By BY ALAN FEUER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3G2zbnm
Tuesday, 30 November 2021
El Chapo’s Wife Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison
By BY ALAN FEUER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3G2zbnm
Federal health officials say that they are expanding the search for Omicron in the U.S.
By BY NOAH WEILAND from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3peocAl
The Horrors of Irish Magdalene Laundries, Revisited
By BY LYDIA MILLET from NYT Books https://ift.tt/3Da15f2
‘Frozen in fear’: The accuser known as Jane said she was only 14 when Epstein started abusing her.
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Jim Warren, Early Influencer in Personal Computing, Dies at 85
By BY STEVE LOHR from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/3ElGFkE
The unbundling of professional learning and entrepreneurship education
Launched in 2003, LinkedIn quickly became the first global professional social media network by offering an easy way to make and track professional connections. At roughly the same time, Y Combinator (YC) and other accelerators emerged as a largely analog means for entrepreneurs willing to commit three months of time and ~6% of their company to receive en masse training and connections to mentors, peers and funders.
While both LinkedIn and Y Combinator are still going strong, a new crop of companies are looking to fill the gap between these two approaches via structured online experiences that provide a combination of training and connections to help people achieve their professional goals.
The ease with which like-minded professionals can receive training, coaching and participate in communities, largely thanks to improving and scalable digital offers, is a key part of the unbundling we are seeing.
The emergence of these companies is part of a broader trend of the democratization of professional development, sparked in part by increasing awareness and recognition of the mismatch between what traditional education is delivering to young people and what’s demanded by employers. Indeed, the OECD estimated in 2019 that at least 80 million workers in Europe are mismatched in terms of their qualifications and what’s demanded in the workforce across a wide range of industries.
It’s positive, then, that the unbundling process is improving access to high-quality professional education and development. Lower prices, shorter courses and content more closely tied to professions all make it easier for people to retrain and upskill where necessary.
Gone are the days when the only way to get a fantastic business education, for example, is via a $50,000-$250,000 MBA, and where the only route to highly skilled professions is via a $20,000-$300,000 university course. Similarly, within this increasingly democratized system, access to coaching and mentoring at the individual and group levels is improving.
New approaches range from companies like The PowerMBA, which offers an MBA alternative for $800-$1,000, to On Deck, which offers professional development courses and communities for about $3,000, and Dorm, which sells mentorship support and networks to entrepreneurs for $150 per month.
What do these approaches have in common? They are typically digital, not accredited by traditional academic institutions, and are shorter, condensed, focused and tightly linked to careers and outcomes compared with traditional education courses. Many providers communicate and market themselves on the “exclusivity” and focus of their communities. Further, there will typically be some content associated with the courses — the amount will largely depend on the purposes of the course and offer (i.e., content is shared, but not the central offers of most accelerators, incubators and mentoring providers).
The main avenues of differentiation for this new wave of companies are price (depending on the amount of personalization available and the pricing model), duration (short, intensive, bootcamp-style or an annual recurring subscription), method of delivery (asynchronous and on-demand or synchronous and live), content focus (content-driven or focused on relationships and mentorship), degree of accreditation (degree of formality around certification and accreditation), and, of course, whether providers focus on specific roles or broad topics. It’s important to point out that most of these avenues are spectra along which providers can place themselves.
With this in mind, Brighteye Ventures created a market map of the range of organizations supporting individuals to further their professional learning, with a particular focus on business and entrepreneurship education. It doesn’t aim to be exhaustive but rather highlights the broad range of groups operating in the space. We have, for indicative purposes, included total funding (including IPO) for the companies in each of the categories where suitable and available (via PitchBook).
Image Credits: Brighteye Ventures
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What does this have to do with selling books?
Adam Selipsky gave his first AWS re:Invent keynote this morning since taking over as CEO from Andy Jassy earlier this year. He had big shoes to fill, but it’s not as though Selipsky was a complete stranger to the AWS team. In fact, he had been at the division since its earliest days, helping Jassy to build it into a substantial business, before leaving in 2016 to become CEO at Tableau.
He began the day with a history lesson, and he didn’t need to count on others to feed the background to him, given he had been there when they opened their doors in Seattle all those years ago, a pig-in-a-poke of an idea to sell web services.
As Selipsky told it when he presented the cloud infrastructure concept to early potential customers, they didn’t quite get it. “What does this have to do with selling books,” he was continually asked.
While he didn’t share the answer he gave, I would speculate that it had nothing to with it, and it had everything to with it. Years ago, at a presentation with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, he talked about similar conversations. As he said at the time, Amazon was never about selling anything. It was about building a web business at scale.
If you look at the top three cloud infrastructure vendors today — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — they are all really good at building businesses at scale, and running data centers is a big part of that. Looking back it seems almost logical that a bookseller came up with the idea of selling infrastructure services, but it certainly didn’t at the time.
In 2005 nobody really knew what the cloud was, or if they did, it wasn’t a concept that was widely understood. I remember the first time I heard the term in the 2008 timeframe at a Web 2.0 conference in Boston. There, representatives from Amazon, Google and Salesforce gave a talk on what the cloud was and why it mattered.
I remember IT people lining up at the microphones for questions and comments and being openly hostile to the concept. They weren’t sharing their company data with a bookseller that was for sure — until they did.
Even Selipsky himself didn’t completely get it when he came on board. As he told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in an interview recently, “So the call I got went something like, ‘We have this initiative to turn the guts of Amazon inside out and expose it to other people.’ And it sounded intriguing, but I confess I didn’t fully understand what that was all about.”
As Andy Jassy described the genesis of the idea in a 2016 TechCrunch article, it came about during an executive offsite brainstorming session in 2003:
As the team worked, Jassy recalled, they realized they had also become quite good at running infrastructure services like compute, storage and database (due to those previously articulated internal requirements). What’s more, they had become highly skilled at running reliable, scalable, cost-effective data centers out of need. As a low-margin business like Amazon, they had to be as lean and efficient as possible.
It was at that point, without even fully articulating it, that they started to formulate the idea of what AWS could be, and they began to wonder if they had an additional business providing infrastructure services to developers.
And eventually, they did what they described to Selipsky when they recruited him in 2005. They turned guts of the bookselling website inside out and sold them back to customers. It didn’t have much to do with selling books, yet it had everything to do with it — and that idea today is a $60 billion business.
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Via raises $130M to expand on-demand shuttle software business
On-demand shuttle and software company Via has raised another $130 million, capital that has pushed its valuation to about $3.3 billion as demand from cities to update its legacy transit systems rises.
The round was led by Janus Henderson with participation from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, ION Crossover Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies and existing investor Exor. To date, the company has raised $800 million.
Via, which today employs about 950 people, has two sides to its business. The company operates consumer-facing shuttles in Washington, D.C. and New York. Its underlying software platform, which it sells to cities, transportation authorities, school districts and universities to deploy their own shuttles, is not only the core of its business; it has become the primary driver of growth.
Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ramot previously told TechCrunch that there was was little interest from cities in the software-as-a-service platform when the company first launched in 2012. Via landed its first city partnership with Austin in late 2017, after providing the platform to the transit authority for free. It was enough to allow Via to develop case studies and convince other cities to buy into the service. In 2019, the partnerships side of the business “took off,” Ramot said in an interview last year.
Today, the software side — branded internally as TransitTech — has eclipsed its consumer-facing operations. Via said TransitTech revenue more than doubled year on year to exceed an annual run rate of $100 million. The software platform is used by more than 500 partners, including Los Angeles Metro. Jersey City and Miami in the United States as well as Arriva Bus UK, a Deutsche Bahn company that uses it for a first and last-mile service connecting commuters to a high-speed train station in Kent, U.K.
Via doesn’t provide specifics on what it plans to use the funds for. The company has made two acquisitions in the past t18 months, including Fleetonomy in 2020.
Earlier this year, Via used $100 million in cash and equity to acquire Remix, a startup that developed mapping software used by cities for transportation planning and street design. Remix became a subsidiary of Via, an arrangement that will let the startup maintain its independent brand.
The acquisition has already produced one product that combines Remix’s collaborative mapping and transit-planning tools with Via’s on-demand transit data. Earlier this month, Via launched a software tool to help cities understand and plan how on-demand rides and fixed route transit like buses, can work in tangent.
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Meadows Agrees to Cooperate in Capitol Attack Investigation
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Jill Biden’s White House Christmas Looks Very … Normal
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Dorsey’s Twitter Departure Hints at Tech Moguls’ Restlessness
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The Gator Finds a Place at the Tailgate
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Who is Alison Nathan, the judge in the Ghislaine Maxwell case?
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AWS introduces IoT TwinMaker, a new service to easily create digital twins
At AWS’s re:Invent conference this morning, the company announced AWS IoT TwinMaker, a new service that makes it easy to create and use digital twins of real-world systems.
For context, digital twins are virtual representations of things like buildings, factories, production lines, and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the behavior of the systems they represent.
The company outlines that with this new service, users can create digital twins by connecting data from sources like video feeds and applications without having to move the data into a single repository.
“You can use built-in data connectors for the following AWS services: AWS IoT SiteWise for equipment and time-series sensor data; Amazon Kinesis Video Streams for video data; and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage of visual resources (for example, CAD files) and data from business applications. AWS IoT TwinMaker also provides a framework for you to create your own data connectors to use with other data sources (such as Snowflake and Siemens MindSphere),” AWS explained in a blog post about the new service.
The company notes that once the digital twin graph is created, users will likely want to visualize the data in the context of the physical environment. To address this, AWS IoT TwinMaker creates a digital twin graph that combines the relationships between virtual representations of users’ physical systems and connected data sources. This allows users to accurately model their real-world environment. Users can also import existing 3D models to arrange 3D scenes of physical space, such as a factory. From there, you can also add interactive video and sensor data overlays along with insights from connected machine learning services.
AWS notes that the service comes with a plugin for Amazon Managed Grafana, which is a managed service for the open dashboard and visualization platform from Grafana Labs.
AWS IoT TwinMaker is available today in preview in Northern Virginia, Oregon, Ireland and Singapore, with availability in additional AWS Regions to come.
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Fox Uses Unverified Study To Promote Anti-Vax Disinformation
On Fox and Friends, Brian Kilmeade misrepresented a Wall Street Journal article that used studies which lacked peer-review. Kilmeade pushed disinformation and claimed natural antibodies work better than vaccines to protect yourself from COVID.
Tuesday morning the Fox and Friends co-hosts were caterwauling over vaccine mandates being imposed by local municipalities.
Kilmeade went ballistic in support of the anti-vax crowd, claiming healthcare workers already have a natural immunity to COVID, so why should they be fired if they refuse the get the shot?
Then he lied when he cited a WSJ article about vaccines and infections.
Kilmeade said, "The Wall Street Journal did this big editorial over the weekend saying natural immunity according to Israel and different studies in Denmark (because we don't do the studies) is even more effective than vaccines with more durability in other cases."
In the beginning of the article, the WSJ clearly states: "One thing is clear: Vaccination is a far safer, more reliable strategy for acquiring immunity, given the risks of serious illness or death from infection."
The WSJ did cite a study from Israel, but the one from Denmark was early in the pandemic and not relevant to Israel's study.
And the Israel study wasn't peer-reviewed.
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Jimmy Kimmel Laughs At Newsmax's 'Rare Moment Of Truth'
Jimmy Kimmel had a good laugh during his Monday monologue over an unusual Newsmax segment.
According to Kimmel, the “veil of anti-Biden BS lifted just ever so slightly” revealing a “rare moment of truth.”
The Fox Wannabe network's Alison Maloni pretended it was a outrage that President Joe Biden is spending taxpayer money on the White House Christmas tree lighting.
The outrage! Meanwhile "real" Americans will struggle to pay for a regular ol' Christmas. John Amato debunked this lie as told by Jim Jordan. They all must make the 2021 economy seem like the Great Depression, when actually unemployment hasn't been this low since 1969.
“It is the season of giving, and the White House wants taxpayers to give $139,000 to cover the cost of President Biden’s first National Christmas Tree Lighting,” Maloni said.
But wait! Co-host Bob Sellers contradicted her ON AIR.
“It is the White House, I mean, you do want them to have it. I mean, is this out of the ordinary?” he asked.
“No, it’s not,” said co-host Shaun Kraisman. The White House has spent $160,000 in the past, when Donald Trump was president.
Then things got REAL: “So, we’re trying to create something out of nothing?” Sellers asked.
Kraisman backed up Sellers, while Maloni grinned.
“A moment of Christmas clarity,” commented Kimmel.
“It’s like watching a dog walk into a mirror.”
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Amid Variant Fears, U.K. Discovers Limits to Its Virus Strategy
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England announces 13 confirmed Omicron cases, and restrictions tighten.
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Empellón Taqueria Opens an Outpost on the Upper West Side
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Andrea Bowers: Her Activism Animates Her Art
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Monday, 29 November 2021
Labor board authorizes new Amazon union vote
The director of the National Labor Relation Board’s 10th region has authorized a new union election for workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. An NLRB representative has confirmed the decision with TechCrunch, which would see the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union getting a second chance to unionize workers at the site, following its defeat back in April.
The victory was a lopsided one for the mega-retailer, though the RWDSU immediately called shenanigans in what was expected to be a major test for unionizing efforts for blue collar tech workers. At the time, the union accused Amazon of “gaslighting” employees through “egregious and blatantly illegal action.”
Amazon naturally denied the accusations, stating, “It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true. Our employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers, and media outlets than they heard from us.”
RWDSU head Stuart Appelbaum said in a statement today that the new ruling serves as vindication for those earlier claims, “Today’s decision confirms what we were saying all along – that Amazon’s intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace – and as the Regional Director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal. Amazon workers deserve to have a voice at work, which can only come from a union.”
A date for a new election has yet to be determined. It will, however, no doubt become another national flashpoint for unionization efforts that have only grown in momentum during the pandemic and subsequent economic slowdowns.
Amazon expressed displeasure at today’s ruling. Spokesperson Kelly Nantel noted in a statement,
Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the RWDSU earlier this year. It’s disappointing that the NLRB has now decided that those votes shouldn’t count. As a company, we don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees. Every day we empower people to find ways to improve their jobs, and when they do that we want to make those changes—quickly. That type of continuous improvement is harder to do quickly and nimbly with unions in the middle. The benefits of direct relationships between managers and employees can’t be overstated—these relationships allow every employee’s voice to be heard, not just the voices of a select few. While we’ve made great progress in important areas like pay and safety, we know there are plenty of things that we can keep doing better, both in our fulfillment centers and in our corporate offices, and that’s our focus—to work directly with our employees to keep getting better every day.
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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen will talk Section 230 reform with Congress this week
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen will go before Congress again this week, this time offering her unique perspective on the company’s moderation and policy failures as they relate to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the key legal shield that protects online platforms from liability for the user-created content they host.
The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold the hearing, titled “Holding Big Tech Accountable: Targeted Reforms to Tech’s Legal Immunity,” this Wednesday, December 1 at 10:30 AM ET. Color of Change President Rashad Robinson and Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer will also testify on Wednesday.
The hearing is the latest Section 230-focused discussion from the House committee. In March, the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter went before lawmakers to defend the measures they’ve taken to fight misinformation and disinformation — two major areas of concern that have inspired Democratic lawmakers to reexamine tech’s longstanding liability shield.
In an October Senate hearing, Haugen advocated for changes to Section 230 that would hold platforms accountable for the content that they promote algorithmically. While Haugen isn’t an expert on legislative solutions to some of social media’s current ills, given her time with Facebook’s since-dismantled civic integrity team, she’s uniquely positioned to give lawmakers insight into some of the most dangerous societal outcomes of algorithmically amplified content.
“User-generated content is something companies have less control over. But they have 100% control over their algorithms,” Haugen said. “Facebook should not get a free pass on choices it makes to prioritize growth, virality and reactiveness over public safety.”
Facebook’s former News Feed lead and current Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri is also set to testify before the Senate for the first time next week, addressing revelations in leaked documents that the company knows its business takes a toll on the mental health of some of its youngest, most vulnerable users.
In its announcement, the House Energy and Commerce committee cited four tech reform bills that Congress is currently mulling: the Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act of 2021, the SAFE TECH Act, the Civil Rights Modernization Act of 2021 and the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act. The first bill, proposed by the committee holding Wednesday’s hearing, would lift Section 230’s liability protections in cases when a platform “knowingly or recklessly” recommends harmful content using algorithms.
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Alms is a social app focused on real-world impact and positive change
A number of startups are experimenting with what a better social app could look like. For a startup called Alms, the answer is a social network that focuses on users’ well-being through participation in creator-led challenges in areas like personal growth, sustainability, and others with positive impacts. Instead of driving the collection “likes,” as on other social apps, Alms aims to encourage real-world engagement through its challenges and the specific steps and actions that must be taken.
The idea, explains Alms founder Alexander Nevedovsky, is to design an app that guides users to a happier and more meaningful life when they use it. That’s something modern social platforms can’t really promise to do.
Work on the project began during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, Nevedovsky says.
“A lot of us were feeling depressed and sad, at home without much access to friends and family,” he explains. “I felt like the world really needed something that’s a bit more than just meditation, journaling, or mood tracking — all those apps and techniques are great, but they’re not designed to improve your life on a day-to-day basis, interacting in the real world.”
However, the original version of Alms released last year was lacking something that would make the app “sticky.” Users would sign up because they liked the concept, but at some point would drop out and stop participating in the activities. The startup knew it needed something more to tie users to their journeys, which is why it has now shifted to become more of a social community.
Image Credits: Alms
When you first launch the newly designed Alms app, you’re taken through a brief onboarding process where you select your interests from three main topical areas: personal growth, sustainability, and impact. For example, “personal growth” interests may include things like mental health, wellness, spirituality, or relationships. “Sustainability” focuses on interests related to the environment and nature. And “impact” would wrap in things like activism, volunteering, local community, and more.
After setup is complete, you can follow creators who post challenges or choose to join individual challenges, each with their own set of steps that have to be taken in order to fully complete them. For instance, in a challenge focused on improving your work-from-home lifestyle, the steps guide users to take steps to improve their workspace and their work-life balance (by scheduling breaks and hard stops to their day, e.g.), and asks them to add physical activity to their routines, among other concrete actions.
As you participate in a challenge by completing and checking off each step, you’re prompted to post a story about that step in that challenge’s feed to inspire others, who may add an encouraging comment. But gathering likes and comments is not Alms’ goal, says Nevedovsky.
“We see tremendous possibility in allowing more and more people with expertise in these topics — personal growth, sustainability, and impact of various sorts — to basically try to scale their impact with us,” he notes. “We allow them to put all their knowledge or their content in a scalable way so that people can actually — not like it, not comment under it — but actually try to repeat it.”
At launch, Alms has around 30 creators sharing their content in the form of challenges on its app, and 15 more are in the pipeline. It hopes to reach a couple of hundred over the next few months. So far, the new version of the app has attracted a couple of thousand users, as well.
Image Credits: Alms
Many of the challenges on the app have been joined by hundreds of users, so you do feel some sense of participating in a larger event when you click to join. However, I’d personally prefer that posting a story and sharing it to the feed was optional — not every step deserves its own post, I feel. (And sometimes, you may not have anything to say about the minor steps you completed and end up feeling like you’ve cluttered the feed with less-than-helpful posts.)
Alms was co-founded with startup studio Palta, a home to apps like Flo.Health, Simple Fasting, and Zing Fitness Coach. Palta owns a majority stake in Alms, and the company has no other outside investment. A remotely distributed team of fourteen works on the Alms app, which isn’t currently monetized.
Nevedovsky says the team is considering adding some sort of token-based economy or perhaps a DAO which would convey some sort of real-world rewards. This could include being able to participate in Alms’ governance or joining a creator fund, for example. The tokens, at least in the near term, would not be tradeable. The company may also consider simpler ideas, like in-app tipping. But nothing has yet been determined as Alms is still working on product-market fit at this time, and scaling its userbase.
Overall, Alms seems like it could appeal to those who want to be more mindful and impactful about how they’re spending their time on social apps, but who are in search of inspiration that comes with more specific direction.
“I think, a lot of the time, people place hopes on what will happen in the future without actually influencing it. So I think that having an app that helps you with ideas and inspiration from people who know what they share, what they recommend, is super helpful — especially when it’s all about support,” notes Nevedovsky. “People [on Alms] actually care.”
The app, we found, is well-built and attractively designed. But it could still face the original issue of having users drop off, despite its new social components, given the competition for screen time on today’s mobile devices.
Alms is a free download on iOS only for the time being.
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Lara Logan Unhinged: COVID Testing Will Keep Us On Lockdown Forever
Lara Logan went on a batsh*t crazy anti-COVID, anti-vaccine rant on Fox News, claiming if we keep testing for different strains of the virus it will never go away.
There was a point in her career where Lara Logan was considered an excellent foreign correspondent for CBS News. That passed long ago.
On Winebox Pirro's Saturday program, the host feared that the Biden administration will lock us all down for the holidays and steal Christmas. (On Monday, Biden announced that lockdowns were not planned, but urged ALL Americans to get the vaccines and boosters in addition to masking up in public indoor spaces.)
The Grinch that stole Christmas, don't you know? That was supposed to happen for Thanksgiving, but their lies slammed up against reality.
Turning to Lara Logan, Pirro -- now a laughingstock thanks to SNL -- asked Logan what she thought about all of this.
"Judge, if they keep testing different strains of coronavirus we're gonna be on lockdown for the rest of our existence," Logan said.
Logan said she had cancer and her oncologist clued her into this new conspiracy.
"There are hundreds of coronaviruses inside our body. They've [Biden administration] created a problem that can never actually be solved so they can justify whatever it is they want to do," Logan fear mongered.
Lara embraced the most extreme form of MAGA, QAnon conspiracy theories, and ran with it.
She's furious that anti-vax border agents and airline pilots that are refusing to get vaccinated are losing their jobs.
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Ghislaine Maxwell ‘exploited young girls’ and ‘served them up’ to Epstein, a prosecutor said.
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‘No red flags’ yet: South African scientists caution against panic over the new variant.
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Xiomara Castro lidera en Honduras con una promesa de cambio a pesar de sus vínculos al pasado
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Biden Urges Vaccinations Amid Omicron Variant Concerns
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De Blasio reminds New Yorkers to wear masks indoors.
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Algeria’s Yassir picks up $30M to build a super app in North Africa
Yassir, an Algerian startup that provides on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, has raised a $30 million Series A round.
The investment came from a long list of VCs and angel investors. VCs include WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, Quiet Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital and Moving Capital. The angel investors include Cleo Sham of Uber; Thomas Layton of Upwork, Opentable and Metaweb; Rohan Monga of Gojek; and Hannes Graah of Spotify and Revolut.
The company said in a statement that most of the investors from its $13.25 million seed round, which was previously undisclosed, participated as well.
After earning a Ph.D. at Stanford and spending most of his professional life in Silicon Valley working at various companies, CEO Noureddine Tayebi returned to Algeria to get involved in the country’s nascent tech scene to start a company and build technical talent in the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia).
Most people in French-speaking Africa are unbanked due to a lack of trust in incumbents and inefficient banking solutions. Tayebi felt that providing on-demand services — which solves essential needs and, more importantly, builds trust to then provide payment services — was the catalyst to enable financial inclusion in the region.
He founded Yassir with Mahdi Yettou in 2017. The company started with ride-hailing services because the cities it targeted had dense populations and inefficient transportation services. Yassir progressed to offer last-mile delivery services, creating a multi-sided marketplace that brings drivers, couriers, merchants, suppliers and wholesalers to individual users on one platform.
Yassir CEO Noureddine Tayebi. Image Credits: Yassir
According to Tayebi, the plan is to use the marketplace model to offer payment services to all parties involved and create a super app in the process.
“Our approach of solving the unbanked population problem is unique in the region by offering more of a ‘banking as a platform’ solution where daily services are at the heart of it all via a super-app marketplace,” he told TechCrunch.
“Such services not only build trust for all the sides of the marketplace but also use them as channels to offer these payment services, which we think is the approach that is most suited to the region. Most of our competitors are either on-demand services — ride-hailing or last-mile delivery only — or pure payment solutions. This gives us an edge over them as we build the network, the channels and the trust that are all key ingredients for the adoption of payment services at large scale.”
Yassir has seen exponential growth since launching four years ago. Last year, it was part of Y Combinator’s winter batch as the first Algerian startup in the accelerator. In terms of traction, over 3 million people and 40,000 partners in all its markets now use the platform. Tayebi said that Yassir generates revenues by taking a commission on the services it offers.
This round of funding makes Yassir the most funded startup in Algeria and one of the most funded in the Maghreb and MENA region. Tayebi isn’t coy about saying his company aims for regional dominance in its category. Yassir also plans to gain market share outside the region into other markets, primarily sub-Saharan Africa and other “strategic geographies.”
The company will use the investment to achieve that as well as consolidate growth in its existing markets by launching new products and improving existing ones.
Yassir also plans to triple the size of its engineering team, a department the company is also particular about building locally.
“We are [a] 100% local champion, including tech talent, as we want to empower the tech talent in the region and hire them in each country we operate in. We want a success model that is fully from the region,” Tayebi said.
“Yassir is a natural evolution of companies seen elsewhere in the world,” WndrCo partner Anthony Saleh said in a statement. “The moment we met the team, we saw the opportunity of entering an enormous market with a service taking the best of models we have seen elsewhere. We’re thrilled to be part of this supercharged journey.”
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How one founder is turning complex decision-making into a developer tool anyone can use
Carolyn Mooney wants you to make your decision-making process code. She is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv which helps companies make efficient decisions on a mass scale—think Amazon delivering packages or Uber plotting a route for an uber pool. In this week’s episode, she talks with Darrell and Jordan about Nextmv’s software that doesn’t just optimize decision making and route planning but also enables engineers to work on many different types of teams. Plus she talks about how coaching high school volleyball has made her a better leader and forced her to prioritize a work-life balance.
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Jack is leaving Twitter and we have ~thoughts~
Well, so much for a relaxed post-holiday week on Monday.
News broke this morning that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down from the company entirely. The company’s CTO, Parag Agrawal, will be taking over at the helm. Saleforce exec Bret Taylor will take over as board chairman.
So, Amanda and Natasha and Alex jumped into onto the mics — and, ironically, a Twitter space — to riff on all things Jack and future of Twitter. From the show:
- Crypto and the CTO, what can we read from the tea leaves?
- Jack’s dual role, and its detractors.
- The fact that Twitter’s product work has been great lately, which we don’t want to stop. When is a good time to leave a company, is it on the up and up or when things are quiet?
- And, finally, Jack’s somewhat biting words regarding founder-led companies, which are, frankly, a bit at odds with his own behavior until now.
The show is back on Wednesday, unless some other major CEO resigns.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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AWS Braket gets improved support for hybrid quantum-classical workloads
In 2019, AWS launched Braket, its quantum computing service that makes hardware and software tools from its partners Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave available in its cloud. Given how quickly quantum computing is moving ahead, it’s maybe no surprise that a lot has changed since then. Among other things, hybrid algorithms that use classical computers to optimize quantum algorithms — a process similar to training machine learning models — have become a standard tool for developers. Today, AWS announced improved support for running these hybrid algorithms on Braket.
Previously, to run these algorithms, developers would have to set up and manage the infrastructure to run the optimization algorithms on classical machines and then manage the integration with the quantum computing hardware, in addition to the monitoring and visualization tools for analyzing the results.
Image Credits: AWS
But that’s not all. “Another big challenge is that [Quantum Processing Units] are shared, inelastic resources, and you compete with others for access,” AWS’s Danilo Poccia explains in today’s announcement. “This can slow down the execution of your algorithm. A single large workload from another customer can bring the algorithm to a halt, potentially extending your total runtime for hours. This is not only inconvenient but also impacts the quality of the results because today’s QPUs need periodic re-calibration, which can invalidate the progress of a hybrid algorithm. In the worst case, the algorithm fails, wasting budget and time.”
With the new Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs feature, developers get a fully managed service that handles the hardware and software interactions between the classical and quantum machines — and developers will get priority access to quantum processing units to provide them with more predictability. Braket will automatically spin up the necessary resources (and shut them down once a job is completed). Developers can set custom metrics for their algorithms and, using Amazon CloudWatch, they can visualize the results in near real time.
“As application developers, Braket Hybrid Jobs gives us the opportunity to explore the potential of hybrid variational algorithms with our customers,” said Vic Putz, head of engineering at QCWare. “We are excited to extend our integration with Amazon Braket and the ability to run our own proprietary algorithms libraries in custom containers means we can innovate quickly in a secure environment. The operational maturity of Amazon Braket and the convenience of priority access to different types of quantum hardware means we can build this new capability into our stack with confidence.”
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Hear how growth investors spot space companies ready to blast off at TC Sessions: Space 2021
The space economy is booming and for the first time ever, there’s a fair amount of exit event activity. That should have later stage investors who focus on the area excited, and we’ll be able to ask them about it directly at our virtual TechCrunch Sessions: Space event on December 14-15.
Joining us for a panel focused on later stage investing in space tech, we’ll have Tess Hatch, partner at Bessemer Ventures, Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and Lisa Rich of Xplore all on our stage at the event. We’ll look at the significant changes in the growth investment industry when it comes to space startups that have taken place this past year, and what it means to have a lot more companies actually shipping product and growing their customer base rather than being focused more on the research and development of groundbreaking tech.
Hatch, who herself has experience at both Boeing and SpaceX in addition to her investment experience, also stays close to the pulse of the industry (in addition to her investment work) by co-teaching a Stanford course on helping researchers commercialize their academic work.
Maguire’s focus as partner at Sequoia is on frontier tech, as well as fintech and enterprise (there’s a lot more crossover than you might expect!). His track record includes leading Sequoia’s investment in SpaceX, and he also led GV’s investment in Spinlaunch when he was a partner there prior to joining Sequoia in 2019.
Rich is herself an entrepreneur and founder, and has an extensive history of investing in both early stage and growth stage space companies, including Axiom Space, Made in Space, PlanetIQ and more. Rich’s own company, Xplore, also offers ‘space-as-a-service’ to customers, providing everything needed to host and operate a payload.
TC Sessions: Space 2021 takes place on December 14-15. Celebrate Cyber Monday and buy your 2-for-1 pass before November 29 at 11:59 pm (PT).
Is your company interested in speaking at TC Sessions: Space 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Lindell Despairs On Live TV Over His Election Lawsuit Flop
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell expressed despair over the weekend after his proposed election lawsuit failed to get the support of a single state attorney general.
During his 96-hour "Thanks-A-Thon" broadcast on Sunday, Lindell admitted that he was "frustrated" after he had lashed out at a Christian radio network just one day earlier.
"You know how many people have worked hard giving up everything they had because they know this country is gone," Lindell opined. "I was angry, it came out wrong -- probably came out wrong -- angry and I'm frustrated. I've had it."
"It's like we've worked so hard here," he continued, "working so hard to get to something that should have been so simple. Open up the [voting] machines. Of course, every state was illegal."
Lindell then held up a copy of the lawsuit for his would-be "Supreme Court case."
"Here's what's frustrating," he said. "We've worked hard on this and they're making a mockery out of it right now on Facebook and stuff, the media over here, the attack media. So where's our media? Where's our media?"
"Oh, Mike doesn't have an attorney general yet!" Lindell said in a mocking tone. "They wanted some more time because they were helping our country and helping those kids so they didn't have to get [Covid-19] shots."
Lindell had previously claimed that multiple state attorneys general would file the lawsuit with the Supreme Court by Nov. 23.
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Editorial Calls For Investigation Of Cruz And Hawley
The editorial board of one of the largest papers in Missouri called for the investigation of Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz over their illicit actions during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
Cruz and Hawley were the only two Senators to object to the election results. Both Senators did this even after the Capitol was ransacked by seditious Trump supporters.
Hawley was the one who objected first to certification which then whipped up the mob and forced a floor vote.
The editorial does not hold back:
Jan. 6 wasn’t a fantasy; it was real, and the culpability of these two senators must be determined.
Hawley and Cruz were the only two senators to object to certification of Joe Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 election results, citing (with zero evidence) supposed concerns about the election’s integrity. That was the same baseless, toxic nonsense then-President Donald Trump had been spewing since before the election. Such talk whipped up the mob of Trump loyalists to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Both Senators are now claiming they are the victims and make-believe they were doing their elected duty, but we know it was to gain political capital from the sickest citizens in this country.
And it was those sick people that assaulted the hub of US democracy.
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‘Looking for the Good War’ Says Our Nostalgia for World War II Has Done Real Harm
By BY JENNIFER SZALAI from NYT Books https://ift.tt/3xE2xoX
Sweden Elects Its First Female Leader — for Second Time in a Week
By BY CORA ENGELBRECHT AND CHRISTINA ANDERSON from NYT World https://ift.tt/3lj3NsT
Black Friday sales were up, but reflected the challenges facing retailers.
By BY SAPNA MAHESHWARI from NYT Business https://ift.tt/3xy6dIS
In Scotland, Serving Halibut for a Better Planet
By BY KIM SEVERSON from NYT Food https://ift.tt/3peos26
Sunday, 28 November 2021
Relations with Honduras, shaped by immigration, have differed under Trump and Biden.
By BY NATALIE KITROEFF from NYT World https://ift.tt/316wzpo
India’s Slice becomes unicorn with $220M funding from Tiger Global, Insight Partners and Advent
Rajan Bajaj, founder of fintech Slice, chimed in on a Twitter thread earlier this year and wondered aloud what he needs to do to turn his startup into a unicorn before he turns 30.
At just 28, Bajaj has figured it out.
Slice, which was valued at under $200 million in a financing round in June this year, has joined the unicorn club with a fresh $220 million fundraise, the startup said on Monday.
Tiger Global and Insight Partners co-led the Bangalore-based startup’s Series B round. Private equity firm Advent International’s Sunley House Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures, Anfa, and existing investors Gunosy, Blume Ventures, and 8i also participated in the round.
TechCrunch reported early last month that Tiger Global and Insight Global were in talks to back Slice. A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the round could grow further to $250 million.
Slice has established itself as one of the market leading card-issuing firms in India. The startup offers a number of cards that are aimed at tech-savvy, young professionals in the country. “These users have been on Instagram and Snapchat for years,” said Bajaj in an interview with TechCrunch.
“The bar for consumer design is very high for them,” Bajaj said of Slice customers. “We don’t have to educate them on how to navigate the app. It’s intuitive for them. They want simplicity and transparency.” The average age of a Slice customer is 27, which is also about the age of the team at Slice that is building the app, he said.
Image credits: Slice
And it’s a huge market.
Despite nearly a billion Indians having a bank account, only a tiny fraction of this population is covered by the South Asian nation’s young credit rating system. As we have outlined in the past, Indian banks heavily rely on archaic methodologies to determine an individual’s creditworthiness and whether they deserve a credit card. Their conclusion: it’s too risky to give a credit card or even a loan to most Indians.
Slice is tackling this by using its own underwriting system. Such is the confidence it has in its underwriting system that in September this year, it launched a card with $27 limit to tap into the nation’s 200 million population. Bajaj (pictured above) said the new card is gaining fast traction, but declined to share any figures.
The startup offers its customers a range of features such as the ability to pay the bill in three interest free instalments and access to discounts on purchase with scores of brands. Slice says it is issuing over 200,000 cards each month. With this, it has become the third largest card issuer in India after two banks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“Slice has built a product that customers love, which we expect will result in continued growth and market share gains,” said Alex Cook, a partner at Tiger Global, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Rajan and the team as they expand access to credit and deliver best-in-class customer experience.”
On the business front, the startup is clocking an annual revenue runrate of over $60 million, according to the source quoted above. The source requested anonymity as the details are private.
This is a developing story. More to follow…
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‘Encanto’ Reaches No. 1, but Moviegoers Are Tough to Lure Back
By BY BROOKS BARNES from NYT Movies https://ift.tt/3E48tKf
Phil Saviano, Survivor of Clergy Sex Abuse, Dies at 69
By BY KATHARINE Q. SEELYE from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3cUTRRt
Stephen Sondheim, as Great a Composer as He Was a Lyricist
By BY ANTHONY TOMMASINI from NYT Arts https://ift.tt/32G7gv3
Israel and Morocco impose blanket bans on all foreign travelers.
By BY ISABEL KERSHNER from NYT World https://ift.tt/3FUcVfb
‘Daddy at Your Service:’ Candidates promise a new era, but are tied to the past.
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Mike's Blog Round Up
Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, was born on this day in 1929. Since it would take a hundred videos to even begin to do Motown justice, let's just kick back and enjoy The Supremes "Love Child" from 1968, above.
Government works! Governing magazine spotlights State and Local Policymakers Honored for Effective Solutions.
Lawyers, Guns & Money wonders whatever happened to Don**d Tr**p’s modest proletarianism?
The Field Negro on fighting off the dark clouds.
Attention space nerds! Did you know that NASA has a small business grant program?
Round up by Driftglass of The Professional Left Podcast. Send tips to MBRU (at) crooksandliars (dot) com.
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