Category: News

Fort Lauderdale, FL, March 23, 2023 –(PR.com)– Neu.ro, a leading MLOps and Artificial Intelligence platform, has partnered with Cato Digital, a leading provider of low-cost, low-carbon bare metal compute and storage solutions.

“The Neu.ro MLOps Platform is created and developed with a responsible and sustainable AI philosophy,” said Neu.ro CEO Uri Soroka. “In this regard, Cato Digital is the perfect match for Neu.ro; together, we are committed to achieving a true carbon-neutral AI Cloud.”

Cato Digital and Neu.ro are members of the iMasons Climate Accord, an industry consortium of over 200 companies focused on reducing carbon in materials, products, and power.

Cato’s platform combines circular economy hardware, stranded data center power capacity, and clean energy to directly reduce scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions in digital infrastructure. Neu.ro’s unique platform optimizes the most advanced ML and AI workloads to increase efficiency and performance while lowering costs and carbon emissions in both on-prem and cloud deployments.

“To make meaningful reductions of carbon emissions in digital infrastructure, we must assess the entire system,” said Dean Nelson, CEO of Cato Digital. “By partnering with Neu.ro we have a holistic view of the data center, hardware, power, and software to increase efficiency and performance while significantly lowering costs and carbon for ML and AI model development, training, and deployment.”

As the data center industry evolves rapidly, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly recognized as critical drivers of increased private and public cloud usage. However, for teams to fully leverage the power of these technologies, they require comprehensive orchestration and integration support at every stage of development and deployment.

The Neu.ro and Cato Digital partnership are founded upon the fundamental tenets of sustainable and ethical data processing. By leveraging their expertise, Neu.ro, and Cato Digital are committed to driving positive change in the industry and promoting responsible data practices. The partnership represents a significant step forward in advancing the ethical use of data and reflects the companies’ unwavering commitment to building a more sustainable and equitable future.

To facilitate AI workload growth and satisfy its current and future AI needs, Neu.ro deployed an OEM AI Cloud orchestration and interoperability solution to reside natively on Cato Digital bare metal.

The platform offers unique advantages such as easy and rapid access to the computing infrastructure via a CLI or menu system, access control and permissions for authorized team members, orchestration of both cloud and on-prem compute resources, workflow automation, and protection of AI assets and artifacts throughout the ML lifecycle.

Moreover, the platform integrates a wide selection of best-in-breed AI/ML toolsets that cover the entire ML lifecycle. For example, this includes modem long-language models (LLM) and ChatGPT-like bots. In an accelerated timeline, Neu.ro successfully installed, tested, and launched turnkey AI/ML services on Cato, enabling both companies to make significant strides to low carbon digital infrastructure.

For more information about Neu.ro and its commitment to ethical and sustainable AI, please visit https://neu.ro or contact us at team@neu.ro to schedule a demo or request more information.

About Neu.ro

Neu.ro is an MLOps interoperability platform that supports the full lifecycle of AI development and deployment, including modular custom pipeline creation, resource orchestration and automation, and instrumentation at each step of AI/ML system construction and deployment on public, hybrid, and on-premise clouds. With industry-unique features like Green Scheduler, Neu.ro MLOps Platform helps businesses reduce their carbon footprint associated with running AI/ML models. The Neuro team comprises full-stack software engineers with extensive experience in MLOps solutions. Neu.ro is passionate about staying up-to-date with the latest AI/ML technologies and providing its clients with the best solutions for their business needs. To learn more, visit https://neu.ro.

About Cato Digital

Cato Digital is a leading provider of low cost, low carbon bare metal. Cato’s platform combines circular economy hardware, stranded data center power capacity, and clean energy to directly reduce scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions in digital infrastructure. The result is an extremely cost effective and scalable compute platform that directly lowers the carbon footprint for customers and partners. To learn more, visit https://cato.digital.

Palm Beach Gardens, FL, March 23, 2023 –(PR.com)– ResClub/MyResClub CEO Craig Shawn Williamson announced today the upcoming launch of the next line of products in the powerful MyResClub Sales Platform, “SOS Beauty.” The beauty line is the next product offering to the existing MyResClub system and represents the company’s first move outside travel and leisure.

ResClub/MyResClub has made a significant impact on changing lives through earning and investments, philanthropy through foundations, and education of its 16,000+ sales force in 5 countries. Williamson states, “We have the finest executives in the business driving MyResClub. Our sales force is international, currently over 16,000 and adding 3,000 per month. They are sophisticated and highly focused on customer needs. You will see us rolling out many more lines to our salesforce.” (www.MyResClub.com)

SOS Beauty is unique as it focuses on the research and development of beneficial products for women, not celebrity endorsements. SOS Beauty creates unique relationships with all clients to understand better their personal needs to achieve the healthiest skincare routine through custom formulas designed for each consumer.

“SOS Beauty is a luxury product line set to be available on Shopify, Amazon, Ebay and other marketplaces,” says SOS VP of Development Shereen Dibseh. She adds, “However, the MyResClub salesforce will have access to exclusive pricing, offers, for its customers and deals not found in those public brand outlets.”

Projected to become one of the fastest-growing online beauty brands due to its launch through the powerful MyResClub Network Marketing platform, SOS Beauty is launching with more than 250 individual products and proprietary formulations released each month based upon direct customer feedback.

About ResClub
ResClub is a vacation real estate investment company and developer with its own Special Purpose Investment Platform. The ResClub model allows investors to earn a high fixed annual return on their investment and enjoy the usage of any ResClub property through the MyResClub portal. Investors have access to the subscriber service of MyResClub with over one million vacation locations, flights, car rental, theme parks, dining, shopping, theme parks, tee times, travel concierge, group travel, and cruises, all at 10% and 50% paid back to their credit card within 3 to 5 days of the charge.

The ResClub Investor portal is a state-of-the-art online platform that automates investment, distribution, compliance, and reporting and allows for efficient and convenient investing.

Toronto, Canada, March 24, 2023 –(PR.com)– actiTIME, a leading provider of time tracking software, has announced the release of their new product, Time Management Assistant. The free tool automates the time tracking process and generates a detailed log of web-based tools users visit throughout the day.

In today’s fast-paced world, we’re all trying to optimize our productivity and make the best out of every second. Efficient time management is crucial for productivity, success, and achieving goals. The Time Management Assistant is designed to help companies and individuals maximize their efficiency by reminding them when some online activities are taking up too much of their time.

The browser extension provides 100% accuracy with robot-level data precision, eliminating the need for manual data entry. With its customizable settings, the Time Management Assistant provides a flexible approach to the time tracking process. Users can track time for all the web-based tools they visit or select a range of tools and categorize them by different types of activities for greater convenience and organization.

The browser extension generates comprehensive analytics with useful insights, allowing individuals to craft a truly great improvement plan for the future. The reports it generates provide an in-depth understanding of how productive users have been and how they can hone their time management skills even further.

According to actiTIME Product Team, “Time Management Assistant is a game-changer for busy professionals looking to optimize their productivity. By automating the time tracking process and generating comprehensive analytics, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of how they spend their time and identify areas for improvement.”

The tool is free and available for download in Chrome Web Store. Users who are already familiar with the benefits of actiTIME can further enhance their experience by integrating the Time Management Assistant extension.

Los Angeles, CA, March 31, 2023 –(PR.com)– YOV is set to launch the first ever communication platform that utilizes cutting-edge AI that allows users to digitally communicate with deceased and absent loved ones. This is possible through the creation of virtual personalities, known as Versonas, that are designed to help people cope with loss. Creating a Versonas is done by collecting and analyzing data from sources such as text messages, voice recordings and video chats. YOV is excited to announce that the official launch of their Versona platform, MyYOV, will take place this evening, Friday, March 31 at 7:00 pm.

Justin Harrison, the founder and CEO, started working on this technology after two life changing events: his mother’s stage-4 cancer diagnosis along with his own near fatal motorcycle accident. These events inspired him to find a solution that would allow him to keep connecting with his mother, even after death. In fact, Harrison has been working on this project every day since 2019 and will be amongst the presenters to speak at a live virtual launch event taking place this evening.

Versonas enables users of this platform to have everyday conversations with their deceased and absent loved ones through texts and voice memos. Psychologist, author and renowned trauma expert Dr. Michelle Stevens said, “Anyone who’s experienced loss or works with people who are experiencing loss recognizes the value in (YOV).” Stevens will also be speaking at tonight’s launch, specifically highlighting the clinical implications for YOV’s technology. YOV’s launch event will also feature real users from the MyYOV Beta testing, sharing their impact stories.

“We hope to use this as not just a methodology for comfort and alleviating grief, but also as a therapeutic tool.” – Justin Harrison

The MyYOV Launch will take place live, this Friday, on March 31 at 2355 Honolulu Ave., Montrose, CA 91020 from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm. It will also be streamed live here: https://www.youtube.com/live/lCBtUyOb7Zo?feature=share.

YOV’s platform for interacting with deceased loved ones could be a revolutionary concept that could change the way people see and experience loss. There has never been a more innovative solution for the universal human challenge of death. YOV’s Launch event this evening will provide insight into the future of AI and just how much it can impact humanity’s ever-challenging struggle with grief and loss.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, scientists, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs. It’s where you’ll find inspiration, gain knowledge, forge new relationships and discover tools to help you build your business.

Shameless, but helpful, plug: Buy your pass now for significant savings. Prices increase on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Who doesn’t like to save money?

Pivotal partners at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

We’re fortunate to partner with some of the startup world’s leading companies to help make magic at Disrupt. We say fortunate because they’re passionate, thoroughly engaged and hands-on. They consistently deliver highly relevant content, educational expertise, resources and connection to the event. Their participation elevates, engages and supports early-stage founders.

Our partners also come to Disrupt to connect and explore opportunities with other companies within the startup ecosystem. They form alliances, forge partnerships, and look for potential investments, and sometimes they become a startup’s new client. Be sure to make time to meet, greet and network with our partners.

Here’s an early look at just some of our partners who will be on hand to help you move your early-stage startup to the next level. We’ll announce many more in the coming weeks.

Don’t miss out on the invaluable startup insights that Dealmaker, Helm.ai, Mayfield and Visa will bring to the stage during breakout sessions. Connect with other attendees in small group roundtable sessions with LatinX Startup Alliance, Mayfield and Otter.ai.

You’ll find plenty to discover on the exhibition floor, too, with Builder.ai, DuploCloud, Hedera, InvestHK, Platform.sh, Remote Technology Services, Yatta and others showing off their latest technologies, discussing how you can engage more with their companies and offering everyone’s favorite: swag! Plus, for the second year running, JetBlue Technology Ventures will be front and center connecting with female founders at the Women of Tech(Crunch) reception.

Oh, and if that bounty isn’t enough to whet your startup appetite, check this out. Visa will hold the finals of the Visa Everywhere Initiative 2023 global competition at TechCrunch Disrupt. Stop by to meet and greet the finalists at the TechCrunch Disrupt Pavillion on the exhibition floor.

And finally, you won’t have to worry about dead device batteries while you’re at Disrupt — just plug into one of the charging stations courtesy of Brex, and you’ll be good to go.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco, and our partners will help make it the best one yet. Don’t forget, prices go up on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Buy your pass now and save.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within.

The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March.

WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too.

“Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is to ultimately be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”

Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. The production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story, however, are not new. “Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.

Most cultivated meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how hard it is for companies to produce mass quantities and to create foods by this method so that the finished product is under $10 a pound.

Houston, TX, March 31, 2023 –(PR.com)– A new mom works diligently to pump, freeze, and store breast milk for her baby in order to build a supply for when she heads back to work. After three months of pumping, she finally thaws the milk and gives the first bottle, but her child spits it out and refuses to drink it. Due to high lipase or other factors affecting its taste while stored in the freezer, her milk has become essentially unusable. Months of work gone to waste, mom and baby are both in tears.

This frustrating scenario is one of many that happens over and over for new moms. Houston company Milkify, the first breast milk freeze-drying service available direct to consumers, solves that problem and many others. Milkify’s solution is so groundbreaking that it’s being featured on ABC’s hit show, “Shark Tank,” on April 7.

Berkley Luck, Ph.D., molecular biologist, new mom and founder of Milkify, says the most rewarding part of her work is to hear stories like this – and then hear from that same mom that her baby happily gulped down six ounces of freeze-dried breast milk. The same milk that baby had previously refused, now has new life thanks to Milkify’s patent-pending process. This is an actual story from one of their first clients here in Houston.

“My goal in starting Milkify was to allow moms to preserve the nutritional value of their breast milk long term,” Luck says. “It was only after starting Milkify that I realized the many other life-changing benefits of our freeze-drying process, including salvaging high-lipase breast milk. Our one-of-a-kind facility and strict quality controls allow this to happen in a safe environment that is up to the highest standards. We allow no corners to be cut and no compromises to be made when it comes to the safety and quality of our freeze-drying process for breast milk.”

Milkify gives mothers an easy and safe option to freeze-dry their breast milk, extending the life of this precious source of nutrition for up to three years. Freeze-dried breast milk powder is easy to use when parents are on the go, requires no refrigeration, and prevents nutrient degradation caused by long-time freezer storage. Since its founding in 2019, the company has saved over 500,000 ounces of breast milk from the freezer. They make it a simple process for parents with their easy-to-use shipping kits and local drop-off options, handling all aspects of breast milk logistics for their clients – a first-of-its-kind “breast milk concierge.”

After over $1M of investment and months of development, Milkify inaugurated its new flagship location in Houston in October 2022. This is the only GMP-certified processing facility in the U.S. built exclusively for the freeze-drying of human milk. Milkify is the only company with a completely contact-free process (the breast milk never contacts their equipment or utensils). Milkify’s proprietary SafeDry freeze-drying pouches allow water vapor to escape while protecting the breast milk from contamination during processing.

After freeze-drying, each bag of breast milk powder is packaged individually in order to avoid the use of packaging equipment. Trained technicians perform this transfer using sterile techniques in ISO5 cleanroom workstations. This is important because recent FDA inspections of infant formula facilities identified the presence of Cronobacter sakazakii (the same bacteria responsible for several infant formula recalls in 2022) in powder-packaging equipment. Milkify’s process allows the packaging of breast milk powder without the use of this type of equipment.

Not all freeze-drying services are the same. Given the immense effort a mother puts into saving her milk (and the consequences of improper handling), Milkify recommends they look into a service ahead of time and ask thorough questions in order to keep their baby and their breast milk safe. Services operating out of their homes – or outsourcing the freeze-drying to a processing center that also packages other types of foods (including raw meat, dairy, nuts, poultry or pet food) cannot maintain the kind of environment needed to ensure the sterile handling of breast milk. As the only company to have a completely contact-free process from start to finish, Milkify’s safety protocols are sterile, consistent and absolutely safe.

“We started Milkify to give parents a better way to store, use, and transport their breast milk,” said Pedro Silva, the co-founder and CEO of Milkify. “And while we welcome new entrants into this space, it is disappointing that not all breast milk freeze-drying services share Milkify’s commitment to safety and quality. As the string of recent formula recalls has shown us, when it comes to feeding infants – the stakes are high. That is why we urge all parents to thoroughly vet a freeze-drying service and its facilities in order to protect the integrity of their breast milk and the health of their babies.”

If you would like to set up a tour of the one-of-a-kind facility, interview co-founders Berkley Luck and Pedro Silva, or receive video of client stories/be connected to Milkify clients, please contact Jenna Jackson at P+R Creative Group at Jenna@PRCreativeGroup.com or 917 922 8146. Learn much more about Milkify at www.milkify.me.

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out, you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best.

Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that.

That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people.

For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to think who your newest hire is likely to know best. It doesn’t take many rounds through that particular mill until you end up with a relatively homogenous group of people with similar education, socioeconomic backgrounds and values.

If that’s what you’re optimizing for, great! Well done. If it isn’t, perhaps it’s time to stop being lazy and question why warm intros are still common practice.

My question has long been: What are you optimizing for by relying on referrals? If you spend some time thinking about that, I bet you’d unearth some uncomfortable unintended consequences.

Let’s talk about what we can do about it.

The situation in VC

If you read any guides about startups or raising money (including my own, although I also try to cover cold emails and cold intros), you’ll find that you need a “warm introduction” to land a meeting with a VC. Given the above parallel with hiring, that’s a problem.

Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license when you left the house, but these days it’s not so easy: Identity fundamentally underpins how we engage with the digital world, and identity services can take on many forms (and, unfortunately, abuses). I’m excited to host a TechCrunch Live event with Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song, one of the early movers in the space, about how his company identified ID management as an opportunity.

This TechCrunch Live event takes place on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 12:00 p.m. PDT. Register here for Hopin access, where viewers can ask questions and network with other attendees.

Along with Rick, Index Venture’s Mark Goldberg is speaking at the event, too. Mark made a prescient move to spot and back Persona during its Series B fundraise and backed the company again for its $50 million Series C.

Rick Song co-founded Persona with Charles Yeh in 2015, and according to PitchBook, the company’s valuation is $1.5 billion as of Persona’s Series C in 2021. Since its founding, the company’s goal has remained the same: provide users with a verification system to protect and secure identity from theft and fraud. The company raised a Series B in 2021 after seeing revenues jump 10x while users increased 5x. In late 2022, Persona introduced new services, expanding beyond identify verification with the launch of à la carte tools, including a risk assessment engine, an identity workflow tool, a graph database aimed at link analysis and fraud detection, and a marketplace for external developers to help connect their business tools to Persona’s identity tools.

I hope you can join this TechCrunch Live event. Rick and Mark are set to provide actionable insights on how companies can better protect users, and how founders, building such services, can stand out among their competitors.

REGISTER HERE FOR FREE

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elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Generative AI isn’t just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks. Investors and Big Tech alike are betting that it will also affect enterprise infrastructure and cybersecurity, and they are putting money where their mouth is. — Anna

Dev tools plus generative AI

Y Combinator Demo Days are a strong indicator of the trends investors might be interested in — and that’s one of the main reasons why TechCrunch always watches them pretty closely. In its Winter 2023 batch, three areas stood out, the accelerator said: “open source, dev tools and AI.”

Dev tools startups in that batch drew particularly strong interest among investors, with four of them raising additional funding just weeks after Demo Day, Insider reported. AI-related startups, on the other hand, were very popular with founders, representing 34% of the winter cohort.

While these areas can be looked at separately, I’m more interested in how they might overlap, so I called up Israeli VC Rona Segev to see what she had to say — not only because Israel has positioned itself as a hotspot for dev tools, but also because almost half of her portfolio involves AI in some form.

Segev, the co-founder and managing partner of VC firm TLV Partners, thinks that generative AI could lead to innovative ways for companies to explore and manage their infrastructure.

Atlantic City, NJ, April 04, 2023 –(PR.com)– The New Jersey Heroes, the newest professional sports team in Major League Cornhole, are excited to announce their upcoming tryouts for the 2023 season. The “combine” will be held at the Showboat Resort in Atlantic City, NJ on April 22 and 23. The tryouts are open to anyone who wants to showcase their skills and earn a spot on the team.

“We can’t wait to host the tryouts for our team and have the opportunity to see the amazing talent of cornhole players in the area,” said Ralph D’Alessandro, one of the team owners. “We look forward to building a strong team that will bring the championship title home to New Jersey.”

Co-owner Rich Lauletta also expressed excitement about the upcoming tryouts, saying, “We’re excited to see what players will bring to the table. This is an opportunity for players to show their skills and become a part of something that’s going to be big!”

While the tryouts will be held for two days, attendees only need to attend one day to try out. The typical tryout should last an hour, but players are welcome to stick around and enjoy the festivities. The combine promises to be a fun and exciting event, featuring food and drinks, a beer garden, vendors, merchandise, games, and more.

“We want the combine to be an experience that everyone can enjoy, whether they’re trying out for the team or just supporting their friends and family,” said Lauletta. “We’re excited to bring together the cornhole community in New Jersey and celebrate this amazing sport.”

The combine will take place at the Showboat Resort, which has been transformed into a state-of-the-art cornhole arena for the Heroes’ home games. The venue offers a unique and exciting atmosphere for fans and players alike, with plenty of seating, food and drink concessions, and a lively energy that is sure to enhance the tryout experience.

“We’re thrilled to partner with the New Jersey Heroes and host the combine at the Showboat Resort,” said Showboat Resort VP of Marketing, Josh Allison. “Our commitment to providing unforgettable entertainment options to our guests and visitors is only strengthened by this exciting new addition.”

Don’t miss your chance to showcase your cornhole skills and earn a spot on the New Jersey Heroes team. Register now for the combine and join in on the fun and excitement.

You can get your tickets to the tryouts here: https://njheroes.ticketleap.com/combine/

For media inquiries, please contact:
Support@njheroescornhole.com
www.NJheroescornhole.com

Dover, DE, April 04, 2023 –(PR.com)– As Easter 2023 approaches, Virtual Jesus, an AI-powered multifaceted app designed to provide personalized spiritual guidance, comfort, and support to Christians worldwide through its Ask Jesus feature, links to an online bible, and other resources including a community channel designed to connect believers from around the world to promote Christian dialogue and to provide a noticeboard for Christian events.

Easter, the time when Christians around the world celebrate the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, signifies a period of hope, renewal, forgiveness, and rebirth. The Virtual Jesus app aims to bring the essence of this holy occasion into users’ everyday lives, offering a unique way to connect with the bible verses to build their faith and to deepen their understanding of Christ’s message.

The app uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to simulate meaningful conversations with a virtual representation of Jesus, providing users with tailored advice and wisdom based on their individual needs and spiritual concerns. Through these interactions, users can seek guidance on various aspects of their lives, from relationships and personal growth to overcoming challenges and fostering a stronger connection with their faith. The app also seeks to have moderators that are theologically sound so that those individuals seeking personal interactions, can connect with the moderators via the community channel to further explore any of the topics.

“Our goal with Virtual Jesus is to create an intuitive and interactive platform that allows people to engage with the Word of God in a meaningful and personal way,” said Lwazi Zakumba, co-founder/creator of the Virtual Jesus app. “We are proud to introduce this app just in time for Easter, as we believe it will help people around the world find hope, inspiration, and a renewed sense of purpose during this significant time in our world. Our app is not just about Easter, our ultimate goal is to bring the message of Jesus Christ in any form to a lost and a broken world.”

The Virtual Jesus app is now available. To learn more about the app and how it can help users experience the love and guidance of Christ this Easter and beyond, visit www.virtual-jesus.com.

When it comes to cloud growth, it’s probably safe to say that the sky isn’t falling, even though revenue growth rates have been. We’ve seen the aggregate public cloud revenue growth decline from 32% in Q1 last year to 19% this year. That’s a pretty steep drop-off, and it shows that the cloud has run into some headwinds.

As a result, we have seen folks talking about a great repatriation where cloud workloads will move back on-prem, but the evidence doesn’t suggest that’s happening. Instead, companies may be slowing cloud migration as they look at the most efficient way to distribute their workloads.

Clearly, companies have learned that not every workload is well suited to the cloud. Some that can’t deal with even a little bit of latency to get to the cloud and back, for example, need to be hosted on the edge to be closer to the compute source. But it doesn’t look like many IT departments long to go back to the days of racking and stacking new servers.

So why is public cloud growth slowing down? Customers have started to look at their hefty cloud bills, with budgets coming under ever more intensive review this year, looking for ways to cut costs, which Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky acknowledged in the company’s earnings call with analysts this week.

“Enterprise customers continued their multidecade shift to the cloud while working closely with our AWS teams to thoughtfully identify opportunities to reduce costs and optimize their work,” he said during the call. In CFO speak, that means that they aren’t abandoning the cloud, but they are taking a hard look at expenses, which is having a pretty significant impact on the company’s cloud growth numbers.

He added that the slowing growth could continue for a couple more quarters, but that overall customers are still high on the cloud. “So far in the first month of the year, AWS year-over-year revenue growth is in the midteens. That said, stepping back, our new customer pipeline remains healthy and robust, and there are many customers continuing to put plans in place to migrate to the cloud and commit to AWS over the long term.”

By now, the value proposition of the cloud, regardless of the vendor, is clear. It allows a level of flexibility that just isn’t possible when you run your own data center, and running your own data center is expensive and requires an entirely different set of skills from running cloud workloads.

So what does all this mean for the cloud infrastructure market revenue growth? If the data is right, it’s going to be fine. It just looks a little dicey in the short term.

India’s crime-fighting agency searched three premises of edtech giant Byju’s and its founder Byju Raveendran, it said Saturday, and seized various “incriminating” documents and digital data.

The Enforcement Directorate said it conducted the searches under the provisions of the nation’s anti-money laundering law, but declined to elaborate. The agency has conducted several similar probes in recent months, including at crypto firms WazirX and CoinSwitch Kuber, phonemaker Vivo and news broadcaster the BBC.

The agency said “various” complaints from private individuals prompted the investigation. As part of the probe into Byju’s, which is ongoing, ED said it summoned Raveendran “several” times but the founder “remained evasive and never appeared during the investigation.”

The probe has so far found that Byju’s raised about $3.4 billion in foreign direct investment during the period of 2011 to 2023. During this period, the startup remitted about $1.1 billion to foreign entities and labeled about $115 million as advertisement and marketing expense.

It appears that part of what prompted ED to conduct the investigation was the delayed filing of annual financials by Byju’s. The so-called findings — how much money Byju’s raised, and later invested in overseas units — have been widely disclosed by Byju’s and reported by media earlier.

“The company has not prepared its financial statements since financial year 2020-21 and has not got the accounts, audited which is mandatory. Hence, the genuineness of the figures provided by the company are being cross examined from the banks,” ED said in a statement Sunday.

The Bengaluru-headquartered Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup and which counts BlackRock, Sequoia India, Lightspeed Venture Partners India, UBS among its backers, termed the searches by the agency as “a routine inquiry,” and said the startup maintains complete transparency with the authorities.

“We have nothing but the utmost confidence in the integrity of our operations, and we are committed to upholding the highest standards of compliance and ethics. We will continue to work closely with the authorities to ensure that they have all the information they need, and we are confident that this matter will be resolved in a timely and satisfactory manner. We want to emphasize that it is business as usual at Byju’s,” a spokesperson of Byju’s legal team said in a statement.

“We are committed to delivering high-quality educational products and services to our customers across India and the world. We remain focused on our mission to transform the way students learn and prepare for their future.”

ED’s statement comes at a time when Byju’s is closing a large funding round and is gearing up for the IPO of its subsidiary unit physical tutor chain Aakash.

Tempe, AZ, April 04, 2023 –(PR.com)– A freeze dried breast milk service launches in Tempe, Arizona.

BoobieJuice is a freeze dried breast milk company that takes a mothers very own breast milk and freeze dries it into compact and convenient pouches. Freeze drying is an all natural process that removes all of the water and creates a nutrient dense powder. The breast milk powder doesn’t need refrigeration, halts lipase breakdown, and is individually packaged in the mothers original breast milk pouch serving sizes. It is great for on the go, busy parents and travel.

“We are excited to bring this service to the Valley,” said founder Lisa Bartlett. “I wanted to provide a way for moms to save their hard earned breast milk for an extended period of time.” Freeze drying stops the degradation of fats and protein that normally occurs with storing frozen breast milk in the freezer. “Our priority is creating the highest quality and safest product for your baby.” It is easily rehydrated back to liquid breast milk by adding warm water. The freeze dried breast milk powder can also be used to fortify your baby or toddler’s foods.

BoobieJuice is located in Tempe, Arizona. Customers can drop off their breast milk stash or ship to them using one of their specialty shipping kits. They currently service the entire United States, Puerto Rico, Canada and other international markets. BoobieJuice offers freeze drying service packages starting at 40oz and can accommodate large volume (2000+) custom stash orders.

For additional information, pricing and details, visit boobiejuice.com.

Ethiopians suing Meta for failing to adequately moderate content that amplified violence that left over half-a-million people dead during the Tigray War have been granted the go-ahead to serve the social media giant outside Kenya. This is the latest case that seeks to compel Facebook to stop amplifying violent, hateful and inciteful posts.

A Kenyan court on Thursday granted petitioners leave to serve Meta in California, U.S., after they failed to trace the social media giant’s office locally. It emerged that while Meta has business operations in Kenya, it doesn’t have a physical office, as its local employees work remotely.

The decision lays the groundwork for the beginning of a lawsuit filed in December last year by Kenyan rights group Katiba Institute, and Ethiopian researchers Fisseha Tekle and Abrham Meareg. Meareg’s father, professor Meareg Amare Abrha, was killed during the Tigray War after posts on Facebook doxed and called for violence against him, the lawsuit alleges.

The petitioners seek to compel Meta to stop viral hate on Facebook, ramp up content review at the moderation hub in Kenya, and to create a $1.6 billion compensation fund.

The petitioners allege that Facebook’s algorithm amplified hateful and inciteful posts that drew more interactions and kept users logged in for longer.

They claim Facebook “under-invested” in human content review at the hub in Kenya, risking lives as it ignored, rejected or acted sluggishly to take down posts that also violated its community standards.

Meareg said his family has firsthand experience of how flawed content moderation could endanger lives, and break up families.

He claims his father was murdered after Meta failed to act on repeated requests to take down posts that targeted him and other Tigrayans, as calls for massacre against the ethnic group spread online and offline. The Tigray War, which lasted two years, erupted in November 2020 after the Ethiopian army clashed with Tigray forces, leaving 600,000 people dead.

“My father was killed because posts published on Facebook identified him, accused him falsely, leaked the address of where he lives and called for his death,” said Meareg, a former PhD student, adding that he was forced to flee the country and seek asylum in the U.S. after his father’s death.

“My father’s case is not an isolated one. Around the time of the posts and his death, Facebook was saturated with hateful, inciteful and dangerous posts…many other tragedies like ours have taken place,” he said.

Meta declined to comment.

Meareg says he reported the posts he came across, but his reports were either rejected or ignored. He claims to have reported several posts in 2021, including one that contained dead bodies, and some of those posts were still on the social site by the time he went to court last December.

He faulted Facebook’s content review, saying the hub in Kenya had only 25 moderators responsible for Amharic, Tigrinya and Oromo content, which left out 82 other languages without personnel to moderate.

Meta previously told TechCrunch that it employed teams and technology to help it remove hate speech and incitement, and that it had partners and staff with local knowledge to help it develop methods to catch violating content.

“A flaw has been allowed to grow within Facebook, transforming it into a weapon for spreading hatred, violence and even genocide,” said Martha Dark, director of Foxglove, a tech justice NGO supporting the case. “Meta could take real action, today, to pull the plug on hatred spreading across Facebook.”

This is not the first time Meta is being accused of fueling violence in Ethiopia. Whistleblower Frances Haugen previously accused it of “literally fanning ethnic violence” in Ethiopia, and a Global Witness investigation also noted that Facebook was poor at detecting hate speech in the main language of Ethiopia.

Currently, social media platforms including Facebook remain blocked in Ethiopia since early February after state-led plans to split Ethiopian Orthodox Tewhado Church caused anti-government protests.

Adding to Meta’s troubles in Kenya

Meta is facing three lawsuits in Kenya.

The company and its content review partner in sub-Saharan Africa, Sama, were sued in Kenya last May for exploitation and union busting by Daniel Motaung, a former content moderator.

Motaung claimed to have been fired by Sama for organizing a 2019 strike that sought to unionize Sama’s employees. He was suing Meta and Sama for forced labor, exploitation, human trafficking, unfair labor relations, union busting and failure to provide “adequate” mental health and psychosocial support.

Meta sought to have its name struck off the suit, saying Motaung was not its employee, and that the Kenyan court had no jurisdiction over it. However, it failed to stop the lawsuit after the court ruled that it had a case to answer, as some aspects of how the company operates in the country make it liable. The social media giant has appealed the court’s decision.

Earlier this month, Meta was sued alongside Sama and another content review partner, Majorel, by 183 content moderators who alleged they were laid off unlawfully and blacklisted. The moderators claimed they were fired by Sama unlawfully after it wound down its content review arm, and that Meta instructed its new Luxembourg-based partner, Majorel, to blacklist ex-Sama content moderators.

Meta sought to be struck out of this case as well, but last week, the Kenyan court said it had jurisdiction over employer-employee disputes and “matters of alleged unlawful and unfair termination of employment on grounds of redundancy” and that it had power “to enforce alleged violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms” by Meta, Sama and Majorel.