MyGlamm, a direct-to-consumer beauty brand in India that sells most of its products through its own website, app and retail touch points, said on Monday it has raised $71.3 million in a financing round as the Mumbai-headquartered firm looks to scale its business across the South Asian market. The startup had raised $23.5 million in […]

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It takes a really specific consumer to buy an Android phone, yet use Apple Music. But the small overlap in that Venn diagram may be getting bigger. Last month at WWDC, Apple unveiled a free update for Apple Music subscribers that added lossless audio streaming and spatial audio with support for Dolby Atmos. Now, Android […]

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Venture capitalists have been investing heavily in last-mile delivery over the past five years on a global scale, but Latin America has lagged behind.

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Amazon is giving its Alexa voice platform a shot in the arm after seeing further declines in skill growth over the past year, indicating lagging interest from third-party voice app developers. At the company’s Alexa Live developer event today, the company announced a slew of new features and tools for the developer community — its […]

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Just over five months after securing $50 million in debt & equity, Valoreo has closed on a $30 million Series A funding round. Mexico City-based Valoreo aims to invest in, operate and scale e-commerce brands as part of its self-described mission “to bring better products at more affordable prices” to the Latin American consumer. Valoreo […]

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Just as many other employee services have gone digital, so too is mental health. In the consumer space there are growing startups like Equoo, but the race is now on for the employee. And since telemedicine has gone digital and video-based, so too is mental health provision. A number of companies are already playing in […]

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The Biden administration tripled down on its commitment to reining in powerful tech companies Tuesday, proposing committed Big Tech critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Kanter is a lawyer with a long track record of representing smaller companies like Yelp in antitrust cases against Google. He currently practices law at his […]

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“We are true believers in the fact that the world needs a new Amazon, a better one, a more sustainable one, one that appreciates local areas and products.” It’s quite one thing to claim you are out to replace Amazon (just as its founder goes into space), but Ralf Wenzel, founder and CEO of JOKR, […]

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Blue Origin is set to launch its fully reusable New Shepard spacecraft with humans on board for the first time on Tuesday, and it’s sending Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos up along with his brother and two record-setting astronauts. The launch livestream above is scheduled for 6:30 a.m. CDT (7:30 a.m. EDT/4:30 a.m. PDT), […]

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As more consumers embrace plant-based diets and sustainable food practices, Rise Gardens is giving anyone the ability to have a green thumb from the comfort of their own home.

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A security lapse at insurance technology startup BackNine exposed hundreds of thousands of insurance applications after one of its cloud servers was left unprotected on the internet. BackNine might be a company you’re not familiar with, but it might have processed your personal information if you applied for insurance in the past few years. The […]

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Before we discuss the changes that produced the lift, it is important to quickly go over the research that informed those changes.

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There is an art to engineering and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, the two worlds collided when they created the open-source graphics program, GIMP.

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As it promised last month, Amazon has launched its serialized fiction Kindle Vella store that lets you unlock episodic, self-published stories via in-app purchases. The new platform is a way for readers to discover new fiction and a new way for authors to generate revenue from the Kindle Direct Publishing service. 

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Unybrands is the latest e-commerce aggregator to pick up a significant investment, this time closing $300 million in growth capital from Crayhill Capital Management.

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Earlier this year, Amazon launched Build It, a fun little program that lets customers preorder concept devices. Think about it like Indiegogo or Kickstarter, where the company will only actually make the product if enough people buy-in via preorder. Obviously Amazon has a significantly larger ability to absorb a misstep than your average first-time hardware […]

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Ring, the video doorbell maker dubbed the “largest civilian surveillance network the U.S. has ever seen,” is rolling out new but long overdue security and privacy features. The Amazon-owned company’s reputation was bruised after a spate of account breaches in late 2019, in which hackers broke into Ring user accounts and harassed children in their own […]

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On the heels of raising $775 million earlier this year, Perch has made a big acquisition that will bring on a number of new brands and operations infrastructure to enhance its position in the race to roll up smaller merchants that sell and fulfill sales through Amazon. The company has acquired Web Deals Direct, an […]

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The Amazon roll-up play — where one company creates economies of scale by buying up and consolidating multiple smaller third-party merchants that sell their goods via Amazon’s marketplace — continues to be a strong e-commerce trend, and in the latest development, one of the hopefuls in this space is announcing a major injection of capital […]

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The Biden administration just introduced a sweeping, ambitious plan to forcibly inject competition into some consolidated sectors of the American economy — the tech sector prominent among them — through executive action. “Today President Biden is taking decisive action to reduce the trend of corporate consolidation, increase competition, and deliver concrete benefits to America’s consumers, […]

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We asked several analysts to identify the top problems he will have to address in his new role.

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In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users’ data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would […]

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When the Pentagon killed the JEDI cloud program yesterday, it was the end of a long and bitter road for a project that never seemed to have a chance. The question is why it didn’t work out in the end, and ultimately I think you can blame the DoD’s stubborn adherence to a single vendor […]

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After several years of fighting and jockeying for position by the biggest cloud infrastructure companies in the world, the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on the controversial winner-take-all, $10 billion JEDI contract today. In the end, nobody won. “With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI cloud contract, which has long […]

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Amazon announced this morning it would begin to sell its own brand of COVID-19 at-home tests to Amazon shoppers in the U.S. The test retails for $39.99 on the Amazon.com website and is available to any U.S. customer without a prescription. The COVID-19 PCR collection kit is shipped to the customer’s home via Amazon Prime, […]

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Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has always liked to motivate his employees by saying every day is Day 1. Well, it is actually Day 1 for his successor Andy Jassy, who officially moves into the corner office at Amazon today. Bezos announced in February that he would be stepping down as CEO to focus […]

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India’s central bank has identified Big Tech’s push into financial services as a challenge for banks in the South Asian market, saying the growing presence of these firms have prompted concerns about creation of an uneven playing field. In a report published on Thursday, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said Big Tech offers a wide […]

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Pragmatic customers are being forced to adopt because they are under duress. It is not that they buy into the vision of software eating the world. It is because their very own lunches are being eaten.

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Amazon has petitioned that the newly minted Chair of the FTC and implacable critic of the company, Lina Khan, be recused from decisions relating to the company. The company argues that she has been too outspoken about the failure to regulate Amazon to handle matters impartially. It will be for the FTC to decide, and […]

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As I’ve taken to online grocery shopping over the pandemic, I’ve always wondered why supermarkets didn’t offer simple ‘recipe’ features that would have automatically collected items for a homemade meal. It seemed an opportunity missed. But it is missed no more. Lollipop AI, the new British online grocery marketplace, is launching its public beta today […]

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