Online consignment shop thredUp is taking on The RealReal. The e-commerce site for secondhand items today announced the launch of a new luxury goods storefront, simply called Luxe, which is now available as a public beta. Via Luxe, consignment customers can request a “clean out kit” from thredUp, as per usual, and fill it with both their high-end and low-end items, which the… Read More
The first step of any salesperson is to figure out who to pitch, but some of them are wasting time targeting the wrong prospective clients. That’s the premise behind Node, a startup that says its platform uses artificial intelligence to find sales leads. In “stealth mode” for the past 2.5 years, the company is now announcing a $10.8 million venture financing round. Read More
Bigscreen is living up to its name. The Andreessen Horowitz-backed virtual reality app will be receiving one of its biggest updates since launch with the Cinema Update, which brings a hulking dynamically lit IMAX-like theater environment into the app, which will allow users to watch movies, play games and do work on their PC in a pretty epic manner. Read More
Adobe today announced that Flash, the once-ubiquitous plugin that allowed you to play your first Justin Bieber video on YouTube and Dolphin Olympics 2 on Kongregate, will be phased out by the end of 2020. Until then, Adobe will still partner with the likes of Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft and Google to offer security updates for Flash in their browsers and support new versions of them. Read More
Uber has added a range of updates on the driver side of its service, in keeping with its ‘180 days of change’ promise to the supply side of its ride hailing equation. The new updates include 24-hour, 7 day a week live phone support, quick fixes to fare mistakes, protection against bad ratings resulting from factors beyond a driver’s control and payments for trips to return… Read More
Building blocks are a fascination that most people eventually outgrow. Not Noel Maxam, an Emmy-award-winning producer, director and writer who more recently leapt into the world of modular construction with Emagispace, a company that’s looking to give stick-frame construction the brush. Read More
Project Nimbus is not a secret. Adobe already previewed the app at its MAX conference. But MacGeneration was able to download and play around with the upcoming app. Adobe told MacGeneration that it was available to some Creative Cloud subscribers for a short time by mistake. It has been removed since then. In many ways, Project Nimbus feels like the Photos app and iCloud’s photo library… Read More
Northern Ireland based B-Secur has closed a £3.5m (~$4.5M) late stage seed investment for its biometric authentication technology that utilizes an individual’s unique heartbeat pattern, known as an electrocardiogram (ECG), to — in its words — “quickly and securely authenticate identity”. Read More
Tesla’s Model S once again occupies the top rating spot in the Consumer Reports ultra-luxury sedan category, after the automaker put out a software update that brought automatic emergency braking (AEB) to highway speeds for Model S vehicles with the second-generation hardware package. Tesla had rolled back some of its automated safety and driver assistance features for vehicles… Read More
Synthesio is announcing its second acquisition of the year — it’s buying Social Karma, a company that uses social data to help marketers understand consumers. Back in January, Synthesio announced that it had acquired presentation software-maker Bunkr. Co-founder and CEO Loic Moisand told me that this is all part of a two-year strategy to buy up companies and technologies that can… Read More
The Moto Z was a surprise hit for Motorola — they even made the swappable, modular-backed phone its flagship product. But the novel feature has always been hampered by the fact that there just aren’t that many useful Mods. Today changes the math a bit, with the arrival of the Moto Z2 Force Edition, featuring a shatterproof screen and bigger battery, along with the 360 Camera Moto Mod. Read More
Uber drivers and delivery persons in France are automatically going to get covered by accident insurance over the coming months. Uber has partnered with French insurance company Axa on this insurance product. It’ll go live this fall and it’s going to be free for independent workers. Hold your horses for a minute though. Before you think Uber is a nice company and wants to help… Read More
HBO’s “Game of Thrones” isn’t just a cultural phenomenon – it’s also a driving force for the company’s over-the-top service aimed at cord cutters, HBO NOW. According to new data from app store analytics firm App Annie, the HBO NOW streaming app was downloaded over 500,000 times in the first week following the Season 7 premiere. This translated into… Read More
Facebook may launch its own smart-home gadget to get you messaging more friends and looking at more photos. Facebook is reportedly building a 15-inch touch-screen smart speaker. Pegatron is building the device for a Q1 2018 launch. It’s said to have been designed by Facebook’s secretive new hardware lab Building 8, using an LG in-cell touch screen with a magnesium-aluminum-alloy… Read More
LG Display announced today that it will invest 7.8 trillion won (about $7 billion) to boost its OLED production capacity. This increases the stakes in LG’s competition with Samsung over OLED displays, a market that Samsung dominates by far, as Apple prepares to launch the iPhone 8, which is widely expected to come with OLED screens. Read More
Mobile chip maker Qualcomm wants to enable deep learning-based software development on all kinds of devices, which is why it created the Neural Processing Engine (NPE) for its Snapdragon-series mobile processors. The NPE software development kit is now available to all via the Qualcomm Developer Network, which marks the first public release of the SDK, and opens up a lot of potential for… Read More
The fact is, 360-degree video sucks for an awful lot of things. One of the use cases that kinda makes sense is in giving someone an honest look into your perspective at a given time. This is also an instrumental part of the pitch for Live, so it only makes sense that Facebook would seek to make more and more improvements to the Live 360 platform. Read More
Amazon is continuing its international expansion push with the launch of its services in Singapore coming imminently. The arrival could happen as soon as this week, according to a source with knowledge of the plans, and it will mark Amazon’s entry into Southeast Asia. The launch will see Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Now fast delivery and Amazon’s regular e-commerce services… Read More
For Convoy, a meet-and-greet hosted earlier this year by two prominent investment firms has resulted in one of the bigger Series B fundings of 2017. As Convoy cofounder and CEO Dan Lewis recalls it, his company, a two-year-old, tech-enabled trucking network, was invited to the full-day event organized by Greylock Partners and Y Combinator, the famous startup accelerator. Convoy already… Read More
HubSpot is announcing that it has acquired Kemvi, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams. A few months ago, Kemvi launched DeepGraph, a product that analyzes public data so that salespeople can identify the best time (say, after a job change or the publication of an article) to reach out to potential customers. It also proactively reaches out to… Read More
