Serena Williams (yes, THAT Serena Williams) has joined the board of consumer survey startup SurveyMonkey, along with Intuit CEO Brad Smith. This is the tennis superstar’s first venture into Silicon Valley and, according to a SurveyMonkey spokesperson, came about at the suggestion of fellow board member and Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Read More
To help developers and DevOps professionals manage and secure their microservice-based applications, Google, IBM and Lyft today announced Istio, a new open platform that allows you to create a network of deployed services, and which includes tools for load balancing, service-to-service authentication and monitoring. Read More
At today’s media event in NYC, DJI announced its new Spark drone, destined for the entry-level market as an everyday portable solution for capturing aerial footage. To go with your shiny new Spark, DJI is releasing a new iOS control app, dubbed GO 4.
The new app features a new set of four automated flight modes, which allow you or I to pull off advanced flight maneuvers that would… Read More
An impressive new exploit gives hackers the ability to control your desktop through malware spread by fake movie subtitles. The exploit, which essentially dumps the malware onto your desktop and then notifies the attacker, affects users of video players like Popcorn Time and VLC. Checkpoint found that malformed subtitle files can give hackers the ability to embed code into subtitle files… Read More
In the age of social media, you’re only as good as your last like, and today a startup has raised a sizeable round of funding banking that the same maxim applies to software. G2 Crowd — a Chicago-based company that has built a platform for crowdsourcing enterprise software reviews to help others make decisions on what to use and buy — is today announcing that it has… Read More
Microsoft today announced that virtually all of its engineers now use the Git version control system to develop its Windows operating system. The Windows Git repository includes about 3.5 million files that weigh in at about 300GB when you check them into Git. Git, however, wasn’t built for a project of this size, so Microsoft developed the Git Virtual File System to be able to get… Read More
It’s been a little over a year since Fred Wilson and Tim Armstrong appeared onstage at Disrupt in New York to launch Tech:NYC.
The two titans of New York City’s tech scene were angling to create a new organization that would speak out for the interests of the tech industry in both city and state government while planting a flag for New York’s place at the forefront of… Read More
Circle Media, the company behind Circle with Disney – a device that helps parents enforce their home’s internet rules and restrictions – has raised $10 million in Series A funding, the company announced this morning. The round was led by early stage venture fund Relay Ventures. There was another private equity investment in the round, but the parties didn’t want to… Read More
Over the last month, it’s been hard to miss talk in the media and on social channels about initial coin offerings, or ICOs. What are they? Where did they suddenly come from? Who’s investing in them? When the popular investing platform AngelList announced on Monday that it’s jumping into the business of making ICOs easier to coordinate, attention reached a fever pitch,… Read More
The big news at DJI’s “huge Seize the Moment” event in New York City is, as expected, pretty small. The world’s largest consumer drone maker cracked the code of portability with last year’s backpack-sized, folding prop Mavic Pro drone (soundly thumping former ally GoPro in the process) and now it’s back on the scene a little over six months later with… Read More
MIT researchers have invented a new type of workout material that can breathe using biological cells. The project, called bioLogic, is essentially a “breathable workout suit” covered in small flaps. The flaps are “lined with live microbial cells that shrink and expand in response to changes in humidity” allowing the entire outfit to act as a reactive sensor to let… Read More
Xbox One owners get a new reason to fire up their consoles on June 1: Xbox Game Pass, the download service Microsoft created to deliver subscription-based gaming with a library of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games in an all-you-can game model. The service is similar to PlayStation Now, Sony’s PlayStation 4-based equivalent, and also to Nivida’s GeForce NOW streaming service for its… Read More
Bloomberg is today reporting the size of Softbank’s stake in Nvidia is $4 billion, for 4.9 per cent of the company, which it says would make it the fourth largest investor in the chipmaker. Read More
This is the last trailer we’re getting for Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets before it hits theaters on July 21, 2017. The bright, bold sci-fi epic looks like trademark Besson, which is to say it looks like The Fifth Element. Valerian’s similarity to Besson’s previous sci-fi oeuvre is a good thing until proven otherwise, and I won’t hear… Read More
While we wait to get more news on Microsoft closing a reported acquisition of Cloudyn, another report has emerged of one more enterprise startup that the software giant is buying in Israel. Calacalist reported earlier today that Microsoft is paying $100 million to acquire Hexadite, a cybersecurity company that uses AI to sort through and address smaller network attacks — which can… Read More
While Sphero has released a whole lineup of robotic, Internet-connected toys, it remains best-known for its BB-8 droid from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Today it’s launching its next Disney tie-in — Ultimate Lightning McQueen. This is a car that you can control from your iPhone or Android, based on the Owen Wilson-voiced character from Pixar’s Cars franchise. (Cars 3 is… Read More
Facebook announced today it’s expanding its online fundraising tools – basically, Facebook’s own take on a GoFundMe-type service – to include support for community fundraisers as well as those for sports teams. The company had first launched its personal fundraising tools in March of this year, allowing users to raise money for educational, medical or pet medical… Read More
Bill Rossi, the new chief executive officer at Metabiota, believes that (unlikely as it seems) the insurance industry might be the key to stopping epidemic outbreaks worldwide — and that Metabiota would supply the monitoring tools to make the product work. Rossi, who quietly took the reins at the San Francisco-based company earlier in the year, said that a new product is being developed… Read More
Spider-Man: Homecoming is not that far away now, set for U.S. release on July 7. The movie got two new trailers early Wednesday, including a U.S. version (above), and the International trailer (below). I was worried this was going to be a game of spotting minor differences, but it very much is not, as you’ll see for yourself. The domestic trailer focuses a lot on Spidey’s suit,… Read More
Have a robotic startup or project? We want you on stage at TechCrunch Session: Robotics this July 17 at MIT. We’re looking for students to demo and early stage startups to pitch. If selected, both will get free tickets and exhibit space at the event. Use this form to apply. This opportunity will put participants in front of the companies, founders and engineers driving the robotics… Read More
