If you travel a lot, especially internationally, a new worry being added to the pile is the threat of being forced to unlock your phone for a customs agent. 1Password has a handy solution for this in the form of Travel Mode, which temporarily deauthorizes a device to access your passwords and accounts. Read More
Flightcaster, Prismatic and now Merlon Intelligence. Bradford Cross, founder of the venture capital firm Data Collective is a known figure in the ranks of VCs who have caught the entrepreneurship bug, abandoning what could have been a cushy lifestyle for one with considerably more volatility. His third startup, Merlon Intelligence, services banks, helping them cut down on risk and put a… Read More
The FCC has just published the notice of proposed rulemaking that would roll back the 2015 Open Internet Order establishing net neutrality. Their first and primary justification for doing this is a way of defining broadband access that’s so backwards it’s ridiculous. It would be funny, if the future of the internet didn’t depend on this incredibly disingenuous maneuvering. Read More
If you’re looking to buy something, but don’t want to pay for it yet, Blispay thinks it has the solution for you. The startup works with small and mid-sized businesses to help retail customers defer payments for six months. Baltimore-based Blispay has been gaining traction and raised an additional $12 million in funding after raising about the same amount last year. FirstMark… Read More
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam confirmed the company’s plans to launch an over-the-top streaming service later this year, according to a report from Variety, citing remarks the CEO made at a telecom conference in Boston this week. Verizon (which owns TechCrunch parent company AOL), will use the combined platform of AOL and Yahoo – and their 1.3 billion users – to test the new… Read More
French startup Stanley Robotics just raised $4 million (€3.6 million) from Elaia Partners, Bpifrance and Idinvest Partners. The company is building giant robots that pick up your car at the entrance of a parking lot and park it for you. If you drive your car to the airport, you know how expensive it can be to leave your car at the airport for a week. Airport parking lots have turned into one… Read More
When Google launched its AMP project about a year and a half ago, the focus was squarely on speeding up mobile web pages, with a special emphasis on news sites. Over the last few months, both the scope of supported pages and the range of places where Google surfaces AMP pages increased. Google is now using the AMP technologies to speed up some of its core money-making services. Read More
Uber has come out and said that it accidentally underpaid drivers in New York City over the past two and a half years. On Friday, Uber announced a nationwide change to how drivers see their earnings. While going through that process, the company realized it had been underpaying drivers in New York. Read More
It’s hard to know where to begin with this mess. It’s only been seven months since LeEco launched in the U.S. with one of the most bizarre press conferences in recent memory, right down to the super weird Michael Bay cameo. Since then, it’s been a constant parade of bad news for the company, cumulating with a conference call today that will lead to around 325 layoffs in the… Read More
Warby Parker wants to get you the right prescription glasses without forcing you to get an in-person eye test. It’s now testing its new Prescription Check app that uses your phone and computer in tandem to administer a 20-minute series of eye tests, which are then reviewed by a doctor who makes the final call on your prescription. Read More
Embrace.io says it can help developers understand the performance of their apps — and determine whether things like bugs or slow load times are actually driving users away. The company just announced that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from The Chernin Group, Techstars Ventures, BoxGroup and others. CEO Eric Futoran (pictured… Read More
We have all suffered the pain of seeing the same ad for a BBQ grill we can’t fit in our apartment on our phone, tablet, laptop and work desktop. The duplication is not only annoying, it’s wasteful for advertisers.
At Google’s Marketing Next conference in San Francisco, the company announced Unique Reach, a new measurement tool that captures the number of times the same… Read More
On the road to making machines artificially intelligent, everything needs to be taught, even the facial structure of a dog that looks like a mop. In this episode of Judah vs. the Machines, actor Judah Friedlander sets about his goal of “challenging the world’s top artificial intelligence robots for the sake of humanity” by taking a look at Facebook’s applied machine… Read More
500 Startups’ next batch of accelerator companies is launching now that its previous demo day has wrapped up, this time seemingly having a bit of a wider focus than we’re accustomed to seeing coming out of the firm. This batch, which contains 31 companies, focuses on a range of topics, like VR, healthcare, financial technology and even drones. Read More
“Alexa, how do you hide a body?” Vocal identification is a complicated thing. Alexa doesn’t identify individual users; all us humans are the same. And because Echo has no user identification process, this actually means that anyone within talking range can get access to Echo users’ sensitive emails, documents and other personal data. Read More
Google is making it easier for IT admins to deploy and manage its Chrome browser in their businesses. The new Chrome Enterprise Bundle gives admins a single installer for the Chrome browser, the Chrome Legacy Browser Support extension for running the occasional ActiveX widget and a number of administrative policy templates. With the launch of Chrome 58, Google’s browser now also… Read More
Microsoft CVP Yusuf Mehdi isn’t shy about mentioning the competition. As we discuss the company’s recent launch of Windows 10 S, he refers to the pared down operating system as a “Chromebook compete.” The company knows that Google is eating its lunch in K-12 here in the States, so it answered with its own version, and it’s not really making any bones about it.… Read More
After years of development and flickering just outside of mainstream consciousness and acceptance, record high prices for the most popular blockchain-based cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and newcomer Ethereum and an embrace of the technology’s core principles by some of the world’s largest institutions may mean that blockchain technology is ready for its close up. Read More
Desktop milling machines aren’t nearly as popular was FDM 3D printers but, it must be noted, they are far more versatile. The pieces that come out of a CNC – essentially a plotter that drags a fast-moving spindle over a material to cut out flat and raised shapes – are nearly finished and ready to use in many projects. Other Machine Co. founder Danielle Applestone PhD has… Read More
Google’s Jamboard is not a kitchen app for curating PB&J recipes – it’s a 55-inch digital whiteboard, with pen and touch input, companion iOS and Android apps, an Nvidia Jetson TX1 processor on board and 4K resolution. The behemoth is an enterprise-focused collaboration tool, that comes in three fun colors and has a stand that looks ripped from a Herman Miller catalog, and… Read More
