Andre Harrell, the Uptown Records founder who shaped the sound of hip-hop and R&B in the late '80s and '90s, has died at 59.

A GoFundMe page aims to match the nearly $600,000 that Tia Stokes' non-profit dance group Kalamity has raised for people facing real-life calamities.

After ending print publication in 2019 and moving to online nonprofit model, Nuvo will cease operations.

James "Jim" Cummings Jr., who was the last living founder of Indiana Black Expo., died late Thursday at age 90 of a heart attack.

After ending print publication in 2019 and moving to online nonprofit model, Nuvo will cease operations.

• Oracle's bid to become a bigger player in the cloud has become more aggressive in the COVID-19 crisis, highlighted by a new partnership with Zoom.
• The tech giant is up against stronger rivals led by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, but the need for more cloud capacity sparked by the sudden pivot to remote work has created opportunities for the Silicon Valley behemoth.
• Here are the 10 Oracle executives who are playing key roles in CEO Safra Catz and founder Larry Ellison bold cloud offensive.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Oracle has been through some jarring changes in the last seven months. 

The tech giant lost a well-regarded and experienced co-CEO when Mark Hurd died in October after taking leave for health reasons, leaving Safra Catz as the solo CEO. Now, like other major tech companies, Oracle is grappling with the impact of the coronavirus crisis.

But Oracle has been through tough times in its 43-year history. In fact, the Silicon Valley giant has been known to seize opportunities during rough spots. It's already seen some success during this crisis, too: Oracle just scored a big win when videoconferencing company Zoom — suddenly facing a surge in demand — chose to expand on Oracle Cloud, instead of other platforms like top cloud provider Amazon. Oracle is generally considered a smaller player in the cloud wars, behind giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba.

Yes, Oracle still has a long way to go to match its rivals' reach, but its strategy of expanding its capacity by building more data centers seems to be paying off, IDC President Crawford Del Prete told Business Insider.

That increased capacity and Oracle's "world class" applications are key in the cloud words, Del Prete said: "Oracle is one of the few companies able to deliver both at scale in order to compete."

While Catz and founder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer Larry Ellison the lead company, they're also relying on key top executives, including cloud veterans from rival Amazon, to advance Oracle's cloud strategy. 

Nearly all are white men, something Oracle has criticized for in the past: Over 30 members of Congress slammed the company late last year about the lack of diversity in its leadership team and on its board.

Meet the 10 top executives playing important roles in Oracle's cloud offensive:

SEE ALSO: Oracle is known for making bold M&A moves in a recession and it's sitting on a fresh $20 billion. Here are the 7 companies experts think it could acquire as the coronavirus crisis drives down valuations

SEE ALSO: Experts lay out five moves that Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of tech's best tacticians, might take in a coronavirus-driven downturn

Don Johnson left Amazon to focus on Oracle's cloud infrastructure.

Title: Executive vice president, cloud infrastructure

Reports to: Larry Ellison

Johnson  played a key role in Amazon's dramatic expansion in the cloud before joining Oracle in 2014.

He was instrumental in setting up Oracle's cloud engineering development center in Seattle and in the tech giant's expanding data center footprint.  Johnson has also led another major Oracle initiative: forming a cloud partnership with Microsoft.

Oracle's chief corporate architect Edward Screven has been with the company since 1986.

Title: Chief corporate architect

Reports to: Larry Ellison

Screven is an Oracle veteran who helped lead the company through all of the major industry changes of the past 30 years.

He admits that cloud market-leader Amazon had a head start, but says that there are benefits to following it. 

"We definitely started after Amazon: The bad news is they have market share, the good news is we get to learn a lot," he told Business Insider in an interview in May 2019. "Mindshare, that may be their biggest asset. But there is no technology they have that is concerning to me at all."

As one of Oracle's top technologists, he's focused on making Oracle's cloud infrastructure more secure, with more sophisticated and efficient ways to manage data. 

"We have hundreds of thousands of customers that store their most important data in Oracle databases," Screven said. "We could do a far better job for them than any other cloud provider. We are doing a far better job for them."

Clay Magouyrk leads cloud infrastructure engineering and played a key role in forging Oracle's new alliance with Zoom.

Title: Executive vice president, cloud infrastructure engineering

Reports to: Don Johnson

Magouyrk is another veteran of Amazon Web Services who joined the Oracle team in Seattle in 2014. 

He was Oracle's point-man in forging its new partnership with Zoom, which was seen as a major victory for Oracle.

"They needed capacity," Magouyrk told Business Insider last month "They reached out to us and we were like, 'Awesome, we can work with you.' Within a day, we had their application up and running."

Magouyrk was a founding team member of Oracle's cloud engineering development center in Seattle, which is spearheading the company's cloud infrastructure efforts.

Ariel Kelman left Amazon Web Services to become Oracle's chief marketing officer.

Title: Chief Marketing Officer

Reports to: Safra Catz

One of the biggest hurdles for Oracle is the public perception that it's a minor player in the cloud. In other words, it's a marketing problem.

This is where Kelman comes in. Before Oracle brought him on board in January 2020, Kelman led rival Amazon's cloud marketing efforts, and served as a marketing executive at Salesforce for six years before that.

"Ariel is a super smart hire for Oracle," analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research told Business Insider. "He brings the cred in the market and understands how to counter all of Amazon's tactics and long-term strategy. He has the ear of Larry and Safra and is making progress with some great hires on his team."

Juergen Lindner left SAP to lead Oracle's software-as-a-service marketing strategy.

Title: Senior vice president, software-as-a-service marketing

Reports to: Ariel Kelman, chief marketing officer

Lindner spent most of his career helping SAP outsell Oracle in the traditional business software market: both dominated teh market for software installed in private data centers. 

He switched sides and roles four years ago to support Oracle's bid to become a stronger player in cloud software, also referred to as software-as-a-service, where businesses access applications through cloud platforms and pay via a subscription, usually based on the number of users granted access. 

Lindner has said it became clear to him that Oracle had a better strategy for the cloud-software era.

"Oracle has architected a very sustainable cloud infrastructure and applications strategy," he told Business Insider last year.

Steve Daheb left Citrix to lead Oracle's cloud marketing strategy.

Title: Senior vice president, cloud go-to-market

Reports to: Ashley Hart, senior vice president, global marketing cloud platform and database

Daheb joined Oracle in 2015 after serving as the chief marketing officer of Citrix, a cloud pioneer that first let businesses set up computing networks on web-based platforms instead of on-premise data centers, leading to dramatic IT cost savings.

Daheb witnessed the unexpected rise of Amazon in cloud computing, which began in the early : 2000s when the online retail giant realized it could make some extra money by giving businesses access to its massive but underutilized computing infrastructure, hosted from its data centers.

"Amazon had spare computing resources to rent out," he told Business Insider last year. "It's like, 'Hey, man, I got an extra room in the house during the summer when it's not spike retail time. There's nobody in there, so why don't I put this thing on Airbnb and see if anybody wants it?'"

Amazon Web Services has led the industry ever since. 

Like others on the Oracle team, Daheb thinks the software giant's technology and track record of working with major players across industries will eventually propel it to the front of the cloud pack.

"There's a level of understanding we have and a level of empathy we have for enterprise users: We serve the major banks, we serve transportation, we serve healthcare," he said. "We brought this enterprise mentality to it."

Juan Loaiza, who has been with Oracle since 1988, is in charge of mission-critical database technologies.

Title: Executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies

Reports to: Larry Ellison

Loaiza is another Oracle veteran who has been with the company for more than 30 years and is currently focused on its bid to expand the reach of its flagship database product.

The tech giant's cloud-based automated data-management platform Autonomous Database uses machine learning to quickly repair and update itself.Loaiza has compared the status of this fairly new initiative to the development of the self-driving car:

"It took a long time to get to a point where we are now and say, 'The next step is a self-driving car,'" he told Business Insider last year. "It's got to be safe. It has to have seatbelts and airbags and a navigation system. All that stuff was necessary before you take it to the next stage." 

The database is ready for that next stage. 

Jason Williamson left Amazon to lead Oracle's outreach to startups.

Title: Vice president, Oracle for Startups

Reports to: Mamei Sun, Ellison's chief of staff

Startups have played an important role in the growth of cloud computing and Oracle has launched a big push to establish closer ties with these smaller companies, given that they could eventually become the biggest power players. 

Williamson has been the company's point-man in this effort, as he develops ways to make Oracle's products and services more accessible to startups.

Williamson is another veteran of Amazon Web Services where he led the cloud giant's private-equity team before joining Oracle in 2017.

Evan Goldberg cofounded NetSuite, which is now part of Oracle.

Title: Executive vice president, NetSuite

Reports to: Safra Catz

Goldberg is part of the elite club of Oracle alums who went on to launch successful enterprise-software companies. (Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is perhaps the best-known.)

Goldberg left a long career at Oracle in the late 1990s to launch NetSuite, a cloud-based provider of financial- and accounting-management services. He was the chief technology officer alongside CEO Zach Nelson, another Oracle alum, and Ellison was actually one of their early backers.

Oracle acquired the company in 2016 and it now has more than 18,000 customers. 

Steve Miranda has been with Oracle since 1992 and leads cloud-applications development.

Title: Executive vice president, applications product development

Reports to: Ellison

Miranda is an Oracle veteran in charge of different aspects of the company's cloud-software business, including product development and strategy.

This covers applications used for major business operations, like supply-chain management, human resources, and enterprise performance management.

strataconf: The Future Is Graph Databases http://t.co/BVxOZwtoKS A Conversation with @EmilEifrem, founder of @Neo4J #strataconf

I’m excited to speak with Pavel Cherkashin in today’s episode of the How To CEO podcast!. Pavel is a co-founder and managing partner at Mindrock Capital. Pavel is also a managing partner at GVA Capital. I spoke with him about what founders and CEOs need to know about raising early checks. When Should Founders Try […]

The post How Founders and CEOs Can Raise Early Checks (With Pavel Cherkashin) appeared first on ReadWrite.

Elana Medo has dedicated many decades of her life to making mother’s milk available to premature babies. Now a questionable trade secret lawsuit threatens to destroy her life’s work and leave preterm infants without access to life-saving milk. The cost of a Corporation Stealing from an Individual has been the loss of human lives — […]

The post Trade Secrets Claimed by Prolacta to Steal Founders’ Company – Again appeared first on ReadWrite.

As the venture capital world gets a hot new buzz phrase in 'founder-market fit', serial founder Alex Depledge counters with her view that industry experience doesn't help founders crack a market

DeepMind's cofounder and head of applied artificial intelligence, Mustafa Suleyman, has abruptly left the company for an indefinite period

The virtual-based office hours is to connect female founders with early-stage VC investors who will provide business advice and investments

Ohio is seeking to recoup millions of dollars in funds from now-defunct online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

Ohio's attorney general last week filed suit against the founder of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, aiming to recover millions of dollars in public funding that the state claims wrongfully went to the cyber charter school.

Ingrid Newkirk isn’t sure exactly how many times she has been arrested. “Definitely a few dozen,” she’ll say, if you ask. I’ve just done exactly that, so right now the British-born founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is running me through a sort of greatest hits of her law-baiting exploits and the jailtime they have brought her in the name of animal rights.

Andre Harrell's death was first announced by D-Nice during his "Club Quarantine" sets on Instagram Friday night.

A record number of student startups from across Penn State campuses are getting ready for the 2020 Summer Founders program, a 13-week entrepreneurial bootcamp offering mentoring, networking, resources and $15,000 in funding to teams of Penn State student entrepreneurs from all campus locations and the World Campus.

His decades of work as an editor, publisher, and thought leader helped elevate the national conversation about education at a pivotal time for public policy.

Lifestyle, as an industry, has a lot of potential. There are challenges that keep me motivated as this industry goes through evolution in terms of practices and business methods.

The Messy Middle. The book talks about the middle stages of every start-up, the troubles it goes through, and how crossing that hurdle is important yet tricky

Our mission is to solve boredom. There are now 500 million Indians who have an internet connection, and are spending nearly five hours a day on social media and entertainment.

Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav was discharged from a Lucknow hospital where he was admitted after he complained of stomach and urine-related...

A founder leaving a large internet company hasn’t been a very common move in the Indian startup ecosystem. Nonetheless, in a similar instance, Zomato’s co-founder Pankaj Chaddah had left the company in 2018 after 10 years.

Mallika Sherawat has always worked closely with several NGOs for social causes and this time around, the Bollywood actress, has gone a step ahead in helping humanity. The actress worked with Free-A-Girl India and supported the association’s co-founder,…

High taxes, bad healthcare, police repression, lack of culture, poor education… Telegram founder Pavel Durov wants you to know he really doesn’t like Silicon Valley and thinks living or doing business in the US is a terrible idea.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Schneider and collaborator Ralf Hutter combined the German language lyrics with synthesisers and drum machines to create 'krautrock,' which won Kraftwerk a legion of musician fans, including David Bowie, Madonna, Daft Punk and Kanye West

Kapoor, former MD and CEO of Yes Bank, was arrested by the ED on March 8 under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). He is accused of sanctioning loans to certain firms against kickbacks.

Founders of Infosys sell their stake in the company for $1.1 billion

In a statement, SolarEdge Technologies announced that the company's founder and co-chairman, Guy Sella has passed away.

Florian Schneider, co-founder of pioneering German electronic band Kraftwerk, which influenced generations of pop and dance musicians with mesmerising tracks such as "Autobahn", has died of cancer aged 73, longtime bandmate Ralf Huetter said.

ABSTRACT

Each year, >180,000 infants become infected via mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV despite the availability of effective maternal antiretroviral treatments, underlining the need for a maternal HIV vaccine. We characterized 224 maternal HIV envelope (Env)-specific IgG monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) from seven nontransmitting and transmitting HIV-infected U.S. and Malawian mothers and examined their neutralization activities against nontransmitted autologous circulating viruses and infant-transmitted founder (infant-T/F) viruses. Only a small subset of maternal viruses, 3 of 72 (4%), were weakly neutralized by maternal linear V3 epitope-specific IgG MAbs, whereas 6 out of 6 (100%) infant-T/F viruses were neutralization resistant to these V3-specific IgG MAbs. We also show that maternal-plasma broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb) responses targeting the V3 glycan supersite in a transmitting woman may have selected for an N332 V3 glycan neutralization-resistant infant-T/F virus. These data have important implications for bNAb-eliciting vaccines and passively administered bNAbs in the setting of MTCT.

IMPORTANCE Efforts to eliminate MTCT of HIV with antiretroviral therapy (ART) have met little success, with >180,000 infant infections each year worldwide. It is therefore likely that additional immunologic strategies that can synergize with ART will be required to eliminate MTCT of HIV. To this end, understanding the role of maternal HIV Env-specific IgG antibodies in the setting of MTCT is crucial. In this study, we found that maternal-plasma broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb) responses can select for T/F viruses that initiate infection in infants. We propose that clinical trials testing the efficacy of single bNAb specificities should not include HIV-infected pregnant women, as a single bNAb might select for neutralization-resistant infant-T/F viruses.

Objective

Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) are used to quantify the cumulative effects of a number of genetic variants, which may individually have a very small effect on susceptibility to a disease; we used PRSs to better understand the genetic contribution to common epilepsy and its subtypes.

Harrell had been working as an executive producer on a TV miniseries about Uptown Records with BET.

The 73-year-old multi-instrumentalist played synthesiser, vocoder, flute, sax and performed vocals in the pioneering electronic music group, until his departure in 2008.

Florian Schneider, co-founder of pioneering German electronic band Kraftwerk, which influenced generations of pop and dance musicians with mesmerising tracks such as "Autobahn", has died of cancer aged 73, longtime bandmate Ralf Huetter said.

Comedian Jack Whitehall has endorsed the Evening Standard's Food for London Now campaign and launched a competition to encourage his followers to donate.

Influential keyboardist and electronic music pioneer dies following short battle with cancer

The post Kraftwerk Co-Founder Florian Schneider Dead at 73 appeared first on My Site.

The new scheme wants to ensure diverse founders are still standing once things are back to normal

Stay Wild is on a mission to create truly sustainable and ethical swimwear that's well-designed and flattering for all women

Laura Hampson chats to Megan Ziems, founder of cult Australian bridalwear brand Grace Loves Lace, about the joy of living on the coast and why she's swapped Spanish beaches for hiking in New Zealand

Florian Schneider-Esleben, a co-founder of German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk, has died, record label Sony said Wednesday at age 73.

Florian Schneider, co-founder of the pioneering electronic music group Kraftwerk, has died at the age of 73.

The Allbirds co-founder on how sustainable materials like Merino wool and eucalyptus are changing the shoe game.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Tim Brown, Co-Founder, Allbirds