By ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY from NYT Real Estate https://ift.tt/2n4uqDr
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
Recent Commercial Real Estate Transactions
By ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY from NYT Real Estate https://ift.tt/2n4uqDr
Summer Reading Contest Winner, Week 5: On ‘It Was “Roseanne” vs. “Roseanne,” in a Polarizing Revival’
By THE LEARNING NETWORK from NYT The Learning Network https://ift.tt/2ApKyZr
'Pistol Pete' Sessions Getting His Slops At The Public Trough
I wanna talk to you about Dallas Republican Congressfool Pete Sessions this morning. We call him Pistol Pete because he’s always shooting off his mouth.
Pete’s wife of 28 years finally had it with him. After putting up with his strip club, skirt chasing ways, she filed for divorce one month after Pete sent this love letter to Allen Stanford.
Just hours after federal agents charged banker Allen Stanford with fleecing investors of $7 billion, the disgraced financier received a message from one of Congress’ most powerful members, Pete Sessions.
“I love you and believe in you,’’ said the e-mail sent on Feb. 17. “If you want my ear/voice — e-mail,’’ it said, signed “Pete.’’
Stanford is serving a 110 year prison sentence.
Upon his divorce, Pete almost immediately married a failed Republican congressional candidate in Florida. Karen Sessions is 12 years Pete’s junior.
Okay, that’s the juicy stuff, but not all of it. In today’s Washington Post, you will discover that Donald Trump – who Pete loves almost as much as he loves Allen Stanford – is removing civil service employees and replacing them with his unqualified political friends at an agency that is supposed to oversee foreign aid.
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DeSantis Pledges Undying Loyalty To Trump In Bizarre New Ad
The Florida Governor's race took a turn for the weird yesterday when congressman Ron DeSantis released this weird and sinister little ad yesterday. It's meant to be cute and playful, but that's just what makes it all the more appalling.
An ad where you tease your toddler to "build the wall", read her "The Art of the Deal", and make her wear a MAGA hat is tantamount to child abuse,
Source: NBC News
Florida GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis wants to "Make America Great Again," and if he has his way, his young daughter will too.
Just a month out from his gubernatorial primary, DeSantis's campaign released a new spot that plays up his endorsement from President Trump and jokingly shows him giving his young children a crash-course in everything Trump.
He encourages his daughter to "build the wall" while she plays with blocks; reads his son Trump's book, "The Art of the Deal"; and tries to teach his children to say "Make America Great Again" and "Big League," two of the president's catchphrases.
The ad is meant to highlight Trump's endorsement, which has been a central piece of DeSantis's push against Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. DeSantis is one of the president's chief defenders on Capitol Hill, a frequent guest on Fox News, and has also traveled on Air Force One with the president.
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California Today: Feinstein Leads in Polls but Fails to Attract Voters
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and INYOUNG KANG from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2vqFSg6
The Fight for the One-Piece Swimsuit Emoji
By VANESSA FRIEDMAN from NYT Style https://ift.tt/2NUwSHM
Refugee Office Attacked as ISIS Seeks Soft Afghan Targets
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Freshworks raises $100M
Freshworks, a company that offers a variety of business software tools ranging from IT management to CRM for sales and customer support software, today announced that it has raised a $100 million funding round co-led by Sequoia and Accel Partners, with participation from CaptialG.
The company’s last funding round came in the form of a $55 million Series F round led by Sequoia in 2016. Today’s round brings the San Bruno-based company’s total funding to $250 million, at a valuation that’s now north of $1.5 billion, the company tells us. Freshworks also today noted that it now pulls in over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
In addition to the new funding, Freshworks also today announced that it has hired a former AppDynamics VP of finance and treasury Suresh Seshardi as its CFO. Seshardi helped AppDynamics prepare for its IPO, so it’s a fair bet that he’ll do the same at Freshworks. AppDynamics, of course, famously didn’t actually IPO but was instead acquired by Cisco only hours before the team was supposed to ring the bell on Wall Street.
Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham tells us we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for his company to IPO. “Freshworks hasn’t started the IPO process but we do feel that we will eventually go public in the U.S.,” he said. “With that said, our primary focus right now is on growing the business and investing in our platform. When the timing is right, we’ll make that decision.”
Freshworks, which launched its first product back in 2010, also tells us that it plans to use the new cash to invest in its platform and especially in looking at how it can use AI to bring new innovations to its tools.
Current Freshworks users include the likes of Sling TV, Honda, Hugo Boss, Toshiba and Cisco. In total, the company’s tools are now in use by about 150,000 businesses, making it one of the larger SaaS providers you have probably never heard of.
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Tractable is applying AI to accident and disaster appraisal
“Happy to spend 10 minutes on our vision and the journey we’re on, but then, really, 15 minutes on what we’ve got today, what it is we’ve achieved, what it is our AI does,” says Tractable co-founder and CEO Alexandre Dalyac when I video called him a couple of weeks ago. “You can probably speed up all of that,” I quip back.
The resulting conversation, lasting well over an hour, spanned all of the above and more, including what is required to build a successful AI business and why he and his team think they can help prevent another “AI winter.”
Founded in 2014 by Dalyac, Adrien Cohen and Razvan Ranca after going through company builder Entrepreneur First, London-based Tractable is applying artificial intelligence to accident and disaster recovery. Specifically, through the use of deep learning to automate visual damage appraisal, and therefore help speed up insurance payouts and access to other types of financial aid.
Our AI has already been trained on tens of millions of these cases, so that’s a perfect case of us already having distilled thousands of people’s work experience Alexandre Dalyac
Those things, he says, broadly break down into cars, homes and crops, roughly equating to $1 trillion in damage each year. But, perhaps more importantly, livelihoods get impacted.
“If a car gets damaged, mobility is reduced. If a home gets damaged, shelter is reduced. And if crops get damaged, food is reduced. Across all of those accidents and disasters, we’re talking hundreds of millions of lives affected.”
It is here where a little lateral (and non-artificial) thinking is required. Accident and disaster recovery starts with visual damage appraisal: look at the damage, say how much it’s going to cost, unlock the funds and rebuild. The problem (and Tractable’s opportunity) is that having an appraiser look at a car, house or field can take days to weeks depending on availability — and therefore so can accessing funds to start rebuilding — whereas the claim is that computer vision and AI technology can potentially do the same job in minutes.
“When you assess, that is basically a very powerful but very narrow visual task, which is, look at the damage, how much is it gonna cost? Today, as you can imagine, these kind of assessments are manual. And they take days to weeks. And so you instantly know that with AI that can be 10 times faster,” says Dalyac.
“In some sense this is a perfect class of AI tasks, because it’s very heavy on image classification. And image classification is a task where AI can surpass human performance as of this decade. If you have instant appraisal, that means faster recovery. Hence the mission.”
Dalyac says that part of Tractable’s secret sauce is in the many millions of proprietary labels the company has produced. This has been aided by its patented “interactive machine learning technology,” which allows it to label images faster and cheaper than typical labeling services.
The team’s focus to date has been to train its AI to understand car damage, technology it has already deployed in six countries, seeing the startup work primarily with insurers.
Related to this I’m shown a simple demo of Tractable’s car damage appraisal tool. Dalyac opens a folder of car images on his laptop and uploads them to the software. Within seconds, the AI has seemingly identified the different parts of the car and determined which parts can be repaired and which parts need to be entirely written-off and therefore replaced fully. Each has an AI-generated estimated cost.
It all happens within a matter of minutes, although I have no way of knowing how difficult the pre-determined and fully controlled task is. It’s also unclear how an AI can possibly do the full job of a human assessor based on a limited set of 2D images alone, and without the ability to peek under the hood or undertake further investigations.
“We’re trying to figure out how much damage there is to a vehicle based on photos,” explains Dalyac. “There’s some really tough correlations to pick out, which are: based on the photos of the outside, what’s the internal damage? When you’re a human you are going to have seen and torn down maybe about a thousand to two thousand cars in your whole life of 20 or 30 years of doing that. Our AI has already been trained on tens of millions of these cases, so that’s a perfect case of us already having distilled thousands of people’s work experience. That allows us to get hold of some very challenging correlations that humans just can’t do.”
You need to find real-world use cases that will make a difference, where you can surpass human performance Alexandre Dalyac
What is abundantly clear is Dalyac’s commitment to developing AI technology with real-world use that is commercially viable. If that doesn’t happen, he believes it won’t just be Tractable that will suffer, but the continued belief and investment in AI as a whole. Here, of course, he’s talking about the prospect of another so-called “AI winter,” citing a recent Crunchbase report that says funding for artificial intelligence companies in the U.S. has levelled off and even started to decline at seed stage.
“If you’re trying to make the $15 billion that has been invested into AI not fuck up and lead to something successful that will prevent an AI winter that will lead to continuous improvement, you need a really good return on that asset class. And for that you need those businesses to be successful.
“To make an AI company successful, really successful — not just an acqui-hire, not just an IP exit but a real commercial success that’s going to prevent an AI winter — you need to find real-world use cases that will make a difference, where you can surpass human performance, where you can change the way things work,” he says.
The reference to acqui-hire or IP exit takes on more meaning when you consider that Tractable was in the same cohort at Entrepreneur First as Magic Pony Technology, the AI startup acquired by Twitter for up to $150 million for its image enhancing technology. And most recently, the team behind Bloomsbury AI, another EF company, was acqui-hired by Facebook for $20-30 million.
To ensure that Tractable can continue its mission of applying AI to accident and disaster recovery — and presumably not sell too early — the startup has closed $20 million in Series B investment in a round led by U.S. venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors, including Ignition Partners, Zetta Venture Partners, Acequia Capital and Plug and Play Ventures, also participated. The new capital is to be spent on accelerating growth, expanding its research and development and entering new markets.
(The Series B also included an additional $5 million in secondary funding, seeing some investors at least partially exit. I understand Tractable’s founders sold a relatively small number of shares as they were permitted to take money off the table. Dalyac declined to comment.)
As we wrap up our call, I note that all of Tractable’s main investors, not including EF, are from the U.S. — something Dalyac says was a deliberate decision after he discovered the gulf between European and U.S. valuations.
“That’s a shame, isn’t it?” I say with my European tech ecosystem hat on.
“It isn’t; it’s enormous exports for the U.K.,” says the Tractable CEO who is French-born but raised in the U.K. “We have, as of today, the vast majority of our headcount in London. The entire product team is in London. The entire R&D team is in London. But most of the revenue comes from the United States. We are making AI an export industry of the U.K.”
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Only one week left to apply for Startup Battlefield Latin America
Startups in Latin America, your time is running out. You have just one week to apply for the inaugural TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Latin America on November 8, 2018, in São Paulo, Brazil. The application page can be found here, and the deadline to fill out an application is Monday, August 6 at 5 p.m. PST.
Just last week we were in Buenos Aires and Santiago to speak with startups, VCs and accelerators about Startup Battlefield. Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, which over the past 12 years has placed 750 companies on stage to pitch top VCs and TechCrunch editors. Those founders have gone on to raise more than $8 billion and produce more than 100 exits. Startup Battlefield Latin America aims to add 15 great founders from Latin America to those elite ranks.
Here’s how Startup Battlefield Latin America works. TechCrunch editors with years of pitch-off experience review all eligible applications (more on eligibility in a moment) and select 15 finalists.
Finalists receive free pitch coaching and will be prepped and raring to go for the main event, which takes place in front of a live audience at São Paulo’s Tomie Ohtake Institute. During three preliminary rounds, five startups per round will each have six minutes to pitch and present their demo before a panel of top VC judges. The judges have six minutes following each pitch for a rigorous Q&A.
Five of the 15 startups will move on to the finals and pitch again to a new set of judges and, out of that final cohort of five, the judges will pick one startup to be the first TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Latin America champion.
The winning founders receive a $25,000 non-equity cash prize and a trip for two to the next TechCrunch Disrupt, where they can exhibit free of charge in the Startup Alley. While there, they might even qualify to participate in the Startup Battlefield.
And then there’s the media coverage — and it’s not just for the winning team. All Battlefield participants benefit from the broad exposure that comes with competing in Startup Battlefield. In addition to the potential interest of the media outlets and investors sitting in the audience, we video all the Startup Battlefield sessions and post them on TechCrunch.com. That’s pretty awesome exposure.
Now, let’s get down to eligibility. All founders must meet these basic requirements:
- Have an early-stage company in “launch” stage
- Be headquartered in one of these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, (Central America) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama, (Caribbean — including dependencies and constituent entities), Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico
- Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
- Have received limited press or publicity to date
- Have no known intellectual property conflicts
- Apply by August 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST
Now that you know the drill, what’s stopping you from taking your shot? Startup Battlefield Latin America goes down on November 8, 2018, in São Paulo, Brazil, but you must apply by August 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST. We want to see you there, so apply right now!
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Mike's Blog Round Up
Xena: Russian hackers are still at it, and your blog may be a target.
Driftglass: Don't take advice from conservative pundits. They don't even understand their own side as well as we do.
Noahpinion: Fend off gentrification with "fishtanks".
Calvin's Canadian Cave of Coolness: Trump in images.
Note: A correction to the Kropotkhristian item in Sunday's round-up. It doesn't change the point.
Blog round-up by Infidel753. To recommend a post, send link to mbru [at] crooksandliars [dot] com -- I do check it!
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Trump's 'Amazing' Economy Is A Big Republican Lie
Donald Trump has been bragging about the economy a lot lately. He says the United States is now the “economic envy” of the world. Unfortunately, Trump is once again trying to reshape reality to fit his own delusions. Reality is refusing to cooperate.
It’s true the U.S. economy is in the fast lane, by some measures, just as it was in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency. But where, exactly, is it headed?
And what will happen when the next blowout comes, as it inevitably will?
We know one thing: average Americans, who have seen their incomes stagnate while inequality rises, and their wealth declines, will bear the brunt of the next recession.
Less Than Amazing
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Times Reporters Answer Questions About Our G.D.P. Coverage
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New York Today: Learning Your Next Language
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DealBook Briefing: A $100 Billion Tax Break Plan (for the 1 Percent)
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Review: Rubinstein’s ‘Demon’ Is Redeemed in a Rare Staging
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EA launches premium subscription with latest Battlefield and Fifa
Video game company EA is slowly switching its business model to recurring subscriptions. The company just launched Origin Access Premier for $15 per month or $100 per year. This subscription is only available on PC.
This isn’t EA’s first subscription. The company first launched EA Access on the Xbox One. For $5 per month or $30 per year, you can download a play old EA games as part of your subscription.
EA Access doesn’t include the most recent games. But you can play the latest Fifa, Madden and Battlefield games a few months after their initial releases. Usually, EA Access games don’t include any DLC or extra content.
In addition to full games, EA Access lets you try new EA games for 10 hours. You also get 10 percent off on EA digital purchases.
In 2016, EA launched a similar service on PC for the same price. In addition to a collection of EA games, the company partnered with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and other game companies. You can find indie hits, such as The Witness, Oxenfree and Trine 2.
And now, EA is launching a more expensive subscription tier. With Origin Access Premier, you get new EA titles a few days before launch day. For instance, you’ll be able to download and play Madden NFL 19, Fifa 19, Battlefield V and Anthem when they launch in the coming months.
Subscribers won’t have to pay for DLCs, or at least not as many. Games included in the subscription are deluxe editions (Fifa Ultimate Edition, Battlefield V Deluxe, etc.).
In order to convince people to subscribe right away, EA is adding deluxe editions of Battlefront II, Fifa 18, Unravel Two, Fe or The Sims 4 right away.
Other companies have launched subscription services, such as Microsoft with the Xbox Game Pass and Sony’s PlayStation Now. This is an interesting shift as game companies are getting ready for cloud computing.
While many people still buy games on DVDs and play on gaming consoles, the industry is slowly going to switch to cloud gaming. You will launch a game on a server in a data center near you and stream the video feed to the device in front of you.
It doesn’t make as much sense to own a game if you don’t even run it on your console in your living room. By creating recurring subscriptions and putting together gaming libraries, companies can increase recurring revenue.tt
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WhatsApp now allows group voice and video calls between up to 4 people
WhatsApp has added a much-requested new feature after it began to allow users to make group voice and video calls.
It’s been just over three years since the company, which is owned by Facebook, introduced voice calls and later a video option one year later. Today, WhatsApp counts over 1.5 billion monthly users and it says they make over two billion minutes of calls via its service each day.
Starting this week, callers can now add friends by hitting the “add participant” button which appears in the top right corner of their screen. The maximum number of participants is four and, impressively, WhatsApp said the calls are end-to-end encrypted.
That’s not an easy thing to do. Telegram, a self-professed secure messaging app, hasn’t even gotten around to encrypting its group messaging chats, let alone group calls.
On the encryption side, WhatsApp has long worked with WhisperSystems to cover all messages and calls on its platform from prying eyes and ears. That said, the relationship between the two become a little more complicated this year when WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton donated $50 million of his wealth — accumulated from Facebook’s acquisition of his company in 2014 — to the Signal Foundation, which is associated with WhisperSystems.
Acton quit Facebook last year — this year he encouraged people to delete the social network for its data and privacy screw-ups — while his fellow WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum joined him in departing in May of this year.
Like Acton, Koum was apparently irked by scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, although his on record explanation for quitting was to “do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee.” Each to their own…
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Nintendo’s profit jumps 88% as it nears 20 million Switch sales
Nintendo released its latest earnings report today and the headline is that the company has now sold nearly 20 million Switch consoles. The actual number is 19.67 million as of the end of June, so add July sales and the 20 million milestone is likely to have already been hit. Either way, it has easily surpassed its predecessor, the much-maligned Wii U.
Overall, the business recorded a 30.5 billion JPY ($275 million) operating profit, up 88 percent year-on-year, as revenue grew 9 percent to reach 168 billion JPY, or $1.5 billion.
The Japanese firm sold 1.88 million Switches in the most recent quarter, which is actually down from 1.97 million one year ago, although this quarter tends to be a slow one ahead of the holiday season. That slip was made up for on the software side as sales of Switch games jumped from 8.1 million last year to 17.96 million in the most recent quarter.
Nintendo has a bunch of new titles incoming — including Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and two Pokémon titles — while its Nintendo Switch Online service is due to launch in September so there’s plenty more to come. That said, Nintendo has some work to do if it is to hit its target of 20 million Switch sales during the current financial year.
Elsewhere, Nintendo said it sold 1.26 million of the NES Classic Edition when it was relaunched in June, while it sold 1.39 million Labo kits for the Switch.
The companies mobile gaming business continues to do well, grossing nine billion JPY, $81 million, in the quarter. That’s likely to spike when the company introduces Mario Kart Tour (huzzah!) and new title Dragalia Lost for mobile before March 2019. Although Nintendo suggested that the pipeline for new mobile games will slow once these two new arrivals are released.
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Investing in Local Business to Get an Even Break
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With Less Than 50 Days to Go, Cuomo Keeps Big Lead Over Nixon
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Mars, Zimbabwe, Alex Trebek: Your Tuesday Briefing
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In Cambodia, Dissenting Voters Find Ways to Say ‘None of the Above’
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Trump Is Putting Indelible Conservative Stamp on Judiciary
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A Census Question That Could Change How Power Is Divided in America
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Places 26 and 27: Summer in France, in Two Very Different Ways
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Work Is Weird. Alison Green of Ask a Manager Can Help.
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How I Turned My Tiny Apartment Bedroom Into a Relaxing Retreat
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Mixing Generations and Styles in the Hamptons
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How One Agency Built a Multimillion-Dollar Business in Migrant Children
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The City of My Birth in India Is Becoming a Climate Casualty. It Didn’t Have to Be.
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Key Question for Les Moonves of CBS: What Were You Thinking?
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Two Views of Flint’s Water Troubles: One a Close-Up and One With a Wide-Angle Lens
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Stephen Colbert Wants Accountability for His Accused Boss, Les Moonves
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Dixons Carphone now says ~8.8M more customers affected by 2017 breach
A Dixons Carphone data breach that was disclosed earlier this summer was worse than initially reported. The company is now saying that personal data of 10 million customers could also have been accessed when its systems were hacked.
The European electronics and telecoms retailer believes its systems were accessed by unknown and unauthorized person/s in 2017, although it only disclosed the breach in June, after discovering it during a review of its security systems.
Last month it said 5.9M payment cards and 1.2M customer records had been accessed. But with its investigation into the breach “nearing completion”, it now says approximately 10M records containing personal data (but no financial information) may have been accessed last year — in addition to the 5.9M compromised payment cards it disclosed last month.
“While there is now evidence that some of this data may have left our systems, these records do not contain payment card or bank account details and there is no evidence that any fraud has resulted. We are continuing to keep the relevant authorities updated,” the company said in a statement.
In terms of what personal data the 10M records contained, a Dixons Carphone spokeswoman told us: “This continues to relate to personal data, and the types of data that may have been accessed are, for example, name, address or email address.”
The company says it’s taking the precaution of contacting all its customers — to apologize and advise them of “protective steps to minimize the risk of fraud”.
It adds it has no evidence that the unauthorized access is continuing, having taken steps to secure its systems when the breach was discovered last month, saying: “We continue to make improvements and investments at pace to our security environment through enhanced controls, monitoring and testing.”
Commenting in a statement, Dixons Carphone CEO, Alex Baldock, added: “Since our data security review uncovered last year’s breach, we’ve been working around the clock to put it right. That’s included closing off the unauthorised access, adding new security measures and launching an immediate investigation, which has allowed us to build a fuller understanding of the incident that we’re updating on today.
“Again, we’re disappointed in having fallen short here, and very sorry for any distress we’ve caused our customers. I want to assure them that we remain fully committed to making their personal data safe with us.”
Back in 2015, Carphone Warehouse, a mobile division of Dixons Carphone, also suffered a hack which affected around 3M people. And in January the company was fined £400k by the ICO as a consequence of that earlier breach.
Since then new European Union regulations (GDPR) have come into force which greatly raise the maximum penalties which regulators can impose for serious data breaches.
Last month, following Dixon’s disclosure of the latest breach, the UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, told us it was liaising with the National Cyber Security Centre, the Financial Conduct Authority and other relevant agencies to ascertain the details and impact on customers.
Of the 5.9M payment cards which Dixons disclosed last month as having been compromised, it said the vast majority had been protected by chip and PIN technology. But around 105,000 lacked the security tech so Dixons said at the time could therefore have been compromised.
It’s the additional 1.2M records containing non-financial personal data — such as name, address or email address — that have been revised upwards now, to ~10M records, which constitutes almost half the Group’s customer base in the UK and Ireland.
The spokeswoman told us the Group has approximately 22M customers in the region.
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Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic
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Recovering Lost Photos of Life Before the Chernobyl Disaster
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What Do 525 Ventriloquists Do at a Convention? Ask Their Dummies
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48 hours left to score early-bird tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018
Chaucer wrote that “time and tide wait for no man.” With apologies to the “father” of English literature, we say that time and money wait for no entrepreneur. The deadline for saving big money on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2018, which takes place on November 29-30, comes to an abrupt halt on Wednesday August 1 at 11:59 p.m. CEST — in just 48 hours.
Right now, early-bird pricing tiers start at €595 including VAT. That’s a sweet deal because, depending on the tier you choose, early-bird pricing can save you up to €700. When time runs out, you pay more money. Don’t get sucked out with the tide. Buy your passes today.
Disrupt Berlin 2018 offers two program- and value-packed days for startup founders, investors, marketers, tech-heads, designers and innovators. We’re busy lining up an incredible group of speakers — including founders, VCs, tech titans and rising stars — who will step onto the Disrupt stage and hold forth on the most pressing and interesting tech and investment issues of the day. Here are just a few exciting examples from our lineup:
- Anne Boden, the founder and CEO of Starling Bank
- The four partners from VC firm Accel — Philippe Botteri, Sonali De Rycker, Luciana Lixandru and Harry Nelis
- Aline Sara, founder of NaTakallam
We’re still accepting speaker nominations. If you have a fantastic candidate, by all means, send us your recommendation.
What incredible early-stage startup pitch competition helped launch more than 750 companies that have gone on to collectively raise $8 billion and produce 100 exits? Yeah, OK so it’s an easy answer. Startup Battlefield — with $50,000 cash and the chance for massive global media and investment exposure — is one of the most exciting elements of every Disrupt. Don’t just come and watch. Sign up to compete!
Our Disrupt Berlin exhibition hall — Startup Alley — always features hundreds of the best early-stage startups, and this year is no exception. Exhibiting in the Alley is a magnificent way to place your startup in front of media outlets, investors, accelerators, incubators, solo founders and developers. It’s prime networking territory.
Whether you’re a founder or an investor, you want to be as efficient about that networking as possible in your two days at Disrupt. CrunchMatch, our free, business match-making service, simplifies networking and saves you time. Last year, CrunchMatch generated a total of 888 meetings — and 97 percent of participants said they’d use the service again.
Disrupt Berlin 2018 takes place on November 29-30, and your chance to buy early-bird passes — and save up to €700 in the process — ends on Wednesday August 1 at 11:59 pm. CEST. Don’t make us quote Chaucer again. Buy your tickets now.
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A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same
By MIRIAM JORDAN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2LVfOnX
If an N.B.A. Workout Isn’t on Instagram, Does it Even Count?
By SCOTT CACCIOLA from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2AAY4tB
After Doctors Cut Their Opioids, Patients Turn to a Risky Treatment for Back Pain
By SHEILA KAPLAN from NYT Health https://ift.tt/2v3sI9D
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