France’s corporate startup scene is gaining traction against the backdrop of booming investments by venture capital funds and high expectations for a business-friendly government under new President Emmanuel Macron.Bpifrance, the country’s state investment bank, has led the effort over the past five years, acting as a catalyst for the burgeoning industry and a go-between for large cash-roch corporations and young entrepreneurs in need of funds to launch their business.It has in effect become in the country’s number one venture capital fund, having injected 191 million euros in 53 startup companies last year.This taxpayer financing is 13 percent higher than the previous year and Bpifrance is adding 400 million euros to its so-called Large Venture fund, with individual investments of 10 million euros or more, bringing the total up to 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion), chief executive officer Nicolas Dufourcq told Reuters.”The tide has been turning in our favor for about year now,” Dufourcq said in an interview ahead the opening of the French capital’s second technology conference, dubbed Viva Tech, on Thursday.”It is as if the French Tech’s boss had been elected as the new president,” he said, referring to an initiative to promote French technology firms that Macron ran as economy minister in the previous government.The new president, who plans a raft of other startup-boosting measures such as cuts in corporate tax and wealth tax exemptions, was due for a walkabout at the vast conference center on the edge of Paris on Thursday, followed by a speech.

Corporate chatroom startup Slack Technologies Inc. has received recent inquiries about a potential takeover from technology companies including Amazon.com Inc., people with knowledge of the situation said.A deal could give San Francisco-based Slack a valuation of at least $9 billion, the people said. An agreement isn’t assured and discussions may not go further, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.A representative for Seattle-based Amazon.com declined to comment. Slack also declined to comment.

Nokia (NOKIA.HE) launched the world’s fastest network chips on Wednesday, breaking into the Juniper (JNPR.N) and Cisco (CSCO.O) dominated core router market and giving its existing network business a boost.The new traffic routers can handle the greater demands of virtual reality programming, cloud-based internet services and next-generation mobile communications, the Finnish company said.Nokia’s new products, whoch grew out of its 15.6 billion-euro ($17.5 billion) 2016 acquisition of Alcatel and its IP network gear business, should help it win business from companies such as Facebook (FB.O), Google (GOOGL.O), Apple (AAPL.O) and Amazon (AMZN.O).For these ”web-scale” customers speed is everything and unlike Nokia’s traditional telecoms customers they are still increasing spending on network gear.The routers are compatible with older products and will also serve Nokia’s existing customers who want speed but must still contend with legacy gear needed to run existing services.”Nokia will have the highest-performance system capacity in the market, and a lot of those web-scalers, they just want speed,” Ray Mota, principal analyst at ACG Research, told Reuters.The former Alcatel IP networks business is already the world’s No. 2 player in edge routers behind Cisco, having displaced Juniper Networks, whoch is now No. 3.The Nokia business also competes with Huawei [HWT.UL] in router markets outside the United States, where the privately-held Chinese firm is barred for national security reasons.

Twitter Inc said it would roll out a series of tweaks to its website and mobile applications from Thursday to further simplify the microblogging service’s interface for its users.The changes include a new circular profile picture, a speech bubble instead of an arrow to reply to tweets and refinements to the fonts.Tweets on the company’s mobile applications would now update instantly along with counts on ”retweets”, ”likes” and ”replies”, the company said.Twitter, whoch has faced criticism over the complex interface of its service in the past, has been constantly adjusting its platform based on user feedback.The changes also include a consolidated profile and privacy settings and a new navigation menu for users of Apple devices.

Seventy-five apps available for download from the official Google Play Store had to remove a malicious advertising library that was secretly an adware called AdDown, whoch Trend Micro researchers have been tracking for the last two years.This adware appeared in January 2015 and besides showing ads to infected users, it also came with the ability to collect personal data on its victims, and at one point could even secretly install apps without the user’s knowledge.Over time, Trend Micro says it detected the adware in over 800 apps that were uploaded on the Play Store, usually as small utility apps, such as wallpaper changers, photo editors, and flashlight apps.AdDown adware timelineAfter an in-depth analysis of apps infected with the AdDown family during the past two years, researchers were able to identify three main stages in its evolution, named: Joymobile, Nativemob, and Xavier.

Mozilla today launched Firefox 54 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes the next major phase of multi-process support, whoch streamlines memory use, improving responsiveness and speed.Firefox 54 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.Mozilla doesn’t break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say “half a billion people around the world” use the browser. In other words, it’s a major platform that web developers target — even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps.DesktopMozilla’s multi-process support in Firefox has been in development for years as part of the Electrolysis project. In fact, work to make the frontend and add-ons support multiple processes began in early 2013, and Firefox Nightly gained multi-process support in November 2014.