The timing was perfect. Just as startups were settling into NYU and ffVC’s new brains-meet-money accelerator, “AI Nexus Lab,” Uber acquired Geometric Intelligence. In a stroke of luck, the startup that would become Uber’s AI lab happened to have been raised by NYU Tandon’s Data Future Labs. Uber’s interest in Geometric helped solidify New… Read More
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, long had aspirations to become a player in the mobile phone and tablet world, too. You can’t easily buy an Ubuntu-powered phone today (at least not in the U.S.), but over the years, a few have come and gone. As Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced today, however, the company will end its investment in the phone… Read More
Uber admitted today that it had found one of the documents Waymo alleges was stolen by a former employee — who left its self-driving car effort to join Uber’s — on the employee’s personal computer. Read More
It’s actually a pretty great URL: Bus.com. It’s also a much better brand identity than Sharethebus, which is the old name of the company that just raised a $5 million Series A round from Jackson Square Ventures and BMW’s i Ventures investment arm. Bus.com is the destination you’d expect to head to for what the company does, which is organize charter bus trips for… Read More
It’s no secret that Google has developed its own custom chips to accelerate its machine learning algorithms. The company first revealed those chips, called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), at its I/O developer conference back in May 2016, but it never went into all that many details about them, except for saying that they were optimized around the company’s own TensorFlow… Read More
SpaceX has posted a video of the Falcon 9 rocket it used first last year during the CRS-8 mission, and then again just last week during the SES-10 mission. The reuse of the rocket was historic in itself, but the kicker was the successful recovery of the rocket, as documented below. During the actual launch, SpaceX tried to provide live footage of the rocket landing, but the camera on the… Read More
YouTube TV takes a bunch of the more popular U.S. cable channels — ABC, Fox, CBS, NBC, CW, Disney, SyFy, ESPN and 40+ more — and crams them into one app. It’ll cost $35 a month, and you’ll be able to stream to six devices simultaneously with each plan, starting with today’s launch in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Read More
Monzo, one of a number of so-called “challenger” banks in the U.K. aiming to re-invent the current account, has had the “restrictions” on its banking license lifted and says it will begin rolling out full current accounts to its pre-paid card and beta app users. Read More
Dojo Madness, a Berlin-based startup that sells analytics and coaching tools to casual and professional online gamers, has raised $6 million in a new round of financing. Read More
Eyeo, the parent company behind AdBlock Plus, announced this morning that it has acquired Flattr. The two companies were already working together on a project initially called Flattr Plus, where users can allocate a monthly payment to online publishers. The money is then distributed based on users’ engagement with different sites and articles. This sounded pretty similar to what Flattr… Read More
Amazon will refund millions of unauthorized in-app purchases kids made on mobile devices, having now dropped its appeal of last year’s ruling by a federal judge who sided with the Federal Trade Commission in the agency’s lawsuit against Amazon. The FTC’s original complaint said that Amazon should be liable for millions of dollars it charged customers, because of the way… Read More
Michael Kim is pretty much killing it. Kim’s Cendana Capital just closed on $260 million in fresh capital across a network of five funds. Altogether, the San Francisco-based outfit now manages around $450 million — which says a lot about how much the market has changed. We talked with Kim — who runs Cendana with principal Graham Pingree — about that ongoing evolution. Read More
IBM today announced that users on its Bluemix cloud will soon be able to add two Nvidia Tesla P100 accelerator cards to their bare metal servers. The company says this feature will launch later this month and, when it’s live, IBM will likely be the first major cloud provider to offer support for these chips. Read More
Taser is now Axon. The brand has been a household word for years, but the company felt it was time to leave that identity behind and double down on the body camera and digital evidence management side of its business. As part of that move, it’s offering free body cameras and software to any police department that asks. Yes, free as in beer, and yes, any as in any. Read More
Microsoft has had a fair bit of investment action with InsideSales, the startup with a unicorn valuation of $1.5 billion, and today they are expanding that relationship with some product integration. The companies announced that InsideSales Playbooks will be available on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. Playbooks offer customers a set of recommendations aimed at sales teams, such as the… Read More
AT&T’s $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner hasn’t yet completed, but the company is already leveraging Time Warner assets to boost its own services – first with its streaming TV service DirecTV Now, which is currently giving out free HBO, and now today it’s rolling out free HBO to AT&T’s “Unlimited Plus” wireless plan subscribers. The… Read More
French fintech startup Compte Nickel was acquired by French bank BNP Paribas yesterday. I couldn’t nail down the price but I’ve heard that it was quite significant. Compte Nickel was one of the leading fintech startups in France. You can open the equivalent of a current bank account in thousands of tobacco shops in just a few minutes. Compte Nickel gives you an IBAN and a… Read More
With AI and machine learning breathing down the neck of the vast quantities of dull contract checking which currently goes on in many law firms, its no wonder startups are training their guns on this sector.
Legaltech is, naturally, driving down the cost of legal work and new wave of these startups range from the ‘Uber of Lawyers’ (Lexoo, Linkilaw, Lawbite) that create a lawyer… Read More
Coras connects tickets to customers through a global distribution platform so they can purchase tickets through any Coras-connected site. It’s now closed a €1.9 million investment round led by Atlantic Bridge, with participation by The Edge (the guitarist with U2), Hambro Perks and Elkstone Capital. Read More
There are several apps on the market that help you track your spending (Parity), save money (Pennies), or invest (Moneybox) using basic machine learning. Now an ambitious startup wants to do all three. Based out of London, new startup Oval (Apple, Android) will combine expense tracking, saving, and investing into one app, while also adding a social element by enabling its community of users… Read More
