Virgin Orbit, the unconventional rocket company founded by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, said its mission failure earlier this week was due to an anomaly with the rocket’s second stage. Although the LauncherOne rocket managed to reach space and achieve stage separation, the anomaly...
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Visa and Mastercard payments are convenient for customers, but can cost merchants high processing fees. Atoa Payments wants to provide a cheaper alternative that is still easy for customers to use. The London-based fintech announced today that it has raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding. The...
Startup founders go to war with UK government over its moves to appoint bank into key ecosystem role
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Nothing less than a war has broken out between an influential swathe of the UK tech startup community and the British government, after the latter has allegedly sought to hand the curation and promotion of British startups – both inside the UK and abroad – over to a single UK bank. As we...
The EU is developing a long-term gaming and esports strategy while it also investigates Activision Blizzard's $68.7B merger with Microsoft.Read...
Lyubov Guk Contributor Share on Twitter Lyubov Guk is a founding partner at Blue Lake VC. She supports early-stage international founders working in the U.K. Robyn Klingler-Vidra Contributor Robyn...
Changes are incoming to draft online safety legislation in the UK which continues to attract controversy over the impact on free speech. The draft Online Safety Bill has already been years in the making but new prime minister Liz Truss signalled earlier this month that she wants “tweaks” to...
Victims of the LockerGoga ransomware can now recover their stolen files for free, thanks to a new decryptor released by Romanian cybersecurity firm Bitdefender and the NoMoreRansom Initiative. The LockerGoga ransomware family, known for its attacks against industrial organizations, first emerged...
Getting a bunch of bananas and avocados from your favorite 15-minute grocery delivery company at 3 a.m. might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but some of these companies are finding themselves in somewhat of a cost-related pickle in such a low-margin business. While covering the recent...
The UK’s competition watchdog has confirmed it will move to an in-depth investigation of the Microsoft-Activision $68.7BN gaming mega-deal, a couple of weeks after it signalled concerns about the proposed acquisition. Earlier this month, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was...
There is a fight emerging in Central and Eastern Europe, and all the way down into the South Eastern regions. Investors such as Inovo, Credo, LauncHUB, Vitosha, Venture Friends, Marathon VC, are all VCs of varying sizes who are – as we speak – roaming everywhere from Eastonia and Poland all...
More antitrust litigation targeting Big (ad)Tech: Google is being sued in the UK and the Netherlands where two suits have been announced today seeking damages on behalf of publishers who claim they have been harmed by anti-competitive adtech practices. Per Reuters, publishers are seeking up to...
Roku’s latest update adds short-form video, a universal save list and ‘continue watching’ feature
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Alongside its fall hardware update, which included new streaming and audio devices, Roku today unveiled the features it has in store for the next version of its media software, Roku OS 11.5. This time around, the platform maker is looking to advance its own offerings, like its Live TV experience,...
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as...
GPS in its many regional flavors has become a ubiquitous feature in phones, smart watches, cars and other connected devices, but for all the location-based features that it helps enable (mapping being the most obvious) it has a lot of shortcomings: it can be slow and inaccurate, it can contribute...
InterContinental Hotels Group, also known as IHG Hotels & Resorts, has confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack that downed its booking systems and mobile apps. U.K.-headquartered IHG operates some of the world’s largest hotel chains, including the Holiday Inn, Crown Plaza and Regent hotels....
Tencent, the biggest social networking and video games company in China, hasn’t really managed to scale its popular products in the Western mainstream. The behemoth’s international expansion for the most part has been achieved by investing in companies outside China, but now it’s upping its...
This Week in Apps: Twitter’s edit button, BeReal clones, Trump’s Truth Social gets blocked
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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as...
The UK could be gearing up to hit a handful of tech firms with enforcement orders (and potentially fines) related to a children’s online privacy and safety Code which has been in force for a year. “The ICO are currently looking into how over 50 different online services are conforming with the...
Apple’s highly anticipated mixed reality headset may now have a name, according to a Bloomberg report earlier this week. The outlet spotted trademarks in the U.S. and global markets related to the device that were filed by Apple-affiliated firms. Names like “Reality One,” “Reality Pro”...
With schools increasingly focused on mental health, PsycApps raises Seed round for US expansion
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I’ve been tracking PsycApps, a startup that came up with a gamified mental health game ‘eQuoo’, since 2016, and this company – and its founder – is nothing if not persistent in ‘pivoting into the wind’. The last we heard it had been approved by the UK’s National Heath Service and...
Laura Spiekerman Contributor Share on Twitter Laura Spiekerman is the co-founder and chief revenue officer of Alloy, an identity-decisioning platform for banks and fintech companies. We’ve all seen the headlines: Fintech is struggling....
Microsoft’s $68.7 billion all-cash deal to bag gaming giant Activision Blizzard faces closer antitrust scrutiny in the UK where the country’s market watchdog has just announced it will move to an in-depth investigation — unless the pair submit suitable proposals to address its concerns in...
The process of sending and receiving payments in a $1.5 trillion B2B payments market in sub-Saharan Africa is one where merchants commonly use manual invoices and inefficient processes that burden merchants and make them struggle with their businesses. Duplo, a B2B payments startup that solves...
UK mobile and broadband carriers face fines of $117K/day, or 10% of sales, if they fail to follow new cybersecurity rules
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More than three years in the making, the UK government today announced a new, sweeping set of rules it will be imposing on broadband and mobile carriers to tighten up their network security against cyber attacks — aimed at being “among the strongest in the world” when they are rolled out,...
Oxwash, a UK startup that’s spent the last few years applying high tech processes to shrink the environment cost of dry cleaning and commercial laundry, has trousered £10 million (~$12M) in Series A funding to expand its nationwide footprint. Currently its service is available in five UK...
The provision of virtual foreign bank accounts has become a common strategy for fintechs to enable Nigerians and Africans to facilitate international transfers. In the latest development, Grey, a fintech in this category that provides virtual international bank accounts to African freelancers and...
It’s been a tumultuous year for OnlyFans, the popular subscription-based social media platform best known for hosting explicit content and offering an online safe haven to the sex workers who create it. In August 2021, the company launched OFTV, a streaming platform featuring safe-for-work...
Novel competition litigation filed in the UK against Facebook/Meta — seeking to extract billions in damages from the social media giant via an opt-out class action lawsuit route — will proceed to a certification hearing at the end of January, 2023, after Meta did not challenge the choice of...
In the post-2016 U.S. election world, secretive online campaigns designed to influence global politics are nothing new. And while U.S. adversaries like Russia, Iran and China have been linked to government propaganda on major social media sites, there’s been little evidence to date of the U.S....
As developed-world populations increasingly get older, healthcare is being rapidly digitized and ‘platformized’ in order to meet the huge scale of change heading our way. I recently covered how Cera in the UK just raised $320 million to shift monitoring of patients into the home rather than...