Plugo, an e-commerce support platform for D2C brands in Southeast Asia, picks up $9M Series A

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Singapore-headquartered startup Plugo has secured $9 million in a Series A funding round. The company offers a complete spectrum of e-commerce support services for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, from making a website, setting up a payment system, and managing marketing to handling shipping, warehousing, and logistics. In other words, Plugo enables D2C merchants to focus on … Read more

OECD adopts declaration on trusted government access to private sector data

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A notable development for the fraught issue of cross-border data flows from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Wednesday: After two years of closed-door discussions, the intergovernmental organization has adopted a declaration on government access to data held by private sector entities. The declaration, which has been adopted by the 38 OECD countries … Read more

Parsing LastPass’ data breach notice

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Two weeks ago, the password manager giant LastPass disclosed its systems were compromised for a second time this year. Back in August, LastPass found that an employee’s work account was compromised to gain unauthorized access to the company’s development environment, which stores some of LastPass’ source code. LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said the hacker’s activity … Read more

Daily Crunch: Twitter backpedals on CEO’s promise, permanently bans user who tracked his private jet

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To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello, and happy Wednesday! As I write this, I am also enjoying a virtual “holiyay” celebration with my fellow TechCrunchers. Haje is leaving on a jet plane, but he’ll be back tomorrow. … Read more

Frustration and anger after SPV platform Assure dumps users at the curb ahead of holidays

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Over the last decade or so, the once-clubby world of startup investing has been cracked open wide by a number of innovations, including special purpose vehicles (SPVs), which are essentially pop-up venture funds that come together quickly with monies from all kinds of accredited investors — from institutions to VCs to dentists — to nab … Read more

Apple’s Emergency SOS via satellite prompts rescue after car goes off a cliff north of LA

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Apple’s new “Emergency SOS” service that lets off-grid iPhone users call for help via satellite has led to what may very well be its first successful rescue operation, certainly the first to be documented live. As related by the Montrose Search & Rescue Team, which conducted the operation, two people were in a vehicle driving … Read more

Google’s making code formatting a breeze in Docs

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Code blocks in Docs. | Illustration: The Verge Google Docs is getting a new feature that will make it easier to show code in an easy-to-understand way. The company announced that it’s adding code blocks to its “smart canvas” system, which will automatically add the proper spacing and color-coding for a variety of programming languages, … Read more

Twitter bans @ElonJet’s creator and links to other Elon Jet trackers

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Twitter doesn’t seem to like the jet-tracker’s creator. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Hours after suspending @ElonJet, an account that tracked the trips taken by Elon Musk’s private plane, Twitter has now banned the account’s creator, Jack Sweeney. Twitter is also blocking links to versions of the tracker on other platforms, like … Read more

How researchers recorded the sounds of a Martian dust devil for the first time

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A dust devil captured by instruments on the Perseverance rover. From the study authors: “These are images taken of the direct dust devil encounter by the rover’s Navigation Camera (Navcam). The images have been processed to show the quantity of dust. The colour scale ranges from lowest dust content (blue) to highest dust content (yellow).” … Read more