John Foraker, who led the well-known organic food brand Annie’s for 17 years, is working on a new organic food startup in Berkeley. General Mills bought Annie’s for $820 million in 2014. Foraker was supposed to stay for one year. He stayed on for three. He isn’t cut out for corporate life and instead wants to pour his time into his new startup. Read More
Oracle is one of the few in the tech industry backing a bipartisan bill to hold websites facilitating human trafficking legally accountable. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, sponsored by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Senator Robert Portman (R-OH), would amend a part of a 90’s era law (section 230) currently protecting social networking sites and online platforms such as… Read More
French startup Streamroot just raised $3.2 million from Partech Ventures, Techstars Venture Capital Fund, Verizon Ventures* and R/GA. The company is taking advantage of WebRTC to make video streaming much cheaper. When you’re watching a video on YouTube or Netflix, those companies send a video file to your device from their servers. It’s a straightforward, one-way transaction between… Read More
Google today announced the launch of new desktop application for Google Drive users, called Drive File Stream, which is now available to G Suite customers. The app will serve as a replacement for the Google Drive desktop app that will be shut down for good next year – a far enough date to give enterprise customers plenty of time to make the switch. The company had earlier detailed its… Read More
Facebook and Microsoft announced ONNX, the Open Neural Network Exchange this morning in respective blog posts. The Exchange makes it easier for machine learning developers to convert models between PyTorch and Caffe2 to reduce the lag time between research and productization. Facebook has long maintained the distinction between its FAIR and AML machine learning groups. Facebook AI… Read More
The starscape on view from James Ward Packard’s window in Warren, Ohio, was magnificent. In the summer, Draco, the dragon, would have wheeled above, clawing at Ursa Minor. Gemini would have ridden across Clinton Street and up the old Canal as Ursa Major reared and fell. And, with the help of his powerful, handmade, bespoke watch, Packard would have been able to plot the locations of… Read More
GoPro’s stock is up 12% [NASDAQ:GPRO] as of noon Eastern on Thursday. This jump was caused after the company released a statement stating that its revenue and gross margin will be at the top of its guidance range. This should put the company’s revenue close to the amount Wall Street is expecting. The company also expects the third quarter to be profitable on a non-GAAP basis,… Read More
Speaking at a press conference this morning, Florida Governor Rick Scott told state residents to turn to apps and other online resources, including Gas Buddy, Google Maps, Expedia and Comcast’s Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspot finder, to help them find fuel, navigate safely, and stay connected both ahead of and following Hurricane Irma’s arrival.
The lack of readily available gasoline, in… Read More
Google today launched a new networking option for large enterprises that want to connect their private networks directly to its cloud. These new dedicated interconnects, which are now in beta, allow businesses to set up a highly available, high-bandwidth network connection to the Google Cloud Platform for their data intensive or latency-sensitive services. This service goes a step further… Read More
Tome Software has teamed up with Trek Bicycle to reduce the number of bike to vehicle collisions. To achieve this goal, the partners have turned to using artificial intelligence at the autonomous vehicle testing facility, Mcity. The project will be conducted at Mcity’s TechLab, an early-stage transportation technology incubator. The project’s press release points to an US DOT… Read More
Bad news for Netflix: Disney CEO Bob Iger now says that Disney’s forthcoming streaming service, which is set to debut in late 2019, will exclusively get Star Wars and Marvel movies. This is in addition to Pixar and Disney studio films, which were the content focus of the service when it was initially announced. The addition of Marvel and Star Wars movies coming exclusively to the app… Read More
Google Drive is having some major issues this morning. Starting around 7:30am PT, Google’s file storage service, which forms the backbone of much of Google’s G Suite, became either unreachable or incredibly slow, depending on where you were. Since then, the problems have only continued and Google doesn’t currently have an ETA for when the service will return to normal.
In… Read More
HotelTonight, the platform that lets you make last-minute bookings at hotels, is today announcing that they’re expanding their reservation to up to 100 days out. The change doesn’t take effect immediately, but HotelTonight says that the expanded booking window will go live “in the fall.” As it stands now, HotelTonight only lets users book hotels within seven days of… Read More
StatMuse, the sports statistics database that can be queried using natural language inquiries, just announced that it’s become the second startup accepted into the NFL Players Association’s accelerator. As a refresher the accelerator, called The One Team Collective, was built to help smaller startups get access to player licensing rights in return for equity. We first wrote… Read More
Apple is about to unveil a brand new iPhone on September 12. For the first time, the company is likely going to switch from LCD displays to OLED displays, a newer technology that is causing some challenges. In particular, according to a new report from KGI Securities and obtained by Apple Insider, Samsung is going to be the sole supplier. Samsung is taking advantage of that by charging a ton… Read More
Jaguar is envisioning a future that’s focused on self-driving and on-demand shared mobility with its new Future-Type concept car. The vehicle boasts fully autonomous or assisted manual driving options, a narrow body design aimed at fitting into tight quarters in dense cities – and a removable steering wheel named ‘Sayer’ that’s sort of like an automotive… Read More
Plex’s Live TV service, a service offering cord cutters a way to watch and record live television via an antenna, is now available to use via the web as well as on Amazon Fire TV. From the desktop, only the Live TV service itself is available, but on Fire TV, you can use both the streaming TV service and the newer DVR feature. Plex Live TV was previously available on Android TV, Apple… Read More
Pendo helps businesses understand and assist their customers with tools like analytics, polls and walkthroughs. Until now, however, CEO Todd Olson said the company has been focused on the web (both desktop and mobile), with just a single mobile developer on the team. “We as a team constantly had a lot of internal debates about how much to invest in [mobile],” he said. “If… Read More
The on-demand economy is great for consumers but hard for the companies that provide on-demand services. While many are still struggling to stabilize their business model and optimize their work force, Favor has seemed to find a bit of success by focusing in on a specific region. Favor is an on-demand delivery service that operates in Texas. Much like Postmates, the service lets users order… Read More
SpaceX can add another first to its ever-increasing list: On Thursday, it successfully launched the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B experimental spaceplane for the first time. This makes it the only launch provider to accomplish this besides the United Launch Alliance, and should help ensure SpaceX gets more business from U.S, defense contracts in future. The launch vehicle used was… Read More
