The U.S. Department of Defense has booked a prototype flight on Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne to demonstrate the capabilities of the company’s Low Earth Orbit launch service, Virgin Orbit said today. Read More
Verizon has initiated another round of layoffs as a result of its acquisition of Yahoo and subsequent combining of the company with its existing business property AOL to form a new division — called Oath. Read More
NBC will live stream the 2018 Olympic Winter Games from PyeongChang, South Korea, the company announced today. Its coverage will include 1,800 hours of games – a record for a Winter Olympics. It’s also the first time the Winter Games will offer live streaming of NBC’s broadcast network.
The streaming coverage will include a combination of authenticated TV viewing and… Read More
Ride hailing provider Lyft has brought in 12 members of the Kamcord team, essentially acquiring its engineering talent, though not any of the broadcast live streaming app’s technologies. The goal of the acquihire is to help build out its transportation service, the Kamcord team said in a Medium post announcing the news. Kamcord had been focused on delivering mobile game streaming, and… Read More
If you’ve ever ended up with an injury, you’ve probably gone through an overly long process to eventually end up in a physical therapist’s office: you go to a doctor’s office, they take a look, hand you a slip of paper, and refer you off to a PT office (that might not even still exist).
And that’s just to get to the point of actually starting the workouts and… Read More
Trocafone, the online marketplace for used electronics, has raised $15 million in new financing to expand its reach beyond Brazil and Argentina into other emerging markets. The company, which raised $7 million in a previous round of financing last year, said the new money came from Callfort, MIT Castor Ventures Fund, FJ Labs, Rocketship, Mercado Libre Fund and other undisclosed investors.… Read More
OnePlus has carved out a nice niche for itself over the past couple of years. The company’s never been too preoccupied with the rush toward bleeding-edge tech. Instead, it’s worked to provide consumers with one of the best deals in smartphones. And the newly announced 5T is firmly inline with that mission statement. Read More
Airbnb, the accommodation and travel startup that is now valued at $31 billion, is today announcing an acquisition that points to how it wants to address the travel needs of more kinds of customers. It has bought Accomable, a startup based out of London that focuses on travel listings that are disabled-friendly. Along with the announcement Airbnb is refreshing its own accessibility features as… Read More
Kairos, the organization for young entrepreneurs founded in 2008 as Kairos Society, has lifted the veil on its first venture fund that it teased earlier this year.
The $25M fund will focus on companies that are working to solve real-world issues facing the middle class in America and abroad. Essentially the fund and its investment thesis is a response to the often heard complaint that while… Read More
Revising the results of their headline-grabbing, decade-long study, researchers from top universities still believe that a brain training exercise from app developer Posit Science can actually reduce the risk of dementia among older adults. The groundbreaking study still has incredible implications for the treatment of neurological disorders associated with aging — and helps to validate… Read More
Instagram really wants the developing world on Stories. They won’t be able to use Instagram’s augmented reality masks or share videos, but starting today mobile web users can post to Instagram Stories. Previously, mobile web users could only view Stories, which have to be created in Instagram’s native apps. But now users can snap photos, overlay text captions, and share them… Read More
PayPal announced today it has agreed to sell $5.8 billion in consumer credit receivables to Synchrony Financial, in an expanded relationship between the companies. The deal also includes Synchrony’s acquisition of $1 billion in participation interests in PayPal receivables held by certain investors and a chartered financial institution, the company said. Following the news, shares of… Read More
It took a while, but last month the latest iteration of MegaBots’ giant fighting robot finally did battle with a 6.5-ton machine from Japan’s Suidobashi Heavy Industry. The battle was really a precursor for what the Bay Area robotics company has been planning all along: a robotic fighting league. Unsurprisingly, it’s going to take another crowdfunding campaign to get there. Read More
SpaceX will be launching a Falcon 9 with a special payload aboard today, with a two-hour long launch window opening up at 8 PM EST (5 PM PST) today. The launch will take place from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and SpaceX will also attempt recovery of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket at its LZ-1 landing pad at Cape Canaveral. But the most interesting part of the mission… Read More
“Fake news” and other misinformation, online propaganda, and satirical content people believe is true have filled the web via search engines and social media, and have caused a rift in how people perceive today’s news organizations and the quality of their coverage. A nonpartisan effort called The Trust Project is working to address this situation by helping online… Read More
If the blockchain is going to be an immutable record, you need to start with clean data. The question is, how do you get clean data into a blockchain database to begin with. It’s kind of a quandary for use cases not starting with a green field, but Venzee, a startup that has been helping customers clean up their retail supply chain data to share with large vendors, thinks it has an… Read More
Segment is a startup that helps companies collect customer data from a variety of siloed sources and place that data in a single usable record. Today, it announced it has added a new tool to prepare for the EU’s GDPR privacy guidelines, which are coming in May next year. The new tool makes it a simple matter to stop collecting data or completely remove a person’s information from… Read More
Shopify has teamed up with UPS to provide merchants on its platform with special rates normally only available to bigger business customers, and direct Shopify platform integration of UPS shipping, billing, and tracking services. The special pricing includes “pre-negotiated domestic and international rates” for Shopify sellers, which the companies say are lower than the posted… Read More
They’re back. After staying heads down for the past year, Trae Vassallo and Neil Sequeira, two longtime venture capitalists whose individual brands are well-known to Bay Area startup founders, are finally taking the wraps off their new venture firm, Defy Partners. As part of the big reveal, they say they’ve closed their debut fund with $151 million in capital commitments,… Read More
Microsoft’s Surface Book 2 is the most powerful mobile Surface device yet. It easily blows away the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop and, of course, the old Surface Book. It’s also one of the odder devices in the lineup, though. It’s not just a Surface Pro with a rigid keyboard. It’s a relatively heavy base with a powerful processor and graphics card and a big battery… Read More
