Nauto, a Palo Alto company focused on retrofitting existing vehicle fleets with networked safety camera-equipped devices, has raised $159 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank. The company’s products focus on gathering data about human drivers and their behavior in order to improve safety practices. Read More
Nintendo just launched a new smartphone app called Nintendo Switch Online. It is a companion app for Nintendo’s latest console and it is now available on iOS and Android for free. Read More
It took a while, but the Open Container Initiative (OCI) today announced the launch of the 1.0 versions of both its container runtime and image specs for software container. The two-year-old open source foundation was established by Docker and other leaders in the container ecosystem to be the guardian of exactly these specifications, which are basically the industry standards for… Read More
Facebook could begin testing a paywall for subscription news stories as early as October, according to a top company executive.
Campbell Brown, who heads up the social network’s new partnerships business, made the reveal at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit on Tuesday, The Street reported. We have independently confirmed that, too. Read More
A San Diego-based company that believes “tomorrow’s robots will be intelligent autonomous machines that can take care of us,” which will be “as commonplace as computers and mobile phones are today” has raised $114 million in Series C funding led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures. Read More
Indian startup Rentomojo — which lets consumers rent appliances furniture, motorbikes and other urban living essentials — has closed a $10 million Series B to continue its expansion. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, and others that put in include Lending Club founder and former CEO Renaud Laplanche and existing investors Accel and IDG. It’s nearly one year to the… Read More
Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital Partners, one of Europe’s leading early stage venture capital firms, has raised $170 million for its latest fund.
Mangrove V will be used to invest across Europe and Israel. The amount matches that of its previous funds, and was completed inside two months with 90 per cent coming from returning investors, said the firm. Mangrove has been one of… Read More
The following is a chapter from Ryan Holiday’s new book, The Perennial Seller, a fascinating look at what it takes to help books, tech projects, and art that last. In this chapter he discusses the questions that no startup founders ask before they begin work.
For more background on the book I encourage you to visit his post about how he made the book over a grueling (and fun) 2-year… Read More
More than four years after the launch of Google Now, the company has fully dissolved its AI assistant into the DNA of many of its core product offerings. Nowhere is this impact more evident than in search, where Google has significantly shaken up its philosophy on what a term like “search” even means when you know so much about users and their interests. Today, Google is delivering… Read More
After much delay, Samsung has begun rolling out it Bixby smart assistant to users in the U.S.. The company said today that an update will allow owners of the Galaxy S8 and S8+ to gain voice capabilities for the service. Bixby is the Korean phone-maker’s take on Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but it didn’t ship with Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S8+ when… Read More
IBM reported its quarterly earnings this week and while the company’s overall results were once again disappointing, cloud revenue was up 15 percent year-over-year and accounted for $3.9 billion in revenue. It’s no surprise then that IBM is doubling down on its cloud strategy and to keep its momentum going, the company today announced the launch of four new data centers for its… Read More
In the next several months, phone-based augmented reality is going to become quite a bit more visible for consumers as tech titans like Apple and Google launch new AR platforms, but startups won’t let the big public companies have all the fun. Blippar has been in the augmented reality field since before Google Glass. “When we just started probably one out of a thousand people knew… Read More
Google Glass is relaunching but this time for the enterprise, Game of Thrones breaks HBO streaming records, Amazon and Tinder both now have a “stories” feature and Embark has taken over. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
Apple has appointed Isabel Ge Mahe as its first vice president and managing director of its business in Greater China. China-born Ge Mahe is tasked with managing Apple’s China business, and she will report into CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams when she takes up the role, which is based out of Shanghai, “later this summer.” Ge Mahe is currently located in California,… Read More
ReWalk has been talking up its upcoming “soft exoskeleton” since January. The company finally took the system out for a spin in the daylight, showing what it’s capable of at a robotics event held on the MIT campus this weekend. The version on display is a prototype, but all the functionality is in place, using a motorized pulley system to bring mobility to legs. Read More
Until now, any Facebook Page that posted a link could change the headline, body text and image that appeared in the News Feed preview. To combat false news without stifling responsible publications, Facebook is now starting to disable the ability of all Pages to edit the previews of the links they post in the Page composer or API, with an exemption for some original publishers. Read More
It’s been said that augmented/virtual reality is the fourth wave of consumer technology, and that AR could become much bigger than VR. But AR itself is not one giant wave, it’s a set of four big ones: mobile AR software, mobile AR hardware, tethered smartglasses and standalone smartglasses. These four waves could drive AR to more than a billion users and $83 billion by 2021. Read More
Desktop Metal has already earned a number of fans with its 3D printed metal technology — Lowe’s, Caterpillar and BMW were all among its earliest clients. As first noted by CNBC, the Massachusetts-based startup is also getting some healthy monetary support, adding $115 million of venture funds to its coffers this week. The Series D features a number of high profile names, including… Read More
Adobe launched an update for its Lightroom photo management and editing apps on iOS and Android today. The iOS app for iPhone and iPad is getting a few new features, including support for Adobe’s selective brush, a new details tab and an interface update for the iPad version. That’s all pretty nice, but the biggest news here is that Adobe also completely redesigned the Android app… Read More
Hours after WeWork announced plans to move into Japan, one of the U.S. co-working giant’s chief rivals made a move to increase the competition in Asia. Naked Hub, which was born out of China-based luxury resort company Naked Group, today announced a merger deal with JustCo, a fast-expanding co-working firm located in Singapore. It also revealed that it is working to finalize a $200… Read More
