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Politico : A look at the increasing prevalence of facial recognition and AI tech across the globe, as the US and EU governments' efforts to limit their use have stalled   —  The result is an impasse that has left tech companies largely in control of where and how to deploy facial recognition. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2u0Hmkb

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat : ProtonMail launches E2E encrypted calendar app ProtonCalendar in public beta, tied to users' paid ProtonMail accounts, encrypting event info and participants   —  Encrypted email provider ProtonMail has officially launched its new calendar in public beta.  The move is part of the Swiss … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2SJbBGW

2019 was the year wireless earbuds went mainstream. The category has been around much longer, of course, and Apple really broke the whole thing open a full three years ago, with the release of the first AirPods, but sales exploded in 2019. The category experienced a 183% YOY increase in shipments last quarter, according to a new study . The space continues to be driven by Apple, which currently controls 43% of the market (a number that will likely increase with the arrival of the AirPod Pros), but its near future seems destined to be defined by a race to the bottom. With Apple, Samsung, Sony and Google battling it out for the high end of the market, other players are determined to undercut the competition on price. At $30, JLab’s Go Air True Wireless Earbuds (the first and last time I’m going to type that full name) are positioned right around Xiaomi’s category defining AirDots. The Chinese manufacturer controls around 7% of the market (a notch above Samsung’s more premium offerings)...

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today, the last day of 2019, we’re taking a second look at Boston. Regular readers of this column will recall that we recently took a peek at Boston’s startup ecosystem , and that we compiled a short countdown of the largest rounds that took place this year in Utah . Today we’re doing the latter with the former. What follows is a countdown of Boston’s seven largest venture rounds from the year, including details concerning what the company does and who backed it. We’re also taking a shot after each entry at where we think the companies are on the path to going public. As before, we’re using Crunchbase data for this project ( here ). And we’re only looking at venture rounds, so no post-IPO action, no grants, no secondaries, no debt, and no private equity-style buyouts. Ready? Let’s have some fun. Countdown Boston has produced a number of big exits in recent years,...

InsightFinder , a startup from North Carolina based on 15 years of academic research, wants to bring machine learning to system monitoring to automatically identify and fix common issues. Today, the company announced a $2 million seed round. ​ IDEA Fund Partners, a VC out of Durham, North Carolina,​ led the round with participation from ​Eight Roads Ventures​ and Acadia Woods Partners. The company was founded by North Carolina State professor Helen Gu, who spent 15 years researching this problem before launching the startup in 2015. Gu also announced that she had brought on former Distil Networks co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid to be Chief Operating Officer. Essaid, who sold his company earlier this year, says his new company focuses on taking a proactive approach to application and infrastructure monitoring. “We found that these problems happen to be repeatable, and the signals are there. We use artificial intelligence to predict and get out ahead of these issues,” he said. He add...

The tech giant has filed a copyright infringement claim against software company Corellium. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/358hVdz

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Shipfix , a relatively new startup aiming to drag the dry cargo shipping industry into the digital age, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Idinvest Partners, with participation from Kima Ventures, The Family, Bpifrance and strategic business angels. The company was founded in December 2018 by Serge Alleyne (CEO) and Antoine Grisay (COO), and launched just two months ago. “We’re trying to fix the email overload for everybody involved in the process of fixing a dry cargo ship by providing a comprehensive market monitor,” Alleyne tells TechCrunch. “We’re also producing data-driven insights that are profoundly missing in the bulk/break-bulk space. Actually the last revolution of the dry cargo industry was email, and so far people still rely on indices based on a panel of brokers while all the data is available in emails”. To solve this, Alleyne says that Shipfix connects to its clients’ email to extract and anonymously aggregate “billions of data points using...

Dan Sabbagh / The Guardian : UK surveillance watchdog: public bodies have insufficient government guidance on when it's appropriate to use facial recognition, lip-reading tech, and more   —  CCTV commissioner says he gets many queries about facial recognition and other tools  —  Police forces, hospitals and councils struggle … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/35cfp5Z

Customers who recycle old speakers qualify for a 30% discount on new products but there is a catch. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/39ulQ7S

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Celia Chen / South China Morning Post : Research shows Tencent participated in 108 investment deals this year, compared to 162 in 2018, spending ~$4.9B in total, less than half of its 2018's total   —  Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings, one of the most active investors in the tech world, put money into 108 deals this year compared … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/36cQuk2

Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, is ready to take on Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart. Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio, two subsidiaries of Ambani’s Reliance Industries, said they have soft launched JioMart , their e-commerce venture, in parts of the state of Maharashtra — Mumbai, Kalyan and Thane. The e-commerce venture, which is being marketed as “Desh Ki Nayi Dukaan” (Hindi for new sore for the country), currently offers a catalog of 50,000 grocery items and promises “free and express delivery.” In an email to employees, accessed by TechCrunch, the two aforementioned subsidiaries that are working together on the e-commerce venture, said they plan to expand the service to many parts of India in coming months. A Reliance spokesperson declined to comment. The soft launch this week comes months after Ambani, who runs Reliance Industries — India’s largest industrial house — had said at a conference that he wants to service tens of millions of retailers and store owners across the c...

Postmates and Uber have filed a complaint in California federal district court, alleging that a bill limiting how companies can label workers as independent contractors is unconstitutional. The complaint, which includes two gig workers as co-plaintiffs, was filed in U.S. District Court on Monday, days before Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5) is due to go into effect on Jan. 1. It asks for a preliminary injunction against AB-5 while the lawsuit is under consideration. The complaint argues that AB-5 violates several clauses in the U.S. and California constitutions, including equal protection because of how it classifies gig workers for ride-sharing and on-demand delivery companies compared to the exemptions it grants to workers who do “substantively identical work” in more than twenty other industries. AB-5 was authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Democrat representing the 80th Assembly District in southern California and signed into law in September by Governor Gavin Newsom. It is int...