#who is Varza

[axe-trio-commanders]

Ok yeah I've got to infodump (and im. late because I wanted to draw enkkioh in her new outfit but have been too tired so;;; have old art and more recent screenshots for now)-

I don't really have a main at this point, I really do have 3 (as referenced in the blog title :3c They all did at least wield axes at some point) that sorta rotate in and out depending on who I'm thinking about the most at the time, for whatever reason?

But right now it's Enkkioh and I've talked about her probably the least anyways out of the three (Zori (charr soulbeast survivor's guilt incarnate baby) and Seremnis (smol uwu sylvari necromancer with simultaneous god complex and significant self-worth issues that i may or may not be sending on a multiverse adventure to see new york) being the other two)

Enkkioh is the third commander- Zori was the first, the actual 'Pact Commander', Seremnis was the second because Zori went AWOL during PoF (which is. its own post tbh)- and those two sorta co-commanded before a while, but a little after the Icebrood saga, Seremnis sorta officially got the title.

And immediately gave it to Enkkioh, because heck if she's dealing with that.

So, by EoD, Enkkioh is the official, by-title Commander- though Zori and Seremnis are still working closely with her pretty much up and until a few weeks pre-SotO, where Zori is just kinda... vibing, and Seremnis is off on Multiverse Adventures(tm).

But! As for Enkkioh's whole. Story, and whatnot, she had a relatively normal childhood in Rata Sum, decent parents, found a very lost charr cub who didn't have claws for some reason and decided that they were sisters now, learned everything through two years of Synergetics college with that charr before backlash over the cool new claws Enkkioh designed for her drove that charr out of the city (and then personal story based grievances and a rifleshot through a certain counselor's ear got Enkkioh banned from Rata Sum about a year-ish later).

And then, she joined the Vigil, got another dad, nearly lost him (but didn't- I decided he gets to live, actually. Zori and Seremnis get a grumpy war grandpa by proxy.) Most of her contributions there, beyond General Vigil Things, is she's the one who actually does the story dungeons to get Destiny's Edge back together (which. Man did that suddenly become extremely relevant very soon after she became commander, huh).

The next two expansions mostly consist of her aiding and learning from the pale reavers and sunspears, respectively, so she's sort of off the radar where the main story is concerned- the main two plot points there that lead to Seremnis and Zori actually knowing about her, let alone trusting her with the title (besides various Destiny's Edge members going 'oh, yeah, that one. I like that one.') are... well, this whole situation, and also the Icebrood Saga, where she gets a bit more directly involved by demanding Bangar's head on a pike.

(She also did a... fair bit of proving in EoD itself; both Seremnis and Zori were trying to take a backseat for the whole thing, but they aren't... very good at it- and Enkkioh isn't Aurene's champion, but... she was the one to finish the fight against Ankka while Seremnis was. Incapacitated (planning to write out some scenes about that later), and Zori was too busy taking care of her (read; panicking) to help; she was pretty directly involved in most things after that.) In general, though? Enkkioh is Synergetics smart, will learn from pretty much anyone who lets her (She's a warrior specc'd into first spellbreaker, then bladesworn), got into jewelery because she discovered putting certain magics into stones could make her punch harder- really most of her scientific knowledge goes into, essentially, 'punching harder'. She's not really fond of knowledge for knowledge's sake, and is less likely to give you a ten-page thesis on why you're incorrect than she is to punch you in the jaw (or the shoulder, if you're a friend) and call you an idiot. She also bites.

...And yet, somehow, out of the three, she's still by far the healthiest mentally- she already was when she got the position, and after learning more about... everything, with the other two commanders, it's something she's at least vaguely keeping an eye on in the interest of not being hypocritical- though she's ignoring her own tendancy towards violence. Some people need to be punched. Or bitten. She could use her words, yeah, she knows plenty, but they aren't listening and also this is funnier.

(She will use every opportunity possible to terrorize Phlunt with this information. Yes Phlunt, she is a Snaff prize winner and one of the most accomplished inventors in the Vigil, and yes, she just threw a pen at you and told you to eat her mist-forged socks. Suffer.)

Tell me about your Main!

I don't know if the folks who used to follow me when I first started playing back in like 2017 are still around, but long time real ones will remember Commander Day! I did it for about 2 years(?), and it was a day I invited people to reblog a post n infodump/share pictures of their gw2 main!

I'd like to do that again, so please tell me about your main!

I'll start:

Titania Oberonn! She just turned 6 ingame! :)

My mesmer Commander, Titania is actually the reincarnation of my Prophecies hero from gw1, Tiana! Froggish, blue, bisexual, iconic.

[mariacallous]

French president Emmanuel Macron has spent years dreaming aloud of a homegrown artificial intelligence giant. The AI disruption is coming, he told WIRED in 2018, and “I want to be part of it.” After that interview, he campaigned hard to turn France into a startup nation, home to the kind of companies that could rival American and Chinese behemoths. Then in April 2023 an answer to Macron’s ambition appeared in the form of bushy-eyebrowed entrepreneur Arthur Mensch and the launch of his company Mistral AI.

Mistral’s ChatGPT equivalent, Le Chat, was met with feverishly high expectations when it launched in February 2024, and it did not take long for comparisons to be made between Mensch and his San Francisco rival Sam Altman. Both CEOs are in their thirties. Both companies received backing from Microsoft. Like Altman, Mensch was able to command vast amounts of capital: Mistral’s $6 billion valuation fell far short of OpenAI’s $80 billion price tag, but still—this was validation. To Macron, Mistral was a sign of French genius, and the president started talking about the country as an AI champion in waiting.

This optimism was contagious. French generative AI companies have raked in $2.3 billion in funding over the past decade—more than all their European competitors, according to a June report by VC firm Accel. Amid the Paris startup scene, there was a sense that the country’s AI industry was unstoppable.

Yet when Macron called a shock snap election earlier this month, the AI industry quickly began to fear that the progress of the past seven years could be lost thanks to campaign pledges that could have a knock-on effect on their talent pipeline, and turbocharge taxes.

On Sunday, French voters will cast their ballots in the first-round voting, which polls suggest pits an anti-immigration far right against a coalition including an anti-capitalist hard left, as Macron’s centrist alliance struggles to regain ground in third place.

“With the two options that are leading in the polls, we could take a real step back, which is quite scary and quite disheartening,” says Roxanne Varza, director of the Parisian startup campus Station F, launched by the billionaire and Macron ally Xavier Niel. “We are trying to pretend it's not happening, but we're all talking about it, and the discussion is always, unfortunately, which is the lesser of two evils?”

Now French AI and its prominent homegrown companies and nonprofits such as Mistral, Kyutai, Hugging Face, and H are facing an uncertain future. The status quo that was such a boost to the industry is being rejected by wide swathes of voters who, according to the polls, are instead drawn to parties promising to reintroduce wealth taxes (both far right and left), tax “super-profits” (the left), and restrict immigration (the right). In response, a gloominess has fallen across the industry, and the country which once spoke of ambitions to become AI’s European capital is now busy discussing how to survive a real setback.

Varza considers Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally a real threat to the immigration that the industry needs to compete internationally. Among the 1,000 startups based at the vast Station F tech campus, there are 65 nationalities, many of whom came to Paris on Macron’s French Tech Visa program, which allows non-European startup founders, investors, and employees to move to France with their families. The government even has its own office within the Station F campus to smooth the application process for founders.

“Then on the other extreme, [the left-wing New Popular Front] have been so vocal about all the taxation measures they want to bring back that it looks like we're just going back to pre-Macron period,” Varza says. She points to France’s 2012 “les pigeons” (or “suckers”) movement, a campaign by angry internet entrepreneurs that opposed Socialist president François Hollande’s plan to dramatically raise taxes for founders.

Maya Noël, CEO of France Digitale, an industry group for startups, is worried not only about France’s ability to attract overseas talent, but also about how appealing the next government will be to foreign investors. In February, Google said it would open a new AI hub in Paris, where 300 researchers and engineers would be based. Three months later, Microsoft also announced a record $4 billion investment in its French AI infrastructure. Meta has had an AI research lab in Paris since 2015. Today France is attractive to foreign investors, she says. “And we need them.” Neither Google nor Meta replied to WIRED’s request for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

The vote will not unseat Macron himself—the presidential election is not scheduled until 2027—but the election outcome could dramatically reshape the lower house of the French Parliament, the National Assembly, and install a prime minister from either the far-right or left-wing coalition. This would plunge the government into uncertainty, raising the risk of gridlock. In the past 60 years, there have been only three occasions when a president has been forced to govern with a prime minister from the opposition party, an arrangement known in France as “cohabitation.”

No AI startup has benefited more from the Macron era than Mistral, which counts Cédric O, former digital minister within Macron’s government, among its cofounders. Mistral has not commented publicly on the choice France faces at the polls. The closest the company has come to sharing its views is Cédric O’s decision to repost an X post by entrepreneur Gilles Babinet last week that said: “I hate the far-right but the left’s economic program is surreal.” When WIRED asked Mistral about the retweet, the company said O was not a spokesperson, and declined to comment.

Babinet, a member of the government’s artificial intelligence committee, says he has already heard colleagues considering leaving France. “A few of the coders I know from Senegal, from Morocco, are already planning their next move,” he says, claiming people have also approached him for help renewing their visas early in case this becomes more difficult under a far-right government.

While other industries have been quietly rushing to support the far-right as a preferable alternative to the left-wing alliance, according to reports, Babinet plays down the threat from the New Popular Front. “It's clear they come with very old-fashioned economical rules, and therefore they don't understand at all the new economy,” he says. But after speaking to New Popular Front members, he says the hard-left are a minority in the alliance. “Most of these people are Social Democrats, and therefore they know from experience that when François Hollande came into power, he tried to increase the taxes on the technology, and it failed miserably.”

Already there is a sense of damage control, as the industry tries to reassure outsiders everything will be fine. Babinet points to other moments of political chaos that industries survived. “At the end of the day, Brexit was not so much of a nightmare for the tech scene in the UK,” he says. The UK is still the preferred place to launch a generative AI startup, according to the Accel report.

Stanislas Polu, an OpenAI alumnus who launched French AI startup Dust last year, agrees the industry has enough momentum to survive any headwinds coming its way. “Some of the outcomes might be a bit gloomy,” he says, adding he expects personal finances to be hit. “It’s always a little bit more complicated to navigate a higher volatility environment. I guess we’re hoping that the more moderate people will govern that country. I think that’s all we can hope for.”

[ailelie]

I have to cut this snippet entirely because I've realized that I've got the dynamic wrong. Nora has time-traveled. In the future, she and Ambrose were no longer friends. Now she's back in the past. Ambrose still considers her his best friend, but Nora can't reconcile the Ambrose who turned his back on her and the one who hasn't done that yet (and may never do it if she manages to change the future). Anyway, sharing so that the words aren't lost entirely.

Nora enjoyed dancing with Ambrose. Unlike most men, he did not place his full hand against her. Instead he pressed the inside line of his index finger and thumb to her hip, his palm facing downward. The style was that of Varza, one of the two countries along Astelan’s southern border, but Ambrose never seemed to mind.

“Happy birthday,” Ambrose murmured once the music began. As with her father, Nora rested her hand on his upper arm unable to reach higher without straining.

Nora tilted her head back to meet his gaze. “Thank you.”

“Did your family set a minimum number of dances again this year?” he asked, a smile tucked into the corner of his cheek.

“No. I suppose they believe I’ve grown up since last year.”

“And have you?”

Nora smiled and darted her gaze away. “Perhaps.”

Ambrose chuckled. “What do you have planned this year?”

“Just music,” she said, looking back up at him. “I didn’t even arrange it.”

“But you took full advantage,” he said, spinning her. He tugged her back a bit too quickly and Nora stumbled toward him, her palm hitting his chest. Her cheeks burned. Thankfully the other dancers had joined so fewer should have noticed. “Careful,” Ambrose said.

She tore her gaze from the contrast of her pale skin against the deep blue of his suit. “You did that on purpose,” she said, her eyes narrowing. She moved her hand back to his arm.

[highwarlockkareena]

PASS THE HAPPY ALONG! When you get this, reply with five things that make you happy and pass along to ten nice people. ♥

you & your edits - always so insightful and making me think

magnus bane - i love him and miss him

the best twin & fellow appreciator of turians @amorverus  

my murder buddy @abloodneed for everything

the gc - they know who they are 👀

💜💜💜

[axe-trio-commanders]

oh oh oh yes good I get to tell this story again

So Zori is a ranger. She was also very over-emotional as a cub and got easily attached to any number of things (i say like that ever changed), including the ruins she grew up around, any other cub that would talk to her, and the local animals.

She's eventually basically adopted, pretty late (relatively) into cubhood, into a band of other charr that hadn't really been able to find a 'band- and they get along great, and Zori's so happy to not have to worry about this anymore, but they can't figure out a good warband name.

Zori, off the top of her head, comes up with the idea for the 'Sun' warband, and everyone loves it. Bright, distracting, powerful, hotter flames than even the flame legion (who they're going to beat up)! It's perfect!

.......and Zori simply never tells them that she got her warband named after the grouchy old mousing cat she'd been slowly befriending.

...As for my other charr... Olirus Quickshot was from the Quick warband- I don't think anything dramatic ever happened to the warband, Olirus just decided to go off to the vigil and the 'band agreed she got to keep the name, since they got along well. Quick shot specifically bc one of her (earlier) feats was being able to quickly and accurately fire with dual pistols.

...Now that she's lost a good amount of function in one arm and has resorted to long-range rifle fire as her main attack, she doesn't mention her surname much. Doesn't feel like she deserves it anymore.

Lovi and Varza, siblings of all time, have the surnames Leyspark and Snapspark, respectively. They aren't actually in the same warband- Varza's technically in the Spark warband in flame, even though he's rarely ever in contact with his own warband (by choice. he hates it there. vehemently. he does not like his warband.) And even though Lovi joined the iron legion briefly after leaving rata sum, she... didn't join a ley warband or a spark warband. She just... didn't actually know how legion surnames worked, and didn't respect them enough to try and learn- that, and one of her specializations is working with leyline magic and 'leylime', that funky holey rock you see around leylines in like. maguuma and such.

...Snapspark is also rather accurate for varza.

(...it does feel right, though. In memories long repressed, they both decided as small, small cubs that they'd run away and start their own warband, their own legion...)

Heres a fun question for legion Charr Oc havers! (Feel free to respond either in comments or Rbs!)

Why did your Charr choose the surname they have? What was the reason? Was it given to them by their warband instead?

Leo was part of the Echo Warband and was given the word "Watcher" due to always being seen observing the Ascalonian ghosts, and his tendency to patiently stratageize rather than rush ahead.

[isfeed]

Station F turns its main startup program into an acceleration program

Station F turns its main startup program into an acceleration program

Station F, the iconic startup campus in Paris, is revamping its Founders Program completely to turn it into an acceleration program. Founders who decide to join the accelerator will get many different benefits. They’ll also have to hand out a 1% equity stake to Station F. “We are changing the flagship program of Station F. Everything is changing but the name,” Station F director Roxanne Varza…

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/harvestr-gathers-user-feedback-in-one-place/

Harvestr gathers user feedback in one place

Meet Harvestr, a software-as-a-service startup that wants to help product managers centralize customer feedback from various places. Product managers can then prioritize outstanding issues and feature requests. Finally, the platform helps you get back to your customers once changes have been implemented.

The company just raised a $650,000 funding round led by Bpifrance with various business angels also participating, such as 360Learning co-founders Nicolas Hernandez and Guillaume Alary as well as Station F director Roxanne Varza through the Atomico Angel Programme.

Harvestr integrates directly with Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Slack and Zapier. For instance, if a user opens a ticket on Zendesk and another user interacts with your support team through an Intercom chat widget, everything ends up in Harvestr.

Once you have everything in the system, Harvestr helps you prioritize tasks that seem more urgent or that are going to have a bigger impact.

When you start working on a feature or when you’re about to ship it, you can contact your users who originally reached out to talk to you about it.

Eventually, Harvestr should help you build a strong community of power users around your product. And there are many advantages in pursuing this strategy.

First, you reward your users by keeping them in the loop. It should lead to higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. Your most engaged customers could also become your best ambassadors to spread the word around.

Harvestr costs $49 per month for 5 seats and $99 per month for 20 seats. People working for 360Learning, HomeExchange, Dailymotion and other companies are currently using it.

[themakersmovement]

Only 5 days left for super early bird savings at Disrupt Berlin 2019 Our super early bird countdown continues startup fans. If you don’t have your pass to Disrupt Berlin 2019 yet, it’s time to mach schnell — make it quick! Buy your pass now before the deadline strikes on 6 September at 11:59 p.m. (CEST), and you’ll save up to €600. Just five days left, friends. What are you waiting for? You can save even more money with our group discounts. Buy in bulk, bring your whole team and leave no startup entrepreneur behind. You’ll save 20% when you buy five or more Innovator passes at once. Buy two or more Founder or Investor passes at once and enjoy a 10% savings. We love Disrupt Berlin’s international diversity. More than 3,000 attendees from more than 50 countries gather to learn about and showcase the latest tech innovations and to connect, collaborate and move their business forward. Disrupt is the crossroad of now and future tech. You’ll hear from an impressive array of tech leaders, makers, founders and investors on a range of hot topics. One example is Nigel Toon, the co-founder and CEO of Graphcore — a company that’s designing its own dedicated AI chipset. The company has raised more than $300 million from top investors, such as Sequoia Capital, BMW, Microsoft and Samsung. Pretty impressive, but even crazier — the tiny startup competes directly with giant chip companies, such as Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm. It’s a race to see who can create the most efficient AI chip. Director Roxanne Varza will be on hand to give us an update on Station F, the world’s biggest campus for startups. Housed in an historic monument (a beautiful building constructed in 1929), Station F is also a high-tech building and a cornerstone of the French tech ecosystem. Companies like Facebook, Naver (Line), Ubisoft, Microsoft and a host of others run incubators out of Station F, and its also home to more than 1,000 startups. You can’t talk European success stories without talking UiPath. Currently valued at $7 billion, the company’s wild success comes from creating enterprise software that focuses on repetitive tasks and helps customers automate as many actions as possible. We can’t wait to talk with founder and CEO Daniel Dines — who started the company 15 years ago — about his automation journey. There’s so much more to do at Disrupt Berlin 2019 and you can do it all for a whole lot less if you buy your pass before the super early bird price vanishes in just five days at 11:59 p.m. (CEST) on 6 September. Mach schnell! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form. https://buff.ly/2lnX1FO

[jacobhinkley]

Chain Accelerator Opens Its Doors to Blockchain, Crypto Startups in France

\Chain Accelerator has launched in France. It is the first startup acceleratordedicated to the blockchain that can call Europe its home. Among the organization’s chief operators are Hyperloop Transportation Technologies chairman Bibop G. Gresta, former SWIFT CEO Leonard Schrank, and Ledger president Pascal Gauthier.

The company will assist startups with initial coin offerings (ICOs), business development plans, marketing and public relations.

In a statement, co-founder Nicolas Cantu explained, “At a time when the President and the Government want to make Paris the capital of the ICOs, Chain Accelerator is positioning itself as a key player. By setting up a global and operational network in Paris, it brings together the best talent, extends the circle of contributors, and prepares for disruptions to help blockchain projects develop protocols in all sectors.”

France has been relatively mixed when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency culture. Bruno Le Maire, the Minister of the Economy and Finance, has been particularly wary of cryptocurrencies in the past, and has called on regulators to implement strict rules when it comes to governing and controlling their activities.

In May, however, Le Maire expressed a drastic change of heart in a blog post for a French startup, writing:

“A revolution is under way, of which Bitcoin was only the precursor. The blockchain will offer unprecedented opportunities for our startups. I was a neophyte a year ago, but now I’m passionate. Let us show a lot of pedagogy with our fellow citizens to make France the first place of blockchain and crypto-active innovation in Europe.”

The integration of Chain Accelerator in France could help Paris become a major hub for blockchain development. Currently, the executive board of Chain Accelerator consists of over 30 individuals who will serve as mentors to Europe’s growing list of crypto-based startups, thus increasing the company’s potential to succeed and expand.

In addition, as blockchain technology and cryptocurrency garner more acceptance throughout the continent, more startups may arise, seeking the company’s aid.

National Assembly for Paris member Pierre Person states, “In France, as everywhere in the world, blockchain projects face many uncertainties and complexities, whether financial, legal, or technical. Yet this technology will revolutionize our daily lives. As such, it is essential today to have both a legislative framework enabling its full development and structures enabling the emergence of such projects. Our country must become a leader in the blockchain. I am convinced that Chain Accelerator — the first blockchain incubator — will contribute greatly to this.”

Despite its hard work, France will face competition with countries like the U.K. and Switzerland, which have positioned themselves as some of Europe’s primary fintech and cryptocurrency centers. According to U.K. Secretary of State for International Trade Dr. Liam Fox, the country’s fintech space has already attracted over $2.4 billion in investments in 2018 alone, while Switzerland was recently home to four of the world’s largest ICOs.

Chain Accelerator will be headquartered in Paris’s Station F, a large startup campus that opened in the summer of 2017. Station F director Roxanne Varza commented, “The blockchain universe, inherently decentralized, stands out for its global and international nature. Innovation comes from everywhere, talents are rare, the need for support is exacerbated. We are pleased to welcome Chain Accelerator.”

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

Chain Accelerator Opens Its Doors to Blockchain, Crypto Startups in France published first on https://medium.com/@smartoptions

[joshuajacksonlyblog]

Chain Accelerator Opens Its Doors to Blockchain, Crypto Startups in France

\Chain Accelerator has launched in France. It is the first startup acceleratordedicated to the blockchain that can call Europe its home. Among the organization’s chief operators are Hyperloop Transportation Technologies chairman Bibop G. Gresta, former SWIFT CEO Leonard Schrank, and Ledger president Pascal Gauthier.

The company will assist startups with initial coin offerings (ICOs), business development plans, marketing and public relations.

In a statement, co-founder Nicolas Cantu explained, “At a time when the President and the Government want to make Paris the capital of the ICOs, Chain Accelerator is positioning itself as a key player. By setting up a global and operational network in Paris, it brings together the best talent, extends the circle of contributors, and prepares for disruptions to help blockchain projects develop protocols in all sectors.”

France has been relatively mixed when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency culture. Bruno Le Maire, the Minister of the Economy and Finance, has been particularly wary of cryptocurrencies in the past, and has called on regulators to implement strict rules when it comes to governing and controlling their activities.

In May, however, Le Maire expressed a drastic change of heart in a blog post for a French startup, writing:

“A revolution is under way, of which Bitcoin was only the precursor. The blockchain will offer unprecedented opportunities for our startups. I was a neophyte a year ago, but now I’m passionate. Let us show a lot of pedagogy with our fellow citizens to make France the first place of blockchain and crypto-active innovation in Europe.”

The integration of Chain Accelerator in France could help Paris become a major hub for blockchain development. Currently, the executive board of Chain Accelerator consists of over 30 individuals who will serve as mentors to Europe’s growing list of crypto-based startups, thus increasing the company’s potential to succeed and expand.

In addition, as blockchain technology and cryptocurrency garner more acceptance throughout the continent, more startups may arise, seeking the company’s aid.

National Assembly for Paris member Pierre Person states, “In France, as everywhere in the world, blockchain projects face many uncertainties and complexities, whether financial, legal, or technical. Yet this technology will revolutionize our daily lives. As such, it is essential today to have both a legislative framework enabling its full development and structures enabling the emergence of such projects. Our country must become a leader in the blockchain. I am convinced that Chain Accelerator — the first blockchain incubator — will contribute greatly to this.”

Despite its hard work, France will face competition with countries like the U.K. and Switzerland, which have positioned themselves as some of Europe’s primary fintech and cryptocurrency centers. According to U.K. Secretary of State for International Trade Dr. Liam Fox, the country’s fintech space has already attracted over $2.4 billion in investments in 2018 alone, while Switzerland was recently home to four of the world’s largest ICOs.

Chain Accelerator will be headquartered in Paris’s Station F, a large startup campus that opened in the summer of 2017. Station F director Roxanne Varza commented, “The blockchain universe, inherently decentralized, stands out for its global and international nature. Innovation comes from everywhere, talents are rare, the need for support is exacerbated. We are pleased to welcome Chain Accelerator.”

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

from Cryptocracken Tumblr https://ift.tt/2lkigp1 via IFTTT

[ailelie]

Astelan is the main colored in region. Varza, Creldyn, and the Liuva Empire are nearby countries or empires. Varza and Creldyn have other main roads and cities, but only the roads that connect to Astelanen roads are shown.

Astelan has 4 duchies (which is the current term; it may be changed; the duchies are Ferryn, Hexel, Droit, and Mitnoff) and one capital region (Eroquin).

Astelan used to be part of the Liuva Empire, but won their independence hundreds of years ago (I do have a timeline, I could look up the exact number of years) in the Great Rebellion in which people who already felt disconnected from the Empire due to the mountain range teamed up with young Enid Alysic whose great x many grandmother lost the previous civil war to the Liuva family.

(Basically, this guy Edulf impregnated and married a woman when he was a teenager but then divorced her about 9 or so years later and married another woman and had a child with her as well. The two children fought over who should take over when Edulf died. Wilarich, the son from the second marriage, won and Matilda, the daughter from the first, lost. The war lasted 69 years and for a good portion of it the empire was divided between Liuva and Alysic (a made up last name based on Matilda's mother's first name). Wilarich's great-grandaughter Katerina eventually beat Matilda's granddaughter, Talia).

[ETA: Wow, I totally misinterpreted my notes. I've changed it so taht Wilarich is older and his mother was only ever a mistress. Matilda is ten years younger. I also removed mentions to the Alysic Empire as Matilda, being trueborn, wouldn't make up a new name. Instead, the name change happens because Katerina restores the Gisalic name in honor of her mother, who is a descendant of Nyfain.]

(The Liuva Empire eventually does return after about 300 years during the Hidden Thorn War so named because everyone, up to that point, believed the Liuva family had been killed or had died out. Then Madelyn appears claiming to be a descendant of Gwendolen, the last Liuvan Empress).

[ETA: Gwendolen is no longer the last Liuvan Empress, but Madelyn does still change the empire name back to Liuva as a way of signalling her reign.]

(Do you care about any of this? No. Is it necessary for this map? No. Did I spend an inordinate amount of time last night generating this stuff? Yes).

[albanianvoices]

Mblidhniu ju varza, mblidhniu ju gra, M'ata sy t'bukur q'dini me qa, Eni t'vajtojmë Shqypninë e mjerë, Qi mbet’ e shkretë pa em'n, pa nder; Ka mbet e vejë si grue pa burrë, Ka mbet si nanë, qi s'pat djalë kurrë!

Pashko Vasa, O moj Shqypni

“Gather round, maidens, gather round, women Who with your fair eyes know what weeping is, Come, let us lament poor Albania, Who is without honour and reputation, She has become a widow, a woman with no husband, She is like a mother who has never had a son!”

[technicalsolutions88]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. The iPhone’s new parental controls can limit who kids can call, text and FaceTime and when

With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the day. These limits will apply across phone calls, Messages and FaceTime.

In practice, this means parents could stop their child from texting friends late at night or during the school day. It also allows parents to manage the child’s iCloud contacts remotely.

2. Pear, whose seed-stage bets are followed closely, just raised $160 million for its third fund

That’s more than twice the $75 million that the firm raised for its second fund in 2016 and triple the $50 million it raised for its debut fund back in 2013.

3. Uber guarantees space for skis and snowboards with Uber Ski feature

Starting on December 17 in select cities, an Uber Ski icon will pop up on the app, allowing passengers to order a ride with confirmed extra space or a ski/snowboarding rack. Nundu Janakiram, Uber’s head of rider experience, said to expect more features like this.

4. Accel and Index back Tines, as the cybersecurity startup adds another $11M to its Series A

Founded in February 2018 by ex-eBay, PayPal and DocuSign security engineer Eoin Hinchy, Tines automates many of the repetitive manual tasks faced by security analysts so they can focus on other high-priority work.

5. How Station F is boosting the French tech ecosystem

Three years after unveiling Station F at Disrupt, its director, Roxanne Varza, came back to our stage to provide an update on the world’s biggest startup campus, where there are now 1,000 companies at work.

6. Hyperproof wants to make it easier to comply with GDPR and other regulations

As companies try to figure out how to comply with regulations like GDPR, ISO or Sarbanes Oxley, Hyperproof is launching a new product to workflows that will allow them to gain compliance in a more organized way.

7. Introducing ‘Dear Sophie,’ an advice column for US-bound immigrant employees

Dear Sophie is a collaborative forum hosted by Extra Crunch and curated by Sophie Alcorn, who is certified as a specialist attorney in immigration and nationality law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization.

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[endenogatai]

Resilience is an ambitious bet to improve cancer treatment

Meet Resilience, a new startup that wants to help cancer treatment institutes as well as cancer patients at every step of the treatment journey. It’s an ambitious project founded by two well-known French entrepreneurs. They want to leverage their tech skills for this new healthcare startup.

Behind the scenes, there are two co-CEOs — Céline Lazorthes and Jonathan Benhamou. Nicolas Helleringer and Matthieu Pozza are the two remaining co-founders acting as CTO and CPO respectively. Lazorthes previously co-founded Leetchi, the leading money pot company in France. She also started MangoPay, a marketplace payment solution, as a spinout company. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa acquired both companies.

Benhamou co-founded PeopleDoc, a cloud-based HR service. In 2018, his company was acquired by Ultimate Software. Following the acquisition, he served as an executive in the publicly quoted company. Shortly after, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners acquired Ultimate Software.

Last year, they both spent a lot of time working together on a nonprofit called ProtegeTonSoignant. Along with 140 people, they raised €7.4 million ($8.8 million) in donations to buy personal protective equipment and deliver it to hospitals in need. It was a fundraising and logistics challenge.

After spending a lot of time talking with healthcare professionals, they decided to “dedicate at least the next ten years to those who save lives,” Lazorthes said.

It seems like an ambitious bet, and they’re aware of that. “We don’t know anything about healthcare just like we didn’t know anything about HR and finance. We’re entering a market that is highly regulated,” Benhamou told me.

That’s why they chose to focus on one area in particular — cancer care. While research institutes have made some tremendous progress over the past few years, it has become increasingly more complicated to treat cancer. For instance, Benhamou says he expects to see 300 new treatments over the next three years. Treatment is slowly evolving from broad spectrum treatments to targeted treatments.

Cancer treatment facilities face three issues. First, “a human brain can’t assimilate all this data,” Benhamou said. Second, as life expectancy increases, there are more cancer cases every year. A tumor board is going to spend a minute and a half or two minutes on a specific case to make a therapeutic decision.

Third, as a result of the first two problems, patients are left on their own. For instance, they suffer from side effects because there’s no dosage adjustment in their treatment.

Image Credits: Resilience

Starting from there, Resilience wants to become a full-stack software solution for cancer treatment for both the medical team and patients. When it comes to practitioners, Resilience will be a software-as-a-service solution that can augment therapeutic decisions. The company will categorize scientific literature, use machine learning to find some similarities with past cases and surface clinical trials based on various criteria.

When it comes to patients, there will be a web and mobile app to access content and information about their cancer. In particular, Resilience could help you understand side effects and treat them.

“Our goal is to prove that the app can improve the quality of life of the patients,” Lazorthes said. Resilience also wants to leverage its app to ask questions and collect data to improve treatments.

The startup is already putting together a data science team. It will use natural language processing to parse scientific literature. It will also work with a medical team to double-check everything.

When it comes to finding similarities between patients, the company is signing partnerships with various hospitals to get data from past cases.

Resilience has raised a $6 million funding round (€5 million) led by Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven partners Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. Tech business angels Nathalie Balla (La Redoute), Xavier Niel (Free), Jean-Charles Samuelian (Alan), Roxanne Varza (Station F) and more are also participating.

There are also some healthcare investors in today’s funding round, such as Charles Ferté (AstraZeneca), Philippe Dabi (Bioclinic) and Thomas Clozel (Owkin).

Resilience is a mission-driven company — the company is partnering with a scientific board and a patient board. Gustave Roussy, one of the leading cancer research institutes in the world, is also acting as a co-founder in Resilience.

That’s a lot of stakeholders, but it’s the right thing to do when you’re building a healthcare company. Resilience now has the right system of checks and balance to iterate on its product and roll out a product that has a chance of actually improving cancer treatment.

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[un-enfant-immature]

Harvestr gathers user feedback in one place

Meet Harvestr, a software-as-a-service startup that wants to help product managers centralize customer feedback from various places. Product managers can then prioritize outstanding issues and feature requests. Finally, the platform helps you get back to your customers once changes have been implemented.

The company just raised a $650,000 funding round led by Bpifrance with various business angels also participating, such as 360Learning co-founders Nicolas Hernandez and Guillaume Alary as well as Station F director Roxanne Varza through the Atomico Angel Programme.

Harvestr integrates directly with Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Slack and Zapier. For instance, if a user opens a ticket on Zendesk and another user interacts with your support team through an Intercom chat widget, everything ends up in Harvestr.

Once you have everything in the system, Harvestr helps you prioritize tasks that seem more urgent or that are going to have a bigger impact.

When you start working on a feature or when you’re about to ship it, you can contact your users who originally reached out to talk to you about it.

Eventually, Harvestr should help you build a strong community of power users around your product. And there are many advantages in pursuing this strategy.

First, you reward your users by keeping them in the loop. It should lead to higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. Your most engaged customers could also become your best ambassadors to spread the word around.

Harvestr costs $49 per month for 5 seats and $99 per month for 20 seats. People working for 360Learning, HomeExchange, Dailymotion and other companies are currently using it.

[sheminecrafts]

Daily Crunch: Apple adds new iPhone parental controls

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. The iPhone’s new parental controls can limit who kids can call, text and FaceTime and when

With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the day. These limits will apply across phone calls, Messages and FaceTime.

In practice, this means parents could stop their child from texting friends late at night or during the school day. It also allows parents to manage the child’s iCloud contacts remotely.

2. Pear, whose seed-stage bets are followed closely, just raised $160 million for its third fund

That’s more than twice the $75 million that the firm raised for its second fund in 2016 and triple the $50 million it raised for its debut fund back in 2013.

3. Uber guarantees space for skis and snowboards with Uber Ski feature

Starting on December 17 in select cities, an Uber Ski icon will pop up on the app, allowing passengers to order a ride with confirmed extra space or a ski/snowboarding rack. Nundu Janakiram, Uber’s head of rider experience, said to expect more features like this.

4. Accel and Index back Tines, as the cybersecurity startup adds another $11M to its Series A

Founded in February 2018 by ex-eBay, PayPal and DocuSign security engineer Eoin Hinchy, Tines automates many of the repetitive manual tasks faced by security analysts so they can focus on other high-priority work.

5. How Station F is boosting the French tech ecosystem

Three years after unveiling Station F at Disrupt, its director, Roxanne Varza, came back to our stage to provide an update on the world’s biggest startup campus, where there are now 1,000 companies at work.

6. Hyperproof wants to make it easier to comply with GDPR and other regulations

As companies try to figure out how to comply with regulations like GDPR, ISO or Sarbanes Oxley, Hyperproof is launching a new product to workflows that will allow them to gain compliance in a more organized way.

7. Introducing ‘Dear Sophie,’ an advice column for US-bound immigrant employees

Dear Sophie is a collaborative forum hosted by Extra Crunch and curated by Sophie Alcorn, who is certified as a specialist attorney in immigration and nationality law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization.

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