Latest news with #Launchpad
Al Etihad
4 days ago
- Business
- Al Etihad
In partnership with UAE Ministry of Economy, UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators presents 10 finalists at Launchpad's Circular Economy Cycle event
19 June 2025 13:19 ABU DHABI (ALETIHAD)Ten climate tech start-ups have presented pioneering circular economy solutions at the showcase event for the latest Circular Economy Cycle of the Launchpad, hosted in partnership with the Ministry of Economy by UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA).The UICCA Launchpad is designed to fast-track the growth of climate tech start-ups by providing access to funding, market opportunities, mentorship, and policy guidance. Each cycle targets a critical area of climate action, with this edition dedicated to advancing circular economy solutions that eliminate or repurpose waste across key sectors, such as food, water, energy, and ten participating companies were selected from over 150 global applicants based on the potential of their climate technologies. These include solutions in decentralised composting, textile upcycling, critical minerals recovery, industrial reuse, food waste management, and circular desalination. The showcase marked the culmination of an intensive three-month accelerator, during which the participants received expert mentorship, training, and stakeholder engagement opportunities intended to help them scale their solutions in the and CEO of UICCA, Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, said, 'True circularity challenges us to fundamentally rethink how our economy is designed, not just to reduce waste, but to regenerate systems and create lasting value. Through the UICCA Launchpad, we are backing the innovators who are turning this vision into reality. Their work is not only transforming industries but laying the groundwork for a future where sustainability and growth go hand in hand. Partnering with the Ministry of Economy allows us to amplify this impact and build the enabling environment needed for these solutions to thrive.'Assistant Undersecretary for Policies and Economic Studies Sector at the Ministry of Economy, Her Excellency Maria Hanif Alqassim, said, 'The Ministry of Economy is proud to serve as the official government partner of the UICCA Circular Economy Launchpad Programme. This initiative reflects the values we champion: cross-sector collaboration, support for scalable innovation, and the advancement of sustainable economic models. By uniting entrepreneurs, investors, regulators, and industry leaders, the programme aims to reshape our economic systems to be restorative by design. We look forward to working closely with UICCA, the private sector, and all stakeholders to turn this vision into reality.'The Circular Economy Cycle finalists included: Altera, Cauli, Circa Biotech, Desolenator, Excess Material Exchange, Food with Benefits, Novasensa, Terrax, The Waste Lab, and Yellow Octopus: Circular Solutions. These companies delivered live presentations to an audience of investors, policy stakeholders, and sustainability leaders from across the UAE. The UICCA Launchpad will continue with upcoming cycles focused on carbon solutions and climate adaptation, continuing to support the UAE's growth as a global hub for climate innovation.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Free picnic with food boxes for more than 100 people in Exmouth
Exmouth Hope Church is throwing a free community picnic in Phear Park. On Saturday, June 14, more than 100 people who register will receive free individual picnic boxes, with food provided by Launchpad in Budleigh Salterton. The church has invited people to join them to explore questions about life and faith. The church believes that 'the Christian faith is all about a loving God rescuing a broken world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus'. The church said its mission is to bring the "good news of Jesus and love of God" to the local community.
Arabian Post
09-06-2025
- Business
- Arabian Post
Canonical Ends Bazaar Hosting on Launchpad
Canonical will cease all Bazaar code hosting on its Launchpad platform in two stages, culminating on 1 September 2025. The legacy version control system, once the backbone of many Ubuntu-related projects, will see its web interface retired soon, followed by full removal of backend functionality. Users of Bazaar, including developers relying on Ubuntu Engineering, must migrate to Git or other supported systems ahead of the deadline to preserve continuity. Bazaar, created by Martin Pool and sponsored by Canonical, never matched Git in popularity. With its last stable release in 2016, it gradually lost traction among open‑source communities. Today, Git has become the standard, hosting the vast majority of collaborative software development activity. Canonical itself acknowledged that maintaining Bazaar consumed significant development, operational, and infrastructure resources, resources now better allocated to modernising Ubuntu and Launchpad. Launchpad's rollback of Bazaar support will begin with the immediate shutdown of the Loggerhead web frontend, used for browsing Bazaar code repositories. Canonical cited declining legitimate traffic, with much of the web interface usage now coming from scrapers and automated bots. At this stage, developers will still be able to interact with repositories via command‑line tools, with pushes, pulls, and merges unaffected. The second phase, starting 1 September 2025, will eliminate the Bazaar backend entirely. After this date, Launchpad will no longer host Bazaar repositories, meaning developers cannot push, pull, merge, or browse code via Bazaar. Canonical has urged all users to migrate their code before this shutdown to avoid service disruption. ADVERTISEMENT Migration instructions have been made available on Ubuntu's Discourse platform and Launchpad's documentation site. The recommended method relies on native Bazaar‑to‑Git interop, using tools like 'brz push' that convert Bazaar revisions into Git history. Users have reported this process to be slower but more reliable than older export‑import methods. Not all Bazaar users are fluent with Git. In community discussions, one long‑time developer lamented that 'I love the simplicity of bazaar/launchpad… I really do not get git.' Another emphasised the invaluable contributions of Jezmer Vernooij, the maintainer of the Breezy fork, describing him as 'probably the most tangible act of generosity that can be made among strangers in the open source world'. Ubuntu and Launchpad gained prominence through Bazaar because it was once the only version control system supported for packaging and PPAs. Over time, Git's features, performance, branching model, and ecosystem—spanning GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket—made it the clear choice for modern development. Canonical highlighted its decision to deprecate Bazaar as part of its broader effort to modernise development workflows. By reallocating resources from maintaining outdated infrastructure like Bazaar, Canonical intends to better support Ubuntu's core development and implement improvements to Launchpad as a whole. Despite the shift, Bazaar will not disappear entirely from the world of open source. Users who wish to continue using Bazaar beyond Launchpad's support cutoff can host their repositories with services like GNU Savannah, which remains committed to Bazaar support. Breezy, the active fork of Bazaar, will also continue to receive maintenance, ensuring the version control system endures for those who prefer it. ADVERTISEMENT The discontinuation of Bazaar on Launchpad marks a significant moment in the history of Ubuntu's development tools. Once tightly integrated into canonical workflows for building DEBs, PPAs, snaps and Ubuntu itself, Bazaar's sundering from Launchpad symbolises the retreat of niche VCS in favour of universally supported tools. It speaks to broader shifts in software development culture, aligning Ubuntu with prevailing industry practices centred on Git. Canonical has emphasized that Ubuntu Engineering will receive migration support, and developers with unique needs are encouraged to reach out via Launchpad's feedback channels or Matrix. The company aims to collaborate closely to remove reliance on Bazaar-specific integrations used in Ubuntu's engineering systems. As the 1 September deadline approaches, developers must act swiftly to export their repositories. Migrating preserves their revision histories, branches, and tags, ensuring continued project development. Those who delay risk losing remote access to their code and may face complex manual recovery efforts after Bazaar support ends. Bazaar's sunset also underscores the dominance of Git in open‑source workflows. According to the 2024 Stack Overflow developer survey, approximately 98 per cent of developers use Git, everyone from hobbyists to large enterprises. Git's extensive ecosystem of CI/CD tools, integrations, and community support has entrenched it as the developer standard. Despite familiarity with Bazaar among legacy projects, the broader open‑source ecosystem has migrated towards Git. Organisations seeking to maintain compatibility with the wider community, attract contributors, and leverage automated development pipelines will find Git essential. Enterprises relying on Bazaar must reevaluate their infrastructure and workflows to align with this reality. Canonical's decision reflects both pragmatic resource allocation and alignment with community norms. By removing Bazaar support, it simplifies the development stack, reduces maintenance burden, and clarifies the path forward for Ubuntu's development ecosystem. While the transition brings uncertainty for long‑time Bazaar users, structured migration pathways and continued community support via Breezy and alternative hosts offer continuity. This move also signals potential future efforts by Canonical to deprecate other legacy services on Launchpad, focusing the platform on components with active developer and user bases. By streamlining services, Canonical may enhance Launchpad's relevance in contemporary software engineering workflows.
Telegraph
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Millions of taxpayers' money has been spent on prisoner laptops
Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been spent on providing prisoners with laptops. A Freedom of Information Request submitted by the campaign group Senedd Waste revealed that the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) had spent £6.28 million on laptops for prisoners in England and Wales over the past three years. The framing of the response from the ministry suggests that the primary objective of this scheme is to provide prisoners with access to 'Launchpad', which is an 'in-cell tech programme that gives prisoners secure laptops with digital services in their cells to support their rehabilitation'. The programme has been rolled out in 19 prisons, reaching around 12,900 inmates. But the MOJ's description of Launchpad continues, going considerably further beyond what the average law-abiding Joe would reasonably consider necessary to rehabilitate a convicted criminal into society. We are told that the programme is designed to offer 'distraction to empower prisoners on the inside, to live better lives on the outside'. Is the purpose of prison to distract convicted criminals while they serve their sentences? I would call this a hopeless infantalisation of our criminal justice system but the reality is more absurd. Even children on the naughty step are invited to reflect on their behaviour as they serve out their period of exclusion. The programme is designed to improve inmates' 'peace of mind knowing their laptop can only be used by them', because 'prisoners report they like 'something just for them''. The MOJ further notes that 'prisoners engaging with fresh, relevant, useful and relaxing content 24/7 [emphasis added] report improved mood, reduced self-harm and lower frustration levels'. In their response to Senedd Waste's Freedom of Information request, the MOJ confirmed that the laptops, which provide prisoners with 'tools and technology to help maintain relationships, support health and wellbeing', are issued to be used 'without supervision'. Which raises the very logical question, also put to the ministry by the campaign group, what safeguards are in place to ensure the laptops are not used for nefarious purposes. This query was declined on security grounds, so we are left to arrive at our own conclusion. A spokesman for the DOJ however confirmed to me that 'all in-cell technology is fitted out with tough security measures and cannot be used to browse the internet.' But tech security is a tricky business. Adding convicted criminals to the mix demonstrates a sort of unfounded self-confidence which only the taxpayer-funded public sector can afford to entertain. Such as that shown by Humza Yousaf in 2020 as Scotland's Justice Secretary, when £7.6 million was spent on providing inmates – including 'murderers, paedophiles and gangland thugs' – with personal mobile phones to keep in touch with their families during the pandemic, 'to aid the mental health and wellbeing of those in our care and their loved ones.' The scheme had to be abandoned after the phones were found to be used to commit 'more than 8,000 security breaches, including drug deals, hit jobs and the fire-bombing of family homes' as, rather predictably, illicit SIM cards could be easily used to bypass restrictions. As we reported last year, the mobile phones were then replaced with landlines, taking the total cost of the scheme to £12 million. For taxpayers' sake let us hope that the MOJ has more robust security precautions in place. But is there a framework in place for the ministry to record and assess the success of the programme? At the time of writing this, four days have passed since I posed this question to Shabana Mahmood's department. I have yet to receive an answer. Hardly a day goes by without our criminal justice system hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. From releasing dangerous criminals early to providing child-killing terrorists with access to sweet treats in prison, the news reports paint a picture of a system which is completely out of sync with the nation, chipping away at the public's confidence in it. This story is a depressing reminder of just how great the chasm remains between those who run prison services and those who pay for them.
Cision Canada
06-06-2025
- Business
- Cision Canada
MEXC Officially Unveils Launchpad Platform: Acquire BTC at Discounted Prices
VICTORIA, Seychelles, June 6, 2025 /CNW/ -- MEXC, a leading global cryptocurrency exchange, has officially unveiled its new Launchpad, an innovative token issuance platform that provides users with guaranteed access to high-quality projects at discounted prices. MEXC's first-ever Launchpad event and debut offering lets users subscribe to select tokens and unlock discounts on BTC. According to data from Triple-A, the global crypto user base has surpassed 560 million, and market momentum continues to grow. However, many users remain sidelined from having early investment access to promising projects, but also access to established assets at significant discounts due to high entry barriers and complex risk factors. MEXC Launchpad addresses these pain points with a redesigned, fully upgraded investment platform that breaks through the traditional IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) model. By offering discounted access to premium project tokens, Launchpad aims to provide users with inclusive access to high-quality crypto investments, helping retail users capture emerging and established market opportunities. Because of these highlights, MEXC Launchpad is known for being the "Your Easiest Way to Top Tokens — Early or at a Discount." Key features of the Launchpad include: Discounted Access to Token Subscriptions The platform adopts a differentiated pricing strategy, offering users the opportunity to subscribe at prices below market expectations. This significantly lowers the cost barrier for retail investors to participate in high-quality projects and positions them to benefit from potential gains after the token is listed. Fair Participation Breaking away from traditional lottery systems and favoring large holders, MEXC Launchpad ensures that all eligible users can participate on equal footing. Users are not required to complete complex tasks to subscribe, a feat that significantly improves participation and enhances accessibility. Rigorous and Professional Project Selection MEXC has implemented a rigorous evaluation framework that assesses projects across multiple dimensions, including technology and innovation, team background, and development potential. This professional vetting process ensures that only high-quality projects are featured, helping users manage investment risk effectively. Flexible and Diverse Subscription Models Users can participate using designated tokens, with both non-oversubscription and oversubscription models available. In the non-oversubscribed model, users receive tokens based on the amount committed. The oversubscribed model uses a proportional allocation mechanism to ensure a fair distribution process. The debut MEXC Launchpad event offers BTC-based subscriptions, featuring special discount packages tailored to different types of users. New User Exclusive: Subscribe at up to 90% off (as low as 10% of the market price), with subscription limits ranging from 5 to 55 USDT and a total supply of 4 BTC. All Users: Enjoy a 20% discount on subscriptions, with subscription limits from 25 to 250 USD1 and a total supply of 3 BTC. Referral Rewards: Earn a 5 USDT bonus for each new user referred, up to a maximum of 100 USDT in referral rewards. Subscription Period: June 6 to June 20 "The release of MEXC Launchpad marks a major milestone in MEXC's commitment to inclusive finance," said Tracy Jin, COO of MEXC. " By offering a fair and simple subscription model, we're making premium project investment accessible to everyone, not just a privileged few. Choosing BTC as the first featured asset opens a new channel for everyday users to participate in "digital gold." Looking ahead, we'll continue introducing high-quality projects to bring more value to our global users." Cryptocurrency investing involves significant risk and is subject to market volatility. Investors may face potential loss of principal. Please ensure you thoroughly understand the project details and carefully evaluate your risk tolerance before making any investment decisions. The first BTC Launchpad event is now live on MEXC. For more details, visit the official Launchpad page: About MEXC Founded in 2018, MEXC is committed to being "Your Easiest Way to Crypto." Serving over 40 million users across 170+ countries, MEXC is known for its broad selection of trending tokens, everyday airdrop opportunities, and low trading fees. Our user-friendly platform is designed to support both new traders and experienced investors, offering secure and efficient access to digital assets. MEXC prioritizes simplicity and innovation, making crypto trading more accessible and rewarding.
