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HSBC accuses collapsed oil trader ZenRock of ‘suspicious’ dealings

Bank alleges collapsed Singaporean company raised money through duplicate invoices




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Hong Kong exchange chief to step down after failed LSE bid

Charles Li will not seek reappointment when contract expires in October 2021




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Tencent surveils foreign accounts to aid domestic censorship

Research finds WeChat analyses messages from users registered outside China to train its algorithms




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Saudi Arabia shows Asia focus with renewed oil price discounts

Kingdom offers crude to US at a premium but shows reluctance to lose Asian market share




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UK says ‘small number’ of Turkish gowns failed PPE checks

Government clarifies report that 400,000 garments were unusable




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Brazil approves QE to fight coronavirus woes

Central bank of Latin America’s largest economy can now engage in monetary financing




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Uber Eats delivers, Reliance Jio, future of fashion

A collapse in global car-booking demand was offset by a surge in food delivery at Uber




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Chinese stranded abroad accuse Beijing of abandoning them

Government’s travel ban due to coronavirus makes it nearly impossible for citizens to return home




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It’s the end of globalism as we know it (and I feel fine)

For the most part, its unravelling ought to be of deep concern. But we need a new social compact




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Franklin Templeton tussles with India regulator after freezing funds

US asset manager apologises following comments by company’s president over debt rules




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Fear factor threatens stocks’ Covid-19 fightback

China’s example suggests that life will not snap back to normal, strategists say




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US and China: edging towards a new type of cold war?

Trust between the countries has deteriorated during the pandemic and is close to its lowest point since 1979




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Argentina misses deadline for debt restructuring deal

Bondholders await government’s next move as fears of default intensify




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Annoushka looks to resume China growth as lockdown lifts

Founders plan for further expansion in Wuhan and beyond




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Orca Security raises $20M Series A for its multi-cloud security platform

Orca Security, an Israeli cloud security firm that focuses on giving enterprises better visibility into their multi-cloud deployments on AWS, Azure and GCP, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by GGV Capital. YL Ventures and Silicon Valley CISO Investments also participated in this round. Together with its seed […]




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Sinch acquires SAP’s Digital Interconnect messaging business for $250M

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, […]




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GitHub gets a built-in IDE with Codespaces, discussion forums and more

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 […]




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Microsoft to open first data center in New Zealand as cloud usage grows

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 […]




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Confluent introduces scale on demand for Apache Kafka cloud customers

We find ourselves in a time when certain businesses are being asked to scale to levels they never imagined. Sometimes that increased usage comes in bursts, which means you don’t want to pay for permanent extra capacity you might not always need. Today, Confluent introduced a new scale-on-demand feature for its Apache Kafka cloud service […]




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Enterprise companies find MLOps critical for reliability and performance

Machine learning ops focuses on the ML model and datasets, as opposed to code. Data engineers run MLOps, but it’s likely that the specialized role of MLOps engineer will come about soon.




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Box makes quick decision to add new collaboration capabilities in face of pandemic

When the shutdown began six weeks ago, the powers that be at Box sat down for a meeting to discuss the situation. They weren’t in the same room of course. They were like everyone else, separated by the virus, but they saw this as a key moment for Box as a company. They had been […]




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Harbr emerges from stealth to help build online data marketplaces

Harbr co-founder Anthony Cosgrove has been working with data for over 15 years, so he has an inkling of some of the problems associated with pulling data together in a way that makes it easy for others to consume, whether internally or externally. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he decided to start a company to […]




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VC’s largest funds make big bets on vertical B2B marketplaces

During the waning days of the first dot-com boom, some of the biggest names in venture capital invested in marketplaces and directories whose sole function was to consolidate information and foster transparency in industries that had remained opaque for decades. The thesis was that thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger […]




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Health APIs usher in the patient revolution we have been waiting for

Rish Joshi Contributor Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT. More posts by this contributor Health APIs usher in the […]




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Microsoft and AWS exchange poisoned pen blog posts in latest Pentagon JEDI contract spat

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected […]




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Oakland Startup, The History Project, Raises $2M To Build Digital Time Capsules of Family, Personal Histories

After years of working in mobile advertising, founder Niles Lichtenstein discovered a box of records from his late father. That compelled him to start putting together memories and online histories earlier, by documenting his mother’s life history and how he first met his wife. That developed into an interactive timeline where he collected songs from […]




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How Many American Cities Are Preparing For The Arrival of Self-Driving Cars? Not Many.

Only about 6 percent of the country’s biggest cities are planning for or thinking about autonomous vehicles or self-driving cars in their long-range transportation plans, according to the National League of Cities. What’s even more surprising is that only 3 percent of these cities’ transit plans are even taking into account the impact of ride-hailing companies like […]




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Cannabis Startup Meadow Unveils A Platform For Dispensaries To Manage Orders, Patient Intake

With California on a precipice of a ballot initiative next year that could legalize marijuana recreationally, scores of cannabis startups are vying to capture what is the nation’s largest market in advance of such a big regulatory change. Meadow, a Y Combinator-backed startup, was one of the earlier ones with an ordering and delivery service […]




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Airbnb Pledges Transparency, Education To Fight Commercial Hosting, But Provides Little Detail

In response to calls for stronger action on hosts that aren’t casual users, Airbnb said it would start sharing some data with governments and getting hosts to agree to a policy of listing only their permanent homes. Here’s what Brian Chesky said in a post today: Today, we’re taking the next step to turn these principles into […]




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To Go After Local Neighborhood News And Marketplaces, Hoodline Raises $1.6M

One of the most sought-after, but never quite dominated, frontiers in online media and marketplaces has been centered on local communities. Hoodline, a San Francisco-based startup, is trying to tackle this with a unique focus on news about neighborhood retail corridors. The startup has built up a network of news on about two-dozen neighborhoods across San Francisco as a sort of Trojan horse into a larger platform of hyperlocal listings and markets.




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Townsquared Raises $5.3M To Expand A Nextdoor-Like Experience For Local Retail, Small Businesses

Even though Rohit Prakash was a dual MD and PhD researching optogenetics at Stanford University, his entrepreneurial itch kept returning him to his family’s small business roots. He and his co-founder Nipul Patel began researching the travails of small business owners, interviewing countless entrepreneurs, trying to figure out what their risks were or what caused […]




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TechCrunch Tokyo Startup Battlefield: SmartHR Takes The Top Prize

Every year, our Japanese-language sister site throws a big Disrupt-like event in Tokyo where there is, of course, a Battlefield between about 10 different startups. With north of 100 million Internet users, Japan has a considerable domestic market. While Western companies have had more success in Japan than in mainland China, the national startup scene still has tons […]




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Rwanda’s Not-So-Improbable Ambition To Be A Startup Hub of Africa

It’s an odd feeling to come from California, one of the world’s most prodigious economies where the infrastructure and public systems are simultaneously falling apart in plain view, and arrive in the tiny, landlocked East African country of Rwanda. The first thing you notice is how exceptionally clean the streets of Kigali appear. That’s because of a ban on non-biodegradable […]




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Elder Care Startup Honor Makes Contractors Full-Time Workers With Equity

Honor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company focused on caring for seniors as Baby Boomers tip over into retirement, is making its contractor workforce into a full-time one. The care workers, called CarePros within the company, will have the potential for stock options. “I really don’t want two classes of people in our company. Everyone is in it […]




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Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before

“Capitalists both in the Old World and the States, even now, have but little faith in California. They regard this country and everything relating to it as one grand bubble, liable to burst at any moment…. This is how it should be. The wealth of California is thereby passing into the hands of young, active, […]




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AngelList Raised $163M For Startups in 2015, Up 56% Year-Over-Year

AngelList, the online platform that had made itself indispensable to early-stage startups for fundraising and recruiting, said it closed out last year having raised $163 million online on behalf of 441 companies. That’s about 56 percent higher than the year before in 2014. About 40 percent of the deals were private rounds and institutional funds were in about 40 […]




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OpenVote launches a publishing platform, crowd-voting tool for political debate

Kim-Mai Cutler Contributor Kim-Mai Cutler is an operating partner for Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm and was previously a journalist covering technology, finance and policy issues at TechCrunch -- best-known for her long-form work on the Bay Area. More posts by this contributor The outlook for Bay Area startup space in 2017 OpenVote launches […]




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With voter verification, Brigade becomes a more legitimate platform for political debate

Kim-Mai Cutler Contributor Kim-Mai Cutler is an operating partner for Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm and was previously a journalist covering technology, finance and policy issues at TechCrunch -- best-known for her long-form work on the Bay Area. More posts by this contributor The outlook for Bay Area startup space in 2017 OpenVote launches […]




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The outlook for Bay Area startup space in 2017

One of my favorite things to do is riff on Bay Area real estate and tech  --  of all kinds, residential, commercial, retail ... and Justin Bedecarre has been working with San Francisco founders for almost a decade in the commercial real estate market. He’s now a founder of HelloOffice, a technology-powered commercial real estate brokerage. We talk about what 2017 holds for the office market.




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France is a big loser from Brexit

When Britain leaves, the power imbalance between Berlin and Paris will be laid bare




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Rights and wrongs of Macron’s vision for Europe

The EU should do more to defend itself, without expecting the US to underwrite the peace




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British voters face an impossible choice

Boris Johnson’s allies include a national mood of exhaustion, and his Labour opponent




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Realpolitik for post-Brexit Britain

The UK needs a hard-headed assessment of how to safeguard the national interest




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A saint among the sinners of the Afghan war

The death of a doctor who transformed Afghan lives contrasts with revelations of US ignorance




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Memo to Brexiters — free trade is no vote winner

The aggregate gains are distributed unevenly — witness how well the top 1 per cent have done




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How populism will heat up the climate fight

Politicians know what they have to do, but must beware the ‘gilets jaunes’




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Always detached, UK has now forced a complete break from Brussels

Past prime ministers put head before heart on Europe. Not any more




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The skies darken for France’s Sun King

His imperious manner and lack of emotional intelligence make him vulnerable




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Europe must embrace a new way of politics

The two-party system that prevailed for so long has been upended




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Coronavirus lays a political minefield

Hopefully, its defeat will show the worth of intelligent and honest government