European founders, adept at launching startups which cross many international borders are fast ganging a reputation for launching in emerging markets. In countries where markets are often still very chaotic, there remains a host of opportunities. That’s evidenced by the news today that the Frontier Car Group, which builds and runs marketplaces for used cars in emerging markets, has closed… Read More
At Google’s Marketing Next conference, the company is announcing a new beta for Google Attribution, a free tool for examining the role that different marketing strategies play in customer purchasing decisions.
Regardless of device or marketing channel, Google wants Attribution to be a home for evaluating marketing campaigns. By creating a tight loop between strategy, ad spend and… Read More
Snapchat is deepening its Bitmoji integration – your Bitmoji, if you have one set up, will now appear within your Snapcode, and users can also now change their Bitmoji’s expression to reflect their mood when making edits to their cartoonish avatar in the app’s settings.
This seems like a small change, but the new offering from Snapchat actually gives you a lot of reason to… Read More
Google is announcing a major update to its store visits measurement tool today at its Google Marketing Next conference. Google has used anonymized location and contextual data since 2014 to estimate brick and mortar store visits spurred by online ads. The company is augmenting its existing models with deep learning to bring insights to even more customers. Omnichannel marketing is as big of… Read More
Snapchat is adding the ability to create custom stories limited to specific friends, or to direct contacts and their friends within a geofenced area. These new custom stories otherwise operate just like regular Snapchat Stories, but will disappear entirely if no one within the group adds any updates for 24 hours. The custom Story feature is a good fit for special occasions, like birthdays… Read More
Google’s AlphaGo AI Go player has defeated Ke Jie, Go world champion, in the opening match of a three game series that will include matches with Jie on Thursday and Saturday. The win was by a narrow margin, but AlphaGo has been programmed to ensure victory, not to run up the score or devastate its opponent, so the margin by which it wins isn’t necessarily a good indicator of how… Read More
When the MateBook launched last year, plenty of sites were quick to position it against Apple’s offerings. There were caveats, of course. Namely, the fact that the device was a touchscreen two-in-one. Now the company’s done messing around. Alongside the updated version of last year’s model, the company has launched a device designed the compete with the MacBook straight on. Read More
Microsoft says it didn’t mean to do a “head fake” when it told the press that this week’s big event in Shanghai wouldn’t center around the launch of the Surface Pro 5. Sure, the company was telling the truth, but that’s really a technicality, because the new Surface Pro (full stop) is really the Surface Pro 5. Read More
Content delivery company Fastly has raised $50 million in financing to expand its footprint as a corporate supplier of speedy application, website, and web service delivery. In its press release, Fastly calls its service an “edge cloud platform”, which is a fantastic mix of nonsense and meaningless garbage that I’m going to refuse to use (seriously, Bateman Group, that is… Read More
Zenefits, in a further attempt to find its way into small businesses as a human resources management service that can outmaneuver larger and more complex platforms, is releasing a suite of new updates today.
Much of these updates revolve around trying to simplify the process of managing an employee base, from benefits to payroll, to something as simple as a few taps on an app. Right now… Read More
Can AI overhaul the social care system? That’s the pitch underpinning UK home care provider Cera’s plans. The startup has today taken the tiniest baby steps to launch an AI chatbot that it hopes will, at an unspecified point in future, be able to assist carers with recommendations for home care of people with conditions such as dementia. Read More
Outreach, a software developer selling services that gives sales forces a needed prompt to more efficiently use their time and optimize sales, along with an organizational tool to manage their pitching process, has just raised $30 million with that very pitch.
The company touts its ability to triple the volume of meetings and increase the sales pipeline for front-line sales… Read More
The race to control the TV is on, and today comes some news out of Europe underscoring Amazon’s ambitions in that department. The e-commerce giant announced the launch of Amazon Channels in the UK and Germany — its two biggest markets in the region — which will see Amazon, for the first time, offer close to 50 live and on-demand streamed channels to the region as part of… Read More
The global smartphone market grew 9.1 per cent in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner’s latest stats, and growth is being driven by a trio of Chinese device makers. Read More
Well that didn’t last long. A fresh patent spat between Nokia and Apple which fired up at the back end of last year when Cupertino accused the former world number one mobile maker of making like a patent troll appears to have been resolved already. Read More
While Quora has been around for almost seven years, it’s been a little slow when it comes to monetization through advertising.
The question-and-answer site first launched ads last year in April 2016, but since then it’s only existed in closed beta to pre-approved advertising partners like Mulesoft and Shopify.
Until now.
The startup just announced that it’s opening its… Read More
Food startups are apparently still steaming hot as French startup Frichti just raised a whopping $33.7 million (€30 million). Frichti is currently available in Paris and nearby cities. It handles everything in-house — from cooking to orders and deliveries. Verlinvest and Felix Capital invested in today’s funding round, with existing investors Alven Capital and Idinvest Partners… Read More
Having already taken a significant chunk of the international money transfer market away from the major banks, London-headquartered TransferWise has its sights set on the bank account itself. Read More
I’ll be in Reykjavik next week and you know what that means… I want to meet you! So we’ll be holding an small meetup (not really a pitchoff but feel free to pitch me while I’m there) at Bryggjan Brugghús, Grandagarði 8, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland. Event starts at 5pm and you can meet the speakers and mentors coming to Startup Iceland 2017. Expect some booze, some fun,… Read More
When Instagrammers don’t get enough likes or think their posts look boring, they sometimes impetously delete them. But they can later regret this common emergent behavior which also deprives Instagram of monetizable content and your history in images that could keep you locked into the service. So Instagram is rolling out a new feature called “archive” that lets you hide any… Read More
