Africa has made its global IPO debut. Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia—a $1 billion-valued company—began trading live on the NYSE last week. The stock offering made Jumia the first upstart operating in Africa to list on a major global exchange. This raises expectations for unicorns and IPOs to create the continent’s first wave of startup moguls. ...

The company’s vast power in e-commerce is only the initial, quick jab to an opponent’s face. Data-focused innovations in offline retail will be Amazon’s second, much heavier cross. ...

Ed Byrne Contributor Share on Twitter Ed Byrne is an entrepreneur, investor and co-founder of Scaleworks. More posts by this contributor Netflix is still too cheap Don’t fear the big company ‘**** zones’ If you’re a SaaS business — you’re likely overwhelmed with data and an ever-growing list of acronyms that purport to unlock secret keys to ...

Over the past half a decade, the tidal wave of niche brands delivering new kinds of products to consumers and doing so online has changed the retail and CPG landscapes forever. ...

The USDA this morning announced the launch of a pilot program that will open up online grocery shopping to those on public assistance. During a two-year pilot program, those receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits — often referred to as “food stamps” — will be able to shop for groceries from online retailers, including ...

A seemingly endless number of startups has attracted funding in recent years to make life easier for people with money to spend. They’re sold nice clothes, chic shoes, cool office space, on-demand car services, on-demand laundry services, on-demand cleaning services, anti-aging therapies. It goes on and on. Overlooked in the process is the overwhelmingly majority ...

Sick of pausing and rewinding YouTube tutorials to replay that tricky part? Jumprope is a new instructional social network offering a powerful how-to video slideshow creation tool. Jumprope helps people make step-by-step guides to cooking, beauty, crafts, parenting and more using voice-overed looping GIFs for each phase. And creators can export their whole lesson for ...

Five years ago, Dynamic Yield was courting an investment from The New York Times as it looked to shift how publishers paywalled their content. Last month, Chicago-based fast food king McDonald’s bought the Israeli company for $300 million, a source told TechCrunch, with the purpose of rethinking how people order drive-thru chicken nuggets. The pivot ...

Facebook is pulling away from its ambitions to provide peer-to-peer money transfers via Messenger in Europe. Today, the company announced that it would be discontinuing the service — which let individuals send money to each other — in the two countries in the region where it had rolled it out, the UK and France on ...

Amazon has a large and growing advertising business, but rival Walmart’s own ad business is much smaller. It’s now working to change that. Earlier this year, the retailer consolidated ad sales for its stores and websites and said it was ready to start monetizing its shopper data on a grander scale. Today, its efforts continue ...