TECHCRUNCH.COM — It’s official — applications are now open for TC Top Picks at Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place on 11-12 December. This pre-conference competition is your chance to experience Disrupt Berlin VIP-style and exhibit your early-stage startup to some of the world’s most influential tech leaders, investors and media outlets across Europe, Asia and beyond — for free.

HBR.ORG — I recently helped a large industrial manufacturing company with its strategic planning process. With so much uncertainty surrounding autonomous vehicles, 5G, robotics, global trade, and the oil markets, the company’s senior leaders needed a set of guiding objectives and strategies linking the…

ECONOMIST.COM — THRONGS OF YOUNG people roam around the makeshift booths in an exhibition hall in northern Beijing. They are at a job fair organised by the municipal government, aimed at unemployed college graduates. Like most jobseekers in attendance, Su Jian has brought along a stack of CVs to hand out to…

ECONOMIST.COM — THE AMAZON basin, most of which sits within the borders of Brazil, contains 40% of the world’s tropical forests and accounts for 10-15% of the biodiversity of Earth’s continents. Since the 1970s nearly 800,000km² of Brazil’s original 4m km² (1.5m square miles) of Amazon forest has been lost to…

ECONOMIST.COM — YARUB IKHDEH and his friends had been waiting half their lives to get on a bus. The six young men had never left Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt since 2007. They grew up in a territory where half the population is jobless and at least 70% rely on aid to survive. “We’re all…

ECONOMIST.COM — LIKE MOST citizens of Central America’s northern-triangle countries, Hondurans have reasons to flee. Gangs terrorise them. Jobs pay poorly. Many of the half-million Hondurans in the United States urge relatives to come. Since October, Mexican and American border agents have detained a 30th of…

TECHCRUNCH.COM — A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn. Japan Post Capital has led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.The company, founded in Tokyo in 2012, boasts 20 million monthly active users in the U.and Japan.

ECONOMIST.COM — ALTHOUGH ITS cradle is the sparsely wooded savannah, humankind has long looked to forests for food, fuel, timber and sublime inspiration. Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against…

MASHABLE.COM — Technology is always transforming language and communication. After all, it’s thanks to predictive text and autocorrect that a word as innocent as “duck” became synonymous with “fuck.” Online text for many of us is now our primary form of communication. So necessarily, web culture started breaking all the traditional rules of grammar to make it better fit the medium, with trends like the extra space before punctuation …

SOCIALMEDIATODAY.COM — Last December, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was re-launching its search ads after a five year absence. And this week, access to Facebook’s new search ad option appears to have been significantly expanded, with a range of Facebook advertisers reported that ‘Search’ is now an option within their Ad Placements tools.

TECHCRUNCH.COM — Fever, a startup that uses proprietary algorithms to help companies plan events, announced today that it has raised $35 million led by Rakuten Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet giant . Other investors in the round, which brings total raised to $70 million, included Atresmedia, Accel and Michael Zeisser, the former chairman of U.investments for Alibaba Group.

ECONOMIST.COM — REVEALINGLY OFTEN, when foreigners meet Chinese leaders the encounter is a pain in the neck. The cause is not mysterious. For reasons that may involve both high culture and low political calculation, important visitors to China are typically invited to sink into one of a pair of side-by-side…

MASHABLE.COM — Though Google’s browser is the most popular browser by an overwhelming margin, there are some good reasons to switch, especially if you care about privacy. The Washington Post recently described Chrome as “a lot like surveillance software,” citing the browser’s habit of automatically signing you in if you use Gmail in order to serve better targeted advertising.

ADWEEK.COM — The $5 billion fine Facebook agreed to pay to the Federal Trade Communications in a settlement over privacy issues had no bearing on the company’s second-quarter financial results, which were reported earlier this week. Facebook reported revenue of $16.886 billion, up 28% from $13.231 billion in…

TECHCRUNCH.COM — Yoti, the London startup offering a digital identity platform and app that lets you prove who you say you are when accessing services or making age verified purchases, has raised £8 million in additional funding. Backing the round is unnamed private investors, Yoti employees, and Robin Tombs, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, who previously founded and exited online gambling company Gamesys.

TECHCRUNCH.COM — in July, French television company Canal+ acquired the ROK film studio from VOD company IROKOtv. Canal+ would not disclose the acquisition price, but confirmed there was a cash component of the deal. Founded by in 2010 — and backed by $45 million in VC — IROKOtv boasts the world’s largest online catalog of Nollywood: a Nigerian movie genre that has become Africa’s de facto film industry and one of the largest globally (by production volume).

BLOG.HOOTSUITE.COM — Blog / Social Everyone wants to know how to make money on Instagram. We’re all on it all day anyways—usually spending money instead of earning it. In the past few years, Instagram’s endless feed of gorgeous photos has evolved into something between a glossy magazine, your best…

LOLLYDASKAL.COM — Everyone struggles at times with self-doubt, but that struggle can be especially difficult for people in leadership. Leaders are expected to always be self-assured, assertive and poised. But what happens when you begin to doubt your own abilities? What can you do when you’re worried you don’t…

FASTCOMPANY.COM — Of course, mental models can be highly useful. If you want to lose weight, altering your diet will likely lead to results. Mental models also help us to organize the world’s endless details and to make more intelligent decisions. But they can also be limiting and lead to blind spots in our perspective.

SOCIALMEDIATODAY.COM — Social media is always changing, and not just in terms of new algorithm updates or platform features, but also in relation to usage, and where people’s attentions lie. In the past, for example, your best bet on social would have been to establish profiles for your brand on Facebook and Twitter, with others taking a lesser priority, but now that may not necessarily be the case, depending on your business.