Scott Belsky is the co-founder of Behance and investor at Benchmark Capital. In this episode, we discuss how to maximize your creative output, how constraints can – and should – be used to boost productivity, and the patterns most seen in successful businesses. Read More
Reefill is a New York-based company that wants you to stop buying bottled water. Their system, which will be installed in delis and fast food restaurants, lets you refill your water bottle for free with filtered tap water that should, in theory, be better than the swill you currently get from water fountains. The founders, Jason Pessel, Andrew Betlyon, and Patrick Connorton, first worked on… Read More
Recharge, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose app enables users to book a stay in a hotel for just 66 cents a minute, is opening in select New York hotels today, after testing its service over the last year in San Francisco. In New York, customers can now book rooms at The Pierre, W New York, The Knickerbocker and 1 Hotel Central. Read More
The New York Times announced today it’s joining Snapchat Discover – the feature in Snapchat which includes updates and news from a variety of media publications. The paper’s “daily edition” on Snapchat will include a handful of The NYT’s stories, distilled down to the quick, more consumable format that’s common on the medium, and will heavily focus… Read More
This is the best new social app feature in a long time. Twitter should copy it. Instagram should copy it. Facebook probably already is copying it. I’m talking about Pinterest’s “Instant Ideas” button that started testing in February but is slowly rolling out to more people. As soon as I tapped it, I was hooked. Read More
Amazon has a team dedicated to driverless technology, the Wall Street Journal reports, but their focus isn’t on building self-driving cars or trucks; instead, the Amazon squad acts as a kind of braintrust looking at how to best employ autonomous vehicle technology to serve the ecommerce giant’s business goals. The Amazon team was set up just over a year ago, and it’s… Read More
Nintendo is discontinuing the NES Classic Edition. While this decision is still puzzling, you might still be looking to buy one before it disappears into the ether forever. Best Buy stores have some of the last units starting today. If you plan on buying one, I’d head to the closest Best Buy store right now as these units won’t be available on Best Buy’s website. Nintendo… Read More
Tesla’s making a bet on its production process for the Model 3 that defies accepted industry know-how – which is not at all an unusual strategy for the young carmaker. Basically all of Tesla’s success thus far has been due to its ability to defy accepted industry wisdom, but with the Model 3 production line, the risk centers around skipping a step in the manufacturing process… Read More
Can a machine learn aesthetics in a way a human would? Could it then look at a set of photos, and draw on those same aesthetics to reproduce a different set? It’s a big question because it has long-term implications for how AI is going to develop. What are aesthetics anyway? Is it just what you “like”? How does it all work? When you as a human find it hard to express what… Read More
Now that LinkedIn is a part of Microsoft (after closing its $26.2 billion acquisition in December), the social networking site for the working world no longer reports earnings, and the metrics that come with them, as an individual business. So to underscore its growth, today LinkedIn used a blog post to announce that it has now passed 500 million registered users in 200 countries on its… Read More
VideoBlocks made a name for itself a few years ago when it launched its subscription-based stock video service and — later on — a members-only marketplace for buying one-off clips, too. Now, the company is following a very similar model for its expansion into the stock photo space as well. That new service is now open for photographers who want to contribute their images and… Read More
Amazon has made headway in the subscription business with its Subscribe & Save feature for consumers, which offers discounted pricing on products if you agree to buy on a recurring basis. Now, the retailer is looking to expand its subscription footprint with a new program called Subscribe with Amazon, which aims to make Amazon the place to discover, subscribe to and manage a range… Read More
Netflix will raise a little over $1 billion (€1 billion) from “non-U.S. persons” via a new senior notes offering, the company said on Monday. The proceeds of the debt sale will be used to help with general capital expenditures, but also funding content acquisitions, investments, and transactions related to executing Netflix’s strategy. The raise was expected –… Read More
Apple has hired former Google satellite executives John Fenwick and Michael Trela, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The two might’ve been in the market for new gigs, given that Google recently sold off its own in-house satellite imaging business (which came through an acquisition of Fenwick’s former company Skybox) to Planet Labs, apparently happy to act as a client of… Read More
For the past seven years, the Canadian technology developer Komodo Openlabs has been working on a device called Tecla that allow users with limited mobility to control electronic devices. Designed for users who have trouble operating smartphones, tablets, or computers because of limited upper-body mobility caused by spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, ALS, muscular dystrophy,… Read More
The Kitty Hawk Flyer is one of the first aircraft from Larry Page-backed Kitty Hawk, a startup taking aim at creating real, usable flying cars. The company, which is also led by CEO and former Google self-driving car project originator Sebastian Thrun, wants to begin selling the Flyer you see in the video above by the end of the year, so this isn’t a concept depicting a far-flung… Read More
Sling Media, the Dish subsidiary you probably know for its Slingbox and Sling TV service, is announcing its SlingStudio hardware today. With this, Sling Media is entering a completely new market because unlike its previous offerings, which targeted consumers, the $999 SlingStudio is meant for video creators who want to produce live video streams for Facebook Live or YouTube.
Typically… Read More
An obscure request for comments on regulatory standards, released by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) last March, has since evolved into a complex turf war between the states and Washington DC. Caught in the middle is the entire online finance industry, raising the question of just what a ‘fintech’ business really is. Read More
Google is announcing that advertisers can now buy traditional TV advertising through the DoubleClick Bid Manager. Bid Manager is the main DoubleClick ad-buying product, so Google is pitching this as a way to manage TV and online ad campaigns from the same place. “Historically, TV and digital advertising have been bought and measured through different systems and currencies,”… Read More
Flux, a London-based fintech startup founded by three early employees of foreign exchange and banking app Revolut, is on a mission to make store receipts truly digital. Read More
