Yandex and TCS Group Holding, the parent company of Russia's top online bank Tinkoff, have terminated talks on Yandex's proposed $5.48B deal to buy Tinkoff — MOSCOW (Reuters) - Plans for Russia's biggest corporate deal of 2020 collapsed on Friday after talks over a $5.48 billion cash …
Chiper, a Colombia-based e-commerce platform for corner stores in Latin America, raises $12M Series A from WIND Ventures, Monashees, and Kaszek Ventures — Chiper has been amassing a network of digitized corner stores in Latin America for the past two years.
Cribl raises $35M Series B led by Sequoia to help companies route the data generated by their tech infrastructure to third-party monitoring and analytics tools — San Francisco startup Cribl Inc. today said that it has raised a $35 million round led by Sequoia Capital to give companies …
Interview with AMD's CTO, Mark Papermaster, on the launch of Zen 3, its new core complex design and improved power efficiency, and pressure from Arm ecosystem — The announcement of the new Ryzen 5000 processors, built on AMD's Zen 3 microarchitecture, has caused waves of excitement and questions as to the performance.
Democratic governments must take an active role in bringing accountability to cyberspace to avoid losing more ground to harmful actors and authoritarian regimes — This past summer, a host of public organizations as varied as the Norwegian parliament, the New Zealand stock exchange, and the Vatican all came under attack.
With Trump's re-election in doubt, federal agencies are scrambling to enact regulatory changes, like allowing DHS to collect more extensive biometric data — With the president's re-election in doubt, cabinet departments are scrambling to finish dozens of new rules affecting millions of Americans.
DC court has ruled that the replacement of OTF's board of directors by USAGM CEO Michael Pack was unauthorized and any action taken by the new board is invalid — The Superior Court in Washington, D.C., has ruled that actions taken by the U.S. Agency for Global Media's chief executive …
Broadvoice, a VoIP provider for SMBs, has leaked 350M+ customer records, including thousands of voicemail transcripts, many including medical and financial info — Broadvoice, a well-known VoIP provider that serves small- and medium-sized businesses, has leaked more than 350 million customer records related …
Pakistan's ban on TikTok isn't about protecting user data from the CCP or geopolitics, it's an attempt to use those issues as a cover for top down censorship — Pakistan's TikTok ban is not like the ones in other countries. — In a short video uploaded to TikTok, an older Punjabi man engages …
Uber to invest $50M in SK Telecom's T Map Mobility in South Korea, and $100M in a new ride-hailing joint venture with SK Telecom for a 51% stake — - Carrier splitting off its mobility business as Uber invests — Uber renewing efforts in a country where it's not had success
Twitter will now warn users with a prompt before they attempt to retweet or quote tweet a tweet which has been flagged under the platform's misinformation rules — Twitter has added another warning prompt to slow the spread of misinformation, this time alerting users when they go to share …
FOSSA, which helps companies manage open source code use at scale, has raised $23.2M Series B led by Bain, Canvas, and Costanoa, bringing total raised to $35M — If your organization develops software, you're probably using a lot of open-source code — whether you know it or not.
Google says Duplex has completed 1M+ bookings, from restaurant reservations to movie tickets, since launch and is piloting shopping and food ordering tasks — Google today offered an update on the status of Duplex, its A.I. technology that uses natural conversations to get things done …
Sources: GameStop will get a share of the lifetime digital sales revenue for any Xbox console they sell, but the specific cut is unknown and likely small — But the size of the unprecedented revenue-sharing deal is up for debate. — In a seemingly unprecedented deal …
Customer obsession, one of the key Amazon Leadership principles that guides everything we do at Amazon, has helped Amazon Translate be recognized as an industry leading neural machine translation provider. This year, Intento ranked Amazon Translate #1 on the list of top-performing machine translation providers in its The State of Machine Translation 2020 report. We are excited to be recognized for pursuing our passion—designing the best customer experience in machine translation.
Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Neural machine translation is a form of machine translation that uses deep learning models to deliver more accurate and more natural sounding translation than traditional statistical and rule-based translation algorithms. Amazon Translate’s development has been fueled by customer feedback, leading to a steady stream of rich features that help you reach more people in more places—without breaking your translation services budget.
Intento is one of the leading organizations helping global companies procure and utilize the best-fit cognitive AI services. In this independent study, Intento evaluated 15 of the most prominent MT providers used by language service providers and localization services. The data used included examples from across 16 industry sectors, with 8 content types, including topics such as financial documentation, patents, sales and marketing material. These inputs were translated between 14 common language pairs to determine the best engine for a given translation scenario. It ranked the results of each MT engine based on how they compared to a reference human translation.
The results showed that no MT service is best in all language pairs across all industry sectors and content types. However, Amazon Translate had the highest number of instances in which it was rated “best.”
At Amazon, we strive to bring the most value to our customers and deliver the world’s best machine translation service! If your company is looking for machine translation, please contact us. We’d love to show you what Amazon Translate can do.
More information on the features and capabilities that Intento considered in its analysis of the top MT providers is available in the full report (registration is required).
Greg Rushing is a US Air Force Fellow in Amazon’s BRIDGE program. He is currently working with the Amazon Translate Product Management team, where he focuses on coordinating the activities required to bring Amazon Translate features to market. Outside of work, you can find him spending time exploring the outdoors with his family, doing auto repair, or woodworking.
Not everyone needs to be a developer, but everyone will need to be an AI decision maker.
That was the message behind a panel discussion on Advancing Equitable AI, which took place at our GPU Technology Conference last week. It was one of several GTC events advancing the conversation on diversity, equity and ethics in AI.
This year, we strengthened our support for women and underrepresented developers and scientists at GTC by providing conference passes to members of professional organizations supporting women, Black and Latino developers. Professors at historically Black colleges and universities — including Prairie View A&M University, Hampton University and Jackson State University — as well as groups like Black in AI and LatinX in AI received complimentary access to training from the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute.
A Forbes report last year named GTC as one of the U.S.’s top conferences for women to attend to further their careers in AI. At this month’s event, women made up better than one in five registered attendees — doubling last year’s count and an almost 4x increase since 2017 — and more than 100 of the speakers.
And in a collaboration with the National Society of Black Engineers that will extend beyond GTC, we created opportunities for the society’s collegiate and professional developers to engage with NVIDIA’s recruiting team, which provided guidance on navigating the new world of virtual interviewing and networking.
“We’re excited to be embarking on a partnership with NVIDIA,” said Johnnie Tangle, national finance chairman of NSBE Professionals. “Together, we are both on the mission of increasing the visibility of Blacks in development and showing why diversity in the space enhances the community as a whole.”
Two power-packed, all-female panels at GTC focused on a roadmap for responsible and equitable AI.
In a live session that drew over 250 attendees, speakers from the University of Florida, the Boys and Girls Club of Western Pennsylvania and AI4All — a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in AI — discussed the importance of AI exposure and education for children and young adults from underrepresented groups.
When a broader group of young people has access to AI education, “we naturally see a way more diverse and interesting set of problems being addressed,” said Tess Posner, CEO of AI4All, “because young people and emerging leaders in the field are going to connect the technology to a problem they’ve seen in their own lives, in their own experience or in their communities.”
The conversation also covered the role parents and schools play in fostering awareness and exposure to STEM subjects in their children’s schools, as well as the need for everyone — developers or not — to have a foundational understanding of how AI works.
“We want students to be conscious consumers, and hopefully producers,” said Christina Gardner-McCune, associate professor and director of the Engaging Learning Lab at the University of Florida, and co-chair of the AI4K12 initiative. “Everybody is going to be making decisions about what AI technologies are used in their homes, what AI technologies their children interact with.”
Later in the week, a panel titled “Aligning Around Common Values to Advance AI Policy” explored ideas to pave the way for responsible AI on a global scale.
The webinar featured representatives from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Scotland-based innovation center The Data Lab, and C Minds, a think tank focused on AI initiatives in Latin America. Speakers shared their priorities for developing trustworthy AI, and defined what success would like to them five years in the future.
In a virtual edition of the popular Dinner with Strangers networking events at GTC, experts from NVIDIA and NSBE partnered to moderate two conversations with GTC attendees. NVIDIA employees shared their experiences and tips with early-career attendees, offering advice on how to build a personal brand in a virtual world, craft a resume and prepare for interviews.
For more about GTC, watch NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote below.
The post At GTC, Educators and Leaders Focus on Equity in AI, Developer Diversity appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Khosla Ventures is seeking to raise $1.1B for its latest fund, according to an SEC filing — Khosla Ventures, the eponymous venture firm helmed by longtime Silicon Valley rainmaker, Vinod Khosla, is raising $1.1 billion for its latest venture fund, according to documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
[Thread] Twitter clarifies why it blocked the sharing of NY Post's Biden story, saying it contained private info and violated its Hacked Materials Policy — We want to provide much needed clarity around the actions we've taken with respect to two NY Post articles that were first Tweeted this morning.
PassiveLogic, whose platform enables customers without programming expertise to develop autonomous systems for buildings and projects, raises $16M Series A — PassiveLogic, a startup developing a building controls platform, today raised $16 million. A spokesperson says the proceeds …
Morning Brew co-founders Alex Lieberman and Austin Reif | Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
A deal could value the 5-year-old company at more than $75 million
Two college students started Morning Brew five years ago. Now they’re in talks to sell their business newsletter company to Business Insider, according to sources familiar with the two companies.
It’s unclear how much Business Insider intends to pay for Morning Brew, which says it will turn a profit on revenues of $20 million this year. But people who have talked to the company’s founders believe they expect to sell it for more than $50 million, and possibly much more; the Wall Street Journal reports that the deal could be worth more than $75 milllion.
This is an interesting deal, if it gets completed. Business Insider is a digital publisher that got its start with a mix of high-volume clickbait and the occasional scoop, but has recently made a push into more sober journalism it wants to sell via subscriptions. Morning Brew is a business-focused publisher that reassembles news into bite-sized chunks for its millennial audience
You can imagine the logic behind this one: Business Insider gets a company with 2 million subscribers to its free newsletter, which it can try to convert into paying subscribers. And Morning Brews’ team of 50 people gets more resources to help it build out more iterations of its newsletter and other products, like a podcast arm.
A deal could be a huge windfall for Austin Rief and Alex Lieberman, Morning Brew’s co-founders, who started the company as undergrads at the University of Michigan. The two men said they’ve only raised $750,000 from friends and family over the course of the company’s history, which likely means they would keep the majority of the proceeds for themselves.
“I can’t confirm anything, but speaking hypothetically, we’d be happy to be in talks with them,” said Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget, via text message. “Alex and Austin are amazing entrepreneurs, and it’s a terrific company.”
The deal would also underscores the media industry’s current fascination with email newsletters, which are a very old distribution model that’s in favor once again.
For instance: Axios, the politics-focused startup that launched in 2017, is reportedly on track to do $58 million in revenue this year, largely on the backs of its popular newsletters. And Substack, a venture-backed company that helps individual writers launch and run their own newsletters, has generated a lot of media buzz, and has brought several high-profile writers into its stable. Two of them — Andrew Sullivan and Casey Newtown — used to work for Vox Media, which owns Recode.
Blodget founded Business Insider in 2007 by Henry Blodget, who had previously made a name for himself as Wall Street analyst during the dot com boom, but was later charged with securities fraud (Blodget settled with financial regulators without admitting or denying the charges). In 2015, he sold the company to German publisher Axel Springer in a deal that valued his company at more than $440 million. (Disclosure: I worked for Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider, a predecessor to Business Insider, and made money when he sold the company.)
In February, Axel Springer told investors that that Business Insider “expects significant growth in revenues,” and that in addition to ad revenues, its three-year-old subscription business would be a “key driver of revenue growth.” The company also said it would make make “extensive investments…especially in the areas of journalism and product & technology.”
Nuvemshop, a Shopify rival that helps businesses across Latin America develop their online presence, raises $30M led by Kaszek Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures — After several failed startup attempts and nine years spent building Nuvemshop into Latin America's answer to Shopify …
Cybersecurity services company deepwatch raised $53M Series B led by Goldman Sachs to accelerate R&D of the firm's cloud platform and partner ecosystem — - deepwatch — a leading provider of intelligence-driven managed security services — announced it has closed a $53 million Series B investment
Source: meditation and sleep app maker Calm is looking to raise ~$150M at a $2.2B valuation; Calm was valued at $1B in July 2019 — Calm, maker of a meditation and sleep app, is exploring a new funding round that could more than double the company's valuation, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Google releases an Apple Watch app for YouTube Music, providing basic playback controls and library browsing but no offline access — To follow a big Android TV update yesterday, Google has just released an Apple Watch app for YouTube Music. It provides basic playback controls and browsing of what's on your phone.