If the UK’s £30 contactless payment limit was holding back greater adoption of Apple’s biometric contactless payment tech, Apple Pay, the company should expect to see uplift in usage as it believes that a majority of UK contactless POS now supports limitless transactions. Read More
Uber announced this morning a series of under-the-hood changes to its ride-sharing service UberPool in Manhattan, with the goal of improving its matching algorithms, as well as its pickup and dropoff processes in the city. The company says the updates are based on incorporating driver and rider feedback into its algorithms, and come following last year’s redesign of the service in… Read More
Stephen Gates is the Global Head of Design at Citi. In our 15th episode, we talk about how design and creativity are actually blue collar professions, what it’s like to approach design for an industry as old as banking, and what it takes to become a design leader, regardless of where you are in your design career. Design is not easy work and it’s not solely comprised of… Read More
London-based Feast It, an online marketplace that lets you book ‘street food’-styled catering for your work or social event, has picked up $440,000 in seed funding. Read More
The charitable arm of Google and the UN have teamed up on a new website aimed at helping people better understand the Syrian refugee crisis through the combination of data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) along with satellite imagery, 360 degree photos and stills, videos, stories from refugees, and more. The new site, called “Searching for Syria,”… Read More
After a day of speculation, automaker Ford has announced a significant regime change to underscore its ambitions in connected and self-driving cars: Jim Hackett — who had been running Ford’s Smart Mobility business — is taking over as the company’s CEO, replacing Mark Fields, who is retiring.
The move is a bold attempt to push Ford into what many see as the next… Read More
It’s an old story for anyone moving out to a new place, but for Merchant, and others like her, the idea that there can be a better way to move to a place, and live in a city, has led to the creation of new co-living spaces. In the old days, these spaces (once called communes by a generation less capitalized but perhaps no less idealistic) grew organically around shared interests and… Read More
Autonomous vehicles all need sensors that can help them detect and avoid objects in their environment. And to operate at high speeds, these sophisticated machines need to identify objects ahead precisely, and early enough, that they can avoid crashing into them.
Existing systems have included light ranging and detection systems and cameras, primarily. But the effectiveness of both LiDAR and… Read More
Barcelona-based blue-collar recruitment app CornerJob has closed a $19 million Series C. The new financing will be used for product development, says CEO David Rodriguez, as well as bolstering its position in “strategic markets” and expanding into some new ones. Read More
The Guardian has published details of Facebook’s content moderation guidelines covering controversial issues such as violence, hate speech and self-harm culled from more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that the newspaper has seen. Read More
In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, is a different kind of tech startup event which features smaller breakout sessions on key subjects for startups, as well as main-stage speakers and panels. The Europas conference is followed by a glittering awards show for the hottest startups in Europe, based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. But key to it… Read More
Shipamax, a London-based startup and recent graduate of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding, money it plans to use to continue building and marketing its cloud software platform for the bulk shipping industry. Leading the round is Cherubic Ventures, with participation from AME Cloud, and FF Angel. Read More
Plum is one of a number of fintech startups reimagining how we manage our finances online, in the form of an AI-driven or ‘smart’ chatbot. However, unlike competitors that exist primarily as standalone apps, the London startup (for now, at least) has decided to bet big on Facebook Messenger. Read More
Ford Motors will replace CEO Mark Fields with the head of its subsidiary responsible for developing self-driving cars, reports the New York Times. Read More
Chinese tech conglomerate LeEco is reshuffling the executive roster of its publicly traded unit, Leshi Internet Information and Technology Corp., as it continues to struggles with cash flow issues and a bumpy expansion into the U.S. Leshi disclosed in a Shenzhen Stock Exchange filing over the weekend that founder Jia Yueting will leave his role as CEO, but stay on as chairman. Read More
A week ago, Microsoft held its Build developer conference in its backyard in Seattle. This week, Google did the same in an amphitheater right next to its Mountain View campus. While Microsoft’s event felt like it embodied the resurgence of the company under the leadership of Satya Nadella, Google I/O — and especially its various, somewhat scattershot keynotes — fell flat… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Sunday, May 21, 2017 Doc gets off the F train and finds himself in a binge TV debate. Frank preps for his trip to Digital Hollywood, while Keith and Kevin suggest news is dead, long live news. Steve finds respite in advertising from Hulo’s auto-binge onboarding. Directed by… Read More
It was Mannah Kallon’s love for food and gaming that ignited the former chef’s career in coding. During culinary school and on a tour of the South (which he’ll discuss in our latest episode of breaking into startups), the longtime gamer played A LOT of video games and even taught himself how to make an one that could potentially get kids excited about learning Math.… Read More
Google Home has spent the past year catching up. No surprise, really. The Echo had a roughly two-year head start on the device. This week, the smart home hub celebrated the one-year anniversary at I/O of its announcements with a few key additions aimed at making its product a true competitor. From the looks of it, the company is playing the long game here, seeding mobile devices with Assistant… Read More
Tech titans like IBM and Google have emerged major players in New York’s startup ecosystem. Here’s a look at how their New York offices stack up to their west coast counterparts. Read More
