Huge EVs are far from perfect, but they could still help fight climate change.

February 16, 2023
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. When it comes to watching the Super Bowl, I’ve always been more of a football person than a commercials person. During Sunday’s game, though, I couldn’t help but notice something about the ads. …

Lightspeed backs CommandK’s mission to become the go-to enterprise security command center

February 16, 2023

CommandK, a startup offering a dedicated platform to manage enterprise security, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed. Companies accumulate a lot of sensitive data and store secrets, such as API tokens, SSH keys and personally identifiable information. But protecting that is a complex task and requires state-of-the-art security prowess. This […]

Lightspeed backs CommandK’s mission to become the go-to enterprise security command center by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Micro-EV subscription startup Dance pulls in another €12M from existing investors

February 16, 2023

Micro-EV subscription startup Dance, which launched in 2020, has raised an additional €12 million in an equity and debt round led by existing investors HV Capital, Eurazeo and BlueYard. Dance was launched out of Berlin by former Soundloud and Jimdo founders, but since last year is now also available in Paris, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna. […]

Micro-EV subscription startup Dance pulls in another €12M from existing investors by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

South Korea boosts its AI chip industry with $642M amid ChatGPT frenzy

February 16, 2023

South Korea hopes to be a key player in fulfilling the new global demand for next-generation AI chips, and today the government put some money where its mouth is: the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT said it would earmark $642.5 million (826.2 billion won) through 2030 to invest in companies working on advanced AI […]

South Korea boosts its AI chip industry with $642M amid ChatGPT frenzy by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

The ChatGPT-fueled battle for search is bigger than Microsoft or Google

February 16, 2023
It’s a good time to be a search startup. When I spoke to Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com, last week he was buzzing: “Man, what an exciting day—looks like another record for us,” he exclaimed. “Never had this many users. It’s been a whirlwind.” You wouldn’t know that two of the biggest firms in…

How K-pop fans are shaping elections around the globe

February 16, 2023
Less than a month before Chile’s presidential election on December 19, 2021, Constanza Jorquera, an associate researcher at the Chilean Korean Study Center at the University of Santiago, Chile, feared that her country’s future—and her own rights—hung in the balance. The right-wing candidate, a 55-year-old former congressman named Jose Antonio Kast, had won the first…

SoftBank joins game-focused blockchain Oasys as validator

February 16, 2023

As many observers question what real value blockchain can bring to video games, a conglomerate is vouching for the space. SoftBank Corp, the telecom operator arm of SoftBank Group, has joined Oasys, a blockchain designed for video games, as a validator. A validator is a node or computer that helps to verify transactions being added […]

SoftBank joins game-focused blockchain Oasys as validator by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

Firefox for Android gets extension for listening to articles and hiding email addresses

February 16, 2023

Mozilla has added three new extensions for its Android web browser. Firefox only has a limit set of extensions on Android, and today’s new extensions add features and improve privacy. These extensions can hide the user’s email address when signing up to a website and remove tracking elements before sharing a URL. Another extension lets […]

Firefox for Android gets extension for listening to articles and hiding email addresses by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

German startup Kern AI nabs seed funding for modular NLP development platform

February 16, 2023

Natural language processing (NLP), while hardly a new discipline, has catapulted into the public consciousness these past few months thanks in large part to the generative AI hype train that is ChatGPT. Alongside other NLP models such as Hugging Face’s Transformers, and Google’s LaMDA which is set to power its ChatGPT-rival Bard, there’s a palpable […]

German startup Kern AI nabs seed funding for modular NLP development platform by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

Dash CEO placed on ‘indefinite administrative leave’ as the Insight-backed startup carries out financial audit

February 16, 2023

Prince Boakye Boampong, the founder and CEO of Dash, which provides an alternative payment network with connected wallets allowing interaction between mobile money and bank accounts in Africa, has allegedly been temporarily suspended pending an investigation into financial impropriety, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. Boampong founded the Ghanaian fintech in 2019 […]

Dash CEO placed on ‘indefinite administrative leave’ as the Insight-backed startup carries out financial audit by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch