Techhub knowledge

Dara Kerr / CNET : Uber partners with telemedicine service Ro to give US workers free COVID assessments, as Lyft partners with One Medical for one month trial memberships   —  The ride-hailing company partners with the telemedicine service to help drivers figure out if they may have been infected with the coronavirus. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2xn5Vd9

Car brands are looking to tap into the country’s heightened health concerns to help kick-start flagging sales. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/2y770q9

ICANN : ICANN board has voted to reject the sale of the .org registry to private equity firm Ethos Capital   —  Today, the ICANN Board made the decision to reject the proposed change of control and entity conversion request that Public Interest Registry (PIR) submitted to ICANN. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3f9JDN2

Monica Chin / The Verge : Reddit has disabled its chat room feature, Start Chatting, a day after launch due to “several errors” in rollout and moderators' concerns over lack of control   —  The company says the rollout had several errors  —  Remember how Reddit announced just yesterday that it was introducing built-in subreddit chat rooms? from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2WcIBHG

Aimee Chanthadavong / ZDNet : IDC: Global smartphone shipments dropped 11.7% YoY to 276M during Q1 2020, the largest YoY decline ever   —  Shipment volumes suffered its largest year over year decline in the first quarter.  —  The latest data from International Data Corporation (IDC) has revealed that as the world grapples … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/35miL8a

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/2SoHEuD

Benjamin Romano / The Seattle Times : Amazon tells its Seattle and Bellevue employees already working from home since early March that they “are welcome to do so until at least October 2”   —  Amazon told its corporate employees working from home since early March that they “are welcome to do so until at least October 2 … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3bUN6x9

Joseph Cox / VICE : The UN's social distancing app, 1point5, is largely ineffective at monitoring distance between people, indiscriminately picking up any Bluetooth signals   —  This week a division of the United Nations announced its new social distancing app designed to help alert people when they get too close … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2YlUOfJ

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch : Walmart is piloting a 2-hour “Express” grocery delivery service for an extra $10 fee; plans to expand to 1K stores in May, using its 74K+ “personal shoppers”   —  Record usage of grocery delivery services amid the COVID-19 pandemic has led to delayed orders … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2VPbaMe

Bobbie Johnson / MIT Technology Review : Pandemic conspiracy theories are being spread using Wayback Machine links of content already discredited by fact-checkers and even deleted   —  Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote “zombie content” that evades moderators and fact-checkers. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2z1HClK

While iPhone sales fell due to the lockdown in China, sales of streaming services jumped. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/2yYa1ZT

Amazon's sales surged 26%, but costs are also up due to spending on safety precautions and wages. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/2WctkXk

The space agency announces the companies that will develop landers to return astronauts to the Moon. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/35hntEe

Saffron Barker, Jack Maynard, Lady Leshurr and Big Narstie are among names raising cash for NHS. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/2ycVskT

Thermal cameras can spot people with a temperature. Will they help to end the lockdown? from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/3f37YnQ

Tom Warren / The Verge : Zoom admits it doesn't have 300M DAUs, quietly correcting a misleading claim in its original blog post, which now says 300M “daily Zoom meeting participants”   —  Zoom quietly updated a blog post earlier this month  —  Zoom has admitted it doesn't have 300 million daily active users. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2WbkLvL

Just as challenger banks have appeared in the B2C space, so to have B2B startup banks aimed small businesses, among them startups like Qonto (Fr), Tide (UK), Penta (GER) and CountingUp (UK). Today another such firm, Finom , has closed a €6.5m ($7M) seed funding round led by Target Global, with participation from General Catalyst. Further investors include FJ Labs, Raisin founders Tamaz Georgadze, Frank Freund and Michael Stephan, and Ilya Kondrashov, the founder of MarketFinance. The company will primarily use the fresh capital to develop its banking product, and to expand further into Italy, France and Germany in the summer of 2020. Finom puts accounting, financial management and banking functions for early-stage businesses and SMEs into one ‘mobile-first’ product. Businesses can set up an online account, with accounts payable and account receivable from both the app and the site in fairly short order. The company was started by the team that also launched Modulbank, ‘neobank’ fo...

Meet Biloba , a French startup that wants to leverage tech to make it easier to keep your children healthy. The company recently launched a new mobile app that lets you chat with a doctor whenever you want between 8 AM and 8 PM. This way, if you have questions about your kids, you can get a quick answer. Of course, a text conversation will never replace a visit to the pediatrician. But chances are you have a ton of questions, especially if you’re a first-time parent. Instead of browsing obscure discussion forums, you can go straight to a doctor. Biloba isn’t working with pediatricians specifically. The company is also partnering with nurses and general practitioners. Eventually, the service is going to cost €10 per month but the company is waving fees during the lockdown. After just three weeks, the startup managed to attract 4,000 users with around 200 conversations per day. Compared to other telemedicine services in France, such as Doctolib , Biloba doesn’t rely on video consul...

San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup  Flutterwave has launched Flutterwave Store, a portal for African merchants to create digital shops to sell online. The product is less Amazon and more eBay — with no inventory or warehouse requirements. Flutterwave insists the move doesn’t represent any shift away from its core payments business. The company accelerated the development of Flutterwave Store in response to COVID-19, which has brought restrictive measures to SMEs and traders operating in Africa’s largest economies. After creating a profile, users can showcase inventory and link up to a payment option. For pickup and delivery, Flutterwave Store operates through existing third party logistics providers, such as Sendy in Kenya and Sendbox in Nigeria. The service will start in 15 African countries and the only fees Flutterwave will charge (for now) are on payments. Otherwise, it’s free for SMEs to create an online storefront and for buyers and sellers to transa...

Prague based Resistant AI has nabbed a $2.75M seed round. The security startup’s machine learning technology is designed to be deployed on top of AI systems used for financial decision making to protect customers in markets such as financial services and ecommerce from attacks such as targeted manipulation, adversarial machine learning and advanced fraud. The seed round was co-led by Index Ventures (Jan Hammer) and Credo Ventures (Ondrej Bartos and Vladislav Jez). Seedcamp also participating, along with Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath; Michal Pechoucek, CTO of Avast and other unnamed angel investors. Bartos joins the board of directors on behalf of the investors. The startup sells an additional layer of protection that’s specifically designed for tightening security around automated functions such as credit risk scoring and anti-money laundering by using tech to detect fake documents that feed such systems. Its tech is also aimed at uncovering suspicious patterns of transactions whic...

Dan Primack / Axios : Andreessen Horowitz raises $515M for second fund dedicated to cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies   —  Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has raised $515 million for its second fund dedicated to cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.  —  Strategy: Like its $300 million predecessor … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2xlmlTv