Thousands attend military parade in Belarus even as virus spreads rapidly in neighbouring Russia, UK airline industry warns of huge blow if travel quarantine is launched and Seoul closes down bars and clubs in wake of new cluster

The Nobel laureate talks to Anjana Ahuja

Jim Ratcliffe-led chemicals group adds top-flight team to growing sports portfolio

Projections suggest $300m in annual cost savings and $400m of revenue benefits

Cheap shale gas has fed an investment boom in products that often end up as waste. Has the petrochemicals industry miscalculated?

Mark Cutifani says polyhalite a ‘very differentiated’ product to potash

German chemicals group blames Brexit and trade tensions for earnings fall

Like other accelerators, Techstars, a network of more than 40 corporate and geographically targeted startup bootcamps, has had to bring its marquee demo day events online. Over the last two weeks of April, industry-focused accelerators working with startups building businesses around mobility technologies (broadly) and the future of the home joined programs in Abu Dhabi, […]

AskRobin, an Estonia-founded fintech that operates a financial services marketplace for “underbanked” customers in Latin America, has picked up $1.7 million in funding. The seed round is backed by VC funds Change Ventures, Vereeni Early Stage Fund, BENE Asia Capital, and Lemonade Stand. In addition, a number of tech entrepreneurs from Estonia participated, such as […]

A number of UK entrepreneurs have banded together to survey Angels about their investment strategy. The initiative comes in the wake of the UK government’s “Future Fund” for startups, which has been criticized as being inadequate for the needs of Angel and Seed-stage startups. The group hopes the survey will give the UK early-stage investment […]

Meet Kairn, a new startup coming out of stealth today with a sneak peek of what the company has been working on. As Wunderlist shuts down, Kairn wants to prove that there’s still room for an innovative task-management service. “We’re building a task manager that is smart and focused on capturing tasks,” co-founder and CEO […]

“Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite?” Google that phrase and you will get thousands of results. It just goes to show that, to a large extent, the “Q&A” model is broken on the internet. Where once Yahoo Answers and Quora were considered the bright young things of Web 2.0’s “Read/Write Web,” today there is only the […]

Your guide to the investment and business revolution you can’t afford to ignore

Your guide to the investment and business revolution you can’t afford to ignore

You can now debunk thousands of coronavirus-related hoaxes with a few texts on WhatsApp . Poynter Institute, a non-profit organization that supports journalism, today launched a bot on the Facebook -owned service that will allow people across the globe to debunk over 4,000 hoaxes surrounding the pandemic such as whether the infectious disease originated in […]

Ideally governments would co-ordinate fiscal policy but there is no sense of urgency

Donald Trump pulls support from the World Health Organization

Another on-demand transport app is making a move into payments to expand the existing relationship with its customers (and subsequent margins that it makes from serving them). Bird today announced the launch of Bird Pay, a service that will let people use its app to purchase items from local participating businesses alongside renting scooters. The service […]

Traditionally dominated by big players like Adobe and Autodesk, the world of design has been flush with a newer wave of startups that are creating collaboration spaces and new cloud-based tools designed to address the needs of creatives. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble, an online community for designers that lets them post […]

On the heels of a spate of reports over the weekend, today Intel confirmed its latest move to grow its automotive division. The chip giant is acquiring Moovit, an Israeli startup previously backed by Intel that analyses urban traffic patterns and provides transportation recommendations with a specific focus on public transit. The deal values Moovit at […]

M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense. The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, […]

The regulators said “NO” when Telefonica tried to combine its O2 operations in the UK with rival carrier, Hutchison-owned Three, back in 2015. But Telefonica didn’t let go of the idea of divestment, and five years later, in the middle of a health pandemic with related threats of a global economic depression looming over us, […]

Shares soar in after-hours trading following better than expected figures

Transport demand will rebound while the pandemic will reboot the use of plastics

In spite of being in the midst of a pandemic sowing economic uncertainty, one area that continues to thrive is cloud computing. Perhaps that explains why Microsoft, which saw Azure grow 59% in its most recent earnings report, announced plans to open a new data center in New Zealand once it receives approval from the […]

A series of big bankruptcies is unlikely but debt workouts will slow economic recovery

Gulf between darkening Main Street and rebounding markets continues to widen

Online retailer hopes to avoid fate of non-banks whose value surpassed country’s biggest lender

Twitch is doubling down on esports in this new era of social distancing as a number of traditional sporting events have been cancelled. The company this week introduced a new esports directory on its site that will make it easier for viewers to find live matches, information on players, games with active competition leagues, a […]

Tinder will add a video dating feature in the second quarter of this year, parent company Match announced on Tuesday as part of its Q1 2020 earnings report. The company also detailed the coronavirus impact, which slowed Tinder user growth in the quarter, as social distancing requirements and government lockdowns went into effect. Match didn’t […]

Target, which already owns on-demand delivery service Shipt, is in the process of acquiring technology assets from same-day delivery service Deliv. The retailer is characterizing the deal as more of an R&D type of acquisition and not one that will have an immediate consumer-facing impact. Deal terms were not disclosed, but we understand the deal […]

If the UK stock market is in for more of a hiding, the FTSE 100 is likely to outperform the FTSE 250

He has taken money from them and frittered it away over the years after promising he would invest it

I would like to pay her but am worried the IR35 tax changes in April could complicate matters

I’m still worried about being investigated by HMRC despite the 12-month postponement

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service . Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) […]

The UK has this week started testing a coronavirus contacts-tracing app which NHSX, a digital arm of the country’s National Health Service, has been planning and developing since early March. The test is taking place in the Isle of Wight, a 380km2 island off the south coast of England, with a population of around 140,000. […]

Despite the worldwide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, global smartwatch shipments continued to grow during the first three months of the year, driven by online sales, says a new report by research firm Strategy Analytics. Shipments grew 20% annually to reach 13.7 million units in the first quarter of 2020, up from 11.4 million units […]

The UK may be rethinking its decision to shun Apple and Google’s API for its national coronavirus contacts tracing app, according to the Financial Times, which reported yesterday that the government is paying an IT supplier to investigate whether it can integrate the tech giants’ approach after all. As we’ve reported before coronavirus contacts tracing […]

Lofty ideas about open economies will have to be sold on directly improving voters’ lives

In a choice between discussing the WTO and the WHO, I’d take a rules-of-origin trade debate any day

Britain has less margin for error because it is zigging to everyone else’s zag

With police enforcing the lockdown, it may mean new roles for some old telly favourites

Post-lockdown, technology could help us contain Covid-19. But why stop there?

Whether on pocket money or holidays, I see the wisdom in refusing to discuss important decisions

Before lockdown, my desire to eat Hobnobs outweighed my desire to be thinner. Not any more

In poker, complacency is a quiet killer. It can steal your forward momentum bit by bit, using the warm glow of a winning hand or two to cover the bets you’re not making until it’s too late and you’re out of leverage.  Over the past few years, Apple’s MacBook game had begun to suffer from […]

Accessory maker TwelveSouth has a solid lineup of gadgets, many of which fill a niche that their products uniquely address — and address remarkably well. The AirFly Pro ($54.99) is a new iteration on one of those, providing a way to connect Bluetooth headphones to any audio source with a 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s being […]

Apple has new hardware coming, the U.S. government may use cell phone data to track the spread of COVID-19 and Fox acquires a streaming company. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 18, 2020. 1. Apple announces new iPad Pro The new iPad Pro looks more-or-less like the existing iPad Pro, but with better specifications, plus […]

Update: We mistakenly noted in an earlier version that Chaudhri had been a part of Microsoft’s Hololens team. The story has been updated to remove the reference.  In his two decades at Apple, Imran Chaudhri worked on many of the company’s most iconic product lines, including the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The designer left the […]