Google’s vice president of finance, has joined Postmates’ board of directors, the latest sign that the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping to take the company public.

Postmates announced Friday that Kristin Reinke, vice president of Finance at Google, will join the San Francisco startup as an independent director.

Reinke has been with Google since 2005. Prior to Google, Reinke was at Oracle for eight years. Reinke also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Economic Advisory Council.

Her skill set will come in handy as Postmates creeps towards an IPO.

Earlier this year, the company lined up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others. Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt tweeted the news earlier Friday.

“Postmates has established itself as the market leader with a focus on innovation and route efficiency in the fast‐growing on‐demand delivery sector. Given their strong execution, accelerating growth, and financial discipline, they are well positioned for continued market growth across the U.S.,” said Reinke. “I’m thrilled to join the board.”

The startup has been beefing up its executive quiver, most recently hiring Apple veteran and author Ken Kocienda as a principal software engineer at Postmates X, the team building the food delivery company’s semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve.

Kocienda, author of “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s  Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” spent 15 years at Apple focused on human interface design, collaborating with engineers to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

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SpaceX is only getting started launching Falcon Heavy commercial missions, but it already has its eyes on the next prize – launching Starship. Now, we know that it’s hoping to start commercial service for this next-generation, fully reusable rocket by 2021, according to SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Jonathan Hofeller.

Hofeller was speaking at a conference in Indonesia (via SpaceNews), and noted that the private space launch company is currently talking to three different telecom companies about selecting which will be the first mission aboard the new spacecraft. Starship, formerly knowns as ‘BFR’ or ‘Big Falcon Rocket’) is currently in development at two separate SpaceX facilities, one in Texas and one in Florida, in what amounts to an internal company ‘bake-off’ to see which team can delivery the better solution faster. An engineering show-down of this kind is not uncommon among tech companies, and often produces results from both efforts that complement or enhance whatever the final product ends up being, rather than being a ‘winner take all’ scenario.

Starship, once complete, will include a launch system propelled to orbit by a ‘Super Heavy’ booster, with even more lift capacity than the existing Falcon Heavy rocket. It’ll be able to delivery as many as 20 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit, or over 100 tons to low-Earth orbit. It’s also intended to be the spacecraft that enables SpaceX to achieve its goal of running crewed missions to Mars.

Previously stated target dates for Starship milestones include achieving orbital launches by 2020, though based on this new info those will be test or demonstration missions rather than for paying customers. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also previously said that the company is looking at 2023 as the earliest target date for providing a Moon circuit space trip to his first paying tourist customer, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa.

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The lawsuit against the social network will proceed to discovery.

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Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Parent company of Jack'd, a gay dating app with 6M+ users, settles complaint over flaw that had exposed private user photos on a public server for over a year  —  New York's attorney general has settled a complaint over gay, bisexual, and queer dating app Jack'd, whose parent company left …

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Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: since the Apple Watch launched in 2015, Jony Ive began to shed responsibilities, with day-to-day oversight reduced to coming to HQ twice a week  —  - Company's close-knit design team withered in recent years  — Future breakthrough products need new tech, not just design

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Realme announced its entry-level smartphone, the Realme C2 a couple of months ago in India and the handset will go up for sale at 12pm today. The smartphone is priced starting at Rs 5,999, which means it goes up against the likes of Redmi 7, Samsung Galaxy M10 and other handsets that are in the same price range. As the Realme C2 is an entry-level handset, it is powered by the Helio P22 SoC and comes in two memory variants and three storage versions. The handset will be available for purchase today via Flipkart and Realme India website. 

Realme C2 specifications

Realme C2 comes equipped with a 6.1-inch HD+ display that offers a 19.5:9 aspect ratio with a dewdrop notch design. As mentioned earlier, it is powered by an Octa-core Helio P22 chipset and it runs on Android 9 Pie with ColorOS 6.0 on top. Backed by a 4000mAh battery, the Realme handset sports a micro-USB port for charging and data transfer. It also supports memory expansion of up to 256GB storage. The dual 4G dual SIM device has comes with a dedicated third slot for memory expansion.

In terms of optics, the Realme C2 features a dual-rear camera setup. It comes with a 13MP primary sensor, which is assisted by a 2MP depth sensor. Realme says that the rear camera can shoot slo-mo videos in 80fps/480p quality. There’s also a 5MP front camera with AI Face Unlock feature. The handset comes in a total of three variants, two with 2GB RAM and options to select between 16GB and 32GB of internal storage. There's also a 3GB RAM version with 32GB of storage. 

Realme C2 price and offers 

The 2GB RAM + 16GB variant of the Realme C2 costs Rs 5,999, while its 2GB RAM + 32GB variant is priced at Rs 6,999. The 3GB RAM + 32GB storage model of the handset is priced at Rs 7,999. It comes in Diamond Blue and Diamond Black colours. It will be available via Flipkart and the Realme India website. 

For sale offers, Realme is offering a 15 percent cashback for users who pay for the phone via MobiKwik on Realme website. On Flipkart, one can avail a no-cost EMI option and 5 percent discount for payments made through Axis Bank Buzz credit card.

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Zuckerberg claims that dealing with election interference from nation states is above his pay grade.

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