Facebook is deeply appreciated by its employees. It ranked as the best tech company to work for in 2017 and came in second among U.S. companies overall behnd Bain , according to a new report from Glassdoor. The ninth annual list is based on employee reviews posted on the job site from Nov. 2, 2015 to Oct. 30, 2016. More about this here. Meanwhile, the anti-aging pill of the future is here. Elysium Health markets a pill formulated with ingredients it says will keep you feeling young . According to Techcrunch, the startup has closed on $20 million in Series B financing and it has $157 million valuation led by General Catalyst and participation from an ARCH Venture Partners investor.  French VC firm Partech Ventures announced that they closed their seed fund of $107 million (€100 million) for early stage startups. Partech Entrepreneur II is focusing on seed rounds, and the firm plans to invest in 80 different startups. Hosting giant GoDaddy has just announced a big deal. GoDaddy has acquired European rival Host Europe Group (HEG) for $1.8 billion — including €605 million paid to existing Host Europe shareholders, and €1.08 billion in assumed debt.  

Amazon plans to totally change the way we go to supermarkets. The company presented a concept for a physical store in a video. The store, called Amazon Go, doesn't work like a typical Walmart or supermarket — instead, it's designed so that shoppers will use an app, also called Amazon Go, to automatically add the products they plan to buy to a digital shopping cart; they can then walk out of the building without waiting in a checkout line. Learn more for this from Business Insider here. German hotel booking site Trivago updated its plans for a U.S. IPO in a filing that came out on Monday. The company expects to price its shares between $13 to $15, a $428 million offering at the top end of the range. For more on this, click here. Uber has acquired Geometric Intelligence, a startup co-founded by academic researchers with AI experience, and its team will provide the core for a new central AI lab being established at Uber’s SF HQ. You can read more about it here. According to a report from Recode, the GV (nee Google Ventures) founder/former-CEO Bill Maris is raising $230 million for the project Section 32 -  new healthcare-focused venture fund. Learn more about it here.  

Electric cars are one of the hottest topics right now in the business world. But there are also hydrogen cars.  A Utah-based startup is trying to revolutionize the trucking industry with hydrogen power.  Nikola Motor Company unveiled its hydrogen-powered truck, the Nikola One. The truck primarily relies on hydrogen fuel cells, but also comes with a 320 kWh battery, to achieve a range of 1,200 miles. Of course, there is a long way to go until hydrogen cars eliminate all the hurdles in front. See more here. A startup that wants to transform insurance 'beyond recognition' has added $33 million to its war chest, according to Business Insider. In December 2015, the insurance startup Lemonade raised $13 million in seed funding — the largest ever seed investment by legendary Silicon Valley firm Sequoia capital. Learn more about it here. Stefan Stokic, a 15-year old high school sophomore from Jackson, Mississippi, is working 130 hour per week for his dream. Stokic already has a startup called Slik, cofounded by fellow 14-year old student Soroush Ghondsi, and is connected with a bunch of high-profile Silicon Valley investors who are closely following their budding careers. Read more about the wonderboy here.

Early-stage venture firm Network Society Ventures has snagged TechShop’s former CEO and co-founder Mark Hatch as general partner. Hatch is recognized as a pioneer of the maker movement, is a current entrepreneur in residence at UC Berkeley, and is a former Green Beret.

 

Sean Parker, the charismatic billionaire and former President of Facebook, hase a new mission. Cancerous tumors carry certain markers called neoantigens and Parker wants to use algorithms to find them in the search for a vaccine.  To do so, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy will work with more than 30 public and private pharmaceutical, biotech, cancer research nonprofits and academic institutions through a partnership with the Cancer Research Institute to use predictive algorithms to help uncover new cancer neoantigens found coded in DNA. In other news, A Redwood City, Calif. startup called Neurotrack Technologies Inc. has created a brain health app that is helping scientists unravel the mysteries of memory, and work to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. It can detect signs of deteriorating brain health years before the first symptoms. Read more about it here. Meanwhile, Twitter has a new VP of Product, named Keith Coleman, who was until now CEO of Yes, Inc., startup acquired today by the big company.  Bullpen Capital, a venture firm that specializes in post-seed stage deals, has closed its third fund at $75 million. The company invests in startups that previously closed a seed round of investment and showed solid signs of traction, but have been dubbed too early for traditional VCs. Seismologists at UC Berkeley released MyShake, an app that passively monitors for seismic activity, both watching for earthquakes and warning users if one is underway. In the months since its introduction, the app has outperformed its creators’ expectations, detecting over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries. Read more about the important app here.

Fitness wearable creator Fitbit is in the process of acquiring smartwatch maker Pebble in a deal that will likely spell the end of the Pebble brand. VentureBeat has learned that the sale price will be between $34 million and $40 million. Pebble had some problems recently, but more about the deal here. Meanwhile, real estate startup OpenDoor received huge $210 million Series D investment from Norwest Venture partners. With the new capital, the company wants to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes, Techcrunch points out. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project home resale value are complicated, the experience for buyers and sellers is fairly streamlined. And let's talk about closing venture funds. Accel India has closed its fifth fund with $450 million, roughly two years after closing its fourth fund with $325 million, read about it here. Singapore’s Jungle Ventures today confirmed the final close of its newest $100 million fund for investments in Southeast Asia. Founder Collective, the seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based seed-stage venture fund, has closed its third fund with $75 million in capital from a small group of limited partners whose anchor investors are the the firm’s three partners: David Frankel, Micah Rosenbloom and Eric Paley. Three members Genesis Partners are starting a new venture fund. F2 Capital, founded by Eddy Shalev, Jonathan “Jonny” Saacks and Barak Rabinowitz, is in the midst of closing a $50 million debut fund to back seed stage companies. And finally, after raising $300 million from Volkswagen earlier this year, on-demand ride service Gett is getting another tranche of financing. Today the company announced that it has secured a $100 million, seven-year loan facility from Russia’s Sberbank.

In line with the most interesting news from the day, we'll share with you the stories that matter in the business and technology. Webit.Festival speaker Francois Chopard and his venture fund called Starburst Ventures has raised a $200 million debut fund to invest in early stage aerospace startups over the next three years. The fund is an extension of the Starburst Accelerator, which was founded in 2012 to help aviation and aerospace tech startups raise seed funding, and score their first big deal with a corporate customer, typically representing $1 million or more in revenue. Read more about it here. Meanwhile, one of the few remaining alternative mobile OS platforms, Jolla’s Sailfish OS, made a deal with the Russian government. Today the Finnish company which develops and maintains the core code, with the aim of licensing it to others, announced Sailfish has achieved domestic certification in Russia for government and corporate use. More about the alternative of Android, here. One in five people have suffered from depression, one in two will suffer some other mental disturbance in their lifetimes. If you haven’t been through a mental health issue, you will likely know someone who has. After encountering it in amongst those closest to her, former international model Silja Litvin decided to do something about it, launching a special app. Learn more about it here. A new joint venture between major carmakers will attempt to make it easier to get around Europe using electric cars, thanks to a network of chargers with up to 350 kW charging capacity, which could drastically reduce overall charging times compared to what’s available today. The team-up includes BMW, Daimler, Ford and Volkswagen, and plans for roll-out of the fast-charging stations call for installations to start in 2017. Read about it here. Mobileye and Delphi announced a partnership to build an affordable self-driving car platform it could sell to automakers starting in 2019 earlier this year, and now Intel is joining the two automative suppliers to provide the chips used in their autonomous system.

Have a look at some of the interesting news from today, regarding the tech and business world. First of all, we should point out the 100 million euro raised by Devialet,  the French developer of high-end speakers and the IP behind the sound systems that make them go boom.  The investment comes from Foxconn, Jay-Z, Rubin's Playground and even more investors. See more about it here. And let's talk about wireless VR, sounds like a fantasy, right? Well, the researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) may have a solution in MoVr, a wireless virtual reality system. Instead of using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to transmit data, the research team’s MoVR system uses high-frequency millimeter wave radio to stream data from a computer to a headset wirelessly at dramatically faster speeds than traditional technology. Learn more about it here. Meanwhile,  one of the hedge fund industry's hottest new funds is betting on Disney. Samantha Greenberg's Margate Capital Management is investing in Walt Disney Company – even as many peers are shedding the stock. If you want to see more about the interesting investment, click here. Proficio, a cybersecurity startup specializing in managed detection and response (MDR) services, has raised $12 million in a round led by Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. More about it here. About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg. Contact: Aniela Russeva

aniela@webitcongress.com

   

Meet the founder Nadine Levitt and her Wurrly, helping you turn your phone into a professional recording studio. 300 000 users with 1.5 million recording sessions did it already.

Nadine Levitt, who will be speaking during Webit.Festival 2017, is a professional opera singer and if the name doesn’t ring any bells in your mind, you should know that she performed on one stage with people like Steven Tyler, David Foster, Christina Perri and Roger Daltry. So, she decided to create Wurrly, trying to erase some of the barriers for entry in the professional music world. Wurrly is an app, which transforms your phone into a recording studio – easy to use and delivering HQ records of performances on it. That’s an easy way to record good performances without paying huge sums for studio time. All you have to do is download Wurrly. “Location and economic differences should not be a barrier to entry for self-expression,” says Nadine about her try to disrupt the sector.

So here is the answer : because more than 80 % of all jobs and professions will be totally transformed within next 5-10 years. And we have to be ready so to take the advantage. It's not bad – it's just challenging and since yo read this and attend Webit – you will be among the prepared once.

And if you are still not impressed, Wurrly had already collaborated with the 'Lip Sync Battle’show, hosted by LL Cool J and airing on Spike TV. As we all know, celebrities appear on the show lip-syncing worldwide hits for the amusement of the audience. This is the place, where Channing Tatum is channeling Beyoncé, Joseph Gordon-Levitt can be seen performing as Janet Jackson, Anne Hathaway as Miley Cyrus and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson searching for his inner Taylor Swift personality. The app is based exactly on Wurrly’s engine and will help fans of the show record themselves and this way become part of the fun, challenging each other to a lip-sync duel. For just one year, Wurrly has tracked more than 1.5 million recording sessions and over 300,000 users. So, Nadine can really tell us more about her way of changing ways music is made, we are really impatient to hear more on the topic. About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg. Contact: Aniela Russeva

aniela@webitcongress.com

Keeping you in touch with the latest news from tech and business world, these are the stories we want to show you today:   1. With Thanksgiving Day in full swing, many are turning to the internet to get their holiday shopping started. Adobe is tracking e-commerce transactions in real time, and it said that by 5pm Eastern time online retailers had clocked up $1.15 billion in sales, up 13.6% on a year ago.  You can read more about it here. 2. Twitter's Anthony Noto is getting a hefty stock package worth up to $12 million per year to take on a larger role as Chief Operating Officer of the struggling internet company.  You can read more about it here. 3. Secretive big data firm Palantir Technologies  raised another 20 million dollars. The $20 million figure is a curiously low amount for a company that led an $880 million round of funding last December, has raised more than $2 billion total, and is said to be valued at $20 billion as a whole. More about it here. 4. Imagine a laptop you don't need to charge for over a year. This could become reality after engineers from the University of Cambridge have created an ultra low power transistor that can run for a long time without a power source. More about it here. 5. The founding story of Spectacles — how a small glasses startup that struggled to raise money turned into the future of $25 billion Snapchat. Read more about Erick Miller here. 

BASSCOM, the industry association of leading Bulgarian software development companies, presented today its annual report on the IT industry in the country. Among the guests during the press conference was Mrs Aniela Russeva, Senior Vice President of the Webit Global Series.

Georgi Zahariev, member of the Managing Board of BASSCOM, pointed out that the annual turnover of the members of the association is now over 1 billion US Dollars. Another interesting fact is the growth of the software industry in Bulgaria – 16.9% for 2015, 5 times more the growth of the country’s GDP. The members of BASSCOM also reported 278 milion leva of paid taxes during the last year. Outsourcing companies have a growth of 21% during 2015 – 217 million leva – an all-time record for the country. The people, working in the industry, are 19 000 and that makes it one of the most effective in the country. BASSCOM provided information that the salaries in the industry are 4 times bigger than the average in Bulgaria.

BASSCOM is a long term partner of the Global Webit Series of events and they both as communities support the growth of the market and industry and help the establishment of Bulgaria as a hub for the region of CEE, which already was proven by the title given to Sofia as The Digital Capital of the New Markets by Forbes after last edition of Webit in Sofia. BASSCOM also stated that in all industries there is already a need of IT specialists since all businesses are now transforming or started to adapt to the digital economy. Thus BASSCOM also announced a launch of special pilot of educational programme for IT specialists that will start not in the Universities but in the secondary school. First results will be visible on the market in the near future, when more young people will be ready to be part of the continuing growth of the industry in the country. We expect more companies to relocate their operations for the CEE region in Bulgaria as we have all the ingredients needed.

About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here.