Intel has been targeting the sports industry as part of its bigger push into emerging technologies (and finding customers for the resulting new services), and today the company announced its latest play in that area. Intel has signed a wide-ranging deal with the International Olympic Committee to develop technology solutions for the Olympic Games, including developing applications and… Read More
Pinterest’s camera search tool, Lens, is getting a makeover today with some updated including the ability to zoom in and out and tap to focus, and making it easier to search with Lens from photos they’ve already taken.
Lens is very much a move to try to collapse the distance between the experience within Pinterest the app (or site) and the real world. Users point their camera at… Read More
Volvo tuner Polestar, which the carmaker acquired in 2015 to build its own race-ready Volve cars, is now being set up as its own separate company within the Volvo group, with a new focus on performance electric vehicles. The new Polestar will have its own branding, distinct from Volvo’s – though it’ll still produce performance versions of Volvo cars in addition to its own… Read More
Rinse, the San Francisco-based dry cleaning and laundry delivery service, has closed a $14M Series B round of funding. This comes after a $6M Series A last year, meaning the startup has now raised about $23.5M in three rounds. The round is being led by Partech Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Javelin Ventures, Arena Ventures, Accelerator Ventures, and… Read More
Last night at the Computer History Museum, former New York Times reporter John Markoff interviewed some of the original engineers who work on the first iPhone that was unveiled in January 2007. Hugo Fiennes, Nitin Ganatra, and Scott Herz all talked about their own experience working on this incredible project. Then, Scott Forstall looked back at his time at the company when he was leading… Read More
The U.S. is leading the world in mobile gaming, accounting for 20 percent of all sessions played. That’s the word from a new industry report on the mobile gaming landscape, released this week from Flurry. That puts the U.S. ahead of markets including India, China, Brazil and Russia, it found. However, gaming sessions are dropping, even as the money to be made in games climbs, and the… Read More
Israel is one of the world’s centers for cybersecurity technology, and today Intel is announcing a trio of developments in the region to help it take better advantage of that. The company is embarking on two new collaborations with Israeli security startups Team8 and Illusive (which was spun out of Team8), and it’s expanding its cyber center in the country. From what we… Read More
Andreessen Horowitz is making an even bigger push into healthcare IT, bringing aboard serial entrepreneur Jorge Conde as a general partner. Conde, who officially starts in September, has spent the last 15 years working largely in genomics, including cofounding the genome analysis company Knome (acquired in 2015 for undisclosed terms) and more recently becoming chief strategy officer at a… Read More
SEGA is bringing some of your favorite games to mobile in new, free-to-play formats that include ads as a way to drive revenue, support offline play and other more modern features like cloud saves. The games can also be rendered ad-free with a one-time $1.99 purchase, which is a really good deal given the pedigree of some of these titles, and what you might pay elsewhere to get re-released… Read More
The online tutoring market in the US is well-developed. Varsity Tutors raised $50m; Wiseant $20m; Tutor.com sold to IAC and InstaEdu was recently bought out. So it makes sense that this model would be big in other markets. This is the thinking behind MyTutor, a London-based edtech company that connects school pupils to high-performing university students for one-to-one, online… Read More
As Amazon and Walmart continue their battle to become the world’s largest retailer, another longtime rival in the e-commerce business, eBay, is now stepping up its game as well. The company this morning announced a new Price Match Guarantee for over 50,000 items across its site – promising that it will have the best deal online, or it will match the lowest price of a competitor.… Read More
What do Kevin Durant, Rich Kleiman, Kirsten Green, and Sebastian Thrun all have in common? Well, they’ll be at Disrupt SF (September 18-20) to tell their stories on stage, and we’re absolutely thrilled to have them join us for the biggest tech startup conference in all the land. We hope to see you at the conference, too, and general admission tickets are currently available with… Read More
London could be a lot more green by 2050 – Mayor Sadiq Khan has outlined a plan for transportation service (via Engadget) in the city that would make the whole system, including taxis, cars and buses, totally emission free by that year. Even though that’s over 30 years away, it’s still an incredibly ambitious plan that will require a lot of pieces to fall into place. Those… Read More
Millennials remain a hot target for digital marketing and advertising, and so perhaps unsurprisingly, a startup building news and other publishing services targeted specifically at that demographic has raised some money from one of the world’s biggest ad agencies. Mic, the New York-based site and publisher of “branded content” aimed at 20- and early 30-somethings with an… Read More
Rapid changes in the shipping industry has caught the attention of investors who are starting to pour large sums of money into the industry. And likely for good reason: as a future where trucks are run autonomously becomes ever clearer, the sensors and software behind that is going to have to be able to keep up. One company, Samsara, is working on just those kinds of sensors and products to… Read More
Industrial IoT startup Petasense emerged from stealth today, officially announcing $1.8 million in seed funding and a hardware/software solution designed to help industrial customers understand when equipment needs maintenance by “listening” to its vibrations. As it turns out, machines vibrate at a certain frequency when they are operating smoothly, but as parts begin to wear down,… Read More
As it looks to expand beyond recruiting and job postings, Textio has raised $20 million in new funding led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Bloomberg Beta, Cowboy Ventures, Emergence Capital, and Upside Partnership. Read More
Chris Lattner has built a solid reputation after working for 11 years at Apple on low-level software technologies. In particular, he developed Apple’s most recent programming language, Swift. In January, Tesla announced that it had recruited Lattner as VP of Autopilot Software.
Six months later, he announced on Twitter that he was leaving the car company. “Turns out that Tesla… Read More
Oscar Health seems to be expanding rather than shrinking in the next year. Despite worries that the Affordable Care Act wasn’t working out for health insurance companies, Oscar has filed to expand in 2018, adding the states of Ohio and Tennessee, expanding in Texas and California and heading back to New Jersey, where it pulled out at the beginning of this year. Some of the expansion has… Read More
When Slack implemented threaded conversations, it seemed like the holy grail for internal communications. Slack finally lets you talk about multiple things in separate conversations. But Slack remains a real-time messaging service at heart, so threads don’t feel native. It works well for many teams, but some companies would prefer something a bit more asynchronous and focused. At the… Read More
