World Of News

Visa just connected to Africa’s most powerful mobile payments network. The global financial services company and Kenyan telecom Safaricom — operator of the M-Pesa mobile money product — announced a partnership today on payments and tech. The arrangement opens up Visa’s global merchant and card network across 200 countries to M-Pesa’s own extensive financial services network in East Africa. The two companies will also collaborate “on development of products that will support digital payments for M-Pesa customers,” according to a Safaricom release. The partnership is still subject to regulatory approval. Safaricom’s M-Pesa app is arguably the most recognized fintech product in Africa and has become a global case study in using mobile money to increase financial inclusion. On a continent that is still home to the largest share of the world’s unbanked population, Kenya has one of the highest mobile-money penetration rates in the world. This is largely due to the dominance of M...

Google is facing anger from the German startup ecosystem for refusing to restructure ad payments linked to travel and transport bookings that were subsequently wiped out by the coronavirus crisis. TechCrunch has seen a letter addressed to Google that’s co-signed by eight travel industry startups in which the tech giant is asked for flexibility in how it enforces payment terms around these earlier ad auctions. “By selectively enforcing strict payment terms on larger partners — especially from the travel and transportation industry — for its services provided to market those products, Google is opting out of sharing the responsibility to do right by consumers,” writes Christian Miele, the president of the German Startups Association — on behalf of the CEOs of Dreamlines , FlixBus , GetYourGuide , Homelike , HomeToGo , Omio , Tourlane and Trivago , who are co-signatories to the letter. The eight startups represent €75M+ ($80M+) in ad revenues for Google in Q1 2020, per the letter. ...

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. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble , an online community for designers that lets them post their work and look for work, is acquiring Creative Market , a marketplace for ready-to-use fonts, icons, illustrations, photos and other design assets. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Dribbble’s CEO Zack Onisko said in an interview. Prior to this, bootstrapped Dribbble was profitable — revenues come from its job boards, advertising and member subscriptions, kind of like a LinkedIn aimed at the design community — and it had 6 million monthly active users, with 3.5 million registered users. Adding in Creative Market will bring the total number of monthly active users across the two sites to 12 million. The acquisitio...

Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool was first introduced in Ireland in December, and has since been made available to other international markets. To use the feature, Facebook users will need to click on “Settings,” followed by”Your Facebook Information,” then “Transfer a Copy of Your Photos and Videos.” Facebook will ask you to verify your password to confirm your identity in order to proceed. On the next screen, you’ll be able to choose “Google Photos” as the destination from the “Choose Destination” drop-down box that appears. You’ll also need your Google account information to authenticate with its service before the transfer begins. The tool’s release comes about by way of Facebook’s participation in the Data Transfer Project , a collaborative effort with other tech giants including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, which focuses on a bui...

The Fund , an early-stage investment firm with a memorably straightforward name, is looking beyond New York City as it starts investing its second fund. Founders Jenny Fielding (who’s also managing director at Techstars New York ) and Scott Hartley (also co-founder and partner at Two Culture Capital) told me that in the past two years, they’ve already backed 52 New York City startups. “The seed funds in New York have all gone upstream,” Fielding argued, making it harder for founders to get the smaller checks they need when they’re getting started. So The Fund is aiming to participate in those “first check” rounds of between $500,000 and $1.2 million. To find those investments, Fielding and Hartley said rely on a “crowdsourced” approach, taking recommendations from the startup founders that they’ve recruited as limited partners in The Fund — a group that includes names like General Assembly founder Matthew Brimer, One Medical founder Tom Lee, Handy co-founder Oisin Hanrahan, SoundC...

NASA is getting ready to send its next Mars rover to the red planet later this year, and that mission will also carry Ingenuity, a brand new helicopter robot that will attempt to make history by becoming the first vehicle to perform a powered atmospheric flight on another planet. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) created a trailer of sorts to show you approximately what that flight will look like, when it takes place sometime after the targeted February 18, 2021 arrival date for the Mars 2020 mission. Ingenuity may look like a simple dual rotor drone, but it’s actually a groundbreaking piece of engineering that has to overcome significant technical challenges in order to complete its mission of performing short-altitude ‘hops’ on Mars. That’s its sole goal, and the 4-lb craft doesn’t have any other instruments on board, since it’s essentially a demonstrator that will set up the design and development of future aerial exploration craft to help with the study of Mars. Even flyi...

The tech industry experienced turmoil before during the dot-com bust and again during the 2008 economic downturn. But this time it’s a bit different, according to Kapor Capital founding partners Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor. “What’s different this time is that it is society-wide,” Kapor Klein said during an Extra Crunch Live appearance this week. “It’s not just the dot-com bust or its not just financial services. It is much more widespread. But again, as you point out, tech is in a much better position because tech is related to the things that are thriving.” Kapor, formerly a partner at a Sand Hill Road VC firm during the dot-com bust, said it’s similar in that it’s an “enormous disruption with great uncertainty about what will be on the other side of it.” The details, however, are very different. Assuming there will eventually be a vaccine, Kapor said he believes things will be able to get back to some sort of normal, “notwithstanding the irrecoverable disruptions of perman...