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Showing posts from April, 2019

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Trexo Robotics (YC W19) – Robotic Legs for Kids with Cerebral Palsy

Launch HN: Trexo Robotics (YC W19) – Robotic Legs for Kids with Cerebral Palsy 106 by manmeet | 14 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN community! We're Rahul and Manmeet, co-founders of Trexo Robotics ( http://bit.ly/2Vaz1ra ) At Trexo Robotics, we're building wearable robotic devices to help children with disabilities learn to walk, in many cases for the first time in their lives. Video: https://youtu.be/3LW4LJIpa2o We are both Mechatronics undergrads from the University of Waterloo. Rahul later completed a Master's in Robotics at the University of Toronto and I've done my MBA at Rotman. We started this a few years ago when I (Manmeet) found out that my nephew, Praneit, has Cerebral Palsy, and that he would not be able to walk. Not walking can lead to contractures, hip subluxation, and many physiological and psychological issues for kids. We wanted to change that. We decided to use our robotics background, along with help from friends and the top rehabilitation researche
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Samsung sees Q1 profit plummet 60%

Samsung’s Q1 earnings are in and, as the company itself predicted , they don’t make for pretty reading. The Korean giant saw revenue for the three-month period fall by 13 percent year-on-year to 52.4 trillion KRW, around $45 billion. Meanwhile, operating profit for Q1 2019 came in at 6.2 trillion KRW, that’s a whopping $5.33 billion but it represents a decline of huge 60 percent drop from the same period last year. Ouch. Samsung’s Q1 last year was admittedly a blockbuster quarter, but these are massive declines. What’s going on? Samsung said that sales of its new Galaxy S10 smartphone were “solid” but it admitted that its memory chip and display businesses, so often the most lucrative units for the company, didn’t perform well and “weighed down” the company’s results overall. Despite those apparent S10 sales, the mobile division saw income drop “as competition intensified.” Meanwhile, the display business posted a loss “due to decreased demand for flexible displays and increasing m
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Jungle Ventures hits $175M first close on its third fund for Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem is set to get a massive injection of funds after Jungle Ventures reached a first close of $175 million for its newest fund, TechCrunch has come to learn. Executives at the Singapore-based firm anticipate that the new fund, which is Jungle’s third to date, will reach a final close of $220 million over the coming few months, a source with knowledge of the fund and its plans told TechCrunch. If it were to reach that figure, the fund would become the largest for startup investments in Southeast Asia. Jungle Ventures declined to comment. An SEC filing posted in December suggested the firm was aiming to raise up to $200 million with the fund. Its last fund was $100 million and it closed in November 2016. Founding partners Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand started the fund way back in 2012 when it raised a (much smaller)  $10 million debut fund . Digging a little deeper, our source revealed that the new Jungle fund includes returning LPs World Bank aff
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Alphabet cites ‘headwinds’ in smartphone sales, teases I/O hardware announcement

Alphabet’s Q1 earnings were a disappointment for Wall Street, courtesy primarily of ad revenue shortcomings. The hardware team met with some difficulties, as well, owing in part to a stagnating global smartphone market that has impacted virtually all players. CEO Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” when referring to the company’s smartphone line, following the release of the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL last fall. The executive rightly referenced the company’s relatively recent entry as a standalone hardware developer and painted a hopeful picture of the industry’s innovations going forward. “I do continue to be excited to see 5G coming and the early foldable phones, which Android plays a big part in driving,” Pichai said on the call. Google has notably taken an important role developing an Android UI designed for the foldable form factor, along with working closely beside Samsung on its recently delayed foldable. CFO Ruth Porat echoed Pichai’s comments, while hinting at wha
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Equity Shot transcribed: Slack’s S-1 and Uber’s IPO terms

We’re deep in IPO news, and last week was no different. When this happens, Equity’s Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm fire up their mics and wax financial about the news we can’t possibly fit into the regular episode of the popular TechCrunch podcast. Last week the duo discussed Uber’s IPO pricing and Slack’s S-1 . On Uber: Kate: And before we jump into Uber’s Q1 financials, what do you think of Uber is most recent private valuation of 72 billion. Do you think that’s a wildly inflated valuation or do you think that’s a reasonable price tag? Alex: So I have absolutely no idea. And we’re going to get into this a bit with the Q1 numbers, but I don’t know how to price this company. I really don’t. We talk a lot about SaaS IPOs and there’s a lot of really solid metrics out there about those companies and what they’re worth and what makes them work more or less than competitors. Uber’s a strange beast. It’s got these enormous losses. It’s got slowing growth. It is a global brand. It’s got
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Twitter announces new content deals with Univision, The Wall Street Journal and others

Twitter is unveiling a number of new content deals and renewals tonight at its NewFronts event for digital advertisers. It’s only been two years since Twitter first joined the NewFronts . At the time, coverage suggested that executives saw the company’s video strategy as a crucial part of turning things around,  but since then, the spotlight has moved on to other things (like rethinking the fundamental social dynamics of the service ). And yet the company is still making video deals, with 13 of them being unveiled tonight. That’s a lot of announcements, though considerably less than the 30 revealed at last year’s event . The company notes that it has already announced a number of partnerships this year, including one with the NBA . “When you collaborate with the top publishers in the world, you can develop incredibly innovative ways to elevate premium content and bring new dimensions to the conversations that are already happening on Twitter,” said Twitter Global VP and Head of Co
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Amazon is testing a Spanish-language Alexa experience in the US ahead of a launch this year

Amazon announced today it has begun to ask customers to participate in a preview program that will help the company build a Spanish-language Alexa experience for U.S. users. The program, which is currently invite-only, will allow Amazon to incorporate into the U.S. Spanish-language experience a better understanding of things like word choice and local humor, as it has done with prior language launches in other regions. In addition, developers have been invited to begin building Spanish-language skills, also starting today, using the Alexa Skills Kit. The latter was announced on the Alexa blog , noting that any skills created now will be made available to the customers in the preview program for the time being. They’ll then roll out to all customers when Alexa launches in the U.S. with Spanish-language support later this year. Manufacturers who want to build “Alexa Built-in” products for Spanish-speaking customers can also now request early access to a related Alexa Voice Services (A
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Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth on dueling open-source foundations

At the Open Infrastructure Summit , which was previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his keynote to talk about the state of open-source foundations — and what often feels like the increasing competition between them. “I know for a fact that nobody asked to replace dueling vendors with dueling foundations,” he said. “Nobody asked for that.” He then put a point on this, saying, “what’s the difference between a vendor that only promotes the ideas that are in its own interest and a foundation that does the same thing. Or worse, a foundation that will only represent projects that it’s paid to represent.” Somewhat uncharacteristically, Shuttleworth didn’t say which foundations he was talking about, but since there are really only two foundations that fit the bill here, it’s pretty clear that he was talking about the OpenStack Foundation and the Linux Foundation — and maybe more precisely the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of the inc
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What we want to know in the We Company (WeWork) S-1

With news that the We Company (formerly known as WeWork) has officially  filed to go public confidentially with the SEC today, there’s a big question on everyone’s mind: Is this the next massive startup win or a house of cards waiting to be toppled by the glare of the public markets? No company I follow has as much polarized opinion as the We Company. And while the company will have to reveal at least some of its hand in its official S-1, my guess is that the polarization around the company will not be alleviated until well after it goes public, if ever. The challenge with understanding its business is how much the details of each of its leases, real estate markets and tenants matter to its bottom line. We already know the top line numbers : the company had revenue of $1.8 billion in 2018, and a net loss of $1.9 billion that year. That led to the received opinion that the company has an extraordinarily weak business. As Crunchbase News editor Alex Wilhelm put it : from Tec
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