Rocket Internet and iMENA Holding have announced that they will partner together to launch mobile app Easy Taxi in the Middle East and North Africa. iMENA will invest $7 million into the app’s regional rollout, which started today in Saudi Arabia.
Launched by Rocket Internet in 2011, Easy Taxi’s iOS, Android and BlackBerry apps are now available in 15 markets throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. The app has been downloaded 2 million times and has over 60,000 drivers in its network.
Headquartered in Berlin, Rocket Internet’s strategy is to take successful e-commerce startup models and replicate them in markets that competitors have not yet entered or have a relatively small footprint. In July, Rocket Internet announced that it had raised an additional $500 million from previous investors Kinnevik and Access. That round of funding took Rocket Internet to over $1 billion in backing so far for this year.
Rocket Internet is using the funds to rapidly build infrastructure in emerging markets that can be leveraged over and over again when it launches new businesses in other verticals. This makes it relatively easy for Rocket Internet to shut down startups that are faltering in favor of new ventures with more potential. In the Middle East, for example, it closed its previous e-commerce startup Mizado last year to focus on Jumia. Rocket Internet’s other ventures in the region includes fashion portal Namshi.
Easy Taxi’s competition in MENA is still relatively light and includes businesses such as Uber and Careem, which both launched in Dubai last month but have yet to rollout to other cities. Rocket Internet hopes that focusing on countries where there is still relatively little competition will result in higher margins than it would make in developed markets such as Europe. This echoes the strategy of other e-commerce startups like Fab and is a contrast to companies like Amazon, which operate on very thin margins on a massive scale in order to yield large returns.
To avoid legal difficulties when managing intellectual property for open source projects, more tech savvy lawyers are needed, according to the Linux Foundation.
Educating lawyers, however, is not the only solution, argued other open source insiders at the LinuxCon Europe conference in Edinburgh this week.
Open source software adoption is outstripping the legal knowledge of parties involved in open source projects who have difficulty dealing with copyright, patent, licensing and compliance issues, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. During the conference's opening speech on Monday, Zemlin said the open source community needs more lawyers who have an understanding of the technology and how open source collaboration works.
Having lawyers with a better understanding of the technology involved in open source projects would indeed be a way to overcome legal difficulties, said Deb Nicholson, community outreach director of the OIN (Open Innovation Network).
"I would agree that having more tech savvy lawyers that understand open source legal issues would be good," Nicholson said. "Smaller companies are desperate to find someone who can advise them," she said, adding that even if they can pay them, finding an attorney who understands the issues can be difficult.
The problem is that most free and open source software projects are becoming more legally complicated, said Catharina Maracke, a lawyer and associate professor at Keio University, in Japan, who focuses on intellectual property law and policy as well as standardization efforts for public licensing plans.
For one thing, open source projects often call for separate agreements for copyrights and patents, Maracke said. Copyright and patent issues are different, and this can cause communication problems for developers and lawyers negotiating related agreements.
Being a lawyer with a consulting practice herself, Maracke sometimes has trouble understanding what developers try to tell her, while there are similar problems the other way around, she said.
This lack of understanding can lead to friction between parties who are trying to manage intellectual property for open source projects, and protracted negotiations can drive up the legal costs, Maracke said.
Educating lawyers isn't the only option, though. To bridge the gap, standardization of legal terms could also be an important step, Maracke said.
While public licenses such asCreative Commons, the GNU General Public License or other free and open source software licenses have emerged as relatively easy-to-use standardized copyright agreements, more work can be done to make licensing easier, according to Maracke.
Contact: Erin Vollick Comm.ibbme@utoronto.ca 416-946-8019 University of Toronto
Technique has potential use in regenerative medicine and drug development
University of Toronto researchers have developed a method that can rapidly screen human stem cells and better control what they will turn into. The technology could have potential use in regenerative medicine and drug development. Findings are published in this week's issue of the journal Nature Methods.
"The work allows for a better understanding of how to turn stem cells into clinically useful cell types more efficiently," according to Emanuel Nazareth, a PhD student at the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) at the University of Toronto. The research comes out of the lab of Professor Peter Zandstra, Canada Research Chair in Bioengineering at U of T.
The researchers used human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC), cells which have the potential to differentiate and eventually become any type of cell in the body. But the key to getting stem cells to grow into specific types of cells, such as skin cells or heart tissue, is to grow them in the right environment in culture, and there have been challenges in getting those environments (which vary for different types of stem cells) just right, Nazareth said.
The researchers developed a high-throughput platform, which uses robotics and automation to test many compounds or drugs at once, with controllable environments to screen hPSCs in. With it, they can control the size of the stem cell colony, the density of cells, and other parameters in order to better study characteristics of the cells as they differentiate or turn into other cell types. Studies were done using stem cells in micro-environments optimized for screening and observing how they behaved when chemical changes were introduced.
It was found that two specific proteins within stem cells, Oct4 and Sox2, can be used to track the four major early cell fate types that stem cells can turn into, allowing four screens to be performed at once.
"One of the most frustrating challenges is that we have different research protocols for different cell types. But as it turns out, very often those protocols don't work across many different cell lines," Nazareth said.
The work also provides a way to study differences across cell lines that can be used to predict certain genetic information, such as abnormal chromosomes. What's more, these predictions can be done in a fraction of the time compared to other existing techniques, and for a substantially lower cost compared to other testing and screening methods.
"We anticipate this technology will underpin new strategies to identify cell fate control molecules, or even drugs, for a number of different stem cell types," Zandstra said.
As a drug screening technology "it's a dramatic improvement over its predecessors," said Nazareth. He notes that in some cases, the new technology can drop testing time from up to a month to a mere two days.
Professor Peter Zandstra was awarded the 2013 Till & McCulloch Award in recognition of this contribution to global stem cell research.
###
About IBBME:
The Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) is an interdisciplinary unit allowing a remarkable degree of integration and collaboration across three Faculties at the University of Toronto: Applied Science & Engineering, Dentistry and Medicine. The Institute pursues research in four areas: neural, sensory systems and rehabilitation engineering; biomaterials, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine; molecular imaging and biomedical nanotechnology; and, medical devices and clinical technologies.
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Predicting the fate of stem cells
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22-Oct-2013
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Contact: Erin Vollick Comm.ibbme@utoronto.ca 416-946-8019 University of Toronto
Technique has potential use in regenerative medicine and drug development
University of Toronto researchers have developed a method that can rapidly screen human stem cells and better control what they will turn into. The technology could have potential use in regenerative medicine and drug development. Findings are published in this week's issue of the journal Nature Methods.
"The work allows for a better understanding of how to turn stem cells into clinically useful cell types more efficiently," according to Emanuel Nazareth, a PhD student at the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) at the University of Toronto. The research comes out of the lab of Professor Peter Zandstra, Canada Research Chair in Bioengineering at U of T.
The researchers used human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC), cells which have the potential to differentiate and eventually become any type of cell in the body. But the key to getting stem cells to grow into specific types of cells, such as skin cells or heart tissue, is to grow them in the right environment in culture, and there have been challenges in getting those environments (which vary for different types of stem cells) just right, Nazareth said.
The researchers developed a high-throughput platform, which uses robotics and automation to test many compounds or drugs at once, with controllable environments to screen hPSCs in. With it, they can control the size of the stem cell colony, the density of cells, and other parameters in order to better study characteristics of the cells as they differentiate or turn into other cell types. Studies were done using stem cells in micro-environments optimized for screening and observing how they behaved when chemical changes were introduced.
It was found that two specific proteins within stem cells, Oct4 and Sox2, can be used to track the four major early cell fate types that stem cells can turn into, allowing four screens to be performed at once.
"One of the most frustrating challenges is that we have different research protocols for different cell types. But as it turns out, very often those protocols don't work across many different cell lines," Nazareth said.
The work also provides a way to study differences across cell lines that can be used to predict certain genetic information, such as abnormal chromosomes. What's more, these predictions can be done in a fraction of the time compared to other existing techniques, and for a substantially lower cost compared to other testing and screening methods.
"We anticipate this technology will underpin new strategies to identify cell fate control molecules, or even drugs, for a number of different stem cell types," Zandstra said.
As a drug screening technology "it's a dramatic improvement over its predecessors," said Nazareth. He notes that in some cases, the new technology can drop testing time from up to a month to a mere two days.
Professor Peter Zandstra was awarded the 2013 Till & McCulloch Award in recognition of this contribution to global stem cell research.
###
About IBBME:
The Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) is an interdisciplinary unit allowing a remarkable degree of integration and collaboration across three Faculties at the University of Toronto: Applied Science & Engineering, Dentistry and Medicine. The Institute pursues research in four areas: neural, sensory systems and rehabilitation engineering; biomaterials, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine; molecular imaging and biomedical nanotechnology; and, medical devices and clinical technologies.
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
If you’re looking to pick up a freshly announced iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina Display or even an iPad mini with cellular radio, T-Mobile is looking to convince you that it be with them over the other options available by giving away free data.
To help with that process, according to the Apple website T-Mobile will be giving away 200MB of free data as their starter offering for data services.
While 200MB of data is a small amount of data that most users would blow through in no time, AT&T is asking customers to pay $14.99 for 250MB.
Excerpted from Alternate Histories of the World by Matthew Buchholz, out now from Perigee.
In our modern age of inter-nets, cellular telephones, and horseless carriages, we have lost much of our initial wonder at fantastic beasts and creatures. Who needs a clanking, steam-powered robot when we can carry personal computers in our pockets? Many schoolchildren no longer believe in the great river beasts of Venice or sand creatures of the Sahara. Yet the images of our monstrous past remain, forever preserved in archives, libraries, and historical records. Alternate Histories of the World collects them.
The Parthenon 432 B.C., Greece
johnc0ad
Constructed between 447 B.C. and 432 B.C. as a temple to the goddess Athena, the Parthenon has survived as a lasting symbol of the beauty, grace, and industriousness of the ancient Greeks. In addition to the structure itself, the building’s frieze has achieved particular fame as one of the best examples of sculpting in marble to come out of this period. Created (or at least supervised) by the great artist Phidias, the frieze mainly depicts a lengthy procession that includes a great number of historic and mythological figures, including many of the Olympians, Athena herself, a glimpse of a Martian warrior on horseback (pictured), and numerous classes of citizenry. Yet it’s far-fetched to believe that Martians actually rode in battle with the ancient Greeks; more likely the carving was a tribute to a visiting warrior or a kind of talisman designed to keep the building safe from Martian heat rays.
Trades in the Middle Ages Circa 1400, England
johnc0ad
This hand-drawn chart depicts the emergence of the tradesman class during the Dark Ages in Europe. With the growth of cities and specialized goods, trades and apprenticeships sprang up, eventually forming the basis for a new middle class that would lift peasants out of poverty. Some of the trades listed here include blacksmith, tailor, box-maker (what we would consider a carpenter), and Zombie, spelled with the traditional Middle English, Zombye. England, like the rest of Europe, was far behind Africa and other continents when it came to killing the Living Dead. As late as 1330, Zombyes were considered to be people of respectable and enviable status, as their demands for food and shelter were minimal.
It was this misguided embrace of the Living Dead that led to the Zombye epidemic of the 1350s, or as it is commonly known, the Black Death. Between 1348 and 1350, almost half of Europe’s population was turned into Zombies due to the relentless spread of the disease. Finally, in the late 15th century, physicians began to apply the standard methods of decapitation and cranial injury to the problem, often in Plague Doctor costumes (pictured) to remain protected from bites and attacks on their persons. Yet it would take more than 150 years for the Living Dead population in Europe to recede to normal levels.
The Conference at Yalta 1945, Crimea
johnc0ad
As the war in Europe began to point to an Allied victory, the so-called Big Four arranged a meeting in Yalta, on the Crimean Sea, to discuss postwar organization and German occupation. In attendance were British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, and Mexican Luchador and People’s Champion El Santo. The key points of the conference included: a requirement of unconditional surrender from Nazi Germany, the division of Germany into several police states, establishment of reparations and full demilitarization, an agreement to track down all Nazi war criminals and fugitives as well as the fiendish wrestler known only as the Black Skull, Eastern Europe’s de facto annexation by the Soviet Union, and an agreement that the Soviet Union would join the United Nations.
Roosevelt is in visibly poor health here and would die two months after the conference. Churchill would soon be replaced by Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Stalin and El Santo would attend the final Potsdam Conference at the final end of World War II; Stalin would stay in power until 1952, while El Santo remains the ageless, mysterious embodiment of masculinity and heroism.
Excerpted from Alternate Histories of the World by Matthew Buchholz, out now from Perigee.
KABUL (Reuters) - The intelligence service of opium-plagued Afghanistan has sacked 65 officers after discovering they were addicted to heroin, the agency's head said on Tuesday.
The announcement camed weeks after the United Nations said Afghanistan, which is responsible for producing at least 80 percent of the world's opium, risked becoming a "narco state" due to a jump in poppy production over the last year.
"We have sacked 65 employees who were addicted to heroin and our efforts will continue," the acting head of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Rahmatullah Nabil, told parliament.
The men were discovered under a project designed to weed out drug users from the NDS ranks, Nabil said. The program began in Kabul but will soon be expanded to NDS staff across all of the country's 34 provinces.
He did not state over what period the sackings occurred and attempts to contact him and NDS spokesmen were unsuccessful.
The attempt to rid the agency of drug addicts will be welcomed by the international community, which has been fighting a 12-year war against al Qaeda and a Taliban-led insurgency, but is increasingly expecting Afghanistan's security forces to shoulder the burden.
NATO-led international forces are beginning to scale down their presence in Afghanistan ahead of the mission's end next year.
(Reporting by Jawed Farzad and Mirwais Harooni; Writing by Dylan Welch; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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