Magic Leap, an AR company best known for raising money, still owes consumers a product, or at least the hint of one. Thanks to a newly-released patent filing, we now have a new look at an old prototype that could be a guiding force for the direction of the $4.5 billion startup’s product design. The design, which credits Magic Leap’s design head Gary Natsume as the inventor,… Read More
Launching a product and company from scratch is hard, as fresh-faced entrepreneurs and Kickstarter successes often learn to their chagrin. And it turns out even heavy hitters like Andy Rubin and his mobile startup Essential have unpleasant lessons to learn — in this case, about how even a small detail like a mailing list configuration can put your entire company at risk. Read More
Booze delivery startup Thirstie is adding a new twist to its model — it’s working directly with alcohol brands, starting with Dom Pérignon, to offer on-demand delivery. While Thirstie partners don’t mind the additional sales, the real benefit is in the data. Read More
Following a big internal meeting at Uber where former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced his plans as the new CEO of Uber, Expedia said today it has named its CFO Mark Okerstrom as its CEO. Read More
A bug related to an Instagram API allowed at least one unscrupulous individual to access the email address and phone number of an unspecified number of “high-profile” users of the app. No other personal information, like password or what have you, seems to have been exposed. Read More
Some of us like sports but don’t want to pay for channels we’ll never watch. Fortunately there are ways to watch the NFL without cable for the 2017-2018 season. I’m a Baltimore Ravens fan, and I live in San Francisco. It will cost me $17.87 per game to watch every Ravens game from the 2017-2018 NFL season without cable, satellite, or antenna. That’s a lot less than it… Read More
Amazon appears to be planning an expansion of Alexa’s existing messaging capabilities to support sending SMS text messages to friends using your Echo device or Alexa app. That means Echo users could then text anyone using voice commands, not only other Echo owners. According to code found in the Amazon Alexa app, there are references to a new type of phone number – referred to… Read More
It’s a brand new day for Uber, the transportation startup that has been caught up in a whirlwind of drama. At an all-hands meeting today, Uber employees met their new leader: Dara Khosrowshahi, the former CEO of Expedia, who discussed a number of things, including how Uber should go public within the next 18 to 36 months and how he has the support of former CEO Travis Kalanick. Read More
Uber has a new CEO and he wasted no time in talking about IPO prospects. Addressing employees at a company meeting today, Dara Khosrowshahi, who recently had the top job at public company Expedia, said that Uber could IPO as soon as 18 months. He also said it could take up to 36 months (three years), but that the timing wasn’t finalized. Read More
Uber Movement, announced back in January, finally went live today. The service gives anyone access to some of Uber’s internal demand and usage data. The hope is that cities and urban planners can use the data to support projects that would help reduce congestion and generally help people get from point A to point B faster. For now the data is only available for a handful of cities,… Read More
Today, a Delaware court ruled in the favor of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who asked that a case brought against him by early Uber investor Benchmark be moved to arbitration, allowing him to avoid a nasty public battle with one of the company’s earliest supporters. Kalanick quickly sent out a statement to reporters, saying that he is “pleased that the court has ruled in his… Read More
Last April, LeEco heralded the opening of a new Silicon Valley office in San Jose. The new building would be the home of the company’s US operations, with enough space to house up to 800 workers. The Mayor of San Jose was on-hand to help cut the ribbon.
Seventeen months later, the space appears to be a virtual ghost town. The company won’t disclose exact numbers, but did tell… Read More
If you travel a lot for work, you know there are two kinds of employees. There are those who spend less than the budget allows and those who push it to the very limit. Most people don’t feel incentivized to save money for their employer, so that’s why a handful of startups are attempting to solve this problem by rewarding travelers for cost-savings. TravelBank is the latest. Read More
Have you ever wanted to print an animated image? Well now you (almost) can. A maker named Abhishek Singh has created an instant camera that outputs a little box that contains a Raspberry Pi connected to a PiTFT screen. When you take a picture the camera transmits a short video to the screen which then plays it over and over again until you take another picture. The entire project is… Read More
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has devised a method by which robots can understand and respond to voice commands, stated in clear, plain language. The system is advanced enough to understand contextual commands, too, including references made to previously mentioned commands and objects.
The so-called ComText system (short for “commands in context”)… Read More
Last year at AWS re:invent, Amazon introduced a way to get just the right amount of GPU power you needed and nothing more. The trouble was that it was only for Linux applications. Windows users were out of luck. This week, the company announced it has released new EC2 elastic GPUs just for Windows users. These are purpose-built for Windows instances that require accelerated performance for… Read More
Soft robots are a major area of research right now, but the general paradigm seems to be that you pump something (a muscle or tube) full of something else (air, fluid) causing it to change its shape. But a robot from Swiss roboticists does the opposite: its little muscles tense when the air in them is removed. It’s cool — but it also looks kind of gross. Read More
Disrupt San Francisco is less than three weeks away, and registration is open for startups looking to showcase their product or company to thousands of people on the Disrupt floor. According to Crunchbase, startups that exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2016 raised more than $35 million in seed and Series A funding post-Disrupt. You don’t want to miss this chance. Read More
Early Uber investor and former board member Shervin Pishevar can’t seem to stop weighing in on Benchmark’s lawsuit with former CEO Travis Kalanick. Read More
Dropbox continues to tune its products as it tries to tap a bigger audience within larger companies with some updates today to its collaboration tool Paper, including the ability to preview documents before loading them. As a blank slate, Paper is increasingly popular with designers you might talk to in Silicon Valley. It basically turns the process of designing and building a product spec into… Read More
