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The apps keeping Rio’s residents safe from stray bullets
Julia Borges was at her cousin’s 12th birthday party when she was shot. The 17-year-old had been standing on a third-floor balcony when a stray bullet hit her in the back, lodging in the muscle between her lungs and aorta. That was November 8. Luckily, Borges was taken to hospital and has since recovered. Many are not so fortunate. At least 106 people have been killed by stray bullets in Rio this year so far. Among the most dangerous areas are the narrow streets of the city’s favelas, where more than a million people currently live. Here, the houses are … Read More
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Primer, the fintech helping merchants consolidate the payments stack, raises £14M Series A – TechCrunch
Primer, the U.K. fintech that wants to help merchants consolidate their payments stack and easily support new payment methods in the future, has raised £14 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Accel, who I understand were quite proactive in persuading Primer to take the VC firm’s money. The young company wasn’t actively fund-raising, having quietly raised £3.8 million in funding announced in May. Instead, the team was heads down building out the product and wooing potential customers by holding technical workshops and in-depth interviews over Zoom with 100 merchants — activity that didn’t go … Read More
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Kamua’s AI-powered editor helps marketers embrace vertical video
A new AI-powered video-editing platform is preparing for launch, designed to help businesses, marketers, and creators automatically transform landscape-shot videos into a vertical format suitable for TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and all the rest. Founded out of London in 2019, Kamua wants to be aligned with tools such as Figma, a software design and prototyping tool for product managers who lack certain technical skills. For Kamua, the goal is democratizing the creative and technical processes in video editing. “Kamua makes it possible for non-editors to directly control how their videos look in any format, on any screen, in multiple durations … Read More
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What to make of Stripe’s possible $100B valuation – TechCrunch
This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. Welcome to a special Thanksgiving edition of The Exchange. Today we will be brief. But not silent, as there is much to talk about. Up top, The Exchange noodled on the Slack-Salesforce deal here, so please catch up if you missed that while eating pie for breakfast yesterday. And, sadly, I have no idea why Palantir is seeing its value skyrocket. Normally we’d discuss it, asking ourselves what its … Read More
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The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine will be tested in a new trial after questions over its data
However, the 90{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} claim came into question after it was pointed out the vaccine’s overall efficacy was 62 to 70{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} in trials in Brazil and in the UK, while the 90{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} figure was reached only among fewer than 3,000 participants who were given a lower dose as a result of an error. Researchers can’t explain why the accidental lower dose proved more effective. So AstraZeneca plans to run another trial, testing just this lower-dose regimen. “Now that we’ve found what looks like a better efficacy we have to validate this, so we need to do an additional study,” Soriot … Read More
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Facebook’s Libra could launch in January – TechCrunch
According to a report from the Financial Times, Facebook-backed cryptocurrency Libra could launch in January. More interestingly, the Libra Association, the consortium created by Facebook, could scale back its ambitions once again. When it was first unveiled, the Libra cryptocurrency was supposed to be a brand new currency tied to a basket of fiat currencies and securities. Originally, it wouldn’t be based on a single real world currency, but on a mix of multiple currencies. Many central banks and regulators have been concerned about this vision. That’s why the Libra Association changed course and started working on several single-currency … Read More