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Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
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Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud infrastructure spending grew 37% YoY to $29B in Q1, with Amazon at 32% market share followed by Microsoft at 18% — New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Q1 spend on cloud infrastructure services reached $29 billion, up 37% from the first quarter of 2019.
Sources: Bangalore-based education app Byju's is in talks to raise up to $400M at $10B valuation, up from a valuation of $8B in February — Byju's, an education learning startup in India that has seen a surge in its popularity in recent weeks amid the coronavirus outbreak …
UK launches the Cyber Discovery Virtual Cyber School, an online initiative aimed at teaching teenagers cybersecurity concepts — Online initiative looks to inspire a new generation of cybersecurity talent to bring out their ‘digital Sherlock Holmes’ while schools remain closed.
Namely, an eight-and-a-half-year-old, New York-based company that sells payroll, talent management and other HR services to mid-size businesses across the U.S. via subscription software, has let go of upwards of 40 percent of its employees. The cuts are across the board, from high-ranking staffers, including a CFO who was brought on almost exactly two years ago, and a chief security officer who has spent just the last year with the company, to its entire customer success team.
Namely CEO Larry Dunivan says the company had reduced executive pay five weeks ago, hoping to avoid layoffs, but that the coronavirus and its impact on business made that impossible.
Dunivan — who joined Namely last summer — declined to specify exactly how many employees were let go or whether the percentage was even higher than 40 percent, a number provided to us by one source familiar with the situation. He did talk about the difficulties of running a startup right now that depends largely on small- and medium-size businesses, noting that even though Namely’s customers sign uo for between one- and three-year-long contracts — as well as pay for a minimum number of employees — many of those customers are finding it difficult to fulfill those contracts right now.
As an example, he pointed to a client that has numerous yoga studios and earlier this year employed 500 people but has laid off all but 15 of them in the shutdown. Said Dunivan, “We had a stark, painful conversation and you could tell I was one of many people she was calling that day. Because I care about that relationship, I waived that minimum for some period of time so she can conserve cash.”
Indeed, said Dunivan, a company like Namely “doesn’t get hit all at once. Because it’s subscription revenue, it happens over time.” But “underlying trends change as customer behavior changes and unemployment rises, and trying to predict future revenue is a tough job” given that no one knows exactly when the world will return to its previous, pre-Covid 19 state.
Nearly four million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing to more than 30 million the nation’s number of unemployment claims.
While the deep cuts are understandable in the current context, they also represent one in a series of milestones that no startup wants to encounter. While Namely was once among New York’s most promising businesses and accordingly raised at least $217 million from investors, including Matrix Partners, True Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, it has seen more than its share of transition at the top. In the most devastating development for the company until now, Namely’s board abrupt fired the company’s cofounder, Matt Straz, as its CEO in 2018.
Accused of actions “inconsistent with that which is expected of Namely leadership,” as the company told employees at the time, Straz has gone on to launch an employee benefits startup called Bennie, but it cast a cloud over the the company (which still isn’t talking about what happened).
Soon after, the board member who led the investigation into Straz — longtime Silicon Valley executive Elisa Steele — was appointed as Namely’s permanent CEO, which at the time helped attract $60 million in new funding to the company led by GGV Capital.
Yet by last summer, she had also left as CEO, a decision that she made based on family commitments says one source, and owes partly to the relationship she had established with Dunivan, he says separately.
In fact, Dunivan says that in his previous role as the interim CEO of the human resources company ThinkHR, he was consulted by Steele on business and product strategy, and that “as sometimes happens, one thing led to the other and i joined” the company in her stead. (Steele remains on the company’s board.)
Certainly, he inherited a business that no longer enjoys the sheen it once did.
As says one person with a stake in the business, “I don’t think anyone is giving up on Namely but it had a modest growth plan at the start of 2020 and that’s now been made uncertain because of [COVID-19]. I think the company is just trying to control what it can and to structure itself so it can operate more efficiently with a major drop-off in revenue.” Adds this person, “It’s like a clean sheet of paper.”
It’s an optimistic perspective and surely one that remaining employees will need to embrace, at least until the fourth quarter, which is when Dunivan estimates that businesses across the board may pick up again.
“This is an extraordinarily difficult time, but we look at the world through a fairly conservative lens and we’re making certain assumptions about how new customers will buy, how existing customers will increase or decrease headcount, and how many businesses will be closed and never to come back,” said Dunivan when we spoke earlier.
“It’s my believe that the recovery will start to show signs of life in the fourth quarter and into the first quarter, and our current looks at it through that lens,” he added. “But in the meantime, employers will be paying fewer people.”
Faced with dwindling options, Namely is now among them.
Federal judge rules FCC must give access to logs containing IP addresses behind public comments for the 2017 net neutrality vote, after repeated fraud claims — A Manhattan federal judge has ruled the Federal Communications Commission must provide two reporters access to server logs …
New vehicles today can produce a treasure trove of data. Without the proper tools, that data will sit undisturbed, rendering it worthless.
A number of companies have sprung up to help automakers manage and use data generated from connected cars. Israeli startup Otonomo is one such player that jumped on the scene in 2015 with a cloud-based software platform that captures and anonymizes vehicle data so it can then be used to create apps to provide services such as electric vehicle management, subscription-based fueling, parking, mapping, usage-based insurance and emergency service.
The startup announced this week it has raised $46 million to take its automotive data platform further. The capital was raised in a Series C funding round that included investments from SK Holdings, Avis Budget Group and Alliance Ventures. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners also participated. Otonomo has raised $82 million, to date.
The funds will be used to help Otonomo scale its business, improve its products and help it remain competitive, according to the company. Otonomo is also aiming to expand into new markets, particularly South Korea and Japan.
“We now have the expanded resources needed to deliver on our vision of making car data as valuable as possible for the entire transportation ecosystem, while adhering to the strictest privacy and security standards,” Otonomo CEO and founder Ben Volkow said in a statement.
Otonomo’s pitch focuses on creating opportunities to monetize connected car data while keeping it safe from the moment it is captured. Once the data is securely collected, the platform modifies it so companies can use it to develop apps and services for fleets, smart cities and individual customers. The platform also enables GDPR, CCPA and other privacy-regulation-compliant solutions using both personal and aggregate data.
Today, Otonomo’s platform takes in 2.6 billion data points a day from more than 20 million vehicles through partnerships with more than automakers, fleets and farm and construction manufacturers. Otonomo has more than 25 partnerships, a list that includes Daimler, BMW, Mitsubishi Motor Company and Avis Budget Group. The company said it’s preparing to bring on seven more customers.
That opportunity for Otonomo is growing based on forecasts, including one from SBD Automotive that predicts connected cars will account for more than 70% of cars sold in North American and European markets in 2020.
More rough figures from Canalys. After reporting a 13% year-over-year drop for global smartphone shipments, the firm is back with even worse numbers for China. Shipments dropped 18% year-over-year for Q1 in the world’s largest smartphone market. And once again, the COVID-19 pandemic was to blame.
It tracks that China was hard hit for Q1, as it was the first to suffer from the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. The first known case dates back to mid-November, with its eventual spread having a major impact on both local buying habits and the global supply chain, much of which is headquartered in China. The 72.6 million shipments puts the number at its lowest point since 2013.
The figures could have been worse, of course. While an 18% is pretty massive for an industry that had struggled to grow well before the virus emerged, Canalys says the figures were saved from a further skid due to the smartphone’s current status as an “essential product.”
“The smartphone’s status as an ‘essential’ personal item has stopped the market falling further during the pandemic,” Canalys VP Nicole says in a statement. “The Q1 performance was also buoyed by China’s well-established ecommerce channel for smartphone distribution, and the fact that most Chinese businesses were able to resume work rapidly after two weeks of nationwide travel restrictions. Unfortunately, the same conditions do not apply in any other major markets in the world.”
Still, analysts are “cautious” about the market’s ability to rebound in China, let alone the rest of the world, with a number of countries still very much in the throes of the pandemic.
During this pandemic, many organizations are offering free or drastically cheaper courses to help people skill-up for when we eventually get out of lock-down. There are numerous outlets if you want to learn to code from, for instance, Freecodecamp or the ‘Free Fridays‘ scheme form General Assembly. And for gamers, Gamedev.tv has taken 80% off its courses where you can learn to code by building video games.
However most online coding courses, either free or paid, essentially suggest you download a project or copy-paste code from their snippets going through their courses. They tend not to include Integrated Development Environments, which are more helpful in the learning process.
But JetBrains, a startup that makes development tools for developers actually developed its own Educational IDEs, realised they could take a fresh approach to online learning, especially during this pandemic.
Their own IDE means that, while some of the learning happens in the browser, a large part is be available in the IDE on a person’s computer. That means a student learn coding through practicing tasks and integrated tests – directly in the professional environment of the IDE and get instant feedback.
This new product, JetBrains Academy, was due to be launched out of beta just prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19, and it would have been a paid-for product. But now JetBrains has decided to make the entire platform free during the pandemic, allowing people stuck at home or who were laid off or furloughed to learn new skills.
Students can learn Java, Python or Kotlin (the preferred language for Android development by Google) through 60+ projects which they would be building themselves and then get instant feedback because of the IDE. They are provided with the full curriculum that consists of single-concept topics that can be completed in about 15 minutes and try out more than 5,700 interactive challenges.
They are also offering free Educational IDEs, that help teach coding through practicing tasks and integrated tests – directly in the professional environment. These support Java, Kotlin, Python, Scala, JavaScript, Rust, C/C++, and Go, with more languages to come. Any teacher can create their own educational course right in the IDE with any number of lessons and share them privately or publicly with their students.
In addition, students, teachers, schools and courses can apply for educational licenses for full-on JetBrains IDEs and team tools and use them for free.
Sensor Tower: iPad app downloads see first quarterly growth in four years, surpassing 1.1B worldwide in Q1, as consumer spending in iPad apps crosses $2B — Driven by a surge in use and adoption of the device during the COVID-19 pandemic, quarterly first-time downloads of apps …
