A lot of the conversation today about on-demand transportation is focused on how new players like Uber and Lyft are rapidly expanding and disrupting the established transportation market (alongside whether they have been overvalued and overplayed in their rapid ascent), but today comes news about how one of those newer players is teaming up with a legacy transportation business as a route… Read More
Verizon’s* plans to launch a streaming service of its own to compete with the likes of Dish’s Sling TV, AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Sony’s PlayStation Vue, and others, have been pushed back to spring 2018, according to a report from Bloomberg on Wednesday. Citing unnamed sources, the report indicates the timing of the launch is still tentative and could be postponed… Read More
Over the past 18 months, investments in blockchain startups tackling a variety of problems have climbed. SparkChain Capital, a new $100 million early-stage fund launched by SparkLabs Group, wants to contribute by backing blockchain and cryptocurrency-related companies that are solving real-world issues. Read More
A new startup called Relativity Space founded by two aerospace engineers wants to use massive 3D printers to produce rockets without humans required on the factory floor, with the ultimate aim of driving the price of rocket launches down from their current rate of around $100 million to just about $10 million per launch. Bloomberg reports that Relativity’s founders think using 3D printing… Read More
Cisco announced today that it intends to acquire Perspica, a machine learning-driven operations analytics firm that has raised $8.5 million. Cisco intends to fold Perspica’s team into AppDynamics, the company it purchased earlier this year for $3.7 billion. Cisco did not share the Perspica purchase price. All of these machinations have a purpose. Cisco is of course at its heart a… Read More
I’ve seen startups come and go over the years and I was particularly interested to see what happened to August Smart locks today. The company originally tapped Yves Behar to make a better smart lock, one that would meld with the sensitivities of a certain kind of smart home stylist with the high-concept, high-tech design of the Nest thermostat. The products, while beautiful, were unusable… Read More
The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s third or fourth company (who can keep track) is nearly ready to double its tunnel digging capacity: The venture’s second boring machine is “almost ready” according to Musk, and it’ll be named ‘Line-Storm,’ borrowing its name from a poem by Robert Frost. Maybe this is what Steve Jobs really always meant when he talked… Read More
The furniture rental industry is stuck in the last. Current options involve old-school companies like CORT where most of the inventory will make your apartment look like a dorm room, or a place like Rent-A-Center where you’ll almost certainly pay many times what the item is actually worth. Enter Feather, a company trying to breathe some life into the aging industry by letting… Read More
The smart home market continues to heat up, and the legacy giants do not want to get locked out: quite literally. This morning, Assa Abloy, the $23 billion Swedish lock giant that owns Yale and many other brands — announced that it is buying US-based smart lock maker August Home to double down on new technology. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we have asked both August… Read More
Jinn, the London-based startup that offers a same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app that operates quite similarly to Postmates in the U.S., has shut down, with the company in the process of going into administration. Read More
Hiya came to life a year ago when it was spun out by Whitepages to take on TrueCaller and others in the world of smart caller ID services. Using machine learning analytics on a vast database of calling data (3.5 billion calls to date), Seattle-based Hiya’s mission has been to supercharge the humble phone call — by providing detailed information about who is calling you, whether… Read More
Movinga, the European platform for house removals that was seemingly written off last year, continues to perform what appears to be an impressive turn around. The Berlin-headquartered startup has closed a new funding round of up to €22 million led by Santo Venture Capital, the venture arm of the Strüngmann family office, with participation from existing backers Earlybird Venture Capital… Read More
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecom company and provider of the nation’s mobile money service, M-Pesa, has launched a new innovation center in Nairobi.
Named Safaricom Alpha, a priority of the incubator is to identify spending patterns on mPesa and turn those insights into additional Safaricom products — according to Chief Innovation Officer, Kamal… Read More
Tony Fadell is starting yet a new chapter. Fifteen months after leaving Nest Labs, a maker of digital thermostats and smoke detectors that Fadell cofounded and sold to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014, Fadell is taking the wraps off a new investment and advisory firm that’s working with engineers and scientists called Future Shape. The firm’s site, which appears to have gone live… Read More
Duo Security raises $70 million, a close look at Apple’s self-driving car, Snapchat’s Halloween costume and Abu Dhabi’s state fund is doing business in San Francisco. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
If you like playing console games with the younger generation, you may have come across the issue of their tiny hands being unable to perform certain combos, reach certain buttons easily, and so on. While this makes them satisfying opponents, it might be better if they had a controller more suited to their physiology. Well, good thing there is one! Read More
MongoDB has finished up what is essentially the final step in going public, pricing its IPO at $24 and raising $192 million in the process. The company will debut on the public markets tomorrow and will once again test the waters for companies that are looking to build full-fledged businesses on the back of open-sourced software. MongoDB provides open-sourced database software that can be… Read More
Atlas Informatics, whose Atlas Recall promised an intuitive and powerful way to index all your information across many services, is shutting down less than a year after launch. There will be no long sunset period: all user data will be deleted next Friday, the 27th. Read More
While you’ve already got Yelp and other apps to help you figure out where to eat, Truffle is designed specifically for sharing recommendations with friends and other people you know. A new update should make that sharing even easier. The big addition is an iMessage app, which means (you guessed it) that Truffle is now integrated with iMessage. Read More
Tom Willerer, who has spent the last four years with the online education company Coursera — the last two as its chief product officer — is moving on from the outfit to become a venture capitalist. Specifically, Willerer is joining Venrock, a venture firm founded nearly 50 years ago to build off the successful investing activities of the Rockefeller family. Read More
