Category: coronavirus
Mobile payments firms in India are now scrambling to make money
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of India’s most valuable startup, Paytm, posed an existential question in a recent press conference. “What do you think of the commercial model for digital mobile payments. How do we make money?” Sharma asked Nandan Nilekani, one of the key architects of the…
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An EU coalition of techies is backing a “privacy-preserving” standard for COVID-19 contacts tracing
A European coalition of techies and scientists drawn from at least eight countries, and led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI), is working on contacts-tracing proximity technology for COVID-19 that’s designed to comply with the region’s strict privacy rules — officially unveiling the effort today. China-style individual-level…
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NASA issues agency-wide crowdsourcing call for ideas around COVID-19 response
There’s crowdsourcing a problem, and then there’s crowdsourcing a problem within NASA, where some of the smartest, most creative and resourceful problem-solvers in the world solve real-world challenges daily as part of their job. That’s why it’s uplifting to hear that NASA has issued a call to its entire workforce…
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LinkedIn’s making its recruitment tools free to those fighting the coronavirus pandemic
Like many other websites at the moment, the career-oriented networking platform LinkedIn has seen a big boost in traffic as a result of people being asked to work from home and stay indoors overall to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with a bump of 55% more conversational activity between…
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DoorDash now delivers from convenience stores
With the coronavirus pandemic pushing more and more Americans to self-isolate and stay inside, DoorDash is starting to deliver items from convenience stores. Starting today, the company is partnering with both national and regional chains across the… Source
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Palantir provides COVID-19 tracking software to CDC and NHS, pitches European health agencies
As the floor drops out from under many startups, some tech companies are finding a path forward by meeting new government needs. Among them is Palantir, a secretive government-friendly big data operation that’s able to ingest vast amounts of information to visualize trends and track individuals—useful tasks as the spread…
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