to crypto holders. Cryptocurrency-based loans have become a highly utilized aspect of DeFi.

By being built on Secret Network, Sienna Network/SiennaLand is also part of the Cosmos ecosystem, recently upgraded to be a part of IBC. Cosmos competes – after a fashion with Polkadot, also an ‘internet of blockchains’.



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Amazfit GT 3 series gets notification replies and more in latest firmware update

The Amazfit GTS 3, GTR 3 and GTR 3 Pro got a big new firmware update which adds smart reply to notifications, the ability to reject calls via text message as well as several other optimizations. Amazfit GTS 3 gets firmware version 7.42.5.1 while GTR 3 Pro is treated to version 8.37.3.2 in the US, Italy, India, the UK, Vietnam, with more regions being added soon. Amazfit GTR 3 Pro update changelog GTR 3 Pro gets the added benefit of custom replies to notifications via the Zepp app on Android. Other improvements across the GT 3 range include optimized smart alarm clock reminders,...



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Counterpoint: Supply chain issues caused decline in India phone market in Q1

The India phone market had a tough first quarter of the year. According to Counterpoint Research, makers pushed 38 million smartphones, which is 1% less than they did twelve months ago. Feature phones sales between January and March 2022 went off a cliff though, falling 39%. This brings the overall sales decrease to 16%. The first quarter of 2022 began with a slow start due to the third COVID wave in the Asian country, Senior Research Analyst Prachir Singh revealed. The supply chain issues affected all major manufacturers who had to adopt different strategies for dealing with the...



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Thursday, April 28, 2022

ZTE Axon 40 Ultra to bring three 64MP cameras

ZTE is ready to introduce its Axon 40 series on May 9 and we’re expecting at least three models - an Axon 40, a 40 Pro and a 40 Ultra. The latest teasers from the company reveal the Ultra model will pack three 64MP cameras on its back with a wide, ultrawide and periscope lens setup. ZTE Axon 40 Ultra main, ultrawide and periscope lens ZTE also shared a trio of samples from each lens highlighting their performance and confirmed all three cams will be able to capture 8K video. ZTE Axon 40 Ultra camera samples and 8K video poster We don’t get any further spec details on...



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Amazon unveils over 40 new titles, movie rental service in India

Amazon on Thursday unveiled a slate of over 40 original and co-produced shows and movies in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages and launched its movie rental service in India as it looks to win and retain more users in one of the world’s largest entertainment markets.

The Transactional Video-On-Demand (TVOD) Movie Rental service will allow customers to get early rental access to new Indian and foreign movies, the company executives said at an event, which also featured Indian producer Karan Johar, who previously engaged closely with Netflix in India. The rental service is going live in India today for both Prime members and non-Prime members.

At an event in Mumbai, the company executives said Prime Video will double down the size of its investment in India in the next five years and is exploring differentiated services for the country, where the on-demand video streaming service is available in nearly a dozen languages. They did not disclose how much the firm has invested in the entertainment business in India.

The e-commerce group also said it has partnered with Bollywood studios Dharma Productions, Excel Entertainment and Yash Raj Films as well as Ajay Devgn FFilms to license 17 movies including Runway 34, Fukrey 3, and Tiger 3.

This is a developing story. More to follow…



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Realme GT 2 is now on sale in India

The Realme GT2 is on sale in India starting today, joining its Pro sibling that has been on the shelves for the past month. The brand is selling the phone on its website with prices starting from INR34,999 ($460/€420) for the 8/128 GB variant. The Realme GT 2 is a more affordable alternative to the GT2 Pro flagship with a Snapdragon 888 chipset. However, it retains some meaningful features such as the 6.62” AMOLED with a 120 Hz refresh rate, and Android 12 with Realme UI 3.0 on top. The phone also has a 5,000 mAh battery with 65W fast-charging capabilities. Realme is also offering...



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Nigeria’s OnePort 365 lands $5M to digitize freight management in Africa

The global maritime industry oversees the movement and handling of over 800 million containers in various ports worldwide. Africa controls about 12% of this volume, with its clearing and forwarding market standing at almost $4 billion.

That said, Africa’s freight space is stuck with numerous challenges. Some include congestion at ports, opaque processes of service providers, fragmented payments, and low visibility and documentation.

These were the four main challenges Hio Sola-Usidame fronted while running Logigrains, a company he founded in 2016 involved in logistics and commodities trading. OnePort 365 was the business he launched three years later to tackle these issues in Africa’s freight management space. And in a new development, the three-year-old startup confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised $5 million in seed funding.

Founder and CEO Sola-Usidame explained to TechCrunch that in his experience working in the freight forwarding space, generating a quote for a shipment takes about 10 to 14 days. According to the founder, most of the processes involved in the supply chain are manual, which is why it takes time for quotes to be generated.

“Typically, these guys have to deal with as much as 10 different middlemen. The way it works is this, there are probably about six different channels involved–you have a trucking phase, you have a customs brokerage, you have a terminal, you have a shipment, you have a warehouse, and then you have marine insurance,” he said. “As of today, I can tell you 80% of transactions are very much offline.”

Say this hurdle gets passed, the next one to cross becomes visibility, where Sola-Usidame argues that out of every 10 trucks that leave the ports in Nigeria, three go missing in transit; the reason being that just above 20% of them have a tracking system.

“What you’re seeing is a situation whereby cargo worth $100,000 is being hauled by a truck driver earning $400, and as a result, there’s a lot of theft that goes on because there’s no visibility,” he said, giving more description. “If you can track your UPS parcel worth less than $100, why can’t the guy loading $100,000 worth of cargo in a container track where this container is in Africa?”

When it comes to payments, shippers use different payment methods across singular channels. Also, documentation in Africa is pretty much pen and paper, while the rest of the shipping and freight industry globally has moved to the electronic bill of ladings.

OnePort 365 says its platform solves these problems by providing end-to-end digitization of freight management for stakeholders in this space. It is building an operating system for cross-border trade in Africa, helping traders to manage their freight forwarding processes and enabling other value-added services, the company said in a statement.

The CEO claims that his startup, present in Nigeria and Ghana, cuts booking time from 10 to 14 days to “minutes.” Traders can also connect with shipping and inland transportation vendors and manage the entire process (from booking to payments), including real-time visibility of their shipments. And in terms of payments, OnePort 365 claims to aggregate different methods enabled by the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) so traders have access to instant payouts.

OnePort 365 bootstrapped throughout its first year. While the CEO didn’t share numbers on bookings and users, he disclosed that his company has increased the number of twenty-foot equivalent unit containers (TEUs) by 140% and grown its revenue by more than 420% last year. Its business customers also grew from 5 to 50.

OnePort 365

Hio Sola-Usidame (CEO, OnePort 365)

The seed round was led by Mobility 54, the VC arm of Toyota Tsusho and CFAO Group. Participating investors include SBI Investment, Flexport, ODX, a Singaporean syndicate fund, and other angel investors. Samurai Incubate also followed on after participating in OnePort 365’s previous round.

OnePort 365’s says its platform covers air freight, ocean freight, inland haulage (trucking, barge, and rail), pay-as-you-go warehousing, marine insurance, and customs brokerage. The new funding will look into how the company can improve its efficiency and lower cross-border trading overhead across the continent.

More money also includes trying to edge out the competition as the market for cross-border logistics services is said to hit revenues of $32 billion by 2025. Multiple companies are needed for the market to reach its full potential, and there are a few known ones: Ghana’s Jetstream and Nigeria’s SEND and MVX.

Sola-Usidame argues that his team, made up of Maersk and DHL alumni, has first-hand experience running traditional freight forwarding businesses, giving the team some sharpness over others.

“For us, we had experience running this in the traditional space before OnePort365, and it’s a massive edge that gives us a lot of experience and having a good understanding of the space, and that’s what’s led us to significant growth in that period, he said.

The company plans to use the funding to add more people and expand to “three major hubs” across the continent before Q4 2022. Other deployments of capital will go into ramping up its tech and providing trade finance to the shippers.

“There is great potential to unlock significant commercial opportunities across the continent by addressing the longstanding challenges that have made it difficult to move freights into and around the continent, and we are confident that OnePort 365 has what it takes to succeed,” said Takeshi Watanabe, CEO of Mobility 54 Investment SAS said in a statement.



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Samsung reports record-breaking Q1 revenues boosted by strong Galaxy S22 sales

Samsung announced its financial results for the first quarter of the year, and the company proudly revealed a record-breaking consolidated revenue for the third straight quarter. Operating profit was KRW 14.12 billion, and it improved 51% from a year earlier (KRW 9.38 trillion), with the Device Experience (DX) division posting the highest revenue since 2013. According to the detailed financial report, literally all divisions reported a yearly increase both in sales and operating profit. Speaking of the mobile phones business, Samsung revealed the numbers are the result of strong...



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Samsung Galaxy M31s updated to Android 12 with One UI 4.1

The latest Samsung phone to get updated to Android 12 is the Galaxy M31s. The phone originally launched with Android 10 back in 2020 and is now receiving its second and probably final Android version update. The new update comes bearing the M317FXXU3DVD4 identifier and is live in Russia. The firmware update brings Samsung’s One UI interface to version 4.1 and also adds the March security patch. One UI 4.1 and Android 12 bring visual changes such as Color Palette, smart widgets and improved AOD and Dark mode. The update also features improvements for Samsung apps like My Files, Gallery,...



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Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Reveal raises $50M to espouse the benefits of partner ecosystems

Business-to-business (B2B) companies are generating an increasing percentage of their revenue through partner ecosystems. In a 2018 Accenture survey, 76% of business leaders said that current business models will be unrecognizable in the next five years, with ecosystems being the main change agent. But despite their growing importance, businesses haven’t necessarily adopted technology to foster partnerships, instead relying on spreadsheets and lengthy virtual or in-person meetings.

Perhaps as a result, business ecosystems — while profitable — have a high failure rate. Research by BCG found that fewer than 15% were sustainable in the long run. But it doesn’t have to be this way. That’s according to Reveal CEO Simon Bouchez, who alongside Gautier Machelon, Perrine El Khoury, and Alex Sadones aims to build a platform that allows B2B companies to more easily identify sales opportunities with their partners.

With customers including Qualtrics, Tealium, Contentsquare, and Vonage. Reveal today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners with participation from Eight Roads, Chalfen Ventures, and Dig Ventures. The capital brings the startup’s total raised to about $54 million.

“Organizations create 2x more value when selling to a partner customer,” Bouchez told TechCrunch via email. “But most of the time, companies don’t know how to capture this value and don’t invest in partnerships. Partnership leaders still don’t have a clear seat at the revenue table.”

Before launching Reveal in 2020, Bouchez was the CEO of Multiposting, an HR tech startup, until 2018, when it was acquired by SAP. Sadones was the CTO at Multiposting, while Gautier cofounded employee sourcing and hiring platform Work4. Khoury was the director of business development at Work4.

Initially, Reveal, which was founded as Sharework, was focused on automated sales account mapping — i.e., the process of cataloging the people that work at a particular target account. But in 2020, the startup began to broaden its product strategy, targeting marketers seeking to create and convert sales leads.

Some might argue that Reveal’s product falls into the category of ecosystem management, or tools to navigate and manage B2B partner ecosystems. But Bouchez argues that Reveal goes a step further by involving sales and marketing teams in the process for lead generation, sales enablement, and ecosystem expansion.

“We believe we have created a new category: a collaborative growth platform enabling companies to leverage their ecosystem to accelerate growth,” Bouchez said. “Our closest competitor would be an Excel spreadsheet or companies not yet tapping into this growth potential. Of course, we are expecting competitors as our space grows and attracts investment from top investors, and many companies — like Partnerstack, Crossbeam, and Workspan — are growing fast.”

Reveal ingests data from existing customer relationship management systems to identify common sales accounts as well as potential new leads. Algorithms attempt to identify the top partners to add to a company’s ecosystem, even if the company isn’t directly connected to them.

Reveal

Image Credits: Reveal

Within the platform, ecosystems are composed of partners in the same industry, targeting the same customer segment, or selling a complementary product. The idea is that companies can connect with a partner’s account owners through Reveal to get introductions to key decision makers.

Throughout the process, using proprietary methods (Bouchez declined to go into detail), Reveal attempts to quantify the ecosystem influence on a company’s overall sales pipeline and revenue.

“Reveal … allows partnership professionals to quickly identify common customers and prospects with partners to generate more business opportunities,” Bouchez said. “Users [can] discover new relevant partners across the Reveal network.”

Reveal claims that its algorithms — which process more than 200 million customer relationship management records from the company’s over 4,500 customers — are accurate, but it hasn’t conducted outside testing to verify this. Reveal is more transparent about its data collection and retention policies, claiming to not store personally identifiable information and delete customer relationship management data “as soon as the user requests it.”

“Security and compliance has been a top priority from day one to allow our users to trust us with sensitive and important data in full confidence,” Bouchez said.

Reveal’s future plans include tripling its 40-employee headcount (within the next 18 months), investing in product development, and expanding its online learning hub for partnership professionals. Over the long term, Bouchez hopes to build the largest network of “connected companies,” with the tentative goal of eclipsing 20,000 companies by the end of 2023.

“Reveal is quickly becoming a leader in collaborative growth, an emerging category that integrates into a company’s customer relationship management system and serves as a bridge to partner customer relationship management systems,” Insight Partners’ Brad Fielder, who plans to join Reveal’s board, told TechCrunch in a statement. “Reveal allows sales teams to identify new opportunities and utilize partner connections to close deals like never before.”



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Sony to announce new Xperia phones on May 11

Sony is ready to bring its next generation of Xperia phones. The company’s mobile division announced it will hold an event on May 11 where we’ll see the next chapter in the Xperia lineup. The accompanying teaser video linked below makes it pretty clear we’re in for an Xperia 1 IV (mark four) though we could also get new Xperia 5 and Xperia 10 phones. We’ve already seen renders of the Xperia 1 IV which show out a familiar design language with flatter sides than last year’s Xperia III. The phone is also expected to offer the very latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset alongside a...



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Meta disputes allegations of poor work conditions at its contractor’s hub in Kenya

A few weeks ago, a law firm threatened to sue American social-media giant Meta and its main subcontractor for content moderation in Africa, Sama, over alleged unsafe and unfair work conditions at the latter’s hub in Kenya.

The law firm, Nzili and Sumbi Advocates alleged that Sama had violated various the rights, including those of health and privacy, of its Kenyan and international staff. Demands were made that Meta and Sama adhere to Kenya’s labor, privacy and health laws, including that it provides its moderators with adequate mental health insurance and better compensation.

In rejoinders seen by TechCrunch, Meta has distanced itself from the claims. Sama, which is alleged to have fired its former employee Daniel Motaung for leading a strike in 2019 over poor pay and work conditions, has also denied any wrong-doing.

“Your client’s employment was terminated because of unacceptable actions taken against fellow employees that jeopardized their safety. The process leading to the termination of your client was fair, clear and well-documented; there is absolutely no basis for the allegation that your client was unfairly dismissed from employment. Similarly, there is no basis for the allegation that your client is entitled to compensation,” a letter sent to Motaung’s lawyer, Mercy Mutemi, by Sama’s lawyers, Bowmans, said.

The law firm representing Motaung has now threatened to go on with the plans to file a lawsuit.

Trouble for Sama started when a Time story detailed how the company recruited its moderators under the false pretext that they were taking up call center jobs. The content moderators, hired from across the continent, the story said, only learned about the nature of their jobs after signing employment contracts and relocating to its hub in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

The moderators sift through social media posts on all its platforms, including Facebook, to remove those perpetrating and perpetuating hate, misinformation and violence. Among the many requirements that employees are expected to abide by, is not disclosing the nature of their jobs to outsiders. The content moderators’ pay in Africa, the article added, is the lowest across the globe. Sama, which fashions itself as an ethical AI firm, has since the exposé increased its wages.

Motaung’s lawyer alleged that Sama failed to grant her client and his colleagues adequate psychosocial support and mental health measures, including “unplanned breaks as needed particularly after exposure to graphic content.” The productivity of Sama’s employees, it is claimed, was also tracked using Meta’s software — to measure employee screen time and movement during work hours. Sama granted them “thirty minutes a day with a wellness counselor.”

Meta said it was not privy to the arrangement its subcontractor had with Moutang.

“There was therefore no employer/employee relationship between Meta and the Claimant (Motaung), upon which a cause of action may be premised. No action can therefore be brought against Meta for any rights and /or obligations allegedly due to owing to the Claimant with respect to his employment with Sama, as Meta is not and has never been his employer,” said Anjaarwalla & Khanna LLP, the law firm representing Meta.

In our previous report, a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that they regularly conduct audits on its partners and encourage reviewers to raise complaints when issues arise. They added: “We take our responsibility to the people who review content for Meta seriously and require our partners to provide industry-leading pay, benefits and support.”



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iQOO introduces Z6 Pro and Z6 44W

Today, the Indian division of IQOO held an event introducing two phones - iQOO Z6 Pro and iQOO Z6 44W. They are entirely new devices with Snapdragon chipsets and AMOLED screens with Schott Xensation protection. The iQOO Z6 44W is different from the original iQOO Z6 (also sold as vivo T1 5G) and it goes beyond the headlining charging speed. It has an LTE-only Snapdragon 680 chipset with 4GB, 6GB or 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. The Z6 44W is built around a 6.44” AMOLED screen of Full HD+ resolution. The refresh rate is limited to 60Hz, though. Around the back is a 50MP main...



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Ravio is bringing real-time data to the talent fight

UK-based Ravio reckons real-time data is the best way to arm businesses to win the global talent war.

Its new-to-market compensation benchmarking tool lets users see how the compensation (wages and benefits) they offer their own staff compares to the market by pooling data across its employer customers (data is anonymized at the platform level) — idea being to help them offer more competitive packages which help convince talent to sign on the dotted line.

“Customers can explore market data and compare themselves to companies with similar characteristics such as location, industry, funding raised and headcount growth,” it writes of its SaaS platform in a press release accompanying the official launch today.

The software also lets companies “identify compensation inequalities at individual, job type and company levels — and compare to peers in the market”, as it tells it.

“Whether it be gender, background or other criteria, this offers the most detailed diversity insights available to companies who want to make data-driven changes,” is another top-line claim.

The startup, founded out of London, has been operating in stealth mode since starting building work on the platform in January, though it quietly opened up access a couple of weeks ago. (Research work and the idea itself dates back to last year.)

It is now flipping on the light today for its official launch — and also announcing a total of $10 million in seed funding led by Northzone with participation from Cherry Ventures and Spark Capital.

Ravio’s first target is fast growth scale-ups which are of course at the coal-face of the fight for talent. These high profile, high pressure startups are also often on the front line for diversity issues — where Ravio believes its SaaS tool will also provide valuable benchmarking. 

“Hiring and retention is the biggest challenge right now for scaleups due to war for talent, fast moving markets, (over)funding, the shift to remote work and ‘the great resignation’,” argues co-CEO and co-founder, Raymond Siems.

“There’s a lot of clamour on closing pay and diversity gaps at startups but not many tangible numbers or practical solutions — it’s mostly high level reports and talk.”

The follow-on goal for Ravio is to deepen its database by getting more scale-ups signed up — and, ultimately, it hopes to be able to expand the approach to other sectors. After all, notes Siems, there are talent shortages across all sorts of sectors — so a tool that supports businesses to make more attractive compensation offers could have broad utility, assuming the benchmarking insights live up to billing. 

“We’re starting focused but the need for a solution is universal across industries and company sizes, it’s not confined to the tech industry. We validated this during our research phase, with strong feedback from SMEs all the way up to large enterprises in other industries,” he tells TechCrunch.

“High growth startups are the best place to start because they’re the least served by traditional benchmarking providers, and are feeling the talent crunch the most. Employee equity in private companies is one of the least transparent areas within compensation, so we’re tackling this early on.

“By having a focused approach we can build depth in our dataset, before expanding into other sectors.”

Ravio works by a sharing to participate model which means that organizations that want access to its jobs benchmarking data must agree to share info on their own teams, including salary data.

The basic service is free but the team is building additional modules to layer on top that will be paid — so it’s taking a freemium approach to grease its data pipe.

“We gather data from ‘source of truth’ systems including the HRIS, ATS and cap table management software of our customers,” explains Siems. “We primarily connect via API, so there’s no manual work for our customers in submitting and drawing together data, and this enables real-time updates rather than one-off static submissions — which are inefficient and hard to scale.”

“We currently support 28 HR systems which cover all the major players in Europe including Workday, Personio, BambooHR, HiBob and Namely,” he adds.

Per Siems, Ravio’s automated, scalable data-pipeline approach is made possible because of widespread accessibility of employer data held in HR and other business systems via API — it just needs to convince employers to give it API access.

He does not sound concerned that Ravio won’t get a critical enough mass of sign-ups to be able to generate genuinely valuable compensation insights. “We’re set to expand quickly so the market coverage of our dataset will enable us to provide the most useful and granular insights available in Europe, and the only-real time information,” he responds to a question on how comprehensive a view of the market Ravio has at this stage, before reiterating that the benchmarking and compensation analytics product is free.

“It’s a self-service onboarding that can be done in 15 minutes — so it’s as simple as possible for companies to join,” he adds.

Siems also says Ravio is doing some of its own processing of the data it acquires from user companies so that it can extrapolate “beyond our market penetration”.

This “special sauce” incorporates “macro data to predict wider trends”, per Siems, who points to what he says is the most “sophisticated” compensation work currently being done — “by internal teams at big tech players like Meta” — as the team’s inspiration. He says Ravio has also hired people who have experience working on compensation for Big Tech firms including Amazon and Meta, as well as other multinationals like Coca-Cola.

“They buy data from all of the major consultancies and then do their own data science work to build up a more detailed and comprehensive picture. We want to enable this depth and sophistication for companies of all sizes,” he says, adding: “We’re bringing a data science first approach into an area where there has been very little innovation, with a strong data science team from Cambridge and Oxford.”

Ravio isn’t disclosing the total number of scale-ups which signed up pre-launch but Siems, claims it’s already got a “healthy” list of customers who “heard about what we are building and wanted to join our testing phase”.

“Some of the names we’re working with include unicorns Deliveroo, Truelayer, Flink, Zego and other high-growth European startups including Healx, Zoomo and Plum Guide,” he says.

The paid version of the SaaS will be charged based on the number of employees the user has, according to Siems.

“We’re charging for advanced features and two additional modules that we’re releasing in the coming months: Manage and Communicate,” he notes, describing two of the premium products it has in the works. “Our Communicate module includes interactive offer letters for candidates, and a compensation portal for employees, to make it easier for them to understand every part of their package and their employer. This includes education on commonly misunderstood topics like equity and tax.

“Our Manage module provides a suite of tools to allow companies to manage compensation processes effortlessly. This includes organisation level budgeting and banding features, compensation review cycle management workflows, and growth scenario planning.”

On diversity, how ‘full spectrum’ Ravio’s proposition can be is less clear — given Siems says the data available to it “varies by company”.

“We’re seeing the most commonly available data relates to gender, age, country of citizenship, marital status and ethnicity — but increasingly HR systems are supporting wider data fields such as disability status, so we’ll be expanding our analytics as the data allows,” he says on that. 

While employers having better data on competitive rates of pay and broader compensation packages might be good for businesses to win talent, there is a question of whether this necessarily benefits employees — who aren’t being directly empowered to, for example, call out wage gaps inside their own organization, say if certain groups are being paid below market rates, since the tool looks intended for use by the HR department, rather than for general access.

Asked about the risk of one-way real-time information disproportionately empowering employers, Ravio says: “We will be releasing market reports that are freely available — covering both compensation and diversity — that will empower both candidates and other employers.”

“We believe that many of the current inequities in the market are not a result of bad intentions but rather the result of a lack of data,” he adds. “By becoming an objective source of information for employers in a notoriously opaque and difficult to understand space, Ravio’s product will ultimately benefit employees by empowering companies to make unbiased decisions.”

Flush with seed funding and post-official-launch, the team’s focus for the rest of this year is on growth in Europe — where Siems says they spy “huge opportunity”.

“However the talent war is global so we will be quickly expanding our reach to new shores next year,” he adds, noting the startup has grabbed backing from a number of international investors. He also flags the experience of his co-founders, Roy Blanga and Merten Wulfert, in helping to rapidly scale Deliveroo, Groupon and HotelTonight internationally — claiming: “We’re well positioned to execute on our vision.”

On the competitive front, Ravio’s view is “there’s very little on the fairness and team analytics side” — with most of the action focused on compensation benchmarking. So it will presumably be weighting its offering there.

“In some ways we are building a new age version of ‘salary surveys’ and compensation benchmarking services offered by Radford, Towers Watson and Mercer (the big 3 players) which have been around for decades,” Siems suggests, adding: “There is no one offering real-time data in Europe to our knowledge. Some new players are serving tech companies but only with static, manually collected data. In the US there are some new players and older static offerings like Option Impact.

“It’s also possible that HRIS players (e.g. Personio) will look to build their own version but with the market for HR tech being so fragmented — it will be tricky to get worthwhile breadth of data long term. The market is better structured for there to be a HRIS/ATS/Cap table agnostic player like us.”

Glassdoor does already pool user-contributed salary data — so can offer a snapshot of pay rates — but Siems believes Ravio is not directly competing since Glassdoor’s data is unverified, “patchy”, collected via one-off submissions and lacks enough breadth or depth to be useful to companies making compensation decisions.

“Companies need comprehensive data,” he argues. “It also doesn’t have access to information to enable team or fairness analytics.”

Commenting on Ravio’s seed in a statement, Michiel Kotting, partner at Northzone, said: “We see a huge market shift happening which is going to leave behind companies who don’t modernise their approach around compensation. Winning companies will be transparent with compensation in the context of rising prices (inflation, cost of living, logistic costs) and a tighter talent market, especially in tech. Roy, Merten and Raymond are going after a problem that all companies big or small have, and are poised to build a leading company in the category. They have the experience and leadership to tackle all things compensation from salaries to equity and benefits, all big pain points for fast-growing companies.”

 



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Infinix announces Note 12, Hot 12 and Smart 6 HD

A trio of new Infinix phones was announced today. Infinix Note 12 brings a 6.7-inch AMOLED display and Helio G88 chipset. Inifinx Hot 12 gets an even larger 6.82-inch IPS LCD with HD+ resolution as well as a 90Hz refresh rate. Infinix Smart 6 HD is the budget-friendly option in with its 6.6-inch HD+ LCD and Android 11 (Go Edition) interface. Infinix Note 12 gets a 50MP main cam on its back alongside a 2MP macro lens and a QVGA auxiliary module. The 16MP selfie cam is housed in a waterdrop notch. MediaTek’s Helio G88 is paired with 4/6GB RAM and up to 128GB built-in storage which is...



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Eden AI unifies ML APIs from several cloud vendors

French startup Eden AI has raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round (€1.5 million) to build a programming interface that lets you access AI engines from multiple vendors. The company unifies those APIs and offers a simple way to try them out, and mix and match.

Over the past few years, small and large cloud vendors have been building APIs that magically process data in their cloud infrastructure using machine learning models. For instance, you can use these APIs to detect and extract text from images, recognize objects, extract keywords from a block of text, turn speech into text, translate text and more.

And yet, all those APIs aren’t perfectly equivalent. Some APIs are better than others. Some APIs work well in one language but not so well in another language. Some APIs are easier to use and implement as well.

Eden AI is building the API to rule them all. “We started as a consulting firm specialized in data science and AI,” co-founder and CEO Taha Zemmouri told me. “As consultants, we couldn’t directly recommend the best model as we had to test them first,” he added later.

The startup has established 20 partnerships with AI engine providers, such as Mindee, Dataleon, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Rev.AI, Speechmatics and Lettria. It is also compatible with big cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

“We have created an overlay that acts as a single entry point. Switching to another provider is as easy as changing a parameter in the API,” Zemmouri said.

As pricing evolves, Eden AI also offers some flexibility as you’re no longer locked in with a single cloud vendor. On the billing side, you don’t have to open a user account with each provider. Instead, your Eden AI account lets you access all those APIs.

If you already have an account on a specific cloud, you can also add your own key to use your own account. Eden AI doesn’t charge more than what you’d get from cloud vendors. The startup takes a cut on the provider side.

Up next, the company wants to automatically select the right API for your needs. Currently, clients have to define the provider in their API calls. But you could imagine a feature that lets Eden AI pick the best route for you.

Supported by Paris-based accelerator 50 Partners, the company has raised its pre-seed round from several business angels, such as Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia), Sébastien Pahl (Docker), Julien Lemoine (Algolia), Benjamin Fabre (DataDome), Laurent Letourmy (Ysance), Jean-Baptiste Aviat (Sqreen), Georges Gomes (Div Riots) and Thomas Grange (Botify).



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Tuesday, April 26, 2022

In the wake of Fast’s collapse, Volume thinks it can crack the payment checkout conundrum

Online payment methods can be expensive for merchants, who have to pay between 2% and 8% of every sale to debit and credit card, ewallet and BNPL facilitators. Much of this is often passed to consumers. Fast was a hugely well-funded startup that tried to address this by closed in spectacular fashion just recently. Other examples tackling the issue include Rapyd and Checkout.com, Bolt.

Volume, is a new checkout startup that has now closed a pre-seed round of $2.4 million led by firstminute Capital and joined by SeedX and Haatch Ventures. Obviously tiny compared to Fast’s $102 million Series B…

Volume’s take on this checkout market is – it says – about making the checkout process shorter and reducing associated fees. It does this by using the Variable Recurring Payment mandate and also employs biometric security to finalize the purchase.

Simone Martinelli, founder and CEO at Volume, says: “Instead of yet another one-click checkout, Volume is building the world’s first-ever transparent checkout. Ecommerce has a ‘hidden tax’ in the form of payment commissions to cards and ewallets, and consumers don’t know this ultimately impacts on the prices they pay. We want to finally bring transparency to this enormous market and kill all hidden fees.”
Volume was founded by Simone Martinelli and Krzysztof Tarnawski, who spent the last 10 years working at Level39, Mastercard, HSBC and WorldRemit.

The startup says it has 50 merchants across retail, food delivery and digital marketplaces in the UK.

The fintech will use the new funding to expand its UK business, before it looks towards the rest of Europe and North America.

Arek Wylegalski, Partner at firstminute Capital, commented: “Volume is seizing the opportunity created by open banking to enable a new, improved ecommerce payment experience. The high interchange fees that have long been regarded as normal in this $5 trillion market are finally about to disappear. Having backed Revolut at a similar stage in the past, I believe in Krzysztof’s and Simone’s unique mix of fintech know-how, technical talent, relentless customer focus and ambition to get the job done.”

Other participants in the funding round include angels Christian Faes (LendInvest), Russ Carroll (ex-Klarna), as well as angels from MADE.COM, Mastercard, Visa and American Express.



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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 Pokemon Edition sells out in minutes

Last week, Samsung announced its Galaxy Z Flip3 Pokemon Edition phone and the phone now went on open sale in South Korea. Sure enough, several minutes after the device was made available, all units priced at KRW 1,284,000 ($1,024) were sold out over the company’s Galaxy Campus Store in Seoul as well as the Samsung online store. The retail package included a special Pokemon-themed box, a special Pokemon pouch, a clear case with Pikachu stickers, additional Pokemon stickers, a Pokeball pop socket and a Pikachu key chain. Samsung also included a free one-year Samsung Care+ plan on the...



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vivo announces new T1 5G and T1x 4G

vivo launched the 5G-ready T1x last October with the Dimensity 900 SoC and now the company delivers its 4G-only version, powered by the Snapdragon 680 chip. The vivo T1x 4G comes with two RAM options (4GB and 8GB) and as many storage choices (64GB and 128GB). It has a dedicated microSD card slot for storage expansion. The smartphone runs Funtouch OS 12 out of the box, based on Android 12. The vivo T1x 4G is built around a 6.58" FullHD+ LCD with a 90Hz refresh rate and a notch for the 8MP selfie camera. Its fingerprint-resistant back panel has a "frosted curtain coating" for a "silky...



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Can Mirai Flights make it easier to book a private jet? Its new investors think so

If there’s one thing we found out during the pandemic, it is that private jets were one way for the rich and famous to avoid traveling with the potentially infectious plebian classes. This is perhaps why there is still a market for tech companies to enter into this rarefied industry. But more seriously, there are just more wealthy people around, anyway, making this market a growing one.

Mirai Flights, a London-based service for instant booking of charter flights, is benefitting from this renewed interest in private travel, having now raised a $3M investment round led by Xploration Capital. The company plans to use the funds to scale the service in the UK, Europe, United Arab Emirates, and the CIS states. Mirai originally came out of Georgia (the country).

The Mirai Flights app is available in 63 countries and operates with 8 private airlines. Mirai uses a last-mile model, matching supply and demand, utilizing empty flight legs and thereby reducing carbon emissions of flights by making it more efficient to return a jet to its base location. And if you can afford it, you can book a flight for up to €300,000 in one click. 
 
Irakli Litanishvili, co-founder and CEO of Mirai Flights said in a statement: “We estimate that the market for commercial flights on private aircraft is up to 300,000 flights a year or approximately $10 billion in the UK and Europe. Our aim is to cover 4% of this market and provide up to 12,000 commercial flights per year in the UK and Europe in 2023, connecting 150 private jets to the app with the expected turnover of $240 million.”

Mirai’s platform calculates the cost of the flight for the client on the basis of the operator’s data, the activity of flights in Europe over the past 3 years, and the demand at a particular point of departure.

“We are targeting emerging markets and the business aviation industry is a great example of a highly fragmented space with largely antiquated consumer-facing technology”, said Igor Kim, Managing Partner at Xploration Capital.

However, Mirai is not alone as it competes in this market with PrivateFly, FLYXO, Opes Jet, and Victor, to name just a few.



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Honor X7 and Honor X8 midrangers arrive in the UK

Honor has just brought two of its mid-rangers to the UK market. An eagle-eyed reader of ours spotted the Honor X7 and Honor X8 on the company website, where they both are up for pre-order. The Honor X7 is an LTE-only phone with a Snapdragon 680 chipset, 48MP quad camera and a 5,000 mAh battery with 22.5W charging support. It has a single memory option - 4GB RAM and 128GB storage. Honor UK is offering the X7 in Black, Silver, or Blue colors for £170, and is throwing a pair of Earbuds 2 Lite, which have a £70 MSRP if purchased separately. The bundle deal is valid until May 15....



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Lengow acquires e-commerce intelligence startup Netrivals

A bit more than a year after private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in Lengow, the company is expanding its product offering with the acquisition of Netrivals. The financial terms of the transaction haven’t been disclosed.

Lengow is a software-as-a-service company focused on e-commerce automation. For instance, the company helps its customers list their products on several e-commerce platforms at once.

First, Lengow customers import their data feed into the platform. The company supports many popular e-commerce back ends, such as Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, etc. Lengow then helps you cleans up and formats the catalogue.

After that, customers decide where they want to publish their products. In addition to online marketplaces, Lengow can be used to push information to price comparison sites and affiliate platforms. Customers can also use the product for social media and retargeting campaigns.

Once everything is set up, Lengow acts as the backbone for your sales strategy. When you edit you catalogue, changes are reflected across multiple channels. For items that are hard to store, you can reflect when you’re temporarily out of stock across all platforms.

Even when it comes to running your business, Lengow simplifies your workflow as it can centralize all orders. You can accept marketplace orders from a single interface, track packages, cancel orders and issue refunds. You can also use the product to automate some tasks, including adjusting prices according to competition.

Netrivals is a Barcelona-based startup that focuses specifically on price and market intelligence. The product helps you track the prices of your competitors over time across multiple e-commerce marketplaces. It currently tracks 1 billion products across 32,000 stores.

More generally, Netrivals lets you see if you tend to be more expensive or cheaper than competitors. And, you guessed it, you can leverage that data to create rules and dynamically adjust your prices depending on the competitive landscape.

Lengow’s acquisition of Netrivals makes sense as they don’t exactly have the same product positioning, and Lengow doesn’t have a physical presence in Spain. The French startup opened offices in Munich and London — and Netrivals will become Lengow’s office in Barcelona.

“Our customers and marketplace partners have been asking for more capabilities for pricing intelligence alongside the Lengow solution, to activate the product data based on reliable market insights. We’re excited to expand our offerings with this acquisition and continue to innovate to help brands and retailers succeed in their e-commerce strategies,” Lengow CEO Mickael Froger said in a statement.



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Monday, April 25, 2022

GM reveals first images of the EV Chevy Corvette (and teases AWD)

The great American sports car is going electric. General Motors President Mark Reuss shared the news this morning, and released the first images of the upcoming electric Chevrolet Corvette. He says the vehicle could be available for sale as soon as “early next year.” And the electrification of the Corvette is least exciting part of the announcement. The video clearly shows the front tires are powered, meaning only thing: The Corvette is going all-wheel drive.

Chevy appears to be building for an AWD future. Automotive rumors peg the unannounced, high-performance Corvette C8 Z06 to sport AWD, and the video here all but confirms the arrangement in the EV version, too. It appears that the EV Corvette will be based on the existing mid-engine Corvette platform, which leaves plenty of room in the front and back for motors on each axle. With internal combustion affairs, vehicles require significant retrofitting to make room for all-wheel drive’s extra driveshafts and differentials. With EVs, it just takes another motor and some computer programming.

According to Reuss, the electric Corvette utilizes GM’s Ultium platform, which is underpinning numerous upcoming GM EVs including the Hummer EV, Silverado EV, and Blazer EV.

General Motors has been quiet about replacing the Corvette’s small block chevy with batteries and motors. The first murmurs of the vehicle came several years back when GM moved the Corvette team into EV building in Warren, Michigan. And today’s announcement doesn’t shed a lot of light onto the subject either. GM did not release expected price point, battery range, or 0-60 mph times.

Corvette faithful knew this days was coming. The Corvette is the quintessential American sports car, and since nearly the beginning, a small block Chevy V8 has been its beating heart. An electric Corvette will, of course, lack the comforting rumble of a V8, but the electric motors will no doubt make up for it with explosive performance — especially if it comes equipped with motors on each axle.



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What will Elon actually do if he buys Twitter?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week.

  • Stocks are down, and cryptos not looking too impressive as the world gears up for a packed week of mega-tech earnings.
  • The Twitter-Elon Musk deal could happen soon? As soon as today? It appears that after Musk dropped a filing indicating that he actually had the funds to buy the deal, talks shook loose. What’s ahead? I have precisely and exactly no idea.
  • Hopin is perhaps enduring some turbulence, per the FT. The company, once riding a torrid wave of market demand, is seeing its business molt into a more steady form. That meant layoffs earlier in the year, and a decline in its share price on secondary exchanges.
  • Startups! From the startup-realm this morning, new rounds for Zenda and Rooser. Not Rooster, mind, just Rooser.
  • And there’s a general climate of fear out there, which won’t do much for market sentiment. Alas, 2022 is not 2021 when it comes to investor excitement.

And we have a live show coming this week! Get stoked, details to follow.

Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.



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Circa wants to make first-of-the-month rent payments obsolete

Paying rent on time can mean the difference between having a place to live, and well, not. Circa believes there is a simpler way to help renters keep a roof over their heads.

The Maine-based payment technology company has created a mobile-first platform to enable renters to pay on time, in full, each month. And, if you run into problems and can’t pay the entire rent, Circa provides the option to break up the payments.

Co-founder and CEO Leslie Hyman told TechCrunch that over $15 billion in rent is paid late every month in the United States. Not only does that hurt their credit and their housing situation, but it also challenges the relationship between the renter and the property owner.

She shared some interesting stats, including that about 30% of rent payments come in later that the fifth of the month, and that 5.9 million renters, or 15%, were behind in payments, accounting for something like $41 billion in arrears monthly in the U.S. On the property owner side, evictions can cost them between $3,500 and $10,000, and they often have only an average success rate of 17% on debt collection.

Hyman’s background is in life insurance, and she had previously worked for large entities like AIG and MelLife, helping them build new businesses based on payments. She explained that when insurance premiums would bill at the beginning of the month, some 20% of them would not go through and need to be rebilled. When they started listening to the customer support calls that came through, many customers would be asking for a different date, when funds would be available.

That’s when she and her co-founder, Heman Duraiswamy, who has a background in residential real estate ownership, took a look at the pain of paying bills and started Circa in 2019. Circa completed the Techstars accelerator program at the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine in 2021.

“We started to understand what’s happening in America where if you look at the critical bills of housing, transportation and health, those all have the beginning of the month, and they add up to on average over $2,600,” Hyman said. “With income volatility increasing 40% in the past 50 years, you begin to question why we bill on the first of the month.”

Circa, Leslie Hyman

Circa CEO Leslie Hyman. Image Credits: Circa

Circa’s aim is to get out ahead of late rent, and in turn, foster a better relationship between property owner and renter. It is working with 1,000 units under management in the Northeast, Pennsylvania and in Sun Valley.

It raised $2 million — with another bit of money coming in soon — to expand the kinds of properties it can work with. Investors in the round include Maine Venture Fund, Techstars and Hub Investment Group.

Its sweet spot is properties with between 1,000 and 10,000 units. The app and web platform integrate with the property owner’s current property management software. Circa will promote to residents that it is there.

Renters set up an account in minutes and can choose their payment method and schedule the payment — a feature that can be changed anytime if money is tight. There is an option to pay in full or split up the payments and have money pulled on different weeks. Circa sends notifications letting the renter know the payment is coming out of their account, and there is the ability to make a last-minute change.

Circa makes money in a few ways: The company charges the property owner $1 per unit per month in a SaaS fee. Hyman explained that the owner actually recoups some of that cost because Circa charges the resident only when they do a flexible payment schedule. The company will then do a 50-50 revenue share with the property owner. For example, with a $1,000 rent the resident would pay $15 that month to do the flexible payment schedule. Of that $15, half goes back to the property.

In addition, the company offers credit reporting and takes over a property’s arrears management in a way not done by others, Hyman said.

“We have a transition in that same app that the residents are already comfortable with that is smooth and natural and goes straight from not making it at the end of the month into ‘would you pay a portion of that missed rent for the upcoming months,’” she added. “Others have people who go out and have a conversation with a resident. It is enormously labor intensive, and at a time when property managers have the highest turnover ever recorded. We take that heavy lift off their shoulders.”



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