Twitter gets new CTO while startups in China are raising funding and planning their expansions

Toyota plans to launch AI-based, Uber-like services for taxis in Japan – Bloomberg

Japanese auto giant Toyota announced today that it had begun testing a new taxi-dispatch system in February by using data from sources such as smartphones, cab locations, and weather patterns to determine the most efficient distribution of taxi fleet in Tokyo.

The project involves taxi-ordering startup Japan Taxi, telecommunications carrier KDDI Corp., and management consultant Accenture. It has been claimed to have a 94 per cent accuracy rate.

Toyota is known as both an investor in Uber and its rival Japan Taxi.

Twitter appoints Parag Agrawal as CTO – Reuters

Twitter announced on Thursday that it has appointed Parag Agrawal as its new CTO to succees Adam Messinger, who left the company in December 2016.

Joining the company in 2011 as ads engineer, Agrawal had previously worked at Microsoft and AT&T.

Twitter did not respond to requests for comments.

Also Read: Today’s top tech news, March 08: Grab close to deal for Uber’s Southeast Asia business

Chinese news aggregator app NewsDog to expand further in India – South China Morning Post

Founder and CEO of Chinese news aggregator app NewsDog, Forrest Chen Yukun, revealed in an interview the company’s plan to further its expansion in the Indian market.

With the goal to attract 100 million users a day over the next two years, the company aims to double the number of its employees and set offices in all major Indian cities within 2018. It currently has offices in Pune and Gurgaon, and is run by 50 employees.

NewsDog is already ranked as the number one news app in the country on Google Play, with about 40 million aggregate users.

Live game streaming platform Huya raises US$461 million in Series B funding round led by Tencent – Dealstreet Asia

YY Inc. announced that its live game streaming platform Huya Broadcasting has raised a US$461 million Series B funding round led by Tencent.

Tencent also happened to be an investors in Huya’s rival company Douyu, and it also announced a US$632 million investment in the company on the same day.

The Chinese tech giant also obtained a right to purchase additional Huya shares at fair market price to achieve 50.1 per cent of the voting power in the company.

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