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Glints, the Singapore-based career platform, announced today it has raised $22.5 million in Series C funding led by Japanese human resources management firm PERSOL Holdings. The new capital will be used on Glints’ expansion in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan and hiring for its product and engineering teams.

Glints co-founder and chief executive officer Oswald Yeo said this is the largest funding round to date for a talent platform in Southeast Asia, and brings the startup’s total raised to $33 million. Other participants included returning investors Monk’s Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, Mindworks Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and former Goldman Sachs TMT China head and partner Xiaoyin Zhang.

Founded in 2013, Glints says it has been used by more than 1.5 million professionals and 30,000 organizations, including Gojek, Tokopedia, Starbucks and Mediacorp. Most of its current users are from the tech and financial services sectors, but Glints has a “broad horizontal focus on young to mid-level professionals,” and its long-term goal is to be sector agnostic, Yeo told TechCrunch.

One of the ways Glints differentiates from other job platforms active in its markets, like LinkedIn, JobStreet and CakeResume, is by building a “full-stack” of services for people who want to advance their careers. In addition to its job marketplace, which the company says has more than 7,000 active listings and 4 million visitors each month, Glints also offers community features and skills education, like online classes.

One of Glints’ value propositions is helping companies, especially in tech, cope with the regional talent shortage, a topic it recently covered in a comprehensive report with Monk’s Hill Ventures.

One of the solutions the report highlighted is hiring teams based in different Southeast Asian countries to address talent crunches in specific markets, like Singapore. Glints says its cross-border remote work hub, TalentHub, doubled its business in 2020 as the pandemic also made employers more open to hiring remotely.

Hipmunk’s founders are building a successor to their now-defunct flight search service.

The startup was acquired by SAP-owned travel and expense platform Concur in 2016, and its CEO Adam Goldstein departed in 2018. But Goldstein told me he and his co-founder Steve Huffman (also co-founder and CEO of Reddit) were still disappointed when Concur shut the service down at the beginning of last year.

“Over the years, there were millions and millions of people who used it and loved it,” Goldstein said. (I was one of those people — even before I knew what he was working on, I started out our call by telling Goldstein how much I miss Hipmunk.)

So the pair seed funded a project called Flight Penguin, with Goldstein serving as the new company’s chairman. And he said the actual product was built by former Hipmunk developer Sheri Zada.

The Flight Penguin interface will be very familiar to old Hipmunk users, with a visual layout that makes it easy to see the timing of flights and length of layovers. And just as Hipmunk allowed users to organize results by “agony” (so that the top results aren’t just cheap flights with inconvenient timing or ridiculous layovers), Flight Penguin allows them to sort their flights by “pain.”

Image Credits: Flight Penguin

But this isn’t just the old experience with a fresh coat of paint — it’s also meant to improve on Hipmunk in a few key ways. For one thing, it allows users to search by Chase Ultimate Rewards Points (as well as U.S. dollars, with the goal of adding more currencies and rewards programs in the future).

And the product itself is a Google Chrome extension, rather than a traditional flight search website. The extension actually presents a full, standalone web experience (rather than an overlay on another website), but Goldstein said this approach is still important, because it allows Flight Penguin to pull its data “through the frontend instead of the backend,” giving it the most up-to-date data. This helps to avoid situations where a flight or price shows up in search results but isn’t available on the airline’s or other seller’s website.

In addition, Goldstein said Flight Penguin will show “all the flights.” In other words, it won’t be making any deals with the airlines to hide certain flights or prices, and it will also show airlines that don’t normally make their flights available on other search platforms.

“There are actually many, many flights available but consumers don’t see them because travel search sites work out these deals,” he said. “We’re choosing not to play that game.”

That has the obvious benefit of offering more comprehensive results, but also the disadvantage that Flight Penguin will not be able to collect affiliate fees for flight purchases. Instead, after a 30-day trial period, it will charge users $10 per month. (This is an introductory fee and will likely change in the future.)

Goldstein acknowledged that this is probably “not going to be a mainstream product that 50 million Americans use,” but he’s hoping that it can attract a significant subscriber base of frequent travelers who “value their time and care about the flight booking experience.”

“What we learned from Hipmunk was […] the way business has traditionally been done in online travel worked for consumer in an era lots of competition between airlines and travel agencies,” he added. “In a world where there’s much less competition, you’re basically becoming an agent for the people you’re working with, and i’s hard to build a business model around providing a great user experience. That’s why we’re saying that we’re going to opt out of this game and play by our own rules.”

Flight Penguin is currently accepting signups for its waitlist, but Goldstein said the company is simply using this to bring users on in a controlled fashion, and that it plans to move people off the wait list pretty quickly.

Clubhouse, a one-year-old social audio app reportedly valued at $1 billion, will now allow users to send money to their favorite creators — or speakers — on the platform. In a blog post, the startup announced the new monetization feature, Clubhouse Payments, as the “the first of many features that allow creators to get paid directly on Clubhouse.”

Clubhouse’s press team did not immediately respond to comment. Paul Davison, the co-founder of Clubhouse, mentioned in the company’s latest town hall that the startup wants to focus on direct monetization on creators, instead of advertisements.

Here’s how it will work: A user can send a payment in Clubhouse by going to the profile of the creator to whom they want to give money. If the creator has the feature enabled, the user will be able to tap “Send Money” and enter an amount. It’s like a virtual tip jar, or a Clubhouse-branded version of Venmo (although the payments feature doesn’t currently let the user send a personalized message along with the money).

“100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe,” the post reads. “Clubhouse will take nothing.”

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison tweeted shortly after the blog post went up that “It’s cool to see a new social platform focus first on participant income rather than internalized monetization / advertising.”

When the startup raised a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in January, part of the reported $100 million funding was said to go to a creator grant program. The program would be used to “support emerging Clubhouse creators,” according to a blog post. It’s unclear how they define emerging, but cultivating influencers (and rewarding them with money) is one way the startup is promoting high-quality content on its platform.

The synergies here are obvious. A Clubhouse creator can now get tips for a great show, or raise money for a great cause, while also being rewarded by the platform itself for being a recurring host.

The fact that Clubhouse’s first attempt at monetization includes no percentage cut of its own is certainly noteworthy. Monetization, or Clubhouse’s lack thereof, has been a topic of discussion about the buzzy startup since it took off in the early pandemic months. While it currently relies on venture capital to keep the wheels churning, it will need to make money eventually in order to be a self-sustaining business.

Creator monetization, with a cut for the platform, has led to the growth of large businesses. Cameo, a startup that sends personalized messages from creators and celebrities, takes about a 25% cut of each video sold on its platform. The startup reached unicorn status last week with a $100 million raise. OnlyFans, another platform that helps creators directly raise money from fans in exchange for paywalled contact, is projecting $1 billion in revenue for 2021.

Clubhouse’s payments feature will first be tested by a “small test group” starting today, but it is unclear who is in this group. Eventually, the payments feature will be rolled out to other users in waves.

For those who follow the space, LG will be remembered fondly as a smartphone trailblazer. For a decade-and-a-half, the company was a major player in the Android category and a driving force behind a number of innovations that have since become standard.

Perhaps the most notable story is that of the LG Prada. Announced a month before the first iPhone, the device helped pioneer the touchscreen form factor that has come to define virtually every smartphone since. At the time, the company openly accused Apple of ripping off its design, noting, “We consider that Apple copycat Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006.”

LG has continued pushing envelopes – albeit to mixed effect. In the end, however, the company just couldn’t keep up. This week, the South Korean electronics giant announced it will be getting out of the “incredibly competitive” category, choosing instead to focus on its myriad other departments.

The news comes as little surprise following months of rumors that the company was actively looking for a buyer for the smartphone unit. In the end, it seems, none were forthcoming. This July, the company will stop selling phones beyond what remains of its existing inventory.

The smartphone category is, indeed, a competitive one. And frankly, LG’s numbers have pretty consistently fallen into the “Others” category of global smartphone market share figures ruled by names like Samsung, Apple, Huawei and Xiaomi. The other names clustered beneath the top five have been, more often than not, other Chinese manufacturers like Vivo.

Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped a few hints in an interview released Monday about the direction of the much-anticipated Apple car, including that autonomous vehicle technology will likely be a key feature.

“The autonomy itself is a core technology, in my view,” Cook told Kara Swisher in an interview on the “Sway” podcast. “If you sort of step back, the car, in a lot of ways, is a robot. An autonomous car is a robot. And so there’s lots of things you can do with autonomy. And we’ll see what Apple does.”

Cook was careful not to reveal too much, declining to answer Swisher’s question outright if Apple is planning to produce a car itself or the tech within the car. What clues he did drop, suggests Project Titan is working on something in the middle.

“We love to integrate hardware, software and services, and find the intersection points of those because we think that’s where the magic occurs,” said Cook. “And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that.”

To which Swisher responded: “I’m going to go with car for that, if you don’t mind. I’m just going to jump to car.”

We are, too.

Many people in the micromobility industry like to say that e-scooters are basically iPhones on wheels, but it’s more likely that the Apple car will actually be the iPhone on wheels. Apple is generally known for owning all of its hardware and software, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see Apple engineers working closely with a manufacturer to produce an Apple car, with the potential to one day cut out the middle man and become the manufacturer.

The so-called Project Titan appeared at risk of failing before a car was ever seen by the public with mass layoffs in 2019. However, more recent reports suggest that the project is alive and well with plans to make a self-driving electric passenger vehicle by 2024.

Earlier this year, CNBC reported that Apple was close to finalizing a deal with Hyundai-Kia to build an Apple-branded self-driving car at the Kia assembly plant in West Point, Georgia. Sources familiar with Apple’s interest in Hyundai say the company wants to work with an automaker that will let Apple hold the reins on the software and hardware that will go into the car.

The two companies never reached a deal and talks fell apart in February, according to multiple reports. That hasn’t stopped the flow of rumors and reports about Apple and its plans, which have previously been linked to other suppliers, automakers such as Nissan and even startups.

It’s still unclear what the Apple car will look like, but as a passenger vehicle, rather than a robotaxi or delivery vehicle, it will be going up against the likes of Tesla.

“I’ve never spoken to Elon, although I have great admiration and respect for the company he’s built,” said Cook. “I think Tesla has done an unbelievable job of not only establishing the lead, but keeping the lead for such a long period of time in the EV space. So I have great appreciation for them.”

Project Titan is being led by Doug Field, who was formerly senior vice president of engineering at Tesla and one of the key players behind the Model 3 launch.