Solar energy is booming, which is good news for Glint Solar. The Norwegian software-as-a-service startup has built a platform that’s helping energy giants and large solar developers such as E.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft cut the time it takes to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition to renewables.

Glint’s software pulls in data from multiple sources to help speed up Solar project assessments. The platform features adaptable layout designs and yield estimates, along with country-specific geographic information system (GIS) data and topographic analysis to make it easer for solar developers to evaluate potential sites. Cloud-based collaboration features allow teams to access essential project data. The platform can also be used as a project presentation aid by serving up 3D-rendered project layouts “in seconds.”

Since TechCrunch last spoke with the climate startup in June 2022, when it closed a $3 million seed round, its customer base has grown almost 10x, according to CEO and co-founder Harald Olderheim. It’s now announcing an $8 million Series A to keep stoking the growth fire by expanding into more markets in Europe.

Its main regions for customers currently are France, Germany, the Nordics, and the U.K. but with the new funding, the March 2020-launched SaaS will be expanding its sales teams to target customers in “the rest of Europe,” including Italy and Spain, Olderheim says.

One notable change since Glint Solar launched is that it’s narrowed the service proposition to support the planning of land-based solar installations — dropping an earlier dual product focus that had included floating-solar installations, too.

Olderheim said the software can still be used for planning floating solar. But he noted there’s more demand for ground-based installations. “It’s a bigger market,” he said, explaining why they’ve opting to streamline their sales approach.

Glint Solar also isn’t focused on roof-mounted solar installations. Some of its customers are using its software to help plan solar arrays on “big rooftops” as well, per Olderheim. But, again, the reason it’s not focusing effort there is because it’s going after the largest demand chunk.

“If you look at the market, about 60% of the market is utility, large scale. And then about 20% is big rooftops, and 20% is residential. So we are going for the biggest market,” he told TechCrunch. “If you want to make a big impact in the world … we can do it through the utility scale, because that’s much faster if you’re going to build increase the [solar] energy in the world.

“If you think the impact we are making by one solar plant, a big one — like 10 megawatt, maybe with 7,000 or 15,000 solar panels — it’s a very efficient way of growing the energy production fast.”

Expanding impact

Another big focus for the Series A cash injection is product development. Olderheim said the startup will be expanding its platform to help customers plan where to site batteries that can be used to optimize renewable investments by storing energy.

Factors such as grid capacity, protected areas, and sound (since batteries produce some noise once operational) are all considerations the software will be able to factor in, per Olderheim, as well as providing customers with support to ensure a battery is compatible with the proposed solar array and helping them share the information with landowners as they work to obtain the necessary permits.

He emphasizes how much the cost of solar installations have dropped over the last decade (down around 90%). But he also says that projects still aren’t happening as fast as they need to given the existential threats of a heating planet that are driving waves of disasters, from devastating floods and hurricanes to heatwaves, droughts, and forest fires.

“It takes time to get all the agreements — with the land owner, with the grid, and with the municipality — to [deliver a solar project] and all these processes take time; so that’s one of the reasons we are doing Glint Solar,” he adds.

The startup is very focused on software design to maximize accessibility as another tactic to help remove friction from solar project approvals.

“We are making it very user friendly so everyone in a team can use one software together and work on this problem to make [project delivery] much faster. And you can share everything — with the land owner, with the grid, with the municipality — so they can easily take decisions much faster with the lower risk.”

The platform has multiple “modules” that allow the same person to, for example, “evaluate the site, organize all the projects, and design a solar park,” per Olderheim, supporting project teams to get more applications out.

He also flags the platform’s cloud-based collaboration features that allow everyone to work “in the same tool,” which he suggests help give it an edge versus other tools.

Glint says customers are reporting its SaaS is helping solar developers to triple their project pipeline on average and evaluate potential sites 10x faster than traditional methods.

Of course software can only do so much. Olderheim agrees that infrastructure investment and regulatory reform are key to further accelerating solar rollouts, pointing to grid capacity and solar permitting as the main areas for lawmakers to tackle.

“Sometimes it takes five years from a [project] to start to get building,” he points out, adding: “I know the EU is looking at this to reduce it to 12 or 24 months. So I think that’s a very good [start].”

Glint Solar’s Series A is led by Smedvig Ventures, with additional investment from Antler Nordic and Antler Elevate, Futurum Ventures, and Momentum.

Commenting in a statement, Jonathan Lerner, partner at Smedvig Ventures said: “The solar industry has done a great job at developing ways to harvest green energy, but now we need better processes to get these plans in motion. This is the gap that Glint Solar is filling. As one of the first unified products for utility projects on the market, solar developers, engineers, analysts and management can find everything they need to locate the best land spaces quickly and accurately. This is a much-needed evolution from manually trawling through data from multiple sources, saving considerable resources in all-important green energy projects.”

Roblox is going to block kids from accessing certain types of experiences following reports alleging that the platform has enabled child abuse.

One new measure will stop kids under 13 from accessing experiences with “certain types of interactive features,” Roblox says in a post on its developer forum. Those include “social hangouts,” where the primary purpose is to communicate with others over text or voice chat, and “free-form 2D user creation” experiences, where players can do things like draw on a chalkboard or whiteboard. This change goes into effect beginning November 18th.

Another change stops kids under 13 from playing, searching for, or being able to discover unrated experiences. This change goes into effect after December 3rd. If a creator wants to let a player under 13 access their game, they will have to complete a questionnaire and make sure that all of the information regarding their experience meets Roblox’s requirements for its current All Ages or 9 plus ratings. Roblox says it will start enforcing those requirements “next year.”

There have been multiple recent stories about Roblox’ allegedly poor protections for children, including a Bloomberg article titled “Roblox’s Pedophile Problem.” In October, the company announced changes for pre-teen users and a new type of account to let parents manage their kids on Roblox.

“We’re constantly strengthening our safety systems and policies — we shipped over 30 improvements this year and we have more to come,” spokesperson Juliet Chaitin-Lefcourt says in a statement to The Verge. “As a company that’s transparent with our community of developers, we needed to share key information about the upcoming changes prior to launch. The DevForum has all the information on the upcoming changes that we’re sharing at this time. It’s important to know that at Roblox, we’re constantly innovating Safety and we’ll never STOP.” (Emphasis Chaitin-Lefcourt’s.)

Update, November 6th: Added statement from Roblox.

In a world where cloud computing forms the backbone of modern IT, many tech teams now find themselves at a crucial crossroads regarding the future of their cloud strategies.

The move to the cloud was a digital gold rush that revolutionized how businesses operate, offering benefits such as enhanced scalability, cost efficiency, and the ability to rapidly deploy cloud applications, workloads, and data. Today, the dust has settled. Cloud computing has become the new normal and an integral part of modern IT infrastructure. Some organizations have begun to reassess their cloud strategies and, in some cases, are opting to repatriate certain resources and workloads back on-premises. This trend has further increased the complexity of hybrid—and frequently multi-cloud—IT environments.

Can green ships be a reality? Is there enough being done to address the carbon emissions within the maritime industry? What is the latest in the field of sustainable ports? These topics were intensely discussed by industry experts and stakeholders during one of the panel discussions at The Week’s Maritime Conclave 2024 held at ITC Grand Chola in Chennai. 

One of the speakers was Sushil Singh, Chairman, Deendayal Port Authority, Kandla and he relied on figures and statistics to explain the practical challenges that await the industry as well as the country if it resolutes to reducing Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. 

There are 38,000 vessels in international trade burning 200 million tonnes of conventional fossil fuel annually emitting one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, he said and added that by 2050, the GHG emissions will increase along with the maritime trade raising “serious concerns.” However, he suggested that if net zero GHG emissions have to be achieved as per the strategy and roadmap outlined by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), action has to be taken immediately. He pitched for short, medium and long-term measures tackle the issue.

“On the short term side, energy-efficient measures need to be adopted like slow steaming, frequent cleaning of propellers, fiction management, optimization of weather routing and usage of energy-efficient technologies on board. So these measures need to be adopted on shipping lines on an immediate basis, but then these have their own limitations in terms of the potential that they offer for total reduction of GHG,” he said. 

He pointed out that in the current times, the availability of alternate fuels like methanol, green ammonia, green hydrogen, and its derivatives would be challenging and also expensive given that alternate fuel costs at least 2.5 to 3 times more than fossil fuel. He said that to produce these variants of fuel on a large scale sufficient for the maritime sector to achieve net zero, the production infrastructure has to be upgraded which would require significant investments. 

“Scaling up of availability of fuel and improving the affordability of the fuel by reducing the price gap between the fossil fuel and alternative fuel—these are the two factors that will decide how far, how fast and how quickly we can transition from fossil fuel-based transportation system to an alternative, low carbon transportation ecosystem. So India will also have to overcome these two points —affordability and availability.” 

Dr. S Nallayarasu, Head, ocean Engineering Department, IIT Madras was asked about infrastructure development exercises in ports that would ensure sustainability in the long run. He took a critical view and said that capacities are being added without addressing the need to upgrade or replace existing infrastructure. 

“If you go around east and west coast, at least major ports, most of the major ports have already saturated. Most of them have no physical space to develop. I visited almost all the ports, the infrastructure in terms of physical structures, mechanical equipments and the evacuation systems, Is as old as more than 30 years,” he said, “Normally, we forget that the infrastructure is ageing and we keep adding the capacity but not infrastructure enhancement thinking that the system life is infinite.” He said in such scenarios there are chances of the system failing if its stretched beyond its limit. 

In terms of solutions for long-term infrastructure modernisation, Nallayarasu suggested a new approach by adopting unique Master plan and a corpus fund. 

He felt that a master plan for ports should reflect on previous master plans to understand what went wrong and what needs reformed instead of going for a completely new master plan. He proposed a corpus fund for ports that would take care of infrastructure enhancements or new additions for the next 50 years including building new structures, if need be. He also said that well-trained manpower and integrating technological solutions operations will also help in smooth and ideal functioning of sustainable ports.  

Naveen Prakash, SICCI SCM’s Chair and Director, Global Logistics spoke on how his company was supporting MSME’s by giving customers options to ship low-weight cargo at competitive prices. Regarding their contribution to sustainability, he said that his company was ensuring that through technology, they have weeded out the need for customers to travel physically due to the ease of online services.  

Moderator Lekha Ravi, Assistant Professor, School of Maritime Management, Indian Maritime University, appreciated The Week for conducting the event. 

“We are actually amazed at the long list of eminent personalities from maritime sector which The week has got together and each of them has put so much on our plate that it has been a veritable feast of what is what, who is who, coming from who’s who in the maritime sector.”

Connections is one of the best puzzle games from the New York Times. The game tasks you with categorizing a pool of 16 words into four secret (for now) groups by figuring out how the words relate to each other. The puzzle resets every night at midnight and each new puzzle has a varying degree of difficulty. Just like Wordle, you can keep track of your winning streak and compare your scores with friends.

Some days are trickier than others — just like other NYT Games favorites The Mini and Strands. If you’re having a little trouble solving today’s puzzle, check out our Connections tips and tricks guide for some good strategies or check out the hints for today’s Connections puzzle below. And if you still can’t get it, we’ll tell you today’s answers at the very end.

How to play Connections

Connections is a daily game about finding common threads between words. Players must select four groups of four words without making more than three mistakes. Play now. https://t.co/YITfSnqODb pic.twitter.com/CqObVOqeUs

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 3, 2024

You can play Connections on the New York Times website or with the NYT Games app on iOS or Android.

In Connections, you’ll be shown a grid containing 16 words — your objective is to organize these words into four sets of four by identifying the connections that link them. These sets could encompass concepts like titles of video game franchises, book series sequels, shades of red, names of chain restaurants, etc.

There are generally words that seem like they could fit multiple themes, but there’s only one 100% correct answer. You’re able to shuffle the grid of words and rearrange them to help better see the potential connections.

Each group is color-coded. The yellow group is the easiest to figure out, followed by the green, blue, and purple groups.

Pick four words and hit Submit. If you’re correct, the four words will be removed from the grid and the theme connecting them will be revealed. Guess incorrectly and it’ll count as a mistake. You only have four mistakes available until the game ends.

Hints for today’s Connections

We can help you solve today’s Connection by telling you the four themes. If you need more assistance, we’ll also give you one word from each group below.

Advertisement

Today’s themes

• FOOD-RELATED JUMBLES
• PUBLIC STANDING
• INFO ON A MUSEUM PLACARD
• ANAGRAMS OF FAMOUS PAINTERS

One-answer reveals

• FOOD-RELATED JUMBLES – HASH
• PUBLIC STANDING – CHARACTER
• INFO ON A MUSEUM PLACARD – ARTIST
• ANAGRAMS OF FAMOUS PAINTERS – DIAL

Today’s Connections answers

NYT Connection FAQs

Wyna Liu, who has been editing puzzles at The New York Times since 2020, edits Connections daily.

“A few months ago, a new assignment crossed my desk: Create the game boards for Connections, a category matching game that had recently been greenlighted and was in search of an editor,” wrote Liu in an article explaining her process in June 2024. Most of my puzzle experience has been working with crosswords, and I was excited at the chance to try something different. I’ve enjoyed learning how puzzle editing plays out once a game is greenlighted, and seeing how our team fits into a larger ecosystem.”

On the one-year anniversary of Connections launching earlier this year, Liu posted this TikTok about her favorite puzzles so far:

@thegamesteam ? happy one year anniversary to connections, our newest official NYT game ? #nytgames #nytconnections #nyt ♬ The Kite Live by Luisa Marion – luisa_marion_music

Samsung hasn’t rolled out any updates for its older Galaxy Watch models in months. The company may not have forgotten about releasing security patches for its smartwatches. However, the tech giant will have to release updates for older Wear OS-powered Galaxy Watches soon.

Samsung is yet to release any new updates for its older Galaxy Watches

Samsung has been readying One UI 7.0. This update is based on Android 15. The company has fallen behind on the development and indicated that One UI 7.0 will roll out early next year.

Similar to the One UI development, Samsung appears to have fallen behind in updating its older Galaxy Watch smartwatches. The South Korean tech giant has been working on the next major Wear OS update for quite some time. However, there has been no update for the wearable devices in the past several months.

The Galaxy Watch 7 and Galaxy Watch Ultra smartwatches received the Wear OS 5 with One UI 6 Watch update earlier this year. However, no other models have received this update, despite it being in beta.

Specifically speaking, Samsung hasn’t updated any of its older Galaxy Watch devices since it moved on to Wear OS 5 and One UI 6 Watch. The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 5 models still sport the March 2024 security patch. In other words, these smartwatches haven’t received updates for well over six months.

When will older Galaxy Watch models get Wear OS 5?

Technically, the beta testing phase for the Wear OS 5 with One UI 6 Watch update was to be over last month. However, with October gone, the majority of Galaxy Watch users must be wondering why their smartwatches are still running Wear OS 4. Only the Galaxy Watch 6 series has started receiving the One UI 6.0 update, but only beta testers based in the US have access to the same.

While the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7, Watch Ultra, and Watch FE are rocking the latest Wear OS 5 software, they still have the June 2024 security patch. Needless to say, Samsung hasn’t confirmed when the Wear OS 5 with One UI 6 Watch update will roll out to the older Galaxy Watch devices.

Samsung seems to be struggling with its software division, particularly the one that handles updates. The company should have at least demoed the One UI 7.0. However, the company only teased the latest iteration of the custom Android skin recently. Samsung may release the latest Wear OS 5 and the One UI 7.0 simultaneously early next year.