All Things Tech

Fintech startup Bnext has raised a $25 million funding round. The Spanish company is building a banking product and has managed to attract 300,000 active users. DN Capital, Redalpine and Speedinvest are leading today’s funding round. Existing investors Founders Future and Cometa are also participating. Other investors include Enern, USM and Conexo. When you open a Bnext account, you get a card and you can upload money to your account. Bnext accounts aren’t technically bank accounts — the company has an e-money license. You can then use your card and spend money anywhere around the world without any foreign transaction fee. You can also freeze and unfreeze your card from the app. “As of now we'll stick to the e-money license, as our international expansion plans complicate potential passporting of banking licenses. We will first need to understand in which countries makes more sense to get a banking license, and then we'll make a decision,” co-founder and CEO Guillermo Vica

Berlin-based recruitment chatbot startup Jobpal has closed a €2.5 million (~$2.7M) seed round of funding from InReach Ventures and Acadian Ventures . The company, which was founded back in 2016, has built a cross-platform chatbot to automate candidate support and increase efficiency around hiring by applying machine learning and natural language processing for what it dubs “talent interaction”. The target customers are large enterprises with Jobpal offering the product as a managed service. For these employers the pitch is increased efficiency by being able to rapidly respond to and engage potential job applicants whenever they’re reaching out for more info via an always-on channel (i.e. the chatbot) which is primed to respond to common questions. Candidates can also apply for vacancies via the Jobpal chatbot by answering a series of questions in the familiar messaging thread format. Jobpal says its chatbot can also be used to screen applicants’ CVs and recommend the most promisi

M.Games said that its free-to-play first-person shooter online game Warface has 13 million players on the consoles so far. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2o9o35d

WeWork's parent The We Company filed to withdraw its initial public offering, a week after ousting founder Adam Neumann as its CEO. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2n8mJQg

If you look at enough of another developer’s code, you will eventually say, “What were you thinking, you gosh-darn lunatic?” Now, this exchange can precede the moment where you quit a company and check into a padded room, or it can be akin to calling someone a mad genius and offering them a beer. In the case of [Steven Sidley]’s 1982 game Entombed , [John Aycock] and [Tara Copplestone] found a mysterious table for generating pseudo-random mazes and wrote a whitepaper on how it all works (PDF). The table only generates solvable mazes, but if any bits are changed, the puzzles become inescapable. The software archaeologists are currently in a labyrinth of their own, in which the exit is an explanation of the table, but the path is overgrown with decade-old vines. The programmer did not make the table himself, and its creator’s name is buried somewhere in the maze. Game cart storage was desperately limited so mazes had to be generated on-the-fly rather than crafted and stored. Entombed

Dyson’s sculptural air purifiers are getting a new model, with the new Dyson Pure Cryptomic adding formaldehyde removal to their talents. Tucked inside the cylindrical body is a new catalyst panel, which Dyson says can take harmful formaldehyde and convert it into harmless water and carbon dioxide. Compared to smog, cooking smells, and other particulates, formaldehyde might not be on … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2n7Rncw

This year, Apple has finally checked off some of the boxes that iPhone users have been begging for for years while still managing to be typical Apple in others. It has a triple camera system now, at least on its iPhone 11 Pro models, and supports a very fast wired, still not wireless, charging even if it didn’t ship the … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2nlkWav

Adam Neumann’s fall from grace was astonishingly swift once his company, WeWork, filed to go public in August. Even while his spending was fairly well-documented across time (as were his apparent conflicts of interest ), he was humiliated for enriching himself, then ultimately kicked out of the corner office before the company, in the least surprising turn of events in recent weeks, today yanked its S-1 registration. Neumann never exactly hid who he is or how he operates, so what suddenly sparked the ire of reporters — and investors — around the world? What, exactly, in an ultimately unsurprising IPO filing had people coughing up their morning coffee? Boiled down to the worst offense (including selling his own company the trademark “We” for $5.9 million in stock ) was very likely the lock on control that Neumann had set up through a multi-class voting structure that aimed to cement his control. And by ‘cement,’ we mean he would enjoy overwhelming control for not just for 5 or 10 year

Cloud file storage is often presented as a collaborative tool but it can also be used for keeping personal backups of files you want to access any time, anywhere, and on any device. Sometimes, however, those files may require the utmost secrecy and security, perhaps far more than the usual security measures these cloud services implement. That’s where Microsoft’s OneDrive … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2oGXSDh

At I/O 2019 a few months back, Google announced two impressive features that not only improve the accessibility of the Android platform but also offered users more ways to interact with the world around them as well as with digital content. Live Transcribe, as the name says, transcribed sounds the phone picks up around it into text while Live Caption … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2oPs6nX

It wasn’t long ago that we introduced you to a web site, the Godbolt compiler explorer, that allows the visitor to compile code using a slew of compilers and compare their output. We suspect some number of readers said, “Wow! I can use that!”, while perhaps everyone else said, “Huh?” Well if you were in the second group, you ought to watch [What’s a Creel’s] video below where he walks through using the website . He looks at four different algorithms using four different compilers and it is a good example of how you might use the tool to make decisions about how you write software. If you missed our original post about the tool, you can still catch up . Even if you don’t care much about the compiler explorer, this is an opportunity to gaze over an experienced programmer’s shoulder as he looks at some C code and generated assembly code. The results might surprise you. In the first example, CLANG did some great optimization but other compilers created a lot of code by comparison. One o

Even as tens of millions of Indians have come online for the first time in recent years, most businesses in the nation remain offline. They continue to rely on long notebooks to keep a log of their financial transactions. A nine-month old startup that is digitizing the bookkeeping and allowing merchants to accept online payments just raised a significant amount of capital. Khatabook , a Bangalore-based startup, said on Tuesday it has raised $25 million in a new financing round. The Series A round for the startup was funded by GGV Capital, Partners of DST Global, RTP Ventures, Sequoia India, Tencent, and Y Combinator. A clutch of high-profile angel investors including Amrish Rau, Anand Chandrasekharan, Deep Nishar, Gokul Rajaram, Jitendra Gupta, Kunal Bahl, and Kunal Shah also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date. Khatabook operates an eponymous Android app that allows small and medium businesses to keep a log of their financial transactions and accept

Duplex is one of Google’s most interesting, and sometimes most worrying, products to be revealed in recent years. It combines a few key Google technologies, including Google Assistant, Search and Knowledge Graph, language processing, and, of course, machine learning. When it first came out, it was at the service of those trying to book restaurants or even services. Now Duplex … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2oFT3dp

The US government’s blacklists and tariffs were meant to send a strong statement to China and pressure the latter in its ongoing trade and political spat. Unfortunately, it won’t just be the Chinese economy that will get affected as even the US tech market will soon feel the aftermath. The Mac Pros, already one of the more expensive computers in … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2o5n3it

Shawn Layden is leaving Sony Interactive Entertainment. He has spent decades at Sony, but his is just the latest in a string of high-profile departures. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2oNa7OZ

A new analysis has detailed the various health consequences of vaping based on all peer-reviewed studies published on vaping and electronic cigarettes to date. The team found that electronic cigarettes have been linked to many potential health consequences in both humans and animals, including cell and lung health changes similar to diseases caused by smoking traditional cigarettes. Electronic cigarettes, more … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2mpfEdu

Scientists from the EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab and the Laboratory for Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces have teamed up to develop a new soft, flexible artificial skin that is made of silicon and electrodes. The artificial skin has a system of soft sensors and actuators that enable the material to conform to the exact shape of the wearer’s wrist, as an example, … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2mdxcsW

Brain Age is coming back on the Nintendo Switch. Well, at least in Japan. Nintendo is launching a new take on the Brain Age series on December 27. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2oBShyd

BlackBerry launching a new business unit dedicated entirely to cybersecurity R&D, with Cylance and machine learning a core focus. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2otpYll

Our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man has swung back to Marvel, keeping Tom Holland’s incarnation of the hero alive. A new deal between movie studios Sony and Disney agreed to keep Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and even confirming the release date of a third Spidey film on July 16, 2021. The news follows a breakup between Sony and Disney … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2mhbEvH

In our Nintendo Switch Lite review, we look at how the device stacks up as a handheld console. And it might be the new pinnacle of that form factor. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2nTsPUE

Nintendo just launched its oddest Switch barely a little over a week ago and it’s already in a bit of a bind. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the perfect Switch on the go or a total waste of time. But market opinions and sales numbers may have nothing on the technical and legal problems the smaller handheld might … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2nQ1v9A

When asked what data was most important to driving innovation, 78% of business respondents in a recent study answered customer feedback. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2oscl5U

When the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ was announced in March of 2018, one of its new features was the ability to be (more easily) powered via Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), with an official PoE HAT for the low price of just twenty-one USA bucks. The thing also almost worked as intended the first time around. But to some people this just isn’t good enough, resulting in [Albert David] putting out a solution he calls “poor man’s PoE” together for about two bucks . His solution makes it extra cheap by using so-called passive PoE , which injects a voltage onto the conductors of the network cable being used for PoE, without bothering with any kind of handshake. In general this is considered to be a very reliable (albeit non-standard) form of PoE that works great until something goes up in smoke. It’s also ridiculously cheap, with a PoE injector adapter (RJ-45 plug & 2.1×5.5 mm power jack to RJ-45 jack) going for about 80 cents, and a DC-DC buck converter that can handle the input of 12V for abou

Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent is taking a 29% stake to become the largest shareholder in Oslo-based Funcom . The indie games developer is responsible for multiple adaptations involving the Conan the Barbarian franchise, such as Age of Conan and Conan Exiles , as well as a number of other multiplayer titles — including a forthcoming open world sandbox game that will be set in the Dune sci-fi universe. The news that Tencent has entered into a share purchase agreement to acquire almost a third of the company was announced in a press release today. The Chinese giant has agreed to acquire all the shares belonging to the Norway-based KGJ Capital AS, which is currently the largest shareholder in Funcom. Commenting in a statement, Funcom CEO Rui Casais said: “Tencent has a reputation for being a responsible long-term investor, and for its renowned operational capabilities in online games. The insight, experience, and knowledge that Tencent will bring is of great value t

Every new Android release is a guessing game for smartphone owners. No, it’s not really about what dessert it will be named after, which no longer matters starting this year. It’s more of whether and when their phone will get the latest Android version. Few manufacturers can be considered to be consistent, though some are unfortunately consistent at being bad … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2n50DxI

Amboss , the Berlin-based ‘medtech’ startup that originally offered a learning app for students but has since pivoted to a knowledge platform for medical professionals, has raised €30 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Partech’s growth fund, with Target Global acting as a co-investor. Existing investors, Cherry Ventures, Wellington Partners and Holtzbrinck Digital, also participated. Launched in 2014 as a study platform for medical students, Amboss has since evolved to offer what it claims is the “most comprehensive and technologically-advanced” knowledge platform for medical professionals. It has been developed by a group of 70 doctors and 40 software engineers who work together in small cross functional teams. “Medical Knowledge does not find its way into practice efficiently,” argues Ambross co-CEO Benedikt Hochkirchen. “This has two main root causes: the way we educate doctors is outdated, and the way doctors access knowledge is inefficient”. Specifically, he says

Elon Musk has unveiled a new version of Starship, as the SpaceX CEO outlined a speedy development timeline for sending humans to the moon and Mars. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2orhVp7

We have no idea what a playing card press is, nor do we care. All we know is that after watching [Chris] from Clickspring make his playing card press , we want it. Digging a little deeper, [Chris] offered to make this card press for [Chris Ramsay], a magician who specializes in cardistry, or the art of illusions with cards. The feel of playing cards is crucial to performing with them, and a card press keeps a deck of cards in shape. Not a commonly available device, [Clickspring Chris] designed one in an elaborate style that brought in elements from [Chris Ramsay]’s logo. Like all Clickspring videos, this one is a joy to watch, but in a departure, there’s no narration — just 30 minutes of precision machining and metal finishing. [Chris] has gotten into metal engraving in a big way, and used his skills to add details to everything from the stylized acorn at the top to the intricate press plate, all of which was done freehand. And those snakes! Made from brass rod and bent into shape by

Atari revealed today that Antstream Arcade will to bring thousands of retro games to Atari VCS console when the system launches in March 2020. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2m8d0sq

While it might look like a disrobed flash drive or RTL-SDR dongle, the USB Armory Mk II is actually a full-fledged open hardware computer built into the ubiquitous USB “stick” format. But more than just that, it’s optimized for security research and boasts a list of features that are sure to get the attention of any pentesters in the audience. Fine tuned thanks to the feedback developer [Inverse Path] received about the original version of the hardware, the Mk II promises to be the last word in secure mobile computing. Compared to the original hardware, the most obvious change is the switch to USB-C. The previous USB Armory used traces on the PCB to plug directly into a USB Type-A port, but this time around [Inverse Path] has put a proper male connector on the front of the board. Nominally, the USB Armory is plugged into a host computer to provide it with power and a network connection, though it also has the ability to disguise itself as a storage or input device for more stealthy a

In terms of themes, the Surface Pro and the iPad Pro have been nearly equal, both advertising the ultimate computing portability. The similarities end there, however, with Apple’s slate taking the lead in battery life, connectivity, and even weight and thickness. At the mercy of Intel’s chips, Microsoft has never been able to scale the Surface line to an iPad-like … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2nGHXEK

Huawei has started to portray an image of independence from US companies, at least as far as some hardware components go. It has touted its own Kirin system-on-chip (SoC) to rival Qualcomm’s and even Samsung’s and Apple’s on the smartphone side of things. Now it’s doing the same for wearables with the newly revealed Kirin A1. But more than just … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2nPl5CL

A new Microsoft Garage project, Microgravity Lab, presents teachers with a new and interactive way to teach middle school students about complex physics concepts in microgravity. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2oslgEz

Google is expected to launch a new Pixel-branded Chromebook in just a few weeks and those vying for that device will have a shiny new Chrome OS release waiting for them. Of course, all Chromebook owners will be able to enjoy the new stable release of Chrome OS 77, though some might have features unavailable to older devices. With the … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2nHFZUs

Pie Face is a game that does pretty much what you’d expect from the title. Players sit in front of a spring loaded arm, taking turns to twist a crank. Eventually, one unlucky player will release the arm and be splattered with whipped cream to the enjoyment of the group. [Harrison] wasn’t one to leave things to chance, however, so decided to rig the game . Instead of allowing the spring-loaded arm to be released by the internal rotating drum, [Harrison] had a better idea. The drum was sanded smooth, to remove the teeth used by the release mechanism. Then, the release mechanism was replaced with a servo, controlled by an Arduino Nano fitted with a Bluetooth module. With just a tap on his smart phone, [Harrison] can trigger the game, guaranteeing his friends get the cream every time. It’s a tidy build, and one that takes care to avoid detection with subtle design. Had he not released a Youtube video on the build, [Harrison]’s friends would likely be none the wiser. If your thirst for c

Chinese mobile-phone and device maker  Transsion has listed in an IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market, a Transsion spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.  Headquartered in Shenzhen, Transsion is a top-seller of smartphones in Africa under its Tecno brand. The company has also started to support venture funding of African startups. Transsion issued 80 million A-shares at an opening price of 35.15 yuan (≈ $5.00) to raise 2.8 billion yuan (or ≈ $394 million). A-shares are the common shares issued by mainland Chinese companies and are normally available for purchases only by mainland citizens.   Transsion’s IPO prospectus is  downloadable (in Chinese)  and its STAR Market listing  application available  on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s website. STAR is the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s new Nasdaq-style board for tech stocks that went live in July with some 25 companies going public. Transsion plans to spend 1.6 billion yuan (or $227 million) of its STAR Market raise on building more phone as