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The company's stated mission is to simplify the access and authentication experience and centralize previously fragmented systems. Austin, Texas-based hotel technology startup Virdee has secured a $2 million seed round financing led by a group of strategic investors, including former La Quinta president, Rajiv Trivedi. Virdee’s technology, including its app, kiosk and appless access solutions, is focused on contactless, customer-centric interactions, which is the name of the game in a time of disruptive change and shifting models of customer service and operation. The company’s stated mission is to simplify the access and authentication experience and centralize previously fragmented systems. Its API-first approach aims to provide the industry’s most comprehensive solution of check-in/...

FILE - A lab technician works during research on the coronavirus, at Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutical in Beerse, Belgium, June 17, 2020. While the world wants flashy quick fixes for everything, especially massive threats like the coronavirus and global warming, next week’s Nobel Prizes remind us that in science, slow and steady pays off. It may soon do so again. Science builds upon previous work, with thinkers “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Isaac Newton put it, and it starts with basic research aimed at understanding a problem before fixing it. It’s that type of basic science that the Nobels usually reward, often years or decades after a discovery, because it can take that long to realize the implications. Slow and steady success in science has mad...

French aerospace major Dassault Aviation and European missile maker Matra BAE Dynamics Alenia (MBDA) are yet to fulfill] their offset obligations of offering high technology to India under the Rafale aircraft deal, the Comptroller and Auditor General said in a report released on Wednesday. The Dassault Aviation is the manufacturer of the Rafale jets while the MBDA supplied the missile systems for the aircraft. India had signed an inter-governmental agreement with France in September 2016 to procure 36 Rafale jets at a cost of Rs 59,000 crore, and the offset obligations were part of the contract. In its report tabled in Parliament, the national auditor said the Dassault Aviation and the MBDA proposed in September 2015 to discharge 30 percent of their offset obligations by offering high tech...