A new initiative from Facebook will provide aid organizations with location data for users in affected areas, such as where people are marking themselves safe and from where they are fleeing. It shows the immense potential of this kind of fine-grained tracking, but inescapably resurfaces questions of just what else the company could do with the data. Read More
In March, video game streaming site Twitch introduced a new way for its streamers to make money: by selling games directly to their fans. Initially, however, that feature was only available to Twitch’s Partners – that is, the site’s top-tier streamers with large audiences. Today, Twitch is adding game sales to its newly launched Twitch Affiliate program, as well. The… Read More
Each year since 1997, Apple has picked a handful of apps that it felt were amongst the best made on its platforms. The apps that best captured or represented the capabilities of a particular device (this year meaning an iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch or all of the above) — or the ones that were just too pretty to ignore. These Apple Design Awards are usually handed out in a big ceremony… Read More
The total market cap for all cryptocurrencies just surpassed $100 billion. The vast majority of these gains have come in just the last few months — on April 1st the total market cap was just over $25 billion — representing a 300 percent increase in value in just over 60 days. Read More
Airbnb is rolling out a new feature today that will make check-in easier for guests and hosts alike. Up until now, checking in to an Airbnb listing was one of the sloppiest, most human components of the Airbnb user flow. Hosts would point guests to their check-in instructions on their listing page, or send instructions to guests about how to get the key, notes about how to enter the building… Read More
Whether you love or hate native content, revenues from traditional display advertising continue to decline for most publishers, and native ads are one of the few new revenue opportunities for them. Enter Pressboard, a native ad marketplace that today announced it has raised a $2 million funding. Read More
Reedsy provides everything you need to turn your first draft into a book. And it turns out that ebooks aren’t overtaking good old paper books just yet. Reedsy partnered with Blurb so that you can send your finished book to Blurb, get it printed and sell it online. At heart, Reedsy remains a marketplace of professionals in the publishing industries. If you’re a writer, you can… Read More
Facebook this year has launched a number of features that make it easier for people to reach their government representatives on its social network, including “Town Hall,” and related integrations with News Feed, as well as ways to share reps’ contact info in your own posts. Today, the company is expanding on these initiatives with those designed for elected officials… Read More
Payments startup Klarna is ramping up its valuation again as it picks up a new, strategic investor. Last valued at $2.25 billion in 2015, the company today announced that Brightfolk, controlled by fashion tycoon Anders Holch Povlsen, is becoming a “qualified owner” of Klarna — that is, buying up at least 10 percent of the company. This is a secondary deal: specifically,… Read More
Shopify is taking Kit, the virtual assistant it acquired last year and making it free to all members on its platform, as a basic part of their merchant services. That’s a big deal for the previously premium service, both in terms of how far it can reach, and in terms of what it can do for Shopify’s user base. Kit bills itself as a “virtual employee” for Shopify… Read More
Can A.I. help build better educational apps for kids? That’s a question Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind the popular children’s TV program “Sesame Street” and others, aims to answer. The company has teamed up with IBM to create the first vocabulary learning app powered by IBM’s A.I., which adapts itself the child’s current reading level… Read More
Out of all the how-to guides ever written about pitching journalists, I’ve never seen one address the truth—that most are simply too busy trying not to get murdered by their inboxes to even open emails. Upbeat wants to use data science to create PR pitches that don’t automatically end up in the Trash folder. The San Francisco-based startup (formerly called PRX.co) launched… Read More
SpaceX is hoping to return the Falcon 9 first stage booster used in its first flight back to active operations on January 14. That’s an impressive turn around time if they can pull it off – roughly six months. SpaceX has reused a Falcon 9 first stage just once, for its March 30 SES-10 mission. The turnaround for that rocket refurbishment took nearly a year, so under six months… Read More
A little more than six months ago, Vault took to the Disrupt Battlefield stage to introduce automated investment accounts small and medium-sized business owners could offer to their employees. Today the company is launching a set of mobile apps and expanding its investment offerings to allow any independent contractor to easily start saving for retirement. Read More
As the cost of in-class education continue to rise, and the cost for computing continues to fall, we’re seeing a flourishing of startups that target the market for online learning. As one mark of the trend, one of the leaders in this space, Coursera, is today announcing $64 million in a Series D round of funding. Coursera’s CEO Rick Levin (who notably joined the company after a… Read More
While music streaming has become more and more commoditized, artists still have a wide array of places to distribute their songs like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music — but getting paid properly can start to complicate things. That problem gets even more difficult when there are multiple people collaborating on the same song and it’s not clear who is getting how much of a cut from… Read More
SpaceX has secured a contract to launch the uncrewed X-37B spaceplane, a secret military spacecraft created by the U.S. Air Force that’s kind of like a compact space shuttle, but whose functional purpose is ultimately kept under wraps. The Verge reports that SpaceX’s launch services for a launch of the X-37B in August atop a Falcon 9 were confirmed via a U.S. Senate Armed… Read More
A day of protest over the FCC’s controversial proposal to eliminate net neutrality rules has been planned for July 12, with supporters of the online action including the likes of Amazon, Etsy, Github, Kickstarter, Reddit and Y Combinator. Read More
Dance cards are filling up for the coming autonomous driving revolution: The newest partners are Delphi and Transdev, who are joining forces to create an automated, on-demand mobility systems, with a service offering set to make its debut via pilot projects in France, and then to eventually expand eventually to global reach. Delphi will be bringing its automated driving platform to the mix,… Read More
Bosch will be teaming up with TomTom to create a new kind of high-resolution localized maps that incorporate a “radar road signature” generated by Bosch, which can help position cars in their surroundings to within a few centimeters (that’s less than an inch in Imperial terms). It supplements video data previously used for this purpose, and has the advantage of working in… Read More
