NASA has announced the recipients of its most recent round of highly experimental projects it deems promising enough to fund. These NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts aren’t guaranteed to go all the way, but are rather sort of low-risk, high potential reward moonshots — science fiction they hope will be more the former than the latter. Read More
Okta is setting an increasingly ambitious target for its IPO, now officially pricing it at $17 per share set for its debut tomorrow — and looking to raise as much as $187 million in the hopes that it can capitalize on the newly open IPO window. Read More
Many toys today include high-tech and interactive components that keep kids in front of screens. But when it comes to health and educational development, studies have found that kids benefit from things like building with blocks, playing with both hands and looking away from screens at least every 20 minutes. Osmo has dedicated itself to designing toys that bridge the digital and physical. Read More
New legal documents show that Twitter is taking the Department of Homeland Security to court to protect the true identity of an account that claims to be run by employees of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The account, @ALT_USCIS, is one of many “alt” government agency accounts that began appearing in the early days of the Trump administration. The filing… Read More
YouTube is taking measures to help ensure its user-generated content doesn’t end up positioning ads by big brands next to questionable content. The social network will not allow ads on channels that have fewer than 10,000 views total, across all their posted videos. YouTube told The Wall Street Journal that the measure has been in development since November, and that it’s intended… Read More
After postponing its IPO last year, Elevate Credit, the venture-backed lending company, went public on the New York Stock Exchange today. Elevate priced at $6.50 per share, closing the day up over 19 percent at $7.76, but this was still well below the expected range of $12 to $14. They decided to go through with the offering to take advantage of an open “IPO window,” with a… Read More
Azure Stack is one of Microsoft’s most ambitious projects in the data center space. The goal of Azure Stack is, at its core, to bring many of the features of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform into the enterprise data center. While there are some obvious advantages to using public cloud services like Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, after all, for many customers, running their… Read More
In mid-January, the ongoing race for AI put Montreal-based Maluuba on our radar. Microsoft acquired the startup and its team of researchers to build better machine intelligence tools for analyzing unstructured text to enable more natural human computer interaction — think bots that can actually respond with reasonable intelligence to a text you send. The team dropped its first paper… Read More
Thank you for joining me, ladies, gentlemen. Researchers have created a “stabbing machine,” with which they intend to “simulate stabbing events,” with the further intention of getting to the heart of knife-related crimes. Now, I don’t have a problem with teaching robots knifeplay per se, but we must be circumspect. We must be careful. We must not teach them poorly. Read More
You have already read the news. But we thought we would also use this opportunity to share a transcript of the interview with Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing; Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering; John Ternus, Vice President of Hardware Engineering. Bill Evans from Apple PR was also in attendance. It was lightly edited for length and… Read More
Fitbit has eight different fitness trackers on the market right now. And while the company’s financials are downright troubling, it’s still shipping more product that every other wearable company. That’s due in part to tremendous name recognition, solid product design and mainstream appeal. The company offers eight different tiers of products, but they’re all design… Read More
The Food and Drug Administration finally gave 23andMe a long sought-after green light today to sell to consumers genetic tests and their accompanying health risk reports for up to 10 diseases, including late-onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Read More
AeroMobil, a European company that hopes to bring a flying car to market, has raised an additional €3 million ($3.2 million US) to help fund the production and demonstration of a new physical model of its vehicle, following the successful development and testing of the craft’s mathematical and geometric design.
The company has already been demonstrating the ability of its craft to… Read More
Adobe has a tendency to show early demos of the technologies it’s working on but isn’t quite ready to launch publicly. The latest of these is a selfie app from Adobe Research the company outed on its YouTube channel earlier today. Read More
Lyft has just raised a big new round, according to a new report from the Financial Times. The round brings in over $500 million in new funding, and sets the valuation for the ride hailing company at $6.9 billion (pre-money), which is well north of their $4.5 billion (again, pre-money) valuation from their previous funding round in January of last year. Even at $6.9 billion, Lyft is still worth… Read More
Comcast, a cable company notorious for poor customer service, now wants to be your cellular provider, as well. The company today announced its new business, Xfinity Mobile, a wireless service offering unlimited data plans at $65 per line, that can be brought down to $45 per line for customers that subscribe to Comcast’s high-end X1 packages. The service will run over top… Read More
Write “You owe me $20” and Messenger will suggest you use its payments feature. If someone says “goodbye,” Messenger will recommend a “bye-bye” GIF. That’s how Facebook’s new M Suggestions work. Facebook’s AI assistant will privately interject recommendations above the redesigned one-line message composer in your Messenger conversations,… Read More
With its Material Design guidelines, Google set out to create a unified set of ideas for how it wants developers to think about all the different aspects of their applications’ design, ranging from the basic layout to how to use animations effectively. As part of those guidelines, it also offered some ideas about how to best use color. Today it’s expanding on that with the launch of… Read More
Renaud Laplanche had a terrible no good very bad 2016. But the founder and longtime CEO of Lending Club is back with a new lending startup called Upgrade, along with the support of investors who’ve provided the company with $60 million in funding. Read More
A couple of early-stage venture capital outfits have infused medical practice management platform drchrono with $12 million in Series A financing to help the eight-year-old company compete with EHR incumbents in bigger health organizations like athenahealth and Allscripts. Read More
