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Electric vehicle charging management systems are usually end-to-end solutions for managing EV charging operations, billing, energy, drivers, and even fleets. This means EV charging service providers can optimize the monetization of their operations. A number of players have proliferated over the last few years. Driivz from Israel has raised $23.1M in VC funding to date and was recently selected by Shell to run its charging and smart energy management platform. Greenflux from the Netherlands has pulled in €11M. Then there’s ChargeLab (raised $20.4M) out of Canada, Monta (€50M) out of Denmark, and EV Energy ($13.5M) out of the UK. Meanwhile, originally hailing from Sofia, Bulgaria, but now with operations across Europe, is Ampeco , a startup which until now hasn’t popped up on the VC funding radar with its own EV charging management platform. That changes today with the news that Ampeco has raised a series A round of $13M led by BMW iVentures, taking its total raised to...

In Korea, its target audience is more youthful than that of many other Hyundai models, which explains why the Casper is only sold online. And this brings us to another reason we don’t get the model: it’s really popular in Korea. The country’s car market is unusually broad, a melting pot of American- and Chinese-influenced saloons with European-influenced hatchbacks and SUVs. Electric cars, denoted in Korea by a light blue numberplate, are still relatively rare. And as the de facto national car firm, Hyundai straddles all of it – and the Casper is the model it’s using to capture young city dwellers. Spend any time in traffic in Seoul – and if you’ve spent any time in Seoul, you’ve spent time in traffic – and you’ll see a significant number of Caspers on the road. The diminutive size, modern styling and neat LED lighting help it to stand out, and there’s not much else like it. The only real class rivals come from within the Hyundai Motor Group, with the Kia Morning ...

Suneeta Kohli, a female Uber driver in New Delhi, had her account suddenly disabled one evening while she was en route to pick up a rider in a southern part of the capital city. “I was reaching the destination, but it took some time due to heavy traffic. The ride eventually got canceled. But after that, my account was blocked,” she recalled. Kohli, who has been driving for Uber for nearly four years and covers a distance of 112-124 miles daily, received a message saying her account had been blocked due to “an excessive number of fraudulent trips.” Kohli claimed that she had not taken any such fraudulent trips but pointed out the blocking happened to occur just days after participating in the country’s first women-driver strike in the capital in December. She was one of the prominent faces during the hours-long protest. As the sole earner in her family and a single parent of two daughters, Kohli said she often avoids taking leaves because it significantly impacts her house...

One of the few Canadian venture capital firms led by a woman is aiming to raise $100-million for its second fund after backing two of the country’s most successful women-led software startups. Vancouver’s Pender Ventures, an arm of PenderFund Capital Management Ltd., has raised half of the target for the fund, or $50-million, backed by past investors Export Development Canada and Vancouver City Savings Credit Union, and newcomers BMO Capital Partners, Kinsted Wealth Inc., Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CM-T and affiliate Pender Growth Fund PTF-X. The second fund has already raised twice as much as Pender’s first, a $25-million investing vehicle. Pender Ventures, led by managing partner Maria Pacella, has also expanded nationally, hiring former Real Ventures partner Isaac Souweine, and principal Meryeme Lahmami, previously with BDC Capital’s Women in Tech venture fund, both in Montreal. Guillermo Freire, senior vice-president of mid-market with EDC, said the Crown corporation back...

Ryan Standil is a former lawyer and the owner of Write To Excite. He leads workshops for businesses and governments about effective writing in the workplace. Eric Janssen teaches sales and entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School at Western University in London, Ont. Have you ever tried to e-mail a busy person who was unfamiliar with you? Maybe you were searching for a job, seeking advice or hoping to make a sale. A study of two million e-mail users revealed the long odds of obtaining a response: On average, people who receive fewer than 100 e-mails a day respond to 25 per cent of them, and people who receive at least 100 e-mails a day respond to just 5 per cent. Fortunately, you can boost your response rate by applying proven techniques. These techniques are traditionally associated with what are known as “cold e-mails,” but they are also helpful for reaching out on platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram. The next time you write a cold e-mail, focus on three actions to elicit...

A skin crafted from two layers of electrodes around an ion-infused sponge is better at sensing than human skin because it can detect nearby objects and what they are made of Technology 25 January 2023 By Chris Stokel-Wal...

The Renault Espace will be reborn as an electrified family SUV for 2023, it has been confirmed, ahead of an unveiling in the coming weeks.  Utilising the flexible CMF-CD platform that underpins the new Nissan X-Trail and smaller Renault Austral, it's expected to be a stretched version of the latter. An Austral-based prototype with an extended rear portion was previously spotted testing on public roads, and this is now thought to have been the new Espace. It looked identical to the Austral ahead of the C-pillars, but the rear end featured more pronounced overhangs and a less steeply raked window in order to increase boot space and make room for the third row. The new Espace’s gold badging, shown in a new official preview image, hints that it will use the same hybrid powertrain as the Austral: a 1.2-litre three-cylinder turbo petrol engine and an electric motor, combining for 157bhp or 197bhp, depending on specification. This set-up yields up to 61.4mpg on the WLTP combined ...

Bank towers at the four corners of King St. West and Bay St. are photographed on Oct 1 2018. Clockwise from top left are Bank of Montreal, TD, CIBC and ScotiaBank. Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail As Canada’s big banks wrapped up their past fiscal year and looked forward into a period of economic uncertainty, they forecast that things were going to be … pretty okay, actually. I wasn’t eavesdropping in the boardrooms. Instead, I’ve surveyed the fine print of the banks’ securities filings, which detail some of the economic projections they use to forecast potential loan losses. All of the banks give some degree of insight into their estimates of Canada’s gross domestic product, unemployment rate and housing prices for the following 12 months. And as of Oct. 31, only one – Royal Bank of Canada RY-T – thought the economy would contract, to the tune of 0.2 per cent. The rest were still putting GDP growth in their “base case” – or most likely – scenarios. We could call those forecasts “the good...

Oil prices settled largely unchanged on Wednesday after government data showed a smaller-than-anticipated build in U.S. crude inventories, countering weak economic data from Tuesday. Brent crude futures settled at $86.12 a barrel, down a cent, while the U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures settled at $80.15 a barrel, up by 2 cents. The Brent benchmark had dropped 2.3% and WTI futures slipped 1.8% in Tuesday’s session after data showed U.S. business activity contracted in January for the seventh straight month, raising concerns about an economic slowdown. “End of the day here, the market is starting to get a little more anxious about the economy and things along those lines,” Mizuho analyst Robert Yawger said. “Main worry at this point is demand destruction due to an economic slowdown.” WTI prices briefly rose by over $1 per barrel on Wednesday after the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said that U.S. crude inventories rose by 533,000 barrels in the last week to 448...

Microsoft MSFT-Q said on Wednesday it had recovered all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe. Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit. By late morning Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN). An outage of Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and over 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform. Businesses have become increasingly dependent on online platforms after the pandemic caused a shift to more employees working from home. Earlier, Microsoft said it had determined a network connectivity issue was oc...

Britain’s competition regulator said on Wednesday it had started the first phase of an investigation into U.S. chipmaker Broadcom Inc’s AVGO-Q $61 billion acquisition of cloud-computing firm VMware Inc. VMW-N The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said in November it was investigating whether the deal between the two U.S.-listed companies could substantially hurt competition in Britain, adding that it had until March 22 to decide. The Broadcom-VMware deal was one of the biggest announcements globally in 2022, marking the chipmaker’s attempt to diversify into the enterprise software segment. Tech deals have drawn intense scrutiny from regulators around the world on concerns over too much market clout in the hands of a few firms and the possibility of bigger companies acquiring startups only to shut them down. Broadcom and VMware did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. https://www.tausiinsider.com/u-k-competition-watchdog-probes-61-billion-broadcom-vmwar...