Technology

Jio Platforms has quietly launched its first laptop, entering into a new product category as the Indian telecom giant aggressively expands its offerings. The laptop, called JioBook, runs JioOS, a custom Android-based OS that has been “optimized for superior performance” and local languages support. The laptop, manufactured in India, is selling at 15,799 Indian rupees, […]

Reliance launches JioBook, its maiden Android-powered laptop by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Bill Gates, John Kerry, and US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm all struck positive notes at an energy summit in Seattle this week hosted by Gates’s climate-focused venture fund, Breakthrough Energy. With caveats. Government policy is accelerating clean energy projects. The cost of renewables continues to fall. Huge sums of private and public capital are pouring…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The debate over whether aging is a disease rages on Last October, word began to spread among researchers that the World Health Organization was considering a change to its International Classification of Diseases,…

“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Alex Hanna wrote on February 2, her last day on Google’s Ethical AI team. She felt that the company, and the tech industry as a whole, did little to promote diversity or mitigate the harms its products had caused to marginalized people. “In a word, tech has a whiteness…

The kingdom of Eswatini is considering the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), joining the growing list of African countries exploring the viability of an e-currency. The Central Bank of Eswatini (CBE) said it has appointed German technology group Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) to research and explore the possibilities of a digital Lilangeni (the country’s […]

Eswatini’s central bank mulls issuance of a digital currency by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

Nexta, an Egyptian startup that plans to launch its banking app in the coming months, has secured a $5 million investment from eFinance Group, a state-owned provider of digital payments solutions. This news follows the $2 million pre-seed round Nexta announced this March, which Egyptian early-stage VC Disruptech led. Last year, Nexta obtained a provisional […]

Egypt’s Nexta to launch “next-gen banking” app with fresh $5M by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

E-liza Dolls, a Berkeley-based startup, is aiming to challenge the gender gap in STEM by helping young girls learn to code using dolls. The company, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, builds dolls that include programmable computers that girls can code through an app. The startup was founded in 2021 […]

Meet E-liza Dolls, the startup that’s building dolls to help young girls learn to code by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration. “The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with […]

Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch