World Of News

Sony said on Friday that it will launch the PlayStation 5 in India on February 2, suggesting improvements in the supply chain network that has been severely throttled by the coronavirus pandemic. The Japanese firm said it will begin taking pre-order requests for the new gaming console in India, which is the world’s second largest internet market, on January 12. The console will be available for pre-order at Amazon, Flipkart, Croma, Reliance Digital, Games the Shop, Sony Center, Vijay Sales and select other authorized retail partners, the company said. The announcement today should allay concerns of loyal PlayStation fans, some of whom secured a unit from the gray market at a premium in recent months after India was not included in the first wave of nations for the PS5. Fans have also been frustrated at Sony and its affiliated partners for not offering clarification or providing conflicting accounts in recent months. In November, Sony suggested that it had delayed the launch of the

As 2020 comes to a long-awaited end, a series of filings indicate that venture capitalists are ending the year with fresh money. According to SEC paperwork, Learn Capital and USV have filed paperwork that shows the firms have raised new, multimillion-dollar funds. If you’ve been paying attention to news this past year, it’s clear that much of venture capital isn’t just surviving 2020 – it’s flourishing through it. Zoom investing , it seems, is working just fine for cash-rich firms looking to double down on bets in categories from edtech to climate. First up, New York-based USV submitted a pair of filings on late Thursday. The first filing shows that the firm has closed $151 million for USV Climate 2021, which one can assume is focused on climate-tech investments. As my colleague Jonathan Shieber has pointed out, climate tech. The other, more nebulous filing , is the firm’s $22.4 million investment vehicle titled USV Bundled. It’s unclear what this is focused on, but a recent blog

It’s been a strange year for sleep. For me, levels have fluctuated between too little and too much, but have – more often than not – tended toward the former. 2020 gave most of us no shortage of excuses for sleep deprivation, from personal stresses to larger societal concerns. And, thankfully, the past few years have seen no shortage of technological solutions to the problem of sleeplessness. Of course, the underpinning issues can be hard to isolate and even harder to treat. There’s no silver bullet. That’s the lesson I keep relearning at this job – no single piece of technology is going to cure all of my ills. (I’m sure it’s nothing that years of extensive and expensive therapy can’t fix.) Sleep headphones are, in and of themselves, not an entirely new phenomenon. Bose got into the space in earnest back in mid-2018, offering one of the more polished (and pricey) approaches to the category. The company went in an entirely different direction than, say, Kokoon , which offers an over-

When the Los Angeles-based extended reality data visualization company, BadVR , first heard that one of its earliest benefactors, Magic Leap, was about to shed 1,000 jobs and was fighting for its life , the young startup was unfazed. Despite the very public ties that BadVR had to Magic Leap, as one of the enterprise applications on the platform, the startup was more insulated than other businesses from the pivot away from consumer-focused apps. The first step was finding money from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program to get more capital coming in and maintaining its headcount. Eventually, the company managed to land additional financing in the form of a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It’s the second grant that the company has taken from the NSF and is an example of how startups can turn to government funding for capital and avoid some of the pitfalls of fundraising from venture capital. To be sure, even Magic Leap’s trip to the brink of collapse

While much of what made 2020 such an absolute nightmare will still be with us on January 1 (sorry!), we will really, truly be leaving Adobe Flash and FarmVille behind as we enter the new year. The end of Flash has been a long time coming. The plugin, which was first released in 1996 and once supported a broad swath online content, has become increasingly irrelevant in a smartphone-centric world: iPhones never supported Flash, and it’s been just over 10 years since Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter outlining the technology’s shortcomings. Adobe has been planning for the end, announcing in 2017 that it would phase out Flash by the end of this year . Most web browsers have already stopped supporting Flash, and today is the official end date, with Adobe ending support itself — although there’s still one last “death of Flash” milestone on January 12, when the company will begin to block Flash content from playing. In related news, Zynga announced recently that the

On the last day of 2020, New York City’s Metro Transit Authority announced that it has finished its roll out of contactless payment systems. With the addition of a final stop in Brooklyn, every MTA subway station and bus in the five boroughs now sports the OMNY “Tap and Go” system. We got an early demo of the Grand Central terminals when the project rollout began last May. The system involves a major infrastructure overhaul as the transit authority looks beyond the iconic Metro Card to mobile payment systems from vendors like Apple, Google, Samsung and Fitbit – allowing users to use smartphones and smartwatches to swipe their way through the turn style. NYC’s push for citywide contactless transit payment is delayed by COVID-19 The MTA had expected to finish the project by October – though COVID-19 put the kibosh on those plans along with so much else. The goal was pushed back to December, and it appears it’s been met with no time to spare. Join us for a major announcement

I edited hundreds of stories in 2020, so choosing my favorites would be an exercise in futility. Instead, I’ve tried to gather a sample of Extra Crunch stories that taught me something new. (Which means this top 10 list betrays my ignorance, a humbling admission for a know-it-all like myself.) While narrowing down the field of candidates, I realized that we’re covering each of the topics on this list in greater depth next year. We already have stories in the works about no-code software, the emergence of edtech, proptech and B2B marketplaces, to name just a few. Some readers are skeptical about paywalls, but without being boastful, Extra Crunch is a premium product, just like Netflix or Disney+. I know: We’re not as entertaining as a historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II or a space western about a bounty hunter. But, speaking as someone who’s worked at several startups, Extra Crunch stories contain actionable information you can use to build a company and/or look

SoftBank Group is reportedly investing $200 million to bail out Katerra, a startup that had hoped to remake the construction industry with a vertically integrated approach, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal . Katerra’s shareholders reportedly approved the new investment on Wednesday, with the new lifeline from SoftBank coming on top of roughly $2 billion that the Japanese technology conglomerate had already committed to the venture. Funds for the bailout, which will save Katerra from bankruptcy, will be coming from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1, the Journal quoted Katerra chief executive Paal Kibsgaard as telling company shareholders in a message. As part of the funding, the SoftBank-financed financial services firm, Greensill Capital, is cancelling around $435 million in debt in exchange for a 5% stake in the company, according to the Journal’s reporting. This new bailout actually marks the second time that SoftBank has stepped in to dole out $200 million to Katerra th