Thursday, February 17, 2022

Thursday Technology News and More...

Technology News and More...





Earnipay Africa Seed•
Earnipay , a fintech that provides flexible and on-demand salary access to income-earners, has raised $4 million in seed financing led by early-stage venture capital firm Canaan . Participating investors include XYZ Ventures, Village Global, Musha Ventures, Voltron Capital, Ventures Platform and Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade. Earnipay, which has been in beta since September 2021 and only launched l



In 2005, years before Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa came on the scene, two startups—ScanSoft and Nuance Communications—merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade—an average of 27% per year in sales. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Revenues in 2019 were roughly



Audio brand Bang & Olufsen has announced a second iteration of its excellent Beoplay Portal wireless gaming headphones – and unlike the originals they're compatible with PS5 as well as Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles, so even more gamers will be able to experience the brand's high-quality audio. The new Beoplay Portal gaming headset looks to retain the fantastic audio quality the brand i




Rideshare giant Uber is known for its reciprocal rating system, whereby passengers rate drivers, and drivers rate passengers. While many can appreciate the intent of this (to keep both parties well behaved), the rating system has also been controversial, and rubs many people the wrong way. While it has long been possible to see your Uber rating, Uber has just taken this to the next level, and now



Ryan Reynolds hasn't ruled out the possibility of Deadpool making a cameo appearance in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Following the release of Doctor Strange 2 's official poster last Sunday (February 13), some Marvel fans claimed that the beloved anti-hero could be seen (thanks to Culture Crave for the zoom-in on the poster) in the newly unveiled one-sheet. The next Marvel movie i



Mashable / 39min
TL;DR: Lifetime access to all languages on Babbel is just $199 as of Feb. 17. When it comes to self-improvement, 94 percent of millennials — those in their mid-20s to early-40s — reported they were committed to their own personal improvement and were willing to spend upwards of $300 a month to help make it happen. Of course, nobody said self-improvement had to be that expensive. Case in point, le



Mashable / 39min
TL;DR: As of Feb. 17, a lifetime subscription to The Insider School Unlimited — valued at $997 — is just $19. That's savings of 98%. There’s no shortage of knowledge to uncover on the internet. But distinguishing what’s helpful to your productivity and growth from what’s a major time suck isn’t easy. That’s why Brandon Hakim created Insider School Unlimited : a library of courses that covers the



Mashable / 39min
TL;DR: As of Feb. 17, you can get the TREBLAB XR700 PRO Wireless Sports Earphones for just $33.97 — that's 15% off their regular price of $39. When you’re working out, you shouldn’t have to worry about your headphones. And yet, sometimes you end up fiddling with them after just a few minutes. If you want a low-maintenance pair designed to actually stay snug in your ears, the Treblab XR700 Pro Wir



Mashable / 39min
TL;DR: As of Feb. 17, you can take 97% off the price of The Complete 2022 Java Coder Bundle and get the $1,791 value for just $39.99. If you’re interested in the data and logic side of coding, Java is a great language to start with. First developed in 1995, it remains one of the top coding languages in the world. It’s used to create mobile and web applications, games, and database-driven software



Their daughter’s online venture plunged a Florida family into a nightmare, but they decided not to pull the plug.



Patrick Gelsinger is back running a company he first joined at 18. The chip maker was a Silicon Valley titan that lost its luster. As the world craves chips, can Intel make its comeback?



Oppo Find X5 February 24•
The first few months of each year see most Android phone brands launch their flagship handsets, and following on from the Samsung Galaxy S22 , and getting in ahead of the Xiaomi 12 , OnePlus 10 and Realme GT 2 , is Oppo's device. This is the Oppo Find X5 - not the Find X4, despite this phone being a successor to the Find X3 series . It seems that Oppo has done what several Chinese phone companies



Sony Ventures Corporation (SVC) announced today that it has completed the first closing of its $215 million (25 billion JPY) fourth fund, Sony Innovation Fund 3 (SIF3), to back all stages of emerging technology companies. Sony Ventures Corporation was established in July last year to manage all of Sony’s venture investment activities through Sony Innovation Fund (SIF), Sony Innovation Fund by IGV



OnePlus Nord India•
The OnePlus Nord CE 2 is far from a secret for the Chinese phone manufacturer, but we’re expecting to learn everything about the next gen cheap phone during the company’s next big live stream. That’s set for later today (February 17) with the event starting at 8:30am ET / 5:30am PT / 1:30pm GMT, or 12:30am AEDT on February 18. The launch is set to take place on the company’s own website and throu



It would be fair to say that it is the mobile versions of WhatsApp that tend to get the most love and receive new and exciting features fastest. But that is not to say that the web and desktop versions are ignored; far from it. An excellent case in point in the brand-new update that's currently rolling out to users of the Windows 11 and Windows 10 version of WhatsApp who are signed up to take par



Chrome Firefox 100•
As both the Chrome and Firefox browsers approach their 100th versions, what should be a reason for the developers to celebrate could turn into a bit of a mess. It turns out that much like the Y2K bug, the triple-digit release numbers coded in the browsers' User-Agents (UAs) could cause issues with a small number of sites, Bleeping Computer reported. Major milestone: Chrome and Firefox will soon r



‘Embedded commerce’ started with things like PayPal and has evolved with products like Stripe, many years later. But ‘embedded finance’ is appearing as a new wave in FinTech, with the likes of Contis, Solaris, Swan, and Stripe Treasury (not yet live in the EU). Indeed, you may recall that Angela Strange (of a16z) made the proclamation in 2019 that “every company will be a Fintech company”, and so



Oppo MWC Barcelona 2022•
It's mid-February, and you know what that means: Companies that make phones are about to shower us with new models ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One company that hasn't launched a proper flagship in a while is China's Oppo, but that's about to change. The company says it's launching a new smartphone, the Oppo Find X5 Pro, on February 24 – four days ahead of MWC, which officiall



Pattinson Kilmer Batman•
The Batman actor Robert Pattinson dropped by Jimmy Kimmel Live to share what it was like taking up the Dark Knight's mantle — literally. The newest Bruce Wayne shared that he performed his screen test in a mashup of the batsuits from Batmen past, and that "every single one still has the actor's kind of sweat." "I tried on all of them," said Pattinson. "It's the size of your head that's the defini



Beoplay Portal B&O•
Audio brand Bang & Olufsen has announced a second iteration of its excellent Beoplay Portal wireless gaming headphones – and unlike the originals they're compatible with PS5 as well as Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles, so even more gamers will be able to experience the brand's high-quality audio. Launching on February 17, the new Beoplay Portal gaming headset looks to retain the fantastic




In Africa and the Middle East, most companies in the freight industry still use old-fashioned methods such as spreadsheets, phone calls and emails to manage their shipments. They are electronic yet manual processes that make their work very inefficient. While incumbents have pioneered various enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to digitize these processes, companies would still get four to
YESTERDAY



An Amazon union avoidance officer has reportedly told workers at the company's JFK8 warehouse that there's a possibility they could get lower pay than what they're currently getting if they unionize. Motherboard has obtained an audio recording of a mandatory anti-union meeting that happened on Wednesday, wherein the officer could be heard describing the collective bargaining process. "The negotia



DealShare $45M Series•
Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is backing the Indian social commerce startup DealShare, the two said Thursday, joining a roster of marquee investors doubling down on India’s fast-growing e-commerce market. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund is investing $45 million in DealShare , extending the size of the Jaipur-headquartered startup’s recently unveiled Series E financin



21Mashable / 3h
It's official: The Wordle clones are breeding like rabbits. First there came the original: one five-letter word, six guesses . Then alongside a raft of themed imitators , came Dordle , where you must solve two at once , with each guess counting against both grids, with only seven guesses allowed. If you know your times tables, you know what's coming next. Yes, Quordle is here . It's basically Dor



TL;DR: The Online Passive Income in 2022 Bundle is on sale for £14.73, saving you 98% on list price. Millennials and younger generations are behind the older generations when it comes to building wealth. It’s hardly surprising, but seeing the numbers makes it harder to swallow. If you’re looking for ways you can kick the stats to the curb and learn to build wealth non-traditionally, this Online P



TL;DR: The 2022 All-In-One Piano and Musician Training Bundle is on sale for £25.06, saving you 97% on list price. The All-In-One Piano and Musician Training Bundle includes eight full-length courses and over 520 lessons on playing a variety of instruments, writing and producing songs, and even marketing in the music business. And you can get lifetime access to the whole bundle for under £30. It



SAVE 81%: Ivacy VPN unblocks BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Hulu, and 16 major Netflix regions. A two-year subscription to Ivacy VPN is on sale for £36.03 and includes a free password manager — 81% off list price for a limited time. If you're looking for something to unlock extra content from around the world, you can't go wrong with ExpressVPN. This streaming-friendly service can reliably access all the



Colorful Technology Company Limited today announced the second generation of its gaming laptop , equipped with the latest Intel processors and an RTX 3050Ti GPU. The Colorful X15 XS gaming laptop can be configured with either a 12th generation Intel Core i5-12500H 12-core (4P+ 8E Cores), 16-thread processor or an Intel Core i7-12700H 14-core (6P+ 8E Cores), 20-thread processor – both offering exc



FAA Dickson Boeing•
Steve Dickson, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, is stepping down, effective March 31. The former Delta Air Lines pilot and executive had a tenure that was punctuated by multiple crises. Dickson was sworn-in to the agency in August 2019, five months after the global grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX. He was the face of the agency’s effort to get the aircraft recertified, and



Google Cloud Emissions•
Understanding, reporting and reducing carbon emissions is about to get a whole lot easier for Google Cloud customers thanks to the release of a new portfolio of intelligent tools called Active Assist. Last year the search giant analyzed aggregate data from all of its cloud customers to find over over 600,000 gross kgCO2e in idle projects that could be cleaned up or reclaimed. In fact, doing so wo



US Russian Hackers•
Gizmodo / 9h
For at least the past two years, Russian hackers have been targeting Pentagon-linked defense contractors and subcontractors to steal sensitive data and information, U.S. authorities revealed this week. Read more...



Fisker Ocean 31000•
27TechCrunch / 9h
Fisker is still on track to start production of the Ocean SUV in November, with reservations for its first electric vehicle jumping to 31,000, the company said Wednesday during its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings call. The EV startup said production of prototypes have started at the Fisker Ocean assembly facility, which is operated by automotive manufacturer Magna Steyr’s factory in Graz, A



Though HBO isn't ready to reveal a firm premiere date, the company's Chief Content Officer has provided a rough estimate for when "The Last of Us" will arrive.



If you've been using pixelation to redact sensitive information, you may want to use a different method instead as a security researcher has developed a new way to successfully recover pixelated words from redacted documents. Lead researcher at the security firm Bishop Fox, Dan Petro has published a new blog post detailing how he was able to completely recover text from an image that was redacted



SlashGear / 10h
Samsung will once again hold a virtual event for Mobile World Congress, and though it is keeping many details under wraps, it has teased new Galaxy devices.



Twitter Ethereum Bitcoin•
25Mashable / 10h
Bitcoin will just have to learn to share. Twitter announced Wednesday that users can now add their Ethereum wallet addresses to their profiles as part of the social media giant's iOS and Android Tips payment feature. Tips lets Twitter users add public-facing payment methods to their accounts, so that users can (as the name suggests) send tips or payments to others on the platform. Up until today,



Spotify Podcast Chartable•
Engadget / 10h
Spotify announced today that it is acquiring two major podcast ad tech firms, Chartable and Podsights , in a move to expand its offerings to advertisers. Both companies offer popular tools that help brands and agencies better understand the effectiveness of their podcast ads. In a blog post announcing the acquisitions, Spotify laid out how both companies will expand its ad platform. With Podsight



Enlarge (credit: Cooler Master ) OLED is so popular among shoppers seeking high-end image quality that its acronym is expanding (see: QD-OLED ). But in PC monitors, OLED means limited size options and lofty prices. Mini LED is a strong alternative but has long carried high price tags as well, partially due to the devices being so frequently marketed to creative professionals. But with this week's



CDC Wants Guidance•
Enlarge / Signage on a window of a coffee shop informs customer of their masking policy in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022. The state's indoor mask requirement, which requires everyone to wear face coverings indoors regardless of vaccination status, expired on Wednesday. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg ) With national cases of COVID-19 dropping precipitously, the Centers for D



Amazon Staten Island•
39TechCrunch / 11h
Late next month, workers at Amazon’s Staten Island fulfillment center will hold a long-awaited union vote, if all goes according to plan. The in-person election is tentatively set for March 25 through 30, coinciding with the culmination of a mail-in re-vote being held at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Christian Smalls — a former employee of the JFK8 warehouse in the New York borough a




When Swiss announced that it would launch a premium economy product, its modern seat design caught our eye. The airline operates a relatively limited long-haul network, especially compared to its German neighbor, Lufthansa, which coincidentally owns Swiss. Although it will only be placing this product on its 12 Boeing 777-300ERs, Swiss has begun selling this product to eight of its long-haul dest



20TechCrunch / 11h
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here . Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Wednesday, February 16, 2022! Most funding stories don’t go viral, but today is a bit of an exception – Flutterwave’s huge round made an impact, I can confirm. But before that and the rest of the news, am happy to announce that



SlashGear / 11h
Porsche's best-selling SUV is getting a new variant with the 2023 Macan T, which is set to hit dealerships in the US starting early this spring.



Samsung Galaxy MWC•
Engadget / 11h
Samsung's next hardware event will coincide with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company announced today it will host a fully virtual keynote on Sunday, February 27th at 1PM ET. You'll be able to watch the event on Samsung's website and the company's YouTube channel . You'll also find full coverage here at Engadget. In years past, Mobile World Congress was one of the most important events



Samsung Galaxy MWC•
Mashable / 11h
Samsung's got even more news for its fans before February's over, if they're still hungry for it. The tech giant announced via its website that there will be an announcement stream tied to Mobile World Congress to close out February. You’ll be able to watch it on YouTube or Samsung’s site on Feb. 27 at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. And that’s about all we know right now. Samsung’s announcement was notice



An exploitable bug sitting in a popular Linux kernel module, has been found after five years, researchers have claimed. Detailing the findings in a blog post , researcher Samuel Page from cybersecurity firm Appgate said the flaw was a stack buffer overflow, found in the kernel networking module for the Transparent Inter-Process Communication (TIPC) protocol. Page describes TIPC as an IPC mechanis



100+The Points Guy / 11h
Disney Cruise Line describes itself as “where magic meets the sea.” Since 1998, Disney has embraced many of the same skills it uses in its captivating movie-making to create a real-life setting on its first four ships that sweeps guests away to a world where almost anything feels possible. With its original class of ships, Disney introduced “magic” portholes in interior staterooms, fireworks cele



Cena Looney Tunes Acme•
Gizmodo / 11h
John Cena and Wile E. Coyote don’t have much in common. One’s hugely successful , the other loses every time. One’s super skinny, the other super bulky. And, of course, one’s human and the other is an animal . And now, the two polar opposites are going to face off in two very unlikely places: in a courtroom, in a movie… Read more...



AWS Amazon Web Services•
Latency is critical for a lot of workloads, yet the large cloud providers typically build their major data centers where the electricity is cheap and the local tax incentives high. In recent years, though, we’ve seen a new twist on this with projects like AWS’ Local Zones. These are small data centers adjacent to major population centers that provide core cloud features for applications like gami



Google Android Apple•
27Ars Technica / 11h
Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images ) Google is announcing the " Android Privacy Sandbox " today, a move the company says will be "a multi-year initiative" to introduce "more private advertising solutions" into Android. After Apple made tracking opt-in in iOS 14, Android wants to be seen as matching its main rival. Today's announcement is in addition to existing ad systems, not a replacem



Gizmodo / 12h
Mark Zuckerberg has named a new sucker to take his punches. In a blog post , Meta’s founder and CEO said Nick Clegg would now “lead our company on all policy matters,” and decide how the company interacts with governments under the new, glitzy title, “President, Global Affairs.” Read more...



100+Futurism / 12h
Canny Valley As if the possibility that AI might already be conscious wasn’t creepy enough, researchers have announced that AI-generated faces have become so sophisticated that many people think they’re more trustworthy than actual humans. A pair of researchers discovered that a neural network dubbed StyleGAN2 is capable of creating faces indistinguishable from the real thing, according to a pres



Gizmodo / 12h
As convenient as it to ask Siri to skip to the next track or load up songs from your favorite artist without pulling out your phone, there are times when verbally interacting with smart assistants isn’t an option. So researchers at Cornell University developed a wearable smart camera that can detect voice commands… Read more...



Clearview AI Post Database•
100+Ars Technica / 12h
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | imaginima ) The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI reportedly told investors that it aims to collect 100 billion photos—supposedly enough to ensure that almost every human will be in its database. "Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure 'almost everyone in



DeepMind AI Fusion•
74Ars Technica / 12h
Enlarge / Plasma inside the tokamak at the EPFL. (credit: EPFL ) As the world waits for construction of the largest fusion reactor yet, called ITER, smaller reactors with similar designs are still running. These reactors, called tokamaks, help us test both hardware and software. The hardware testing helps us refine things like the materials used for container walls or the shape and location of co



84Gizmodo / 12h
When Horizon Zero Dawn first released five years ago, its biggest draw was the protagonist Aloy exploring post-apocalyptic America and fighting robot animals with just a bow and various arrows. That, plus the mystery surrounding the machines and the larger world, drew fans deeply into Guerrilla Games’ open world… Read more...



McIntosh Labs has just unveiled its newest flagship AV receiver that is… well, the definition of overkill. Not only does it support 15.1 or 9.1.6 surround sound as well as seven(!) HDMI 2.1 ports for 8K/60 and 4K/120, it’s also equipped to support five types of HDR. The receiver in question is called the McIntosh MX180 and for cinephiles and audiophiles, it’s basically the Rolls-Royce of receiver



Galaxies are mind-bendingly big structures, but one recently discovered galaxy is an absolute colossus stretching millions of light years across despite having less mass than many of its counterparts. The galaxy in question, Alcyoneus, is a special type of galaxy known as a radio galaxy, defined by a unique feature of its central supermassive black hole. When any black hole gobbles up material, i



The cleaning products you use in your house are 99% water. Yes, the same stuff that comes out of the spigot at your house. With the radical idea that the municipal water system is probably a better way to transport water around, Blueland just raised $20 million to expand its successful line of cleaning-products-in-tablet-form, in a bid to reduce single-use plastics and put a stop to the silliness



huariqueje : Reading - Darren Thompson , 2020. American , b. 1968 - oil on wood




25Mashable / 12h
There are plenty of plot holes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some of them are small in scale, like Thor destroying the Bifrost, Stephen Strange being a Project Insight target years before he became the Sorcerer Supreme, and the strong possibility that Sebastian Stan the actor exists in the same universe as Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). Other plot holes are substantially larger to the point t



A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips. Continue reading ...



Google Workspace Docs•
Working together online with your colleagues has always been an essential part of Google Docs but with the launch of smart canvas last year, collaborating with others using the company's office software has become even more intuitive. In order to help users sort through all of their documents in their inbox, the search giant is introducing automatically generated summaries in Docs which provide a



Have you always wanted to know what your Uber driver really thinks of you? Do they prefer passengers who sit quietly in the backseat with their headphones in (and face masks on) or do they actually enjoy engaging in conversation? Today is your lucky day, because riders finally have a bit of insight as to what goes into a rating and additional data regarding your ride history. For more TPG news de



30TechCrunch / 12h
David Teten Contributor David Teten is founder of Versatile VC and writes periodically at teten.com and @dteten . More posts by this contributor What are the ‘jobs to be done’ of an investment manager? The investment manager of the future Akshat Dixit Contributor Akshat Dixit is a senior a


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