Buying glasses can be a big commitment. Even with the right deal and a great sale to keep the price down, you’re still picking out what will essentially become a part of your face until your next purchase. Your glasses will inform every first impression and contribute their shape to every smile and frown. Maybe that’s too much pressure, but another way to make things easier is to look at what makes a pair of glasses the “Best” for experts who make a point of judging.

Many online stores offer a wide selection of prescription glasses. Even with an internet full of articles telling you which glasses are the best, it’s still going to come down to you to make a decision about what frame fits your face.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to just choose the latest model of high-tech digital glasses, but for now, you’ve got a decision to make. Here are a few things you can consider when making that decision.

What’s your perfect price point?

This one is obvious on the surface, and it stays obvious once you get deep with it, too. You want the best value for what you’re paying! What could be simpler than that? Well, sites still rank different glasses in different places. Some lists go all the way to the bottom of the price range, finding frames as low as $6, while others take a more holistic view of value, where the price ranges from $39 all the way to $700.

There’s more to price than just finding the smallest number; you need to get that cost-to-quality ratio working in your favor, and there’s style to take into account, too. Before you start judging the price, you need to decide: what are you willing to spend? Those articles can’t answer that for you. Neither can this one.

Style selection and try-before-you-buy

As long as you’re picking out such a major part of your face’s overall look, you’ll want to find a shop with lots of selection so you can find the right look. Then you’ll want to try them on. There’s a whole discourse about what glasses are best for which face shape, and you’ll find plenty of disagreeing guides online if you want to look for those. They all come down to where on your face the glasses sit, how wide or narrow or tall they are, how round or square, and a lot of other things that are on some guides but not others. You know it’s going to come down to putting them on and seeing for yourself.

If you’re buying online, find a site with a virtual try-on feature. Don’t trust a sales pitch or your imagination when you’ve got a webcam that can dispel all doubt.

How optional are optional features?

With the right vendor and a great deal, some optional features are essentially basic. Would you call shatter-resistant lenses optional? What about a scratch-resistant coating? What you should really be making decisions on are things like transition lenses and blue light blocking, things that can make life easier and vision clearer and save you a few headaches (as figuratively or literally as you like).

Shopping for glasses is so personal and complex that it’s not really a surprise that rankings and priorities differ from guide to guide, site to site. What’s really going to matter is your own. Decide on price, find a great selection, and have some optional features in mind, then find a vendor that lets you put some frames on your face (even if only virtually). With some decision-making done up front, you’ve got a better chance of enjoying the shopping experience and finding what makes your next pair of glasses the best for you.

VentureBeat newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.

Physics Wallah, an Indian edtech startup, has secured $210 million in fresh financing amid a tough funding environment for edtech companies in the country following the collapse of Byju’s, once the biggest company in the space.

Physics Wallah said on Friday the Series B round was led by the hedge fund Hornbill Capital, a venture between China’s Orchid Asia and India’s Hornbill, with Lightspeed Ventures Partners “significantly” participating, alongside existing backers WestBridge and GSV. The round values Physics Wallah at $2.8 billion, a substantial increase from the previous $1.1 billion valuation it scored in June 2022.

The startup has raised over $310 million to date. The new funding, largest by an Indian edtech since 2022, included a secondary transaction of about $35 million that saw its founders and employees selling some of their shares.

Physics Wallah began its journey as a YouTube channel in 2016, where co-founder and teacher Alakh Pandey posted his lectures for free to help students who — like he had — lacked the financial means to enroll in premium coaching classes. By 2020, Physics Wallah had grown to become the largest Indian education community on YouTube, prompting Pandey to formalize his efforts into a company that now serves 46 million students in five vernacular languages.

“He always felt that he couldn’t crack the IIT entrance exam because he didn’t have access to quality education,” said Prateek Maheshwari, co-founder of Physics Wallah, explaining the motivation behind the startup’s mission.

India, the world’s most populous nation, boasts one of the largest education markets globally, with approximately 250 million students attending school and about 4 million giving entrance exams for engineering colleges and medical schools every year.

Physics Wallah caters to a broad spectrum of this market, serving students from third grade through those preparing for competitive engineering and medical entrance exams and government positions. It even offers live classes that typically draw tens of thousands of simultaneous attendees.

The startup, which also operates about 180 brick-and-mortar centres, employs teaching assistants and AI to address student queries, and has developed an app called AI Guru that helps students solve problems in their learning material. Physics Wallah has trained the AI on its own data, Maheshwari said.

One of Physics Wallah’s key strengths is the affordability of its courses, with prices starting as low as $50 for an entire year. More than 5.5 million students are paying subscribers, the startup said.

“We are covering nearly all exams in India, and for all the special ones – JEE, NEET, GATE, UPSC, and CAT — we are No. 1 in terms of revenue and the size of the student base served,” Maheshwari said.

That traction is serving Physics Wallah well: It reported revenue of $96.2 million in the year ended March 2023, and the startup told TechCrunch revenue increased 2.5x between March last year and March 2024. It expects its fiscal year ending March 2025 to be its most profitable yet in EBITDA terms.

Dev Khare, a partner at Lightspeed and one of the earliest investors in Indian edtech startups, told TechCrunch that many trends have converged to help Physics Wallah grow. “When you bring the price point down, it just makes things way more accessible,” he said, pointing to budget-hotel chain Oyo, quick-commerce startup Zepto, and storytelling platform PocketFM as other examples of Lightspeed’s portfolio startups that run similar playbooks.

Maheshwari said Physics Wallah will explore inorganic growth opportunities with the fresh funds, but added that the company largely raised the capital because the funding was available and the investors saw value in doing so. The company, which has acquired about 10 firms in the last three years, is thinking about an IPO, but he cautioned that it would not make any immediate moves soon.

The new funding arrives as India’s edtech sector faces significant headwinds. Online learning startups, which saw rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools were closed, have seen a sharp decline in usage since.

Unacademy, a major edtech company based in Bengaluru, has cut approximately 2,000 jobs since 2022. The company cut another 250 positions in July this year, citing the need to restructure for profitability.

Byju’s, formerly India’s most valuable startup at $22 billion, has suffered a dramatic downturn over the past two years. The company now faces the prospect of bankruptcy proceedings.

Maheshwari said recent industry events haven’t affected the market opportunity. “From a student’s lens, things haven’t changed much post-COVID. The market is entirely hybrid and students are enjoying the best of both worlds to strengthen their preparation,” he said.

Physics Wallah is a “rare combination of vision, execution, and impact with a thriving 3C model – Content, Community, and Commerce,” said Manoj Thakur, founder of Hornbill Capital, in a statement. “We are excited to see PW’s use of AI not only to help improve students’ outcomes but also their emotional well-being.”

No investment bank was appointed for the deal.

PlayStation 30th Anniversary:

The Huawei Watch D was one of the weirdest wearables of 2022, and now the airbag-packing, blood-pressure-tracking marvel is back. 

Released this week as one of six new Huawei Watch models, the D2 builds on the ground-breaking blood pressure tracking of the first D model. In a world-first for any smartwatch, its ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) system is now certified by China’s National Medical Products Administration and the EU’s Medical Device Regulation body. 

Normally we share updates through long articles, but writing about photography is like dancing about math. What if we share it in a video? (Spoiler: we are not launching a video app.) If you dig the new format, let us know in the video comments or through Halide@mastodon.social

Most of the ancient underground aqueducts that enabled humans to settle in the world’s hottest and driest regions have been lost over time. Now, archaeologists are rediscovering them by using artificial intelligence to analyse spy satellite images taken during the cold war.

The oldest known underground aqueducts that are found across much of North Africa and the Middle East are called qanats and are up to 3000 years old. They were designed to carry water from highland or mountain…