Jumia’s stock has reportedly lost more than half of its value since its NYSE public IPO

Jumia, the ‘African’ ecommerce company that has its corporate headquarters in Dubai and operations in 14 African countries including Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, continues to struggle after an initial good run at the New York Stock Exchange. It’s stock closed at $6.68, an all-time low, on Friday, with the market cap going down to ~$520 million. For the sake of context, the Rocket Internet-founded Jumia had become a unicorn (with a valuation of $1.08 billion) in 2016 (when it was known as Africa Internet Group or AIG) after raising…

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Miss.Africa Digital Celebrates International Women’s Day With its Annual Seed Fund Application Drive

Miss.Africa Digital Seed Fund 2019

DCA Trust celebrated the Women’s Day by launching the 2019 Miss.Africa Digital Seed Fund Application Drive. Parallel to my advocacy on the philosophy of positive “tech disruption”, and how it has the ability to create a welcome change in our societies, if we regularly engage in doing something out of our comfort zone for our mind, body and spirit, I’m a great believer that we will find ourselves in a much better space as human beings, as well as be more effective in our work.” 2019: Year of work-life-balance, –…

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Andela Secures $100M Series D Funding to Build Distributed Eng. Teams and Power its work

Andela

Andela the company building distributed engineering teams with Africa’s top software developers, today announced the completion of a $100M Series D funding. The round was led by Generation Investment Management with participation from existing investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital, and CRE Venture Capital. The most recent financing brings Andela’s total venture funding to $180M. Andela was founded in 2014 to connect Africa’s engineering talent with the demand for software developers worldwide. With the Series D funding, Andela will accelerate the development of its technology platform to identify,…

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How AI could bring a difference in 2019

In 2019, artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly become a mainstream presence in our work and personal lives, inspiring our purchase decisions and digging deeper into business outcomes and events. At the same time, expectations surrounding AI will also grow, as calls for transparency and fair play become too loud for businesses to ignore. Here are four ways we see AI making a difference in our lives in the new year: AI gets warm and fuzzy. Conversational AI is fast becoming a fact of life; already, 20% of U.S. adults have access to smart speakers in their homes. Google…

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Phishing Makes It Easy To Hijack Accounts

Cyber-thieves grab almost 250,000 valid log-in names and passwords for Google accounts every week, suggests research. The study by Google and UC Berkeley looked at the ways email and other accounts get hijacked. It used 12 months of log-in and account data found on websites and criminal forums or which had been harvested by hacking tools. Google said the research helped secure accounts by showing how people fell victim to scammers and hackers. During the 12 months studying the underground markets, the researchers identified more than 788,000 credentials stolen via…

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With iPod discontinuation, what are the alternatives?

Smartphones have largely replaced portable media players for most people. It’s been a few years since Apple bothered to update its iPod touch, and it’s been even longer since any other company try to offer a good Android-powered alternative to Apple’s touchscreen media player. Apple is now abandoning its traditional iPod because most people with smartphones now use them for everything. However, many current smartphones – including Apple’s – don’t have FM, and none has a DAB radio. Worse, smartphones need regular app updates and sometimes annual operating system upgrades. You…

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Opera shuts down its Opera Max Service

Opera Max has been the rising star in Opera’s portfolio. The service offered a system-wide data-saving proxy that funnelled all app data through Opera’s servers to compress images and videos. Initially, opening a web page required users to calculate the amount of data that they would spend. Smartphones have been always data hungry and people tried all sorts of ways to save the smallest KiloBytes of data. It is this where Opera’s data saving app came to the rescue. Opera developed some clever algorithms and used in their Opera Max…

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Samsung to dethrone Intel as world’s largest chipmaker

South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics Co. has overtaken Santa Clara, Calif. based Intel Corp.’s (INTC) as the world’s No. 1 chipmaker in terms of revenue. Samsung, most well-known for its smartphones and televisions, reported second-quarter sales of $15.7 billion for its semiconductor unit and operating profit of $7.1 billion. For the first time, Intel fell behind its Asian rival with Q2 chip revenue of $14.8 billion and operating profit of $3.8 billion. Samsung mainly generates its chip segment revenue through selling memory chips used in mobile devices, as opposed…

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Microsoft MS Paint to get axed from Windows 10

Microsoft plans to stop developing the iconic Paint program, nudging it a step closer to the end. The Tech Giant announced last week that it will stop actively developing Paint starting with a fall update to Windows 10, its flagship operating system. As a result, Paint could be removed altogether in future updates: The once vital component is now vestigial. In a statement, Microsoft played down the news, noting that Paint will continue to be available for free download and many of its features will remain in other places, including…

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Microsoft’s new app narrates the world for blind people

Microsoft recently released a smartphone app that uses computer vision to describe the world for the visually impaired. The Seeing AI  allows users to point their phone’s camera at a person and it’ll say who they are and how they’re feeling. They can also point it at a product and it’ll tell them what it is. All of this is done using artificial intelligence that runs locally on their phone. “Just hold up your phone and hear information about the world around you,” Microsoft promises. It seems almost magical when…

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