Tag: Billion

technology articles

DoorDash aims to raise $3.14 billion in much-awaited IPO

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(Reuters) – Food delivery startup DoorDash Inc said on Friday it now expects to raise up to $3.14 billion in its U.S. initial public offering (IPO) after lifting its pricing range, signaling a frenzied interest from investors.



a person wearing a helmet: FILE PHOTO: A delivery person for Doordash rides his bike in the rain in the Manhattan borough of New York City

© Reuters/CARLO ALLEGRI
FILE PHOTO: A delivery person for Doordash rides his bike in the rain in the Manhattan borough of New York City

DoorDash, the biggest U.S. third-party delivery company for restaurants, plans to sell 33 million shares at between $90 and $95 apiece, it said in a regulatory filing https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1792789/000119312520309968/d752207ds1a.htm. It had earlier targeted a price range of between $75 and $85 per share.

Founded in 2013, DoorDash is backed by the Vision Fund managed by Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group Corp, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and the Government of Singapore Investment Corp (GIC), Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.

Video: DoorDash kicks off IPO roadshow with updated filing (CNBC)

DoorDash kicks

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future technology

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food | Review

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Chase Purdy
Piatkus
2020 | 272pp | £14.99
ISBN 9780349420332

Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk

An image showing the book cover of Billion dollar burger

Take a stroll down the vegetarian aisle of the supermarket and you’re likely to find an ample selection of products awaiting you on the shelves, from plant-based burgers and sausages to ‘chicken’ nuggets made of soy protein and even vegan kebab meat.

But a new contender is making its way onto the scene. Billion Dollar Burger by journalist Chase Purdy documents the rise of the most intriguing item yet to grace our dinner plates: lab-grown meat. It has a significant edge over its plant-based counterparts because it is actually meat ‒ it just doesn’t involve rearing or killing any animals.

Cell-cultured meat, also known as clean meat or lab-grown meat, originates from a Petri dish or bioreactor rather than any farm or slaughterhouse. Once nothing more than a futuristic vision, cell-cultured meat has rapidly evolved

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science

Most detailed 3D map ever of Milky Way includes nearly 2 billion stars

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milky-way-map.png

The map measures stars closer to the edge of the Milky Way than ever before.


YouTube/ESA

You can’t just drive a Google Maps car around the Milky Way to diagram it. It’s fortunate, then, that new information gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory offers the most detailed map yet of the galaxy. The project’s map now includes almost 2 billion stars, and it helps the agency trace the Milky Way’s history.

“The new Gaia data promise to be a treasure trove for astronomers,” Jos de Bruijne, ESA’s Gaia deputy project scientist, said in a statement.

The new information not only brings the total number of stars mapped over seven years up to close to 2 billion, but it includes “a detailed census of more than 300,000 stars in our cosmic neighborhood,” meaning stars within 326 light-years of the sun. That 300,000 number is believed to be 92% of

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technology articles

ESA: Games directly contributed $40.9 billion to U.S. economy and employed 143,045 people in 2019

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The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has released a new economic impact report today for the U.S. video game industry that says gaming directly generated economic output of $40.9 billion in 2019 and provided direct employment to 143,045 people.

Total income generated across the game economy totals $35.28 billion, including $17.37 billion in direct compensation to video game industry workers (equivalent to $121,459 in compensation per worker). The figures the game industry indirectly supports are even more impressive at $90.3 billion, and it makes sense that number should only rise in 2020, given the growth of gaming as a lifesaver during the pandemic. According to the ESA, this report includes as much of the game industry as it could measure — triple-A, double-A, indie, mobile, and so on.

The ESA is the game industry’s lobbying group. Some people might view any economic impact report as propaganda, but as propaganda goes, this

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new technology

An $11 billion tech-focused hedge fund scored a 52% gain by betting on Tesla and against scandal-ridden Wirecard this year, a report said

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Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images

  • Coatue Management scored a 52% gain this year by betting on Tesla and against German fintech Wirecard, the Financial Times reported.
  • The $11 billion tech-focused hedge fund is run by “Tiger cub” Philippe Laffont, who previously worked at billionaire Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management.
  • Coatue held 3.1 million Tesla shares at the end of the third quarter that are now worth $1.3 billion, the FT said.
  • The fund’s performance eclipses the average 17% return gained by tech-focused hedge funds this year.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

New York-based Coatue Management has been one of the best-performing big hedge funds in 2020, scoring a gain of 52% through November. 

Coatue made its notable gain by betting on Elon Musk’s fast-rising automaker Tesla and against scandal-plagued German payments processor Wirecard, according to the Financial Times. 

The tech-focused fund makes long-short investment strategies, meaning that it buys equities that

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science daily

Astronomers to release most accurate data ever for nearly two billion stars — ScienceDaily

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On 3 December an international team of astronomers will announce the most detailed ever catalogue of the stars in a huge swathe of our Milky Way galaxy. The measurements of stellar positions, movement, brightness and colours are in the third early data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory and will be publicly available. Initial findings include the first optical measurement of the acceleration of the Solar system. The data set, and early scientific discoveries, will be presented at a special briefing hosted by the Royal Astronomical Society.

Launched in 2013, Gaia operates in an orbit around the so-called Lagrange 2 (L2) point, located 1.5 million kilometres behind the Earth in the direction away from the Sun. At L2 the gravitational forces between the Earth and Sun are balanced, so the spacecraft stays in a stable position, allowing long-term essentially unobstructed views of the sky.

The primary objective

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science

The Milky Way and beyond: Scientists publish new data on nearly 2 billion stars

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As of today (Dec. 3), scientists have 1.8 billion local stars at their fingertips.

That bounty is thanks to the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which has spent 6.5 years tracking stars in our Milky Way galaxy and beyond. Using the spacecraft’s observations, scientists can create a precise 3D map of stars and find patterns playing out across the galaxy.

“Essentially all of astronomy benefits from this one way or another because it’s very fundamental data,” Anthony Brown, an astronomer at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and chair of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium Executive team, told Space.com. “It’s a very, very broad survey mission.”

Related: This 3D color map of 1.7 billion stars in the Milky Way is the best ever made

This image shows the paths of 40,000 stars located within 326 light-years of our Milky Way galaxy over the next 400,000 years
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smartphone

Xiaomi Shares Slide 7.1% After Finalising $3.9 Billion in Equity Deal | Technology News

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HONG KONG (Reuters) – Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp’s shares fell 7.1% in Hong Kong trading on Wednesday as the company finalised a $3.91 billion capital raising that included the city’s largest top up placement.

The company said 1 billion shares were sold at HK$23.70 each as part of the top up deal that was carried out overnight. The final price was a 9.4% discount to Xiaomi’s closing price of HK$26.15 on Tuesday.

Trading of Xiaomi’s stock was halted during the morning session before the company released details of the capital raise during Hong Kong’s lunch break, when trading is stopped for an hour.

It had been expected that details of the deal would be announced before the start of the trading day in line with normal market practices.

Xiaomi did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on why the deal was not announced until lunchtime.

When

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technology

SuperData: Black Friday and Cyber Monday digital game sales fell 10% to $3.9 billion

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Digital games earned $3.9 billion worldwide between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, said market researcher SuperData. That represented a 10% decline from a year ago and it suggests even games aren’t immune from changing consumer habits during the pandemic.

Changes in consumer buying patterns led to a drop in Black Friday and Cyber Monday digital game revenue in 2020. Game spending is still on track for a record-breaking 2020 but consumer anticipation for next-generation consoles and the growing popularity of subscription services diminished the importance of the holiday weekend as a main revenue driver, said SuperData, a division of Nielsen.

Spending on PC games during the weekend was up 6% year-over-year, but this was more than offset by a 13% decline in console earnings. Unmet demand for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S likely depressed spending on digital console games, said Carter Rogers, an analyst at SuperData, in an

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technology articles

Salesforce to acquire Slack messaging service for $27.7 billion

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Business software maker Salesforce will acquire work-chat service Slack for $27.7 billion in a deal aimed at giving the two companies a better shot at competing against longtime industry powerhouse Microsoft.

The acquisition, announced Tuesday, is by far the largest in the 21-year history of Salesforce. The San Francisco company was one of the first to begin selling software as a subscription service that could be used on any internet-connected device instead of the more cumbersome process of installing the programs on individual computers.

Salesforce’s outspoken founder and CEO Marc Benioff hailed the “cloud computing” concept as the wave of the future to much derision initially. But software as a service has become an industry standard that has turned into a gold mine for longtime software makers. Microsoft for one has developed its own thriving online suite of services, known as Office 365, which includes a Teams messaging app that

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