On the back of the incredible innovations that have disrupted today’s urban transit systems, with new ride-share models, electric energy and autonomous technologies, urban air mobility is poised for massive growth over the next five years. Read More
One of the beautiful things about owning a Google Chromebook laptop is the surprising lack of maintenance involved. The browser is essentially the OS and you connect to applications via the cloud. Everything gets updated automatically. Easy, peasy right? Well, it gets a bit more complicated when you bring a device into a mixed environment in the enterprise, and VMware announced a partnership… Read More
Mindfulness app Simple Habit was built to help users relieve stress and build healthier lives with more than 1,000 guided meditation sessions available to users. To continue growing, the company has raised $2.5 million from investors that include New Enterprise Associates, Fabrice Grinda’s FJ Labs, Foundation Capital, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Gusto CEO Josh Reeves. Read More
Pinterest today is adding a new feature to its Lens — its live camera search — that will help pick apart what’s in the image and make it easier to search specific parts of that image. In addition, Pinterest’s head of discovery engineering Vanja Josifovski is being bumped up to the CTO role. Read More
Amazon’s Echo Show killer feature is video calls. If you buy a couple of devices, you can call each other using the device. And it should be so easy that young kids and grandparents will be able to use it in no time. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Amazon invested in a startup called Nucleus then built a copycat. And today is a rough day for the young startup. Nucleus spent… Read More
Benchmark’s small partnership has added a new general partner, Sarah Tavel, the venture firm announced this morning, saying that her “career-long desire and commitment to be one of the world’s great venture capitalists” make her an “ideal addition” to the Benchmark team. Read More
In its latest paper, the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team dropped some impressive results for its implementation of a modified convolutional neural network for machine translation. And to complement its research, the company is releasing its pre-trained models on GitHub, along with all the tools needed to replicate the results on your own. Read More
Can your tweets help you find love? That’s the view taken by U.K.-based online dating startup Loveflutter as it pivots once again. The company has rolled out a revamped version of its app that lets you add your Twitter feed to your dating profile, in a similar vein to the way Tinder can import your Instagram feed. Read More
It’s Snapchat’s turn to copy Instagram while also staying one step ahead of its competitor. Today Snapchat launched a slew of new creative tools, several of which mimic Instagram’s features. But Snapchat’s new option to let users erase real-world objects from their photos shows it’s still pioneering the visual communication format. Read More
FileMaker is all about allowing non-developers to create line-of-business apps for Mac, Windows, iOS and the web. Increasingly, though, over the course of its last few releases, it also started to add more features for professional developers. With the launch of FileMaker 16 today, the company is adding new features for both of these constituencies. Read More
Since being founded a decade ago, Credit Karma has worked to help users better understand their credit scores and improve their financial health. Today the company is launching a new product that helps find unclaimed money they might not even have known was owed to them. Read More
Whether you call them granny units, in-laws or backyard studios, accessory dwelling units are rising in popularity in the U.S., in part due to new regulations that make it easier to obtain permits to build them in California. Now, a startup called Cover Technologies Inc. has raised $1.6 million in seed funding to give accessory dwelling units a high-tech makeover. Read More
U.S. millennials and Gen Zs aren’t entirely replacing their Snapchat addiction with Instagram Stories, according to a slew of new studies and surveys commissioned or collected by TechCrunch. Yet the fact that 80 percent of Instagram’s users are outside the U.S. has helped propel Instagram Stories’ ascent to 200 million DAUs, surpassing Snapchat’s 158 million users from… Read More
We want to see you in New York for Disrupt NY 2017, our annual celebration of all things startup. It’s a great time. You get to meet great founders and VCs and I’d love to meet you personally when I run through the alley with our video team. Hardware is my favorite thing in the world and you’re some of my favorite people. Disrupt runs from May 15-17 and will be held on Pier 36… Read More
Industrial 3D printing bigwig (and MakerBot owner) Stratasys took to the stage at the Rapid additive manufacturing event in Pittsburgh this morning showcase the Continuous Build 3D Demonstrator. As the name implies, the system is still in showcase mode, but the company believes its wall of cells represents a key shift toward the dream of 3D printing for manufacturing.
The move from purely… Read More
Amazon is fighting back against Walmart by dropping its free shipping minimum requirement down to $25. The move comes after a number of challenges by Walmart, including the added support for free two-day shipping on orders under $35 with no membership required, announced in January, and the more recent rollout of a new program called “Pickup Discount” that offers lowers prices if… Read More
A teenager with a love of Wendy’s chicken nuggets has displaced Ellen Degeneres as the author of the most-retweeted post on Twitter. Just over a month ago, Carter Wilkerson asked Wendy’s via Twitter how many retweets he’d need to get a year’s supply of free chicken nuggets. The company’s response? “18 million.” Sure, that was almost 15 million more… Read More
If you rewind to late 2013 or early 2014, the market for enterprise startups, and perhaps especially for storage-centered startups, was quite different. Box raised $100 million in December of 2013 and $150 million the following July. Dropbox was on a similar tear, raising a $350 million Series C round in January of 2014 and snagging a $500 million debt facility that April. There was… Read More
Anticipation is at full force for this summer’s slate of TV. New “House of Cards” is due soon, and “Game of Thrones” returns toward the end of the summer. But none is quite as exciting as the return of “Orange Is The New Black,” with season five, which is to be released on June 9. This morning, Netflix put up a full two-minute trailer for the… Read More
Amazon may have flopped with the Fire Phone, but don’t count it out of the telephony game just yet. Alongside Amazon unveiling its newest Echo device earlier today (the Echo Show), the company also announced Alexa Calling, free voice calls and messaging services that you use through all Echo devices (not just the Show), as well as for users of the Alexa app for smartphones. Read More
