July 7, 2025

Producing tangible business benefits from modern iPaaS solutions

When a historic UK-based retailer set out to modernize its IT environment, it was wrestling with systems that had grown organically for more than 175 years. Prior digital transformation efforts had resulted in a patchwork of hundreds of integration flows spanning cloud, on-premises systems, and third-party vendors, all communicating across multiple protocols.  The company needed…

Technology

At Bill Gates’s climate conference, “amazing” progress and “depressing” trends

October 19, 2022
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…

The Download: the aging/disease debate, and WeChat’s dark side

October 19, 2022
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,…

Alex Hanna left Google to try to save AI’s future

October 19, 2022
“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 debate over whether aging is a disease rages on

October 19, 2022
Last year, over Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, Kiran Rabheru eagerly joined a call with officials from the World Health Organization (WHO). Word had spread of a change coming to the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), a catalogue used to standardize disease diagnosis worldwide. In an upcoming revision, the plan was to replace the diagnosis of…

Eswatini’s central bank mulls issuance of a digital currency

October 19, 2022

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

Egypt’s Nexta to launch “next-gen banking” app with fresh $5M

October 19, 2022

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

Meet E-liza Dolls, the startup that’s building dolls to help young girls learn to code

October 18, 2022

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

Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression

October 18, 2022

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

The dark side of a super app like WeChat

October 18, 2022
China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about what’s happening in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Welcome back to China Report!  I know this is going to be a long week for all of you China watchers. New stories seem to be coming out every minute about the 20th Party Congress…