Series A Payward, Inc.’s Kraken division — an exchange for digital currencies such as Dogecoin and Bitcoin — has received $5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Hummingbird…
Yelp’s YP partnership continues alliance trend
Yelp, the search platform best known for turning up restaurants and reviews, has partnered with YP to upgrade its offering. The mutually beneficial deal provides YP’s advertisers a wider audience, and Yelp…
How Berlin became an online privacy haven
After NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked millions of secrets that blew the lid off American spying activities, Germany’s most famous news magazine Der Spiegel defended him, blazoning “Asyl Für Snowden” (Asylum for…
UAE’s Souq.com raises $75m – Investment Round Up
Funding The WSJ is reporting Souq.com, which claims to be the Arab world’s biggest e-commerce site, has secured a $75 million investment from Naspers, a South African media organization. The Dubai-based company,…
Symantec shakeup sees CEO sacked
Mountain View information protection giant Symantec has given its chief executive officer, Steve Bennett, the boot. Board member Michael Brown will take over immediately as interim president and CEO while Symantec, which…
Weekly digest: Mt Gox finds some bitcoins, tech giants to meet Obama over NSA and Office for iPad?
Mt Gox finds 200,000 bitcoins The beleaguered, battered and shuttered bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has been hunting down the sides of its sofa and managed to find almost 200,000 lost bitcoins this…
Somalia’s vulnerable youth find work online
A new nonprofit venture is helping young Somalis get online and into work. Shaqodoon (which means ‘jobseeker’ in Somali) is a product of the USAID-funded Somali Youth Livelihood Program, headquartered in the…
Percolate secures $24m in funding – Investment Round Up
Series A Computer vision and robotics company Blue River Technology has secured $10 million in a Series A-1 investment. Data Collective Venture Capital led the round, while new backer Innovation Endeavors contributed…
Could Vodafone’s Ono acquisition trigger European telco spending spree?
Vodafone’s $10 billion purchase of Spanish cable operator Ono cements the British telecoms company’s pursuance of a ‘united communications’ model. And the British firm may have fired the starting gun on a…
Weekly Digest: Tencent grabs e-commerce stake, Amazon ups prices, Tesla can’t sell cars in New Jersey
Tencent goes online shopping Tencent and Alibaba’s rivalry spans industries, but Alibaba has always trumped Tencent in the realm of e-commerce — no small victory in a market that drew $1.26 trillion…