In 2019, the Seedstars World Competition was first held in Minsk. Of the more than 100 applications, Skinive (Wise AI), the project to create a virtual AI dermatologist, became the winner. In the worldwide final, which took place on April 3 2020 online, the Russian startup StudyFree won.

Dmitry Dosov, ambassador of Seedstars World Competition in Belarus, told about the peculiarities of the Belarusian experience: “Last year we impressed Seedstars and set a regional record for the number of applications submitted. And despite very strong projects, everyone had one problem — the ability to pitch in English to be really breathtaking. Without it, it is difficult to attract an investor, and even more to win in such a difficult international competition. This year we considered our mistakes, and the finalists will be prepared by the Demium Minsk team.”

Due to the current situation in the world, the Seedstars World Competition 2020/21 will be completely online.

In order to get an opportunity for investment and mentoring assistance from Seedstars, Belarusian startups must submit an application on the website in the Minsk event section. At the same time, the following requirements are imposed on projects:

• the presence of MVP — a minimally functional product
• first sales as proof of its relevance
• previous startup investments should not exceed $ 1,000,000.

“You need to try to apply for all startups that fit the criteria. I carefully watched the way of startups that reached regional and global levels — for six months they all attracted funding from investors not linked to Seedstars. Because this contest is really a great opportunity to make yourself known on the world stage and attract smart investments, ”added Dmitry Dosov.

The winner of the competition will receive investments in the amount of $ 500,000, another 10 finalists can expect $ 50,000. All startups that have reached the regional summits will be included into the worldwide expert network of mentors, which will provide a new impetus to the development of the project.

“Our goal is to find and help the most innovative startups from all over the world, giving them investment and entrepreneurial education. We want to give global opportunities to those who don’t have access to resources, increase entrepreneurship in emerging markets and act as a catalyst for local startup ecosystems, ”said Seedstars co-founder Alice de Tonnak.

To apply, simply visit the Online Seedstars World Competition 2020/21.

About the organizer: Seedstars is a Swiss company that, since 2013, has been organizing an annual startup competition in more than 90 countries in order to identify and invest in the most promising projects in emerging markets.

When you have to face an overhaul in your house/flat, you immediately imagine that the next few months will be a real challenge. You will have to deal with a variety of factors, such as budget coordination, duration of work, conscientious and unscrupulous employees. Startup Cubicup from Demium incubator, has developed its tool, designed for both end-users and professionals in the building sector to minimize costs and loss of nerve cells.

The general director of the company, Gabriel Cambra, explains the need for such a service to come up with the fact that it was necessary to develop a platform for the "professionalization" of reconstruction processes in your house for a long time: it is helpful for homeowners who want to make renovations in "safe, transparent, consultable and high-quality" conditions.

"Speaking frankly, says Cambra, the idea arose because of the true fear of customers to face a lack of transparency in the construction sector." Cubicup formed a full-fledged team that calculated all the possible details that could worry the consumer: from calculating the budget to the repair work calculator, which operates in real-time.

The platform immediately begins to work with the client, through information with an expert who consults and accompanies him throughout the process, helping him in the competent preparation of the project and the selection of qualified specialists.

Also, the director guarantees that the conditions are determined from the very beginning and that they have achieved thanks to the terms established in the professional contract. Moreover, he hastens to assure that payments will always be made through a secure form. Highly qualified employees have a quality mark obtained after accreditation. They get jobs that are consistent with their methods and specialization.

Cubicup is currently developing an additional module to account for expansion and budget changes after the work has begun and, therefore, a digital contract between the two parties has already been agreed.

"At Cubicup, we already have over 100 repair companies and trusted architects. All of them have previously passed quality control, which ensures that they are law firms, that they have all the necessary documentation, and that also have professional experience and feedback from the clients for whom they worked," sums up Gabriel Cambra.

Source.

Brickbro continues to expand steadily. The company closed its financial accounts for 2019 after an operation worth more than ten million euros. Brickbro also completed its final fiscal year with a net profit of two million euros.

Brickbro was created in Demium Barcelona in 2018 and sought to create a real financial asset in the estate market from unused and abandoned commercial premises. Currently, the company has twelve employees spread among the capital of Catalonia and Madrid.

Brickbro began its journey as a crowdfunding platform, but the company has redirected its business model to a loft marketplace, that is, old commercial premises.

A few months ago, the company launched an investment platform where they sell commercial premises that they buy from users. They advertise a place on the platform until it is sold. The average sale period is about thirty days.

The company has possibilities and employees in Barcelona and Madrid for the office segment, as well as plans for investing in the industrial sphere. The founders claim that, depending on the type of premises and its location, they will be able to determine which functions are best suited for a particular place.

The company plans to invest up to 250,000 euros in improving this technology.

Source.

Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan — November 20, 2019 — The leading startup community in emerging markets and the investor Seedstars officially launched in Nur Sultan. According to the results of the Seedstars World Competition 2019, over 20 the most promising startups from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia will participate in the summit and present their projects to investors and experts in a particular business field.

The main conference is held at the AIFC FinTech Hub, which brought together 200 key participants from more than 20 countries dealing with relevant fields like Smart Cities, EdTech and AI.

Traditionally, Seedstars Summit runs for three days. On November 20 and 21, on the eve of the main event, an intensive closed bootcamp for startups led by the managing partner of Seedstars Pierre-Alan Masson is held. The participants will learn how to ensure the growth of their companies and scale up their business.

On the second day, the Investor Forum will be held in cooperation with the AIFC FinTech Hub, where more than 20 highly qualified experts and founders of the company, namely Arai Bekembaeva (Bolt), Alena Tkachenko (Nommi), Letizia Monte (Phillips Health Systems), Patrick Bostils (Stage-Co) will hold face-to-face meetings with startups. In addition, the Forum will be a great opportunity for startups to team up with impact investors such as Nurbek Raev (Whitehill), Amirkhan Omarov (BeInTech Company), Arsalan Alfred Ni (AV Ventures), Elena Boytsun (Luminate), Hambartsum Kakhketsn (SmartGateVC) and others.

After the event, the third and main day (November 22) will be open to everyone who wants to learn the latest technical trends, expand their networks and meet inspiring founders and entrepreneurs.

Espree Devora who is known as “the Girl who Gets it Done” will visit Kazakhstan for the first time to perform the WomenInTech podcast live at the summit. She comes from Los Angeles to talk about women entrepreneurship and their opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

In addition, Jonas Schorr, co-founder of Urban Impact (Germany), Richard Paul Gauthier, global IT director of the Amazon (USA), Ramil Mukhoryapov, co-founder of ChocoFamily (Kazakhstan), Daria Egorina, founder and CEO of CleverBooks (Ireland), and Rudradeb Mitra, Senior Advisor on Artificial Intelligence at EFMA and Leading Product Mentor at Google Developers (Poland), will deliver speeches at the Summit. The summit will end with a press conference and a final cocktail for all participants of the event.

Here is the list of all startups participating in Seedstars World 2019:

Couch Coach, Serbia; Wexplain, Azerbaijan; Lingwing.com, Georgia; Biometric, Kazakhstan; iHotel LLC, Mongolia; StudyFree, Russia; XVision, Romania; Skinive, Belarus; FOM, Uzbekistan; Jeff, Latvia; Velvioo, Armenia; Skyworker, Ukraine; SmartGuide, Czech Republic.

The most promising startups will be selected to participate in the Seedstars Summit 2020 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where they will compete for the title of Seedstars Global Winner. The participating teams will be able to present their idea on the main stage along with more than 60 startups from all over the world and win up to $ 500,000 in investment.

Recall that the Skinive startup won the Belarusian stage of Seedstars World 2019. Now they are in Nur Sultan to compete for the finals. We will be broadcasting the event live from Nur Sultan.

The Edge Fund was designed to enable institutional investors to take advantage of some of the potential benefits of eSports investments.

Artist Capital identified three reasons why the fund is interested in investing in competitive gaming. Firstly, it is a large audience (380 million unique viewers in 2018). 79% of viewers under 35 years of age, the audience is global and continues to grow. Secondly, Artist Capital Management believes that eSports revenues — $ 900 million in 2018 — have significant potential for expansion compared to traditional sports leagues. Thirdly, the fund considers the formation of franchised eSports leagues as a key factor for the industry. Franchised eSports leagues like the Activision’s Overwatch League, Riot Games, and the League of Legends Series of North American Championships can attract sponsors and increase the flow of fans and money in the industry.

Josh Dienstag, CEO of Artist Capital Management, compared e-sports to other internet verticals and suggested that a small number of e-sports companies will ultimately receive the lion’s share of industry revenue and market capitalization.

At the moment, The Edge Fund has already invested in 100 Thieves, a lifestyle brand and an e-sports organization from Los Angeles; Washington Esports Ventures, owner of the Washington Justice team at the Overwatch League; and communicating and viewing applications in the ecosystem.

The Edge Fund claimed it plans to work with eSports companies in the long term. The fund also has a flexible mandate and can invest in several stages and both primary and secondary securities.

In July 2019, The Edge Fund led 100 Thieves’ $35 million second round, and Dienstag joined the board of directors of 100 Thieves.

Artist Capital Management also raised $ 35 million of additional capital from its limited partners in the form of separate joint investment tools. The money was directed to further support the portfolio companies of The Edge Fund.

Photo credit: Pixabay

Four students from the Seoul National University and Delfi University of Technologies created a framework that can generate a flow of three-dimensional human dance poses for music. It consists of three elements: a music feature encoder, a pose generator, and a music genre classifier.

The developers’ team is focused on integrating these components for creating a realistic 3D human dancing move from music, which can be implemented to AI and humanoid robots so it is possible to make a robot dance just by listening to music.

The dance pose generator can synthesize a dance sequence longer than 5,000 pose frames. Watch the full video of a man dancing to Madonna and Billie Eilish here.

CEO Adam Mossery announced that the company is going to expand the function of private likes. Users now will put likes that are invisible to other users.

The function will operate in six countries, including Australia and New Zealand, the United States and Canada.

According to a study conducted among 6,000 children aged 12 to 15 years, those who use social media more actively reported issues such as depression, anxiety, and loneliness. They were also more prone to aggressiveness and a tendency to antisocial behavior than adolescents who avoided social networks.

Many people believe that Instagram encourages users to estimate how many likes each message receives, and users, in turn, compare the number of likes with friends and celebrities.

Tammy Hembrow, a fitness blogger with 9.7 million followers, has her own sports line and fitness app. She also works with brands and advertises them in her feed. She says the changes have not affected the way she does business.

However, not all users rated this Instagram step positively. Nicki Minaj wrote on Twitter that she would no longer use the app.

Influential people who make money on Instagram by partnering with advertisers to promote their products are dissatisfied with canceling their likes. The influential Australian blogger Carmen Huter says that the general rule is that a blogger with 100,000 subscribers could require $1000 for publication, but the amount can vary greatly depending on the level of user engagement. The more likes, comments and publications, the more valuable their influence.

Photo credit: TechCrunch

Zeev Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Stereo Capital became investors.

San Francisco-based startup HomeLight is developing artificial intelligence-based software and services for buyers, sellers, and real estate agents.

The fundings will be spent on expanding the platform for matching agents and investors of the company, create new consumer products and expand the coverage of existing instruments.

HomeLight receives income from the final commission of agents in the form of a 25% fee for the attraction. HomeLight algorithms use more than 40 million real estate transactions and more than 1.4 million brokerage profiles to compare agents for several indicators like the number of home agents who are sold a mile from a given property and percentage of properties sold at a specified price.

The artificial intelligence model takes into account such questions as what is the state of a customer’s home and the type of property.

It also provides housing market data for predicting the current value of homes with the highest accuracy. Search results include only agents who have agreed to pay for HomeLight. The company’s base of 449,000 customers has led to more than $ 17 billion in the US real estate market.

Photo: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

Dorsey wrote about his decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter all over the world. Twitter CEO believes a political message should be earned, not bought.

Twitter was supported by Democrat spokesman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, while Trump campaign leader Brad Parskal called it a very stupid decision.

Twitter makes little money on political advertising. During the midterm elections of 2018, revenue from such advertising amounted to $3 million, i.e. 0,1%

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg has reinforced his policy of not checking facts on politicians' advertisements.

Facebook exceeded expectations and increased the number of users per month by 2% to 2.45 billion. The resource earned $66 billion over the year, so that next year it could earn $ 330-400 million on political advertising.

Instead of banning political advertising, Zuckerberg spoke in support of increasing transparency about how advertising looks, how much is spent on it and where it is placed.

The ban on political advertising comes into force on November 22, and additional information on politics will appear on November 15. Dorsey emphasized that some political announcements, such as in support of voter registration, would be an exception.

Photo Credit: TechCrunch

The Australian Department of Home Affairs proposes to use the document and face verification service not only to fight again cybercrime and identity theft but also to verify the age of users during registration on pornographic and gambling sites.

About 44% of children 9-16 years old claim to have seen sexual content on the Internet.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs has announced an investigation into whether age verification measures were adequate when it comes to prohibiting children from accessing adult sites.

A similar program was implemented by the UK government at the end of 2017. The Digital Economy Act has been developed to limit underage users' access to porn sites.

In the UK, the plan was implemented through passport and credit information verification. As an alternative, it was also recommended to obtain an access card for Internet pornography, which users had to buy at local stores.

After widespread complaints, ridicule and delays, the plan was scrapped.

Photo credit: Tech.Co

Aviatrix is a network security provider for multi-cloud enterprises.

The new capital will be used to scale the startup’s operations in sales, channels, customer support, marketing, and product development.

The startup is developing open-source cloud and border management solutions based on Amazon web services, Google cloud platform, Microsoft Azure and Oracle cloud infrastructure, including transit network, network segmentation, firewall integration, SAML VPN, access to the cloud, filtering, encryption and much more.

Connection states and delay indicators are compared in the management console without code and based on the browser, as well as alerts and displays.

Using AVX Controller Aviatrix, administrators can define tags for specific network ranges and apply security rules and firewall filters based on these tags. Also, they can monitor outbound traffic from the VPC using output filtering and log security policy events in third-party tools such as Splunk, SumoLogic, Syslog, ELK, and Datadog. They can also use Aviatrix troubleshooting tools to automatically detect connectivity problems and generate real-time performance reports.

By some estimates, the multi-cloud management market will grow to $ 7.89 billion by the end of 2024.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

A-Series funding round was held by Two Sigma Ventures, World Trade Ventures, and Silvertech Ventures.

Firedome is a startup from Tel Aviv and New York. It develops cybersecurity solutions. Initially, the product was aimed at ensuring the security of smart home devices.

According to Cisco, billions of devices are expected to be connected to the Internet by 2030 and will become very vulnerable to intrusion and data theft. From 2016 to 2017, Symantec tracked a 600 percent increase in targeted attacks on IoT products.

Firedome’s Endpoint Protection package is designed for a range of different cyber attacks:

• ransomware;
• malware
• denial of service;
• intercepting the fleet before remote access;
• crypto attacks.

On the toolbar, response teams can see mapped analytics and analytic data in real-time, as well as deploy zero-day attacks. They can also combine threats and launch remedial actions as needed, detect security alerts, device processes and locations, and update statuses.

The software agent installed on each IoT device is designed to constantly monitor activity and detect anomalies. Due to using a heuristic, reputation, and signature scans along with network traffic checks sent by the AI ​​cloud agent, it is possible to quickly respond to detected attacks and eliminate at least some of them.

Markets and Markets forecasts that the IoT security segment capitalization will reach $35.2 billion by 2023.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

Databricks is a San-Francisco based startup that provides large businesses with tools for analyses, estimation, and manipulation of big databases. The company’s customer list contains brands such as Hotels.com, HP, Shell Energy, Showtime, Riot Games, Zeiss, Cisco, etc.

Databricks is present in the segments of advertising, technology, energy, government, financial services, healthcare, games, science, media, and retail. With the funds attracted the startup is going to increase the number of developers in Amsterdam over the next three years. Other short-term plans include strengthening the company’s operations in the Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

The company mainly develops web tools for organizing deep machine learning and graphics processing. Databricks works with over 100 Spark operators to transform and manipulate data and provides automated cluster management and virtual laptops for real-time collaboration programming.

Databricks Data Science workspaces provide environments for running analytic processes and managing machine learning models, complemented by interactive notebooks that support several languages, including R, Python, Scala, Java, and SQL, as well as libraries and environments such as Conda, XGBoost, Google TensorFlow, Keras.

The platform supports such options as co-authorship, commenting and automatic version control, as well as real-time alerts and audit logs for troubleshooting. They can automatically start machine learning pipelines or transfer data to Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, RStudio, SnowFlake, and other platforms.

According to the Market Research Future report, the big data analytics market will be valued at $375 billion by 2023.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

Series C financing was led by Redline Capital with the participation of MMC Ventures, GMG Ventures, and Hearst Ventures.

Signal AI is a New York-based startup that uses AI to automate business intelligence tasks and monitor media.

Due to the investment received, Signal AI will be able to accelerate its work scaling in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region.

Signal AI’s revenue grew by 130%, and its customer base doubled due to FleishmanHillard, Deloitte, SSE, Balderton Capital, Amadeus, Thomas Cook Group, White Star Capital, Quilter, TalkTalk, HSBC, and MSL Group.

The results of using Signal AI technology give company leaders absolute clarity about what is happening outside their organization and help them make informed decisions.

Signal AI uses the following machine learning techniques: natural language processing;

• classification of topics, entity recognition, mood analysis; detection of quotes and anomalies;
• data visualization for displaying customer demand data;
• recognition and marking of objects such as people, places, organizations, companies, and topics (for example, a variety of jobs);
• the use of visualization and analysis in real-time to compare the results in various maps, tables, graphs, reports.

Signal AI is used by more than 5 million sources in more than 80 languages ​​daily.

More than 150 employees currently work for Signal AI in offices in London, New York, and Hong Kong.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

The round was led by General Catalyst, which had also participated in the previous round and put $ 110 million.

Grammarly is a Ukrainian tech company that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to check the spelling. The number of users is about 20 million people.

Grammarly will use the funds received to scale its product and to make it more accessible wherever there is written communication in English.

By the way, the startup also learns the tone detector which is a more complex aspect of language and communication. So, users will get practical recommendations regarding tone adaptation.

It is also planned to expand the office in Kyiv, which will provide jobs for another 130 people.

Photo credit: Pinterest

According to Bloomberg, the Indian digital payment company Paytm is close to agreeing to attract new investments worth $ 2 billion from Alibaba Ant Financial and the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.

It means Paytm’s valuation is around $ 16 billion.

India has become FinTech’s fastest-growing market ahead of China. It is expected that in 2023 the digital payment market in the country will cost about $ 1 trillion even though it is still in its infancy compared with the Chinese industry at $ 5 trillion.

Besides, according to a CB Insights report, India has surpassed China as Asia’s largest technology investment recipient.

Photo credit: technode

WeWork office leasing company had inflated the valuation before entering the IPO, but due to scandals connected with the leader and business model, the placement was postponed, and the valuation decreased almost 5 times.

The co-founder Adam Neumann resigned last month, and new board members postponed their IPOs, laid off thousands of employees, sold the company’s private jet, and shut down WeGrow, an educational department of WeWork.

The SoftBank financing agreement will give the Japanese company, which is the WeWork’s largest investor, control over the launch of office rent.

Recall that on the eve of the IPO, it turned out that Adam Neumann resold the buildings under construction to his company, while leading a luxurious lifestyle with his wife. According to The Financial Times, WeWork may run out of money by the end of November.

Photo credit: Business Insider

According to EU-Startups, Alisée de Tonnac entered the top 50 most influential women from the field of startups and venture investments. Initially, there were 250 potential candidates in the list.

Alisée de Tonnac also entered the Social Entrepreneur Forbes 30 under 30, 29 influential women from Refinery29, and became a Wired UK Innovation Fellow.

Alisée de Tonnac was born in France and spent most of her life abroad in Singapore, California, Italy and Switzerland, Brazil, and Cambodia. She graduated from Lausanne Business School and received a master’s degree in international management from the University of Bocconi (Italy) with honors.

Alisée de Tonnac is the CEO of Seedstars World, an international startup competition, and co-founder of Seedstars, which helps grow startup ecosystems in emerging markets.

Photo credit: EU-startups

Clari develops a comprehensive platform for analytics and forecasting sales. The startup raised $60 million in the D-series under the leadership of Sapphire Ventures.

The startup provides users with a set of tools that aim to increase productivity and reduce customer outflow by analyzing small signals from dozens of different sources. In this way, Clari can automatically identify transaction risks, integrate sales and marketing data from email services, calendars, CRM and messengers.

If compare Clari to competitors, its' main advantage is the ability to predict financial performance based on long-term and short-term historical patterns.

Startup customers are located in 170 countries. Qualtrics, Lenovo, Adobe, Dropbox, Zoom, Medallia, Datadog, Okta, etc. are among them.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

Ferret Video got in the list of the 15 finalists, a total of 700 applications were submitted.

Finalists enabled to:

• Present their projects at an industry pitch session or on the main stage of GoTech Arena;
• Schedule meetings with foundations and corporations in the Deal Room;
• Compete for prizes and investors' attention;
• Be nominated by partners or the GoTech Innovation team and receive tickets to the Startup category forum for free.

Ferret Video is a Belarusian startup that offers customers interactive videos for increasing sales, CTR & VTR. This product turns a real-time video into an interactive game. For example, you can stop such videos and answer questions directly while playing the video, and the owner of the video will see all the answers statistics.

Recall that at the end of September Ferret Video took third place in the Seedstars Minsk 2019 startup competition organized by The Heroes Media.

Photo credit: Ferret Video

Demecan is the only German company authorized to produce medical hemp in Germany. The green light was given by the German Federal Institute for Medicines and Medical Devices (BfArM). This means that Demecan will be able to produce at least 2,400 kg of dried cannabis over the next four years.

Demecan is also an importer and wholesaler of medical cannabis. Since the German government allowed the plant to be prescribed for therapeutic purposes in 2017, demand exceeded supply.

Germany currently represents the third largest medical cannabis market in the world and is gradually expanding.

Photo Credit: TechCrunch

NASA has released the CGI Moon Kit. It is a useful dataset that includes images and depth data, making it easy to create a detailed 3D map of the moon.

The CGI Moon Kit is shipped from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where scientific visualization expert Ernie Wright found that the data he collected for other purposes was popular with 3D artists.

The data came from two instruments in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbit (LRO). It is a spacecraft that has been moving around the Moon for more than ten years taking photos and measurements all the time. LRO has a high-quality camera on its board which is used to build a precise map of the moon’s surface. The camera can capture only a small part at a time, but it does this all the time and has already covered almost the entire visible area of ​​the moon. Yet some shadow areas cannot be displayed even if passed thousands of times.

To recreate the surface of the moon, making photos is not enough, data on the topology of its surface is also needed. Such data were collected by the LRO laser altimeter.

The CGI Moon Kit is free to download, all resources are available with several options.

Photo Credit: TechCrunch

Bird is the fastest company to hit $ 1 billion in a year. In addition to sharing services they offer:

• Bird Cruiser. It is a miniature motorcycle with a soft seat, where 2 riders can seat.
• Bird Two. It is a $1299 electronic scooter designed with experts leading in the industry of autonomous work.

Both are provided on a monthly rental basis. For $25, Bird offers an unlimited number of trips to customers in particular cities.

One trip will cost $1 per rental plus a fee for every minute of 15-20 cents depending on the city. After the trip, the wheels lock and workers collect and charge the scooters.

Еhe startup managed to expand its network of scooters to more than 120 cities and provide more than 10 million trips in two years since it got funds. But Bird has many competitors, for example, the main competitor is Lime, which has raised $765 million.

CDPQ and Sequoia together contributed $275 million. The startup was funded by the following companies: Accel and B Capital, CRV, Sound Ventures, Greycroft, Craft Ventures, Index Ventures, Valor, Goldcrest Capital.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

SenSat is a London-based startup specializing in geospatial technology and digitizing real-world locations for infrastructure projects. It helps construction, mining, energy, and other companies to create so-called digital twins of places that fit their projects.

In other words, SenSat transfers the real world into a machine-friendly version suitable for teaching AI systems.

SenSat Mapp cloud platform is used to recreate the real world in digital form by receiving all data sets that are linked through their location: real-time data generated by wearable devices; physical sensors connected to ground resources; traffic data; 3D image data from satellites, lidars, and drones.

As a result, companies can at any time gain access to a virtual dynamic version of a specific location like a construction site and to everything that happens there.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat

The Salesforce Sustainability Cloud is a product for enterprises which controls carbon metering. It will generally accelerate carbon neutrality. In other words, this will allow companies to fully understand their environmental impact. The launch is scheduled for December 2019.

Salesforce argues that the business world has a significant responsibility to tackle climate change, and trends support this view. A survey of executives of large companies showed that they called climate change the main risk for the growth of their business.

Salesforce is one of the largest companies in the field of e-commerce (150,000 customers worldwide), which owns the CRM platform of the same name (20% of the market).

Photo credit: Tech.Co

The movie tells about the hit man Frank Sheeran, who will be played by De Niro. In the film, the hero is shown at the age of 20 when Sheeran was involved in Europe during the Second World War. Robert De Niro will go through all the life events with his character. Viewers will see Sheeran in his 20s, 40s, 60s, and 80s.

The classic cinematic CGI combined with artificial intelligence similar to that used in creating deepfake videos based on early images of the young De Niro will de-age him in the movie “The Irishman”. According to the actor, for this purpose special points were applied to his face to fix facial expressions.

The movie has an amazing cast: Al Pacino, Anna Paken, Joe Sands, Jesse Plemons, Harvey Keitel, and Ray Romano. “The Irishman” is directed by Martin Scorsese.

Photo credit: BGR

Gatsby’s total revenue rose to $20 million after the initial round of $3.8 million in May, 2018. The startap is used by hundreds of brends like IBM, PayPal, Nike, Harry’s, Fabric, Braun, Ideo, Airbnb, and Impossible Foods.

Gatsby co-founder and CEO Kyle Matthews claims that 1% of the 10,000 websites are currently created using this technology.

Gatsby relies on two open source JavaScript projects for building websites and web applications: React. It is the user interface development library maintained by Facebook and the developer community. Webpack. It is a batch module that converts resources such as HTML, CSS, and images.

Gatsby generates sites in the form of static files that pre-select resources to reduce page load time, and integrates with more than 120 backends and 1200 plug-ins in 15 leading CMSs (content management systems).

A reliable plug-in mechanism allows developers to extract data directly from SaaS (software as a service) platforms, APIs, databases, file systems, and much more. Besides, Gatsby provides sites with pre-configured templates for various use cases, as well as a curated list of community projects and learning resources such as podcasts and tutorials.

Gatsby offers its cloud service Gatsby Preview, which allows teams to create web applications and websites and see real-time changes. To do this, it generates a shared temporary URL for immediate and discreet viewing of work in progress in Contentful, Sanity, Dato, ContentStack, and Drupal. This costs $50 per month for one site ($600 per year).

By the way, TheHeroes website is also written in Gatsby.

Each of the guests received a welcome box with branded bracelets, t-shirts, and probes of cosmetics by Comfort Zone and Davinas. Also, all guests underwent a Functional workout group and then relaxed at the Stretching & Myofascial release.

According to the guests, evo wellness club is an ideal place where you can restart your body, preparing it for the workweek or the final of the large international competition of startups, which was held on September 22. The comfortable aqua zone and gyms facilitate it like nothing else.

On September 22, in the center of Atlant-M Britain, the final of the Belarusian stage of Seedstars Global was held. 11 startups passed public pitching. The jury chose Skinive (Wise AI) as the winner. The start-up has already created B2B and B2 °C solutions, which need one photo of a single mole or pigment spot to determine whether there is a sign of skin disease.

The winner got the grant for cloud solutions from A1, 10 hours of legal advice from Borovtsov & Salei, club cards from Evo Wellness, certificates from SPA Riviera and a free office layout from Happy Office. Wise AI will represent Belarus at the Seedstars regional summit in Nur Sultan.

31 startups went through training sessions on September, 20 of them were ready for investments and scaling. Here is the list of finalists:

• Cashew Fintech
• CatZu
• FastServe
• GiveAway
• HiRo
• IZOVAC AR
• Lingvanex LLC
• LLC WiseAI
• LLC "Yamoto Samokato"
• Neirika
• Ferret Video

A winner will be determined during the public pitching. The winner will represent Belarus at the regional summit in Nur Sultan. The winners of the Minsk stage will also receive gifts from partners like a grant for cloud solutions from A1 and many more other prizes.

More than 80 projects had applied for the competition. This number is one of the best indicators in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Representatives of the Swiss organizing company Seedstars Global have chosen 31 projects with the greatest prospects of growing into large businesses in the coming years.

The following startups were invited to the training session on the pitching on September 20: Artyline, BookYourStudy, Cashew Fintech, CashMarket, CatZu, Everis Technologies, FastServe, Ferret Video, Fittonic, GiveAway, HiRo, HI-TECH NATION, Hommits, IZOVAC AR, Kakadu Development, LabMap, Lingvanex LLC, LLC WiseAI, LLC "Yamoto Samokato", MalpaTravel, Neirika, One2Lead, OpenBusiness, optliner, PigPug Inc., Stildi, Synpatic, Usefirst, Werbot Inc., ООО "Компания ДА".

On September 22, a public defense of the 10 most prepared startups and an award will take place in a festive atmosphere. You can register as a guest here. Please note: the number of places is limited.

Seedstars Global is an international startup competition with the main prize of $ 500,000 of funding. The remaining participants gain access to the knowledge base, mentors and investors, which allow accelerating the development of the project.

Today Greenlight has announced that $ 54 million were raised in the B-Series investment led by Drive Capital with the participation of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, TTV Capital, Live Oak Bank, and Relay Ventures.

The startup aims to help children learn financial literacy and get prepared for a healthy financial future. The experience of a child with a card from Greenlight begins with a companion mobile application for Android and iOS. Children can track their expenses, set savings goals, request cash and receive alerts when a parent sends money. They cannot spend money that they do not have.

Parents can manage the card and application from their smartphones, transfer money to their child’s card, and also view the journal of all expenses, savings, donations, and earnings for the current day.

Parents can plan and manage weekly or one-time rewards to encourage children to perform household chores or something else. Both parents and their children can disable the debit card from the application at any time at their discretion.

Photo credits: VentureBeat

Simbe Robotics was founded in 2015 to change the retail industry with the help of robots. The robot machine named Tally has already traveled over 40,000 kilometers in such stores as Schnuck Markets, Giant Eagle, Decathlon Sporting Goods, and Groupe Casino.

Simbe Robotics has now raised $ 26 million in A-series investments. Venrock, Activant Capital, and Valo Ventures have received their share. According to the agreement, SoftBank Robotics America will help Simbe increase the production of Tally to 1,000 units over the next two years.

Simbe’s CEO says the new funds will be spent on business maintaining, including research and development, as well as expanding the design, sales, marketing, and successful customer service teams.

Photo credit: VentureBeat

The ink is called PhotoChromeleon and consists of a mixture of photochromic dyes that can be sprayed or applied to any surface. The tests were carried out on a car, a case for a phone, shoes and a toy chameleon. The process is completely reversible and can be repeated an unlimited number of times.

The project is based on the previous MIT ColorMod project, which used a 3D printer for similar purposes. The inventors were disappointed the results were limited in terms of color schemes and resolution. And PhotoChromeleon allows you to create much more complex designs from zebra skin patterns to colorful flames.

The project is at the verification stage now, but it has already aroused interest among the auto giant Ford.

Photo credit: Digital Trends

YouTube’s NextUp program started following up on talented video bloggers in 2011. New promising authors were selected this season. Bloggers from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan whos channels have from 10 to 100 thousand subscribers submitted applications to participate in the competition.

The main selection criteria were:

• original content;
• storytelling integrity;
• production training potential;
• capability to develop further on YouTube;
• compliance with the core values ​​of the video hosting.

ITBeard is a channel from Belarus which tells about the life of IT-specialists from the inside and help those who wish to swell IT experts ranks.

All NextUp 2019 finalists will spend 5 days learning intensively with a professional film crew, YouTube team experts, invited speakers and top bloggers. Over 8 years, more than 500 authors in 14 countries have completed a similar training course from YouTube.

Startup Root Insurance uses drivers' smartphones to assess their driving style and behavior on the road at specific moments. A driver can choose an insurance policy based on this data. Conscientious drivers save up to 50% on car insurance compared to traditional insurance.

Root Insurance was founded in 2015. It has attracted $ 523 million in investment. This money will help the company expand into 29 US states and enter new markets.

In the first six months of 2019, Root paid more than $ 187 million in insurance premiums, an increase of 824% over the same period in 2018.

Photo Credit: TechCrunch

The transaction was carried out by Valor Equity Partners, as well as earlier investors like Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Dragoneer Investment Group, and EQT Ventures.

HackerOne is an intermediary between hackers and companies interested in testing their online vulnerabilities. The startup created a bug bounty platform connecting business and security researchers. HackerOne is one of the first companies which embrace and explore hackers as part of its business model.

HackerOne works with more than 1,500 customers including Google, Intel, Airbnb, Alibaba, General Motors, the US Department of Defense, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, Adobe, and VKontakte. HackerOne also collaborates with Facebook and its partners on the Libra cryptocurrency project.

The company reports that six hackers on its platform earned $ 1 million each. One of them, a 19-year-old self-taught hacker from Argentina, reported 1670 unique vulnerabilities of Verizon Media, Twitter, WordPress, Automattic.

Menlo Ventures, Toyota Motor Corporation, SoftBank and SOSV invested in the startup. Getaround has already raised more than $600 million in total.

Getaround is an online service that allows you to rent cars from private owners, and owners can rent cars out for a fee. The application was created in 2009. Initially, it worked only in America for a price of $5 per hour.

In 2018, the startup entered international markets: France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium, and the UK, where it operates under the Drivy by Getaround brand, and in Norway under the Nabobil brand.

We recall that the startup has two main competitors — Turo and Maven. It is known that Turo has already attracted $437 million of investments.

Photo Credit: TechCrunch

Artificial intelligence developed by the Paris-based Heuritech company scans and analyzes large volumes of images and text to understand trends as they appear, change, and disappear.

Since 2013 during the first three years, the startup was looking for ways for using the developed AI and then came across the fashion and luxury market. The company began to work closely with LVMH (the world leader in the luxury industry) and launched a product analytics platform in 2017. As the amount of data developing and processing grew, the startup had also created a platform for predicting trends. This had led them to customers such as Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Adidas.

Heuritech is a striking example of how AI penetrates a wide range of non-technical industries. Heuritech processes 3 million images and videos daily. It can identify 2,000 details in an image, including patterns, products, shapes, and colors. Developers and marketers get this data and create decisions and predictions about how far a trend can go and who will perceive it.

The Belarusian startup Oyper also created similar artificial intelligence, which recognizes clothes in photos or videos and finds them in online stores. We had a great conversation with the co-founder of this startup on the topic of fashion e-commerce.

Read, listen and see here.

The bracelet contains a lessened non-personalized Visa Classic card for contactless payments. It let you pay for purchases, bills in cafes, shops, pharmacies or travel by subway with one touch. Parents can make a bracelet for children.

To make the transactions reliable and safe the bank will use SMS to notify about each operation. Purchases of up to 80 rubles occur instantly and without the additional introduction of a PIN code.

The price of bracelets is 40 rubles.

To purchase a bracelet, you have to leave a request on the bank’s website, choose a color (black, yellow, light green or turquoise) and the nearest bank branch, where you will take it away.

Co-founder of Alibaba Jack Ma speaking at the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Shanghai on the same stage with Elon Musk, concluded: “People will have more time to enjoy what they are humans thanks to artificial intelligence.”

Musk was invited as the creator of OpenAI, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the existential risks of AI. He claims that computers will surpass people "in every way."

Ma’s statement is entirely different from his concept of working from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week named “996”. Jack Ma called people who work a lot “blessed”. Among the “blessed” is Elon Musk, who claims to work three times the average workweek.

Photo credit: insights.dice.com

Google Play along with the Apple App Store are some of the largest trusted places to download free apps. However, the malicious application has hit stores, and this is a serious cyber security issue.

CamScanner started as a completely safe, legal and useful application for scanning documents and creating PDF files using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). “The latest versions of the application came with an advertising library containing a malicious module, ” explains Kaspersky, the head of cybersecurity of the company, whose researchers discovered fraud.

Kaspersky defines this module as Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Necro.n., Which extracts and launches a virus from an encrypted file included in the application’s resources. An infected device can serve as crackers to display ads or even get paid subscriptions, which means stealing money from a mobile device.

Probably, the malicious module was launched recently by unscrupulous advertising partners. The application was removed from Google Play immediately after detection.

Photo credit: Forbes

The educational project is called the League of Analysts. It aims to prepare students of profile specializations to work as an investment or financial analytics.

The partners of the educational project are BEROC and IPM Business School, they provided the educational basis to hold classes. Program is designed for 7 months and includes disciplines such as financial accounting and analysis, the basics of corporate finance and company valuation, financial modeling and many other disciplines.

The training format combines lectures, homework, master classes Zubr Capital managers and personally Oleg Khusaenov, case championships, business simulations, and thesis project. Program participants will have the opportunity to look at the real business from the inside, chat with top managers of portfolio companies "Bison Capital".

Students of the last and penultimate years of specialized universities can apply for training courses (economic and mathematical specialties Belarusian universities). Personal qualities like leadership, active life position, consistency, analytical skills, thinking outside the box and openness to new knowledge and technologies are also important. Upon selection, the priority will be given to students with knowledge of the English language.

You can apply for training on the website: https://liga.zubrcapital.by/ Admission is carried out on a competitive basis on the results of the interview and performance of test tasks.

Megvii investors include Alibaba, Ant Financial, and Bank of China. As part of the D-series, funding was collected for $ 750 million, which led to a startup valuation of more than $ 4 billion.

Megvii Technology is a startup that, with the help of artificial intelligence, created the Face ++ facial recognition program. The company was founded by three graduates of Tsinghua University in 2011, and is now one of the leading Chinese startups on artificial intelligence, along with competitors SenseTime and Yitu.

Megvii’s decision to list publicly traded companies listed on the stock exchange came amid recession and political unrest in Hong Kong itself. These factors led to the Hang Seng benchmark index decrease in the value, and Alibaba delayed access to the local exchange until the political and economic situation became more favorable.

Megvii does not hide income and loss data. The company’s revenue grew from $ 95 million in 2016 to $ 20 billion in 2018, with an annual growth rate of about 359%. However, between 2016 and 2018, losses increased from $ 480 million to $ 47 billion, and in the first half of 2019, Megvii already lost $ 7.2 billion.

From a macroeconomic point of view, Megvii’s investment risks include restrictions and tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States as part of the ongoing trade war. Megvii is one of the Chinese technology companies that the US government can add to trade blacklists.

Photo: TechCrunch

Audible is Amazon’s largest digital audiobook maker in the world. Audible Captions uses machine learning to convert spoken language from audiobooks to text. The purpose of the function implementation is to allow children to see words while listening, like subtitles in films. The company was planning to launch in partnership with US public schools in September.

The lawsuit states that there are separate licenses for the distribution of regular and audiobooks. Audible acquired licenses for audiobooks, not for textual. In its defense, the company claimed that the text from the audiobooks will be created by artificial intelligence, therefore, it will be different from the printed copy. AAP, however, indicates the lack of permission for such an operation, compensation and quality control of grammar and spelling by copyright holders.

The plaintiffs include seven major publishers and AAP members — Chronicle Books, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster.

Photo credit: The Authors Guild

The Chicago fleet of inventory and parking reservation SpotHero received $50 million in the D-series investment led by Macquarie Capital. Investors trust the company because SpotHero processed transactions for $ 500 million and entered into more than 900 partnership agreements and integrations with Google Assistant, WageWorks, Waze, Hertz, Car2Go, WeWork and Moovit, etc. during the year.

SpotHero was founded in 2011 to show drivers unused and somehow invisible parking spots online, and to reduce the need for building new parking lots in densely populated cities. It currently manages over 7,000 parking lots in 300 cities in the US and Canada and processes millions of orders every month through its website and app.

SpotHero garages are equipped with sensors that allow car operators to automatically book and pay for parking spots. Software development suite and API HeroConnect simplifies payments and allows transport companies, car manufacturers, car-sharing services, and cities to share parking data.

The startup also took into account the trend of unmanned vehicles integration. In 2019, the company announced that more than 500 parking lots connected to it in Chicago were adapted to accommodate autonomous cars, trucks, and SUVs. The idea is that Uber, Lyft, Waymo and hundreds of other companies will rent spots from SpotHero as needed.

The company aims to process transactions worth $1 billion next year to increase the number of its engineers to 100.

Photo credit: Entrepreneur — VentureBeat.

YouTube had to make this decision: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating a possible violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Act (COPPA). But the platform will still collect personal information about kids, although monetizing of this data will be impossible.

The video will continue to show general ads that won’t be relevant to a child’s interests and browsing history. This will deprive YouTube of approximately $50 million per year.

This may upset those who earn eight-figure sums a year on YouTube. But the update will appeal to parents who worry about their children watching viral videos 50 times a day, helping others earn money.

YouTube aims to increase the time a user spends watching videos, and most often the algorithm achieves this by offering to watch violent videos. Therefore, in March 2019, the French Council of the Muslim Faith decided to sue the platform for its role in distributing videos that incite violence.

in January, YouTube announced the launch of "borderline content" which aimed at eliminating the emergence of various conspiracy theories. Video hosting also decided to prohibited comments on kids videos in February after discovering several aggressive comments on the site.

Photo credit: Tech.Co.

UiPath is one of Europe’s newest unicorns, based in the capital of Romania. The startup is a key player in the fast-growing industry of robotic process automation (RPA), which uses AI-bots to solve the frequently repeated tasks of the back office: the department of the company engaged in registration, registration, accounting of operations related to the company’s finances.

The company completed the Series-D investment round and raised $ 568 million. Investors expect UiPath to become the world leader in the AI field and value the company at $ 7 billion (in two years, the cost of a startup jumped by 6000% (!)).

UiPath was founded in 2015 based on DeskOver, a 10-year-old software outsourcing company. “Four years ago there were 10 of us in a small apartment. All we had was technology, and we did not know how to sell it, ”says Daniel Dines, CEO & co-founder of UiPath.

According to the Gartner consulting company, RPA revenue in 2018 grew by 63,1%, reaching $846 million and making it the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market. RPA software revenue is expected to reach $1.3 billion in 2019. According to Gartner, the five largest RPA providers control 47% of the market. And with a market share of 13,6% in 2018, UiPath is the leader in this segment.

Photo credit: Sifted

The weight of exosuit is about 5 kilograms. Engines on the lower back join a man’s hips through a series of drive cables. The system is able to help the gluteus muscles keep their tone. The entire installation is powered by a battery mounted on the waist, which capacity is enough for passing a distance of about 8 kilometers.

Harvard development differs from similar prototypes in that it works in two modes, walking and running. When a person walks, the center of mass moves like an "inverted pendulum," while running makes him move like a "spring." The exosuit system adapts when changing the driving mode.

During testing scientists found that the amount of energy the body spends when walking and running was reduced by 9.3 and 4%, respectively, compared with running without “miracle shorts”.

This prototype has two peculiarities:

• The suit is very bulky, especially in the lower back, where it limits the ability to carry a full-sized backpack.
• The system is designed only for men and it is still difficult to adapt to individual body shapes and styles of movement.

Now system testing is conducted only in the laboratory, but scientists hope that in the future they will be able to evaluate the device in close to real conditions. Scientists are also developing a suit that weighs 40% less than the existing one. The team hopes to expand the approach to help industry workers performing “physically demanding tasks” as well as people with “walking disorders” and disabilities.

Photo: The Verge

Service Engineer.ai is a complex constructor that creates a description of the future mobile application for clients, and then the idea comes to life. Using advanced technologies helped the startup to attract investments, the developers said that some of the applications are now created using AI, and in the future, all applications will be developed in this way. In 2018, the founder of Engineer.ai, Sachin Dev Duggal, claimed that artificial intelligence named Natasha generated up to 82% of all code for a mobile application in an hour.

However, in 2019, The Wall Street Journal, referring to the company’s documentation and the testimonies of its former and current employees, accused Engineer.ai that instead of algorithms, the code for customers was written by ordinary developers. Representatives of the startup specified that the algorithms write about 60% of the code, the remainder is created by programmers from India. WSJ sources also say that Engineer.ai did not use AI to automate the creation of applications for more than a year. The development of such technology began only in the summer of 2019.

Engineer.ai uses AI to:

• Recognize natural language queries.
• Determine the timing of work & the price for customers.
• Using a special decision tree, distribute tasks among developers.

The creation of code is the responsibility of programmers from third world countries. According to Engineer.ai developers, this is happening due to the lack of specialists with extensive experience in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the market. The search for highly qualified workers is ongoing.

During its existence, Engineer.ai raised almost 30 million investor dollars (Deepcore is a subsidiary of SoftBank, a venture firm Lakestar, even Facebook and Airbnb sponsored them at the beginning of the journey). Even though the secret became clear, investors remained with the company and were sympathetic to the fact that “the field of artificial intelligence development cannot progress very quickly so far”.

Photo: Venture-News

The technology is available for a wide range of Mercedes-Benz models from A- to S-Class and takes passenger safety to the next level.

When the car detects that a crash is unavoidable, PRE-SAFE ® Sound activates the Mercedes sound system and produces a short interference signal, the so-called pink noise. A sound of about 80 decibels is roughly equivalent to the noise level on the side of a busy road. This signal activates the reflex in ears, protecting the eardrum and reducing the impact of loud noise caused by the accident.

PRE-SAFE ® Sound causes the stapedius muscle (located in the middle ear) to contract, weakening the connection between the eardrum and the inner ear for a split second. This causes some sound pressure, which is reflected in the eardrum and is not transmitted completely to the inner ear. This helps reduce hearing damage caused by high acoustic pressure or loud noises.

Photo: Mercedes-Benz

MediaCube will direct investments in the development of an IT ecosystem for creators. According to some reports, the size of the stake ranges from 25-50%, and the transaction amount is from $ 3.5 million to $ 7 million.

MediaCube creates services for creators, among customers — YouTube bloggers, major brands and artists from 64 countries. Among the well-known partners from the CIS are bloggers Vlad Bumaga, Dima Maslennikov, Pleasant Ildar, Yegor Creed and Sergey Lazarev. The total audience of creators working with MediaCube exceeds 200 million people, and revenue for 7 months of 2019 amounted to $ 7 million.

The company is in the Top 25 partner networks of YouTube and has developed several solutions unique to the market:

• Express Payments. A service that enables creators to use money even before it is received from a partner.
• Stats. It is a system for analytics and effective targeting among 35 million channels, data on which are included in Stats.
• MediaCube ID. An authorization and identification system that combines all the statistical and financial information of users and an e-wallet of a creator that can manage funds at any time at its discretion.

Zubr Capital is the first company in Belarus that manages direct investment funds and specializes in investments in capitals of Belarusian companies with their subsequent development.

The size of ZCFI is $ 90 million, its portfolio includes 6 companies: SoftClub, 21vek, av.by, Uniflex, GC Softline (ActivePlatform, ActiveCloud), Target Process. The fund invests $ 3.5-10 million in companies, focusing on IT, retail and high-tech production. The key investors of Zubr are European Bank, FMO and Wargaming.

Viktar Dzyanisevich, investment director of Zubr Capital, emphasized that this is “the first Private Equity transaction in Belarus, which is structured as part of the HTP”. Dzyanisevich also expressed hope that the shared experience of the fund and SBH Law Offices, which structured the deal, would be useful to other players in the local investment ecosystem.

Photo: MediaCube

According to Jumpshot analytics company, in June 2019, 50,3% of Google search queries received zero referrals to sites, since the answers were given through the SERP — Google generated page with the answer as part of its search engine. Search queries with clicks on non-Google sites currently account for only 45,25% of all traffic.

Improving data in SERP pages leads to a steady trend: the percentage of organic traffic going to third-party sites is reducing. At the same time, leaving the user on the search engine page, Google pushes him to click on sponsored links from Google Ads. Over the past three years, such traffic increased from 3,34% to 11,38% only on mobile devices.

This statistic is based on a sample of more than 1 billion search queries made on about 10 million computers and Android smartphones in the United States.

Photo: SparkToro

The Tumblr microblogging platform will be acquired by Automattic Inc, which was at the origin of the WordPress engine. Resale has to do with one-third decreasing traffic that occurred immediately after sexual and pornographic content was banned.

The platform was owned first by Yahoo, then Oath and Verizon Media. Over these years Tumblr has become a popular center for various fandoms (groups of fans who share a common interest in various kinds of franchises). Although many users left Tumblr after imposing restrictions on pornographic content, the most loyal fans remained.

Matt Mullenweng, CEO Automattic Inc, refused to derogate from unpopular politics, considering Tumblr as a supplement to WordPress.

“It’s just fun, ” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.“We’re not going to change any of that.”

The new owners emphasized that they understand what a special place Tumblr has taken in the hearts of users. Automattic shares Tumblr’s concept of creating communities based on common interests and democratic publications so that everyone who has a story can tell it, especially if it comes from unheard people or marginalized segments of society.

Photo: The Verge

Bosch’ new technology enables users to see a three-dimensional image without glasses. It will be useful primarily by drivers.

The German automotive giant has taken into account 2 key factors for the successful implementation of 3D display technology in cars:

• A driver does not need glasses to see the 3D effect.
• A person does not need to look from a certain position, image is available from all angles.

The main advantage of this display is providing perceptible information at a glance. So the driver’s attention remains exactly where it should be — on the road.

Here’s what Bosch says about the solvable problems:

1. Ensuring the displaying of important alerts at a time convenient for the driver.
2. Providing even more accurate 3D images from parking cameras, which will help parking sensors better “feel” space.
3. During navigation, the driver can be offered a three-dimensional view of where and when to turn. This will eliminate the question whether the next turn is the one you want.

The German company has not yet announced the release of new 3D devices without glasses in cars. But Bosch plans to do this earlier than other manufacturers.

Telegram’s “Slow Mode” enables administrators to determine how often messages are sent in a group. The new function will save large groups from flood messages and teach users to fit all the essentials in one message. The recess between messages can be set from 30 seconds to an hour.

The messaging platform, which at the beginning of 2018 accounted for more than 200 million active users per month, said the new feature aims to make group conversations “more streamlined” and increase the “value of each message.” Telegram does not force administrators to use this feature always, it can be connected or eliminated at any time. In other words, it will give the participants a sense of "peace of mind," according to the developers of Telegram. This is an important feature for groups, which can consists of up to 200,000 members.

The new update also added the option to send a message without a sound notification on the recipient’s side. You just need to hold the "Send" button. The application’s creators explained: "Your recipient will receive a notification as usual, but his phone will not make a sound, even if the Do Not Disturb mode is turned off."

Other patch features:

• Group owners are enabled to assign posts to administrators like “moderator” or “founder”.
• Video in the application now displays thumbnails of the preview, that simplifies the search for the right moment.
• Like YouTube, Telegram users can now share videos that play directly from a certain timestamp.
• Key emoticons are automatically sent by new animated emojis.

Photo: Telegram

The Klarna platform enables people to "shop now and pay later." Buyers can pay the full price within 30 days or in several payments within a few months.

The latest round of financing, conducted by San Francisco-based investment group Dragoneer, will provide Klarna with the capital to scale to the US market. Other investors in this round were Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HMI Capital, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Klarna’s investors also include Snoop Dogg and Sequoia Capital.

The project was launched in the United States four years ago, but due to slow progress in early 2017, the company had to lay off half of its employees. Klarna currently has 3,000 customers in America, including ASOS, Toms, Superdry, Sonos, and rue21. Brands such as H & M and Abercrombie & Fitch are also about to start working with a company that currently processes over a million transactions per day.

Sebastian Siematkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna, said: “This is a decisive moment in the history of retail banking. Finally, transparency, technology, and creativity will serve the consumer”

Photo: Forbes

3fun used to position itself as a “private space”, but it hardly had can be considered as safe. Data of 1.5 million people was disclosed. Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners, said it was “probably the worst security for any dating app we’ve ever seen.” The researchers noticed the app was dripping the precise location, photos and other private details of any nearby user.

The app wasn’t secured properly, the researchers discovered they could plug in any coordinates they wanted to fake their location, sharing sensitive information on anyone within any location of their choosing, including government buildings, military bases, and even intelligence agencies.

The TechCrunch experiment found people interested in group sex, in such places like the White House and the CIA.None of the data was encrypted. The researchers called the 3fun a “privacy train wreck.”

The application has positioned itself as "a special place to search for the same perverts." An important fact is that the original Pen Test Partners investigation was deleted for an unknown reason.

Photo by TechCrunch

In its blog, Roblox told that the number of active users per month had reached 100 million. 40 million users were involved in game development at the platform. So Roblox got to windward of Minecraft universe, which has 90 million active users per month.

TechCrunch claims active audience accommodated a bit more than 9 million. “We started ten years ago with 100 players and game creators whose purpose was to reveal our imagination, inspiration, and cooperation”, says David Bazucki, founder and CEO of the company.

Photo: TechCrunch

Experts extracted the genetic material of a 2000-3000 years old sequoia. For a long time, scientists had been trying to make sowing sprouts. During the previous 6 months, 75 sprouts took roots. Now they are going to grow up into huge trees up to 100 meters high, and their diameter might be up to 10 meters.

A tree like this during its lifecycle may absorb up to 250 tons of carbon, it is 250 times more than a usual tree. According to “Science” magazine estimation, 1 billion hectares sown with cloned sequoias may absorb ⅔ of all harmful emissions which have been outbursting into the atmosphere since 1800.

Photo: Archangel Ancient Tree Archive

To get access to the application, your startup must be under 2 years old and the total amount of the investments attracted must not exceed $1 million. The free version will be available after registration on the website and application to Early Stage.

The hiring process consists of a few intervals, each of them lasts for 2 weeks. During every interval, 6 candidates apply for a position. In the end, a startup can hire an appropriate employee. The commission of 6nomads is in the size of $475. The founder Denis Shershnev claims that this method of hiring specialists is faster and 10 times cheaper than traditional methods.

Photo: 6nomads

Insiders from two funds told about the readiness to expand their shares in the startup: the Saudi The Public Investment Fund and the Russian Vostok New Ventures. At the same time, the latter already owns 10% in the startup.

Babylon Health was founded in 2013 as an application for patients who wants to get an online consultation with a doctor. A few years later the company created a chat-bot on the base of the data collected and integrated it to the popular messengers. This bot automatized answers to the most frequent questions. Babylon Health raised over €85 million in 2016-2016 after 2 investment rounds.

Minsk, Belarus, July, 29 — Seedstars World, the largest early-stage startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes, is coming to Belarus for the first time. With the support of the local partner The Heroes Media, Seedstars will be holding a dynamic Investment Readiness Bootcamp on September, 20th followed by a closed selection panel with investors on September, 22th.

The companies invited to the training session and to privately pitch at the Seedstars Minsk event must have raised less than USD 500k in funding and built a minimum viable product, ideally with existing traction. The Seedstars team is searching for one additional criterion: potential for regional and global scalability.

Besides representing Belarus at the Seedstars Regional Summit, the winner will get a chance to win an all-inclusive trip to Switzerland, to compete at the Seedstars Summit for the title of Seedstars Global Winner and up to USD 500,000 in equity investments and other prizes.

Seedstars will also award at least 1-month access to the Investment Readiness Program to the finalists invited to pitch locally. It is a non-time bound and data-driven acceleration program focused in boosting tech startups looking to get ready for fundraising. Seedstars connects the entrepreneurs to global experts and mentors, emerging market-specific training materials based on best practices and access to the Seedstars Global investor network.

The applications are open until September, 8 and startups are invited to apply at ssw19-minsk. After careful screening, the Seedstars team will shortlist around ten of the best seed-stage startups to participate in training and 1:1 meetings with investors on September, 20th.

“At Seedstars, we believe talent and good ideas are everywhere. We see ourselves as a platform connecting investors to the next generation of startup entrepreneurs in places where normally people wouldn’t think startup ecosystem have such traction, growth and buzz. We are very excited to be in Belarus, highlighting such a bustling entrepreneurship ecosystem and we are here to witness the reality”, explains Agahuseyn Ahmadov, Regional Manager for CEE & Central Asia at Seedstars, “We are also experts in identifying which are the ones to pull through and how. We’re impressed by what we have seen in the region so far and cannot wait to add startups from Belarus on our map.”

In order to provide local entrepreneurs with this opportunity and aiming to deliver the best possible event, Seedstars is closely working with Dmitry Dosov, CEO at The Heroes Media, who is representing the initiative throughout the year. “Here at The Heroes Media, we help valuable ideas to make a way from a concept to MVP and global scaling. During the last 12 months with the help of our tech partner Humansee Labs we upheld 25 American and European startups which attracted about $10 millions of investments in total. It is a fact that here in Belarus our people have plenty of bright ideas and our country is certainly going to make a startup breakthrough. We want our partnership with Seedstars to be a gift to local startups, as soon as it is the perfect opportunity to declare themselves to the whole world and get awesome insights as well as build a network during the bootcamp”, explains Dmitry Dosov.

ABOUT SEEDSTARS

"They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds." — Mexican proverb.

Seedstars is a Swiss-based private group of companies with a mission to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship. The groups’ activities cover over 80 emerging ecosystems through a variety of events such as the Seedstars World Competition, acceleration programs, physical hubs called Seedspace, venture capital investments and company building activities.

ABOUT SEEDSTARS WORLD COMPETITION

Seedstars World is the world’s largest startup competition in emerging markets. For the past six years, Seedstars Teams travel around for a 9-month world tour and scout for the best early-stage startups in 80+ countries, organizing 100+ events. One winner is selected to represent each country visited, and is invited to attend one of the 5 Regional Summits, reuniting all local winners of each region to network with regional investors, mentors and corporates. Local winners are also awarded the chance to represent their countries at the Seedstars Summit, the competition’s final happening in Switzerland, where startups compete for up to $500,000 in investment. The Seedstars Summit is the flagship event of Seedstars, filled with breakout sessions, panel discussions, specialized workshops and the best minds from emerging markets.

ABOUT THE HEROES MEDIA

The Heroes Media is a global digital platform which aims to enhance entrepreneurs to expand their business reaching new heights. We also strive to unite the IT community making enthusiastic and engaged people build network and share experience. We also intend to help local startups ecosystem grow up and make a breakthrough in tech. Over 50 worldwide startups were launched with our support and expertise. There are more than 20 countries in our list of partnerships and communities, and we plan to scale our platform up worldwide to inspire and unite entrepreneurs and tech devotees from all over the world.

It is supposed that a user will start a conversation at any moment he needs. The app is like a real-time forum — it is not about postponing, Capture was created to unite people by their interests and to let them discuss anything they’d like to.

The app will recommend chat-rooms based on different indicators, so you’ll have to permit Capture to explore your data.

Capture founders are convinced that smartphones and artificial intelligence will empower people talking about anything in that simple way just as taking pictures on a mobile camera.

The app is not created by beginners — the Capture’s founders Aram Hardy and Alexey Moiseenkov took part in Prisma development (tens of millions of users downloaded Prisma in 2016).

This is what helped the new application to attract $1 million of investments. This money accelerated the launch of Capture, which is now available only for iOS — the release of the Android version is scheduled for September.

Source

Underlying the whole thing is tech supplied by Wannaby, a Belarus-based startup on a mission to build AR commerce experiences.

The app is made possible by on-device and real-time machine learning algorithms that suss out the position of the shoes in space while accounting for color, texture, and lighting variations, plus a fully equipped printing studio that Wannaby uses to create 3D sneaker models. The end result is foot-tracking tech that’s robust enough to adapt to different camera angles and follow footsteps as feet move and rotate.

Within the free Gucci app, users pick the Ace sneakers of their choice and point their phone’s camera at their feet, after which they’re prompted to try the shoes on virtually. A built-in photo feature lets them capture themselves “wearing” the models that speak to them and share their snaps via text, email, or social media.

Read More On Venturebeat

In addition to being a mailing service, MailChimp has become a collection of original content with an entrepreneurial spirit. And The Heroes becomes a platform for publication of your content.

It can be said that the boundaries between media, companies and ordinary people are erased forever. In a world where everyone can now become media, anything is possible. Especially if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, a healthy share of adventurism, a desire to share information and at least a few hours to develop your own brand.

The MailChimp mailing service launched its own streaming service. The service’s motto is “A collection of original content with an entrepreneurial spirit.” The service’s menu includes podcasts, documentaries and feature series.

Available for viewing and listening right now:

• A podcast about determination.
• A documentary series about very unexpected business lessons.
• A documentary series about the “photojournal that changed photography” in a separate US region.
• A mockumentary about the exhibition business.
• A documentary series about people who work outside the office.

An art series about a company that owns a photo stock. You can watch and listen to all this here: https://mailchimp.com/presents/

The Heroes also decided to keep up. We are announcing a real opportunity for entrepreneurs and companies who want to loudly declare themselves, to take advantage of the opportunity that our platform offers, and publish their own content on it.

To do so, just follow the link and fill out a Google form. The editors of The Heroes will contact you for further details if necessary.

WHY WRITE CASE STUDIES?

Writing articles in the form of a case study will allow you to:

• show potential customers your approach to work;
• indicate the niches in which you are successful;
• demonstrate the results obtained in your projects;
• explain what you can do — with examples and in plain language.

DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE A CASE STUDY?

It’s simple — describe your story using the universal I.A.R. formula, as in Issues → Actions → Results, where issues are those circumstances that led to a problem requiring urgent solution.

It is important to describe the problem in a way that will make the reader actually feel your pain; actions are the set out in plain language sequence of steps you took to solve the problem; and the results can be numbers, overcoming difficulties and, as a result, conclusions and new experience.

And remember that case studies are stories told from the first person in the “before/after” format.

If there is nothing to write a case study about. Many representatives of businesses believe that they have no cases. But often people don’t notice that they did something really cool. You can always describe well-established processes or talk about the introduction of new cool features. The main thing is to show real benefits for the community.

REQUIREMENTS TO CASE STUDIES

The text for TheHeroes must be unique → not published earlier on another resource. Share a link to GoogleDocs with us allowing to comment on the text. Reposting is welcome (in your blog or on another site that allows it) but not earlier than the publication on TheHeroes.

Share a link to GoogleDocs with us allowing to comment on the text. Reposting is welcome (in your blog or on another site that allows it) but not earlier than the publication on The Heroes. On average, we review applications for an article within 1-2 days. In case the material has to be finalized, the publication time is postponed up to 21 days, depending on how long the revision takes.

If you already have the idea for publication, but the text is not ready yet, write a cover letter to editor@theheroes.media, and we will put it in the publication plan.

ONCE AGAIN BRIEFLY:

1. Write according to the formula: Issues → Actions → Results.
2. When describing the task, formulate so that it hurts.
3. State ways of solving the problem step by step.
4. Write in simple words, make the text shorter. Re-read and simplify again.
5. Pay attention to headlines. Let the reader understand your story only from them.
6. No need for many results, 1-5 is enough, 7 conclusions maximum. A case study is always about “before/after.”

The results don’t have to be in numerical terms, sometimes the conclusion and what you have learned. Examples and community benefits are important.

Use the tips and fill out the template Google form following the link.

Feedback form for case studies from Factory partners “CASE STUDIES”. Publish your story for free on Factory.theheroes.media

In 2018, Irina participated in the international program IVLP (The International Visitor Leadership Program) with topic “Women and Entrepreneurship”. Project participants visited Washington, Kansas City, Missouri, Denver, Colorado, Salt Lake City, Utah, and New York. In these cities, they were introduced to examples of entrepreneurship in the United States, experience in creating new jobs and overcoming social barriers. The organizers paid special attention to companies open and managed by women.

Assessing my experience of working with IVLP, Irina noted that it was useful for her from personal and professional sides: “The program allowed me to explore the business ecosystem from different perspectives: cultural, professional, social, economic and others.”

The main event of the project for her personally was a visit to Salt Lake City, Utah. In this part of the program, special attention was paid to the development and financing of start-ups, public-private partnerships, state support, and the experience of local self-government of women entrepreneurs and small businesses.

The Heroes CEO’s Irina Dubovik

According to Irina, Utah can be compared to the “hidden” Silicon Valley because of the huge opportunities it provides for the conduct and development of business. “In my opinion, Utah is very similar to my home country Belarus and its capital Minsk. Utah has an interesting and, in many ways, similar to the Belarus business model of development. Especially now, after the adoption of a new decree on the Belarus High-Tech Park (Decree No. 8). ”

After IVLP, Irina organized several presentations for the Belarusian business community to share her experience and discuss how the knowledge gained can be used by other people. Inspired by the IVLP program, she launched a number of projects in Belarus, including a startup ecosystem map, an accelerator for startups and entrepreneurs, a profile /workbook for startups.

The Heroes mission is to develop Belarus entrepreneurship and IT ecosystem.

IVLP — the main program of professional exchange of the US State Department. Through short-term visits to the United States, leaders in various fields will personally get to know this country and develop strong relationships with their American counterparts. Over the 21 years of the program, over 200 former and current heads of state, 1,500 ministers, and thousands of leaders from the private and public sectors participated in it.

Did you know that the Belarus startup ecosystem has a detailed map? It highlights the main opportunities for startups on four stages — idea, prototype / market entry, rollout, growth / scaling. No need to google where to go for developing a prototype, networking or entering a new market: map developers have already googled and presented this information in a visual form.

Belarus startup ecosystem is developing, and the map needs to be updated. Do you think that your organization (of any form of ownership, size and profile) should be on this map? Fill out the registration form and submit an application for publication. This is a simple and effective way to express yourself in the Belarusian and foreign markets.

Application deadline is May 31st.

The first version of the map can be downloaded by the link. The updated version will also be available in Russian and English versions.

The new residents of the Park are working in various fields, reports the HTP. Bright Solutions creates software solutions for the automation of housing and energy. The Regula company develops and manufactures devices for the recognition, reading and subsequent control of the authenticity of protected documents. OMP System implements software at industrial enterprises. Pavaga Gaming is preparing eSports teams.

New residents have arrived who work in different regions of Belarus — Vitebsk, Gomel, Mogilev, Grodno, Polotsk, and Rogachev.

The Vizart company from Grodno creates software for visualization of interiors using solutions in the field of computer vision and augmented reality. A resident from Vitebsk, GoodSoft is developing a set of software modules for the automation of pharmaceutical enterprises and laboratories. The Etna-Bel company from Mogilev is working on a securities market management system.

Companies with foreign investment have also entered the High-Tech Park. Lifetech develops digital products for the Turkcell group of companies — the Turkish mobile communications giant. The ArasCorp Software Development Center has been registered — a global software company from the United States that creates systems for managing complex production processes. Some companies came from Singapore, France, and the Netherlands.

The new residents work in the areas of machine learning, computer vision, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, financial technology, industry, education, telemedicine, biotechnology, mining, e-commerce, video games, and eSports.

About 20 residents are focused on creating their own products. 4 companies (currently having an HTP resident status) have expanded their types of activities.

4 companies were denied registration as residents. 5 companies have lost their resident status. Now there are 505 companies in the High-Tech Park.

Teslasuit and the Red Dot Award: Product Design 2019

The Teslasuit VR startup received the Red Dot Award: Product Design 2019 in the Best of the Best nomination for its VR suit. Red Dot Award: Product Design is one of the world’s largest design competitions that has been around for 60 years. This year, 5500+ products from 55 countries participated in the competition. Only 1,5% of the objects entered received Red Dot: Best of the Best.

Teslasuit is a full-body suit that allows you to interact with virtual reality objects. Teslasuit’s tactile technology conveys the feeling of touches, light and heavy impacts, rain and wind. The suit maintains temperature control and imports biometrics.

“Developing smart clothing that links the human body to the digital world is more difficult than just wrapping electronics in a tight gadget. The biggest challenge was to make the interaction between the computer and the human body comfortable and safe, ” says Igor Buturlya, head of design at Teslasuit.

Blinger and $500,000 investment

The customer service through social networks and messengers Blinger raised $500,000, with a company valuation of $5 million. The startup attracted investment from the Admitad Invest fund that had already invested $150,000 in Blinger in 2016. Then the company was estimated at $1 million.

According to Evgeny Besschastny, Blinger CEO, the investment will be used to develop tools with artificial intelligence for the partial automation of customer support in large companies.

Blinger is an omnichannel platform for customer support. Companies can quickly respond to messages from online chats, social networks, instant messengers and email in a single interface. Blinger’s customers include Tinkoff Bank, Ozon, Mail.ru Group, and Yandex.

MolaMola and the first investments for a startup

What to do if the 3 °F (friends, family, fools) are exhausted, and for some reason, it’s impossible to attract business angels? The first fundraising tool finally appeared in Belarus — the MolaMola service.

It is developed on the basis of the Ulej crowdfunding platform, but fundraising has two fundamental differences from crowdfunding. Firstly, you will receive all the money collected, even if it’s only 1% of the stated amount. Secondly, you have no obligations to the backers — they support your undertaking disinterestedly.

For now, only private individuals can create and support campaigns by transferring and accepting money on the cards of Belarusian banks. The minimum transfer amount is 10 BYN. The total commission of the service and the bank is 6%, but not less than 1.1 BYN per transaction.

The National Bank of Belarus plans to use artificial intelligence to collect and analyze data on information failures. It is reported by dev.by with reference to the deputy head of the Head Department of the payment system and digital technologies of the National Bank, Tatyana Ruskevich.

According to the expert, the National Bank is exploring the possibilities of replacing human labor with machine labor. “This is more convenient, easier, and cheaper. We are currently working on a project that concerns the collection and processing of data on information failures in the ATM network, the terminal network, and banks. We’re identifying the information necessary to collect and process, in order to quickly receive data and respond. We will develop a technical project and announce a competition in order to find out who will help us develop everything later.”

Banks have been using artificial intelligence for years. One of the key areas of its application is credit scoring. A neural network will determine the risks of non-repayment of the loan, the optimal time and amount of the loan better than any analyst.

For example, in Sberbank, artificial intelligence makes decisions about granting a loan for 98% of applications. According to German Gref, risks are analyzed on the basis of the user’s “digital trace”. A person can make a “trace” of 500 MB on the Internet every day — from this information, a digital “person” is composed, which exactly repeats the personality of a real person. We can talk only about private individuals, though. A live analyst still better evaluates applications from legal entities.

The neural network functioning as a collector is another promising direction for AI. A robot can make more calls than a person, and it will never start shouting or insulting. As a result, the neural network does the job better than the operator by 20-24%.

AI recognition of faces and voices, automation of routine processes, advising clients on major issues — all this is already done in banks by artificial intelligence.

The Autonomous Next research company predicts that banks around the world will reduce costs using AI technology by 22% by the year 2030. The total savings could reach $1 trillion.

Top 100 best outsourcing companies include following companies with Belarusian offices: Bell Integrator, Ciklum, EPAM, IBA Group, Intetics and Itransition.

Dev.by asked Intetics Inc. how the rating was made. The Association did not accept new applications, but made a list of companies that repeatedly became participants in annual ratings “Best of The Global Outsourcing 100” over the course of all 10 years.

Read more: https://dev.by/news/top-100-autsorserov-mira-by

For the fourth year in a row, Product Hunt has been hosting the Golden Kitty Awards, the world’s best product competition. Three Belarusian startups became winners in their nominations in 2018.

The best in the nomination "AI & Machine Learning Product of the Year" was the startup OneSoil. The guys from OneSoil are developing their platform for smart farming and have already made maps of 60 million fields with recognized crops on it.

The Wanna Nails won in nomination Augmented Reality Product of the Year. As written on official Fb page of Wanna Nails App: "E-commerce application Wanna Nails helps users try-on nail polishes with augmented reality. It is cool and easy to do: you just need to show your hand to the camera of the phone, and you will see more than 100 different colors of nail polishes and shades".

The Rocket Body Startup won in the category Health & Fitness Product of the Year. Rocket Body developed an app that tells an athlete when is the best time to train. So fitness tracker allows an athlete to increase the effectiveness of training.

Other ProductHunt’s winners are here: Blog ProductHunt