Medium is expanding its subscription efforts today by allowing any author or publisher to join its partner program. That’s the program where readers can pay a monthly fee (currently $5) to access content behind a metered paywall (plus, they get early access to new features). The writers who participate will then get a share of the revenue, based on what CEO Ev Williams (pictured above)… Read More
Yandex is virtually unknown here in the States, but it’s become something approaching a Russian Google (and Amazon and Uber) in the 20 years since its founding. The company controls around 65-percent of search engine market share in its home country, and has branched out into practically every other software category imaginable, so a smart assistant was a bit of a no-brainer. The company… Read More
Wells Fargo’s ATMs are getting an upgrade. The bank announced today that more than 40 percent – or over 5,000 of its ATMs – will now allow customers to perform transactions without having to pull out their bank card. Instead, users can take advantage of NFC – aka the “tap and pay” technology that powers mobile wallet systems like Apple Pay, Android Pay,… Read More
Carspring, the London and Berlin-based startup that makes it easy to buy a used car, has gone quiet, amid reports that its recent £5 million in Series B funding fell through. According to sources, Rocket Internet has pulled its investment in the company, which it co-founded with ex-McKinsey management consultants Peter Baumgart and Maximilian Vollenbroich. Read More
Waggit, a smart collar for dogs, aims to help improve your pup’s quality of life and help humans better care for their dog companions. Like other smart dog collars — think Whistle, which sold to Mars for over $100 million — Waggit offers tracking, but its core value proposition is health.
“No one has truly tackled health for dogs,” Waggit CEO Susan Sierota told me. Read More
Snapchat is introducing a new feature that will transform the experience of using the apps at a fundamental level. They’re called ‘Context Cards,’ and they’re new ways to find out more info about any Snap shared by users, providing access to things like restaurant reviews, reservations, Uber and Lyft ride hailing, contact information and more. This is where Snapchat has… Read More
Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana has finally arrived in Skype. Announced at last year’s Microsoft Build 2016 event, the assistant’s integration was also previewed when the company released an overhauled, Snapchat-inspired version of its mobile messaging app this summer. But Cortana for Skype wasn’t ready at that time. Now, the feature is live, offering users… Read More
Velodyne, largely considered the current leader in LiDAR tech for autonomous vehicle development, announced today that it has increased its production capacity by more than 400 percent in order to meet growing global demand. This means it’s now actually offering immediate availability for its LiDAR sensors, for the first time in a long time, for clients in Europe, Asia Pacific and… Read More
Backstage Capital, the venture firm focused on funding underrepresented minorities, recently acquired The Door for an undisclosed amount in cash and equity. The acquisition makes quite some sense given The Door’s similar focus on helping underrepresented founders get funding. The platform specifically connects those founders to investors.
As part of the acquisition, The Door… Read More
Location and mapping been two of the key features underpinning a wide array of smartphone services. Now a startup that has been at the center of building those location services for mobile devices has picked up a large round of funding to take its tech to newer frontiers in hardware, specifically in automotive and virtual / augmented reality. Mapbox, a company that competes against Google and… Read More
With a shortage of machine learning developers bearing down on the industry, startups and big tech companies alike are moving to democratize the tools necessary to commercialize artificial intelligence. The latest startup, Petuum, is announcing a $93 million Series B this morning from Softbank and Advantech Capital.
Founded last year by Dr. Eric Xing, a Carnegie Mellon machine learning… Read More
Fresh off its first Emmy win for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Hulu is dropping prices in an effort to attract new subscribers. The streaming service is lowering the cost for its entry-level, ad-supported plan from $7.99 per month to $5.99 per month – a price that undercuts rivals’ Netflix and Amazon Prime Video’s lowest monthly plans, at $7.99 and $8.99 per… Read More
While image recognition in photos and video has become increasingly sophisticated at an incredible rate, Standard Cognition co-founder Jordan Fisher says everyone is chasing autonomous driving — or, the “shiny object,” as he calls it.
That’s not the aim of Fisher and his team, who set out to start a company that’s focused on streamlining the checkout experience. Read More
Microsoft Ventures today announced a new AI startup competition with a total prize purse of $3.5 million in investments into the winners. The firm is partnering with Madrona Venture Partners, Notion Capital and Vertex Ventures to host this competition, which is looking for (very) early-stage AI startups in North America, Europe and Israel. The Innovate.AI competition will award $1M in funding… Read More
Everyone wants a piece of the Internet of Things, and why not? If predictions come to fruition, there are going to be billions and billions of devices and sensors broadcasting information at us by 2020, and someone has to make sense of it and point us to the data that matters. Salesforce wants to be that company (or at least one of them). Salesforce has never been shy about jumping on the… Read More
Airbnb finally got serious about the Chinese market this year, and now its chief rival in the country — Tujia — has tapped investors for $300 million more to sharpen its focus on global markets.
The new funding values Tujia at $1.5 billion, the startup confirmed. That’s a big jump on the $1 billion it commanded when it last raised in 2015, but the company is going to the… Read More
Upskill wants to be the development platform for your smart glasses, regardless of the brand. This agnostic approach is fairly unusual for companies building augmented reality applications and it provides enterprises with a neutral way to build these applications to work across different smart glasses systems. Company CEO Brian Ballard says the hardware is beginning to mature, but… Read More
Vertex Ventures, one of the VC funds linked to Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek, has closed its third investment fund for Southeast Asia and India with a total of $210 million for investment. Vertex Venture Holdings operates five funds across the world, which include vehicles focused on the U.S., Israel and healthcare. This is the third installment of its fund for India and Southeast… Read More
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang once told me that one of the things he was most excited about for the future of his company’s tech was bringing the Holodeck to life – and now, that’s exactly what Nvidia is doing with its new Holodeck photorealistic VR platform for designers and developers. Nvidia Holodeck (yes, it’s actually called that) in an “intelligent virtual… Read More
