In the U.S., Robinhood has led the charge in upending the stock investing model through its mobile-first, minimal-step, commission-free trading platform. Now a startup out of Germany built on a similar premise is announcing a big round of funding from some top investors to continue its growth. Trade Republic — which lets people buy and sell […]

We’ll admit it: Some of your Original Content podcast hosts are a little skeptical about improvised comedy. Of course, we can enjoy improv when it’s done well. It’s just that we’ve seen it done less well, often by friends who are so enthusiastic without being particularly funny. And our friends aside, live improv has rarely […]

“Waco,” a Paramount Network series that recently started streaming on Netflix, dramatizes the tragic real-life standoff between the FBI, the ATF and the Branch Davidians. A couple of your Original Content podcast hosts only had a fuzzy idea of what actually went down in Waco, Texas in 1993. And all of us were surprised by […]

Target makes another acquisition, social platforms struggle with a “Plandemic” conspiracy video and Boston Dynamics’ robot Spot encourages social distancing. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 8, 2020. 1. Target to acquire same-day delivery tech from Deliv Target, which already owns on-demand delivery service Shipt, is in the process of acquiring technology assets from same-day […]

In its April Short-Term Energy Outlook, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts that U.S. electricity generation will decline by 3% in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 related economic slowdown. Most new generating capacity built in 2020 will use renewable energy sources. EIA expects renewable generation to grow by 11% in 2020. Although EIA expects renewable energy to be the fastest growing source of U.S. electric generation in 2020, the economic slowdown will reduce the total amount of new generating capacity over the next few months. The electric power sector will add 19.4 gigawatts of new wind capacity and 12.6 gigawatts of utility-scale solar capacity in 2020. These annual wind and solar capacity additions are 5% and 10% less, respectively, than EIA forecast in its March outlook. This update combined with EIA's forecast lower overall electricity demand, leads to a decline in U.S. fossil fuel generation, especially at coal-fired power plants. EIA expects that coal generation will fall by 20% in 2020.

CEOs are more optimistic about growth than international counterparts, despite concerns about over-regulation and the Government's response to Australia's fiscal deficit, according to a PwC report launched today.

If we continue to ignore the rising economic success of our Asian neighbours we will lose our place as a G20 economy by 2030.

Australia dropped six places to 15th position - the largest drop out of the 27 OECD countries measured.

The workplace gender gap is at its widest among the expat community with only one in four Australian females currently working overseas, PwC People Business Partner Jonathan Dunlea said today while launching a new report.

While technology and innovation are transforming our economy, they are also the solution to our workforce and growth challenge.

Early reports of what is in next Tuesday’s Federal Budget indicate “more carrot and less stick” to help lift productivity and tighten the fiscal gap.

Driving workforce participation, support for small businesses and much needed investment in infrastructure make this a pragmatic budget.

The South Australian Budget focus on tax cuts is a welcome move by the Weatherill Government to reduce costs to business and grow the economy.

Unique granular modelling of over 2,000 locations across Australia uncover how fragmented and concentrated our economy is.

Australia jumped five places to 15th in OECD rankings for employment of mature age workers.

The eyesight of more than 32,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would be saved if the Government invested just $227 million over 10 years, a new report has found.

Australia lags behind the world's best corporate performers in all ten indicators of digital intelligence needed to drive financial performance.

PwC Australia is pleased to announce it was selected by The Workplace Gender Equality Agency WGEA as one of 90 organisations in Australia as an Employer of Choice in 2015.

Australia is facing a growth problem, and the best way to spark growth is to create a bedrock for innovation and support businesses to disrupt themselves and take risks.

Australian oil and gas companies will need to think bigger and embrace customers in Asia, rapidly evolve their business models, and become much more responsive to emerging trends, if they are to thrive in a challenging new global marketplace.

Australia's next generation of family business leaders is more confident and better prepared for senior roles than two years ago, but is also experiencing more challenges, both inside the firm and in the wider business landscape.

Modest personal tax cuts, tighter superannuation concessions, and a pathway to lower corporate tax rates make this a responsible if not spectacular budget.

PwC has today been announced as the first employer partner for a new Pathways in Technology (P-TECH) style pilot at McCarthy Catholic College, Emu Plains.

Microsoft today announced a slew of updates to various parts of its Microsoft 365 ecosystem. A lot of these aren’t all that exciting (though that obviously depends on your level of enthusiasm for products like Microsoft Endpoint Manager), but the overall thrust behind this update is to make life easier for the IT admins that […]

About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It’s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s also dropping […]

Backblaze today announced that its B2 Cloud Storage service is now API-compatible with Amazon’s S3 storage service. Backblaze started as an affordable cloud backup service, but over the last few years, the company has also taken its storage expertise and launched the developer-centric B2 Cloud Storage service, which promises to be significantly cheaper than similar […]

At its Think Digital conference, IBM and Red Hat today announced a number of new services that all center around 5G edge and AI. The fact that the company is focusing on these two areas doesn’t come as a surprise, given that both edge and AI are two of the fastest-growing businesses in enterprise computing. […]

Mozilla today launched version 76 of its Firefox browser, and with that, it’s launching a couple of new features that you’ll likely notice if you’re already using the open-source browser. The highlight of today’s release is the enhanced password manager. Firefox Lockwise, as it is called these days, will now ask you for your device […]

Under different circumstances, GitHub would be hosting its Satellite conference in Paris this week. Like so many other events, GitHub decided to switch Satellite to a virtual event, but that isn’t stopping the Microsoft-owned company from announcing quite a bit of news this week. The highlight of GitHub’s announcement is surely the launch of GitHub […]

Google today launched an update to its Duo video chat app (which you definitely shouldn’t confuse with Hangouts or Google Meet, Google’s other video, audio and text chat apps). There are plenty of jokes to be made about Google’s plethora of chat options, but Duo is trying to be a bit different from Hangouts and […]

On Monday, April 20, 2020, New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil front-month futures prices fell below zero dollars per barrel (b)—at one point, trading at -$40.32/b (Figure 1)—and remained below zero for part of the following trading day. Monday marked the first time the price for the WTI futures contract fell below zero since trading began in 1983. Negative prices in commodity markets are very rare, but when they occur they typically indicate high transactions costs and significant infrastructure constraints. In this case, the WTI front-month futures contract was for May 2020 delivery, and the contract was set to expire on April 21, 2020. Unless they have made other arrangements ahead of time, market participants that hold WTI futures contracts to expiration must take physical delivery of WTI crude oil in Cushing, Oklahoma. Typically, most market participants close any futures contracts ahead of expiration through cash settlement in order to avoid taking physical delivery, and only about 1% of contracts are physically settled. The extreme market events of April 20 and April 21 were driven by several factors, including the inability of contract holders to find other market participants to sell the futures contracts. In addition, in this case, the scarcity of available crude oil storage meant several market participants sold their futures contracts at negative prices, in effect paying a counterparty to close out of the contracts. ...

Twitter announced today it’s introducing a new layout for replies that will use lines and indentations to make it easier to understand who you’re replying to and how the conversation is flowing. The company will also test putting engagement actions — including likes, Retweet and reply icons — behind an extra tap to make replies […]

Pinterest is introducing new features that make it easier for those planning recipes, virtual events and other quarantine activities. These include the ability to add a date or notes to a board as well as automated ways to better organize your pins on a given board, with the aid of machine learning technology. The company […]

1. Scientists discover a gene in honey bees that solve the mystery over virgin birth  Zee News
2. These ‘mostly useless’ male honeybees lay eggs, produce females  BGR
3. Study: Single Gene Causes 'Virgin Births' in Cape Honeybees | Biology  Sci-News.com
4. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Astronomers in Hawaii capture high resolution images ..ky imaging’ technique, probe into planet's cloud tops  Firstpost
2. Giant Planet More Astounding Than Before  NEWS9 live
3. Scientists obtain 'lucky' image of Jupiter  BBC News
4. New images of Jupiter captured by astronomers using `lucky technique`  WION
5. Scientists probe Jupiter's violent storms, lightning strikes  EdexLive
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Raghuram Rajan on monetisation debate: 'It's neither a game changer nor a catastrophe'  CNBCTV18
2. India Raises Borrowing Limit by Over 50% to Rs 12 Lakh Crore as Virus Grips Economy  The Wire
3. Need for non-collateralized reverse repo operations: SBI Report  Economic Times
4. View: Why a new 'Bad Bank' when there are 24!  Economic Times
5. Bank credit up 6.74% to Rs 102.69 lakh crore; deposits rise 9.82%  Moneycontrol.com
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. ‘Have 7-stage plan to bring back migrants’: Trinamool on Amit Shah’s letter  Hindustan Times
2. I am healthy, not suffering from any disease, says Amit Shah  Times of India
3. Not Allowing Migrants' Trains "Injustice": Amit Shah To Mamata Banerjee  NDTV
4. No proposal so far to run 'Shramik Special' trains to Bengal: Railway officials  Livemint
5. Home Minister asks CM Mamata Banerjee to arrange for return of migrant Bengal workers  Times of India
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. 'Walked all night on tracks, left behind as I couldn't keep up' says Aurangabad tragedy survivor; 16...  Firstpost
2. Sorry, we have run out of all words today  Mumbai Mirror
3. NHRC issues notice to Maharashtra govt over deaths of migrant workers in Aurangabad train mishap, seeks det...  Zee News
4. 16 walking home to MP fall asleep on rail tracks, run over in Maharashtra  The Indian Express
5. Tragedy on tracks  The Indian Express
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. LG Polymers admits leaking vapor from gas storage tank caused Vizag tragedy  Livemint
2. LG Polymers fined Rs 50cr for Vizag gas leak by NGT, ministry says firms violated green norms  Times of India
3. Vizag gas leak: Venkatapuram village wears deserted look on the second day  Times of India
4. Vizag gas leak: Locals protest for closure of LG Polymers amid Andhra Pradesh DGP's visit  Times of India
5. Cautionary tale  The Indian Express
6. View Full coverage on Google News

Zhihu may not be as well known outside of China as WeChat or ByteDance’s Douyin, but over the past eight years, it has cultivated a reputation for being one of the country’s most trustworthy social media platforms. Originally launched as a question-and-answer site similar to Quora, Zhihu has grown to be a central hub for […]

When in April of last year, the photo-hosting service SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said he was committed to breathing new life into the service, calling it “core to the entire fabric of the Internet.” MacAskill didn’t reveal at the time how much SmugMug — […]

Time is supposed to make technology better. The idea is simple: With more time, humans make newer, better technology and our lives improve. Except for when the opposite happens. Google is a good example of this. I’ve been harping on the matter for a while now. Google mobile search, in case you haven’t used it […]

Ecosia, a not-for-profit search engine which uses ad generated revenue to fund planting trees, is set to get a visibility boost in Chrome. A change Google is making to its chromium engine will see it added as a default search engine choice in up to 47 markets for the version 81 release of Google’s web […]

“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 […]

Countingup, the business current account that “automates” your accounting, has raised £4 million in self-described bridge funding. Leading the round is ING Ventures, with co-investment from Triple Point, CVentures, and BiG Start Ventures. Founded by Tim Fouracre, who previously founded cloud accounting software Clear Books, and now boasting 20,000 business customers, Countingup’s long term vision […]

Deep Render, a London startup and spin-out of Imperial College that is applying machine learning to image compression, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Pentech, with participation from Speedinvest. Founded in mid-2017 by Arsalan Zafar and Chri Besenbruch, who met while studying Computer Science at Imperial College London, Deep Render […]

Zoom announced this morning that it has acquired Keybase, a startup with encryption expertise. It did not reveal the purchase price. Keybase, which has been building encryption products for several years including secure file sharing and collaboration tools, should give Zoom some security credibility as it goes through pandemic demand growing pains. The company has […]

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 […]

The U.S. lost a record 20.5 million jobs over the past month.