March 16, 2022

Lisa Kudrow thinks a Romy and Michele sequel would be ‘really fun’

Published by
BANG Showbiz English

Lisa Kudrow thinks a ‘Romy and Michele’ sequel would be “really fun”. The 58-year-old actress starred alongside Mira Sorvino in the comedy film ‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion’ as a pair high school failure who fake their career in order to impress old classmates at a ten-year reunion and Lisa finds the prospect of a sequel exciting. She said: “Tell Disney you want a sequel. [Producer] Robin Schiff will figure it out. She’s got ideas brewing. Yeah, I would. [like to do it] I think it would be really fun!” The comedy star – who was at the height of the fame with playing Phoebe Buffay in… Continue reading “Lisa Kudrow thinks a Romy and Michele sequel would be ‘really fun’”

March 16, 2022

The Celtics Found Their Missing Piece

Published by
Sports Illustrated

By Michael Pina Derrick White is everything Boston needs, but can the former Spur get up to speed before the playoffs begin? View the original article to see embedded media. As his mind started to race, Derrick White couldn’t think. Gregg Popovich had just walked into his hotel room in Atlanta, on the morning of Feb. 10, to deliver surprising news: the Spurs were trading White to the Celtics. He heard Pop’s words but couldn’t process them. We think you’re going to be great out there. Keep going. They spoke for an emotional five minutes. Or maybe it was 10. White can’t remember. He thanked the … Continue reading “The Celtics Found Their Missing Piece”

March 16, 2022

How one Uyghur woman survived a Chinese re-education camp

Published by
Al-Araby

Gulbahar Haitiwaji, Uyghur, 52 years of age, born 24th December, 1966 in Ghulja amid the mountains and meadows of China’s border with Kazakhstan, stood up to receive her sentence. No lawyer or defence, simply a nine minute show trial where she was battered by her so-called “crimes”. As a “separatist and a terrorist” she would be locked up in a “re-education” camp for seven years. Two years to the day had passed since she was cuffed, shackled, and spirited away into police custody on a routine trip back to her homeland, from her adopted France. After months of unspeakable cruelties and privatio… Continue reading “How one Uyghur woman survived a Chinese re-education camp”

March 16, 2022

Chargebee Launches Industry’s First E-Invoicing Service with Spring 2022 Product Release, Also Featuring Increased Automation Capabilities

Spring update to support tax, revenue recognition and regional compliance mandates to help customers expand globally

San Francisco, CA, March 16, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Fresh off its recent round of funding, Chargebee, the leading subscription management platform, today announced the industry’s first e-invoicing service for high-performing SaaS and subscription-model businesses as the centerpiece of its Spring 2022 Product Release. The release includes updates geared towards enabling growth and efficiency for Chargebee customers, including taxation and revenue recognition features and a new Marketplace to automate billing workflows through a library of customizable integrations.

E-Invoicing

Countries across the world, including Brazil, France, Finland, Germany and India, are already mandating e-invoicing for Business to Government (B2G) transactions as a way of modernizing and simplifying tax reporting and payment and several countries, including Poland and France, will join Italy, Mexico and Chile in mandating e-invoicing for B2B transactions as early as 2023. Chargebee’s e-invoicing service will allow businesses seeking to expand operations globally to easily comply with local e-invoicing mandates and serve B2G and B2B customers in new regions.

“Chargebee has solved a huge problem for us,” said Gabriele Proni, co-founder and CTO of Voxloud, an Italian-based communications company. “Italy has some of the strictest e-invoicing mandates in the entire world, and without Chargebee’s e-invoicing service, we would have had to spend countless hours sending them out manually. Chargebee came in and helped automate the process, saving our team from spending unnecessary time and power and allowed us to focus on doing what we do best.”

Marketplace

Automation is key to ensuring that modern billing systems are able to remain flexible and adaptable for businesses to succeed, especially for SaaS and subscription models, and is taking on a large role in Chargebee’s 2022 Spring Product Release.

Chargebee’s Marketplace enables businesses to build their billing systems on top of Chargebee, allowing for more and better integrations by connecting merchants with a wide catalog of available integrations to choose from. Marketplace improves integrations with other apps end-to-end, from discovery to sign-up, automating billing workflows and use cases.

Taxation and Revenue Recognition

In addition to e-invoicing and Marketplace, Chargebee adds taxation and revenue recognition capabilities to handle real-time changes based on customer demands. Through automation, Chargebee is providing subscription businesses with a new way to sync billing information and improve an organization’s financial efficiency and enabling them to meet the growing list of compliance requirements, including Value-Added Tax (“VAT” in Europe) and Tax Deduction at Source (“TDS” in India).

Compliance

As Chargebee continues to support expansion into new and different geographies, customers need not worry about the growing list of regional and local compliances they will face. Chargebee is now certified as HIPAA compliant with the “Privacy Rule”, “Security Rule” and “Breach Notification” as per the HIPAA Portability and Accountability Act to support customers in the healthcare industry. In addition, Chargebee is also compliant with PCI and GDPR standards and adheres to ISO, SOC1, SOC2 and MFA standards.

Global Growth

“Global and product expansion is a big part of Chargebee’s 2022-and-beyond roadmap, and we know that our customers are always looking to scale up, increase capabilities and enter new territories,” said John Pearce, Vice President of Product Management at Chargebee. “There are tons of constantly changing rules and regulations that could inhibit growth, and our new offerings are designed to help our customers offload these concerns and focus on building and maintaining business.”

The Chargebee Spring 2022 Product Release full list of features includes:

E-invoicing for India and the European Union
Tax Withholding (TDS)
Subscriptions Marketplace
New Salesforce Integration UX
GST Breakdown (Australia)
Revenue Recognition through acquisition of RevLock
Retention through acquisition of Brightback
Receivables through acquisition of numberz
HIPAA Compliance
SOC-2 Compliance

These latest product enhancements come on the heels of a $250 million funding round that valued the company at $3.5 billion and was geared towards Chargebee’s global expansion. Recent acquisitions of Brightback (customer retention), RevLock (revenue recognition) and numberz (receivables) will also strengthen Chargebee’s offerings to enable end-to-end management of subscriptions and revenue data.

To learn more about Chargebee’s Spring 2022 Product Release, please visit https://www.chargebee.com/blog/spring-release-2022.

Penny Desatnik
Chargebee
penny@chargebee.com

March 16, 2022

Shufti Pro Announces $20 Million Series A Funding to Accelerate Growth

Globally acclaimed IDV solution provider, Shufti Pro, announced that it has raised $20 million in Series A Funding led by Updata Partners to accelerate global expansion and enhance product development.

LONDON, March 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — A global market leader in AI-powered IDV solutions, Shufti Pro, has announced that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Updata Partners, a tech-focused growth equity firm.

The investment will be used to accelerate Shufti Pro’s global expansion providing additional resources to push their completely automated solution to new markets to help solve organisation’s unsatisfactory IDV process, enhance its IDV solutions and extend the company’s compliance suite.

Shufti Pro’s mantra is to provide a seamless digital customer experience when it comes to KYC, and as such the organisation provides a diverse range of solutions with identity verification at its core. With the World changing and digital transformation accelerating, digital identity services have become the cornerstone of any organisation looking to verify the identity of customers.

As businesses continue to undergo digital transformation, relying on trusted IDV partners has become more important than ever. As stated by Victor Fredung, the CEO of Shufti Pro, “Our configurable and fully automated platform allows customers to incorporate a frictionless verification process specific to their business objectives and provides the flexibility to address data privacy and security requirements, including the ability to deploy an on-premise solution. We strive to provide the global coverage demanded by borderless organisations.“

There is a global need for a flexible and compliant solution for onboarding, background checks and management that operates across borders without the prejudice of regions, business types and languages. The World is calling for a broader solution to its digital crisis and Shufti Pro answers these questions with unique capabilities:

Automation – the most advanced fully automated solution.

Global coverage on various reading capabilities in all major languages including Arabic.

Configurable and highly customisable while specialising in unique requirements. Our solution can be installed on-premise which is a highly unique advantage in the market. We comply with even the most stringent regulatory requirements such as VideoKYC in Germany or data retention in UAE.

The company is already serving 500+ clients globally as per Founder and CTO of Shufti Pro, Shahid Hanif. He further said, “The funding round was about finding a strategic partner that has the relevant experience and knowledge, which we truly believe we have found. We can now develop more exciting products and solve onboarding and compliance issues faced all over the World.”

For more than 20 years, Updata, a firm that believes in creating exceptional outcomes for customers, employees, and shareholders, has supported entrepreneurs in B2B software that have a growth mindset and acknowledge capital efficiency.

“We were impressed by the technology and commercial progress achieved by a bootstrapped business. Shufti Pro is poised to build on this strong foundation and accelerate growth.” – said Braden Snyder, Partner at Updata Partners.

About Shufti Pro

Shufti Pro is an identity verification service provider offering KYC, KYB, and AML services to help global businesses onboard and manage risk of legitimate customers. The UK-based company has 5 regional offices and launched 17 different IDV products since its inception in 2017. With the ability to verify ID documents globally in 150+ languages, Shufti Pro is serving customers in 230+ countries and territories.

For more information,
Graeme Rowe
Chief Marketing Officer | Shufti Pro
Graeme.r@shuftipro.com
+44 1225290329

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1766856/Series_A_funding__1.jpg

March 16, 2022

Courteney Cox felt ‘forgotten’ by Hollywood

Published by
BANG Showbiz English

Courteney Cox thinks Hollywood “forgot” about her in the years after ‘Cougar Town’. The 57-year-old actress directed and starred as Jules Cobb in the sitcom from 2009 to 2015, but she has revealed how her career seemed to dip as she started to focus on other things, including her relationship with Johnny McDaid. She told Variety’s ‘Just For Variety’ podcast : “I would say the years after ‘Cougar Town,’ trying to find the right thing and I didn’t feel very relevant at the time. “I was focusing on something else. I was focusing on my relationship and didn’t focus as much on business side of thin… Continue reading “Courteney Cox felt ‘forgotten’ by Hollywood”