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French startup Ankorstore has raised a $29.9 million Series A round (€25 million) with Index Ventures leading the round. Existing investors GFC, Alven and Aglaé are also participating. Ankorstore is building a wholesale marketplace that connects independent shop owners with brands selling household supplies, maple syrup, headbands, bath salts, stationery items and a lot more. That list alone should remind you of neighborhood stores that sell a ton of cutesy stuff that you don’t necessarily need but that tend to be popular. The company works with 2,000 brands and 15,000 shops. And the startup isn’t just connecting buyers and sellers as it has a clear set of rules. For instance, the minimum first order is €100, which means that you can try out new products without ordering hundreds of items at once. By default, Ankorstore withdraws the money 60 days after placing an order. Brands get paid upon delivery. And of course, buying from several brands through Ankorstore should simplify yo...

Matt Richtel / New York Times : Members of rehab groups like Alcoholics Anonymous say moving meetings online was helpful due to the convenience of virtual sessions, which feel more intimate   —  It began as a stopgap way to get through the pandemic, but both participants and providers say virtual sessions have some clear advantages … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3g5k7tv

Theodoric Chew, co-founder and chief executive officer of mental health app Intellect Intellect , a Singapore-based startup that wants to lower barriers to mental health care in Asia, says it has reached more than one million users just six months after launching. Google also announced today that the startup’s consumer app, also called Intellect, is one of its picks for best personal growth apps of 2020 . The company recently closed an undisclosed seed round led by Insignia Ventures Partners. Angel investors including e-commerce platform Carousell co-founder and chief executive officer Quek Siu Rui; former Sequoia partner Tim Lee; and startup consultancy xto10x’s Southeast Asia CEO J.J. Chai also participated. In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners principal Samir Chaibi said, “In Intellect, we see a fast-scaling platform addressing a pain that has become very obvious amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that pairing clinically-backed protocols with an efficient mobile-f...

Nearly all of China’s largest internet firms have established a presence in online grocery. Just this week, news arrived that Alibaba co-led the $196 million C3 funding round of Nice Tuan , the two-year-old grocery group-buying firm’s fourth round year to date. People in China shop online for almost everything, including groceries. At first, grocery e-commerce appears to have caught on mainly among the digitally-savvy who have grown reliant on the convenience of e-commerce and don’t mind paying a bit more for delivery. Many elderly shoppers, on the other hand, still prefer visiting traditional wet markets where ingredients are generally cheaper. Now tech companies in China are scrambling to capture grocery shoppers of all ages. A new business model that’s getting a lot of funding is that of Nice Tuan, the so-called community group buying. In conventional grocery e-commerce, an intermediary platform like Alibaba normally connects individual shoppers to an array of merchants and offe...

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch : Amazon launches EC2 Mac instances bringing the Intel-based Mac mini to its cloud for $1.083 per hour billed by the second   —  AWS today opened its re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement: the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud.  These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/39t1EWa

AWS today opened its re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement : the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud. These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview. They won’t come cheap, though. The target audience here — and the only one AWS is targeting for now — is developers who want cloud-based build and testing environments for their Mac and iOS apps. But it’s worth noting that with remote access, you get a fully-featured Mac mini in the cloud, and I’m sure developers will find all kinds of other use cases for this as well. Given the recent launch of the M1 Mac minis , it’s worth pointing out that the hardware AWS is using — at least for the time being — are i7 machines with six physical and 12 logical cores and 32 GB of memory. Using the Mac’s built-in networking options, AWS connects them to its Nitro System for fast network and storage access. This means you’ll also be able to attach AWS block storage to these instances, for example. U...

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Some retailers are converting stores into mini-distribution hubs in response to Covid-19. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/37mkFqD

Starting in January, Facebook will pay UK publishers for some - but not all - of their content. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/3lpMymA

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 / Getty Images ) The Tor anonymity network has generated controversy almost constantly since its inception almost two decades ago. Supporters say it’s a vital service for protecting online privacy and circumventing censorship, particularly in countries with poor human rights records. Critics, meanwhile, argue that Tor shields criminals distributing child-abuse images, trafficking in illegal drugs, and engaging in other illicit activities. Researchers on Monday unveiled new estimates that attempt to measure the potential harms and benefits of Tor. They found that, worldwide, almost 7 percent of Tor users connect to hidden services, which the researchers contend are disproportionately more likely to offer illicit services or content compared with normal Internet sites. Connections to hidden services were significantly higher in countries rated as more politically “free” relative to those that are “partially free” or “not free.” Licit versus illicit Spe...

Nickie Louise / TechStartups.com : Totum Labs, which is developing low earth orbit nanosatellites for global IoT connectivity, raises $13M Series A led by Heroic Ventures and Space Capital   —  Totum Labs, a San Diego, CA-based tech startup that is revolutionalizing wireless technology by enabling low-cost, global … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/36mDfzE

Lee Clifford / Fortune : Mursion, which offers VR training to practice human skills, such as emotional intelligence, in the workplace, announces $20M Series B led by Leeds Illuminate   —  Hugo is furious.  —  He's sitting across from me, arms crossed, face scowling, exuding bad energy.  Sitting next to him is Maia. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3fUiuP4

The pandemic has made it all but impossible for a retail company without an online presence to survive. While companies heavily dependent on foot traffic, like J.Crew and Sur la Table have filed for bankruptcy this year, companies that are expert in e-commerce have thrived, including Target and Walmart. Amazon has gained perhaps the most steam in 2020, attracting roughly one quarter of all dollars spent online by U.S. shoppers throughout the year. Unfortunately, as more shopping moves online, fraud is exploding, too, and while many startups work with enterprises on the problem — flagging transactions for banks, for example — one New York-based startup, Fakespot , is using AI to notify online shoppers directly when the products they’re looking to buy are fake listings or when reviews they’re reading on marketplaces like Amazon or eBay are a fiction. We talked earlier today with founder and Kuwaiti immigrant Saoud Khalifah about the four-year-old business, which got started in his ow...

Wall Street Journal : S&P Global has agreed to acquire IHS Markit for about $44B in an all-stock deal, which would merge two of the largest providers of financial data and analysis   —  Landmark deal would combine two of the largest providers of data to Wall Street  —  S&P Global Inc. agreed to acquire IHS Markit Ltd … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2VkXxTT