Jeff Jones, the president of Uber, leaves the company, Y Combinator launches a vertical for AI startups, according to Bloomberg, Apple assembles a team to work on new augmented reality device and SpaceX recovers capsule and sets sights on Mars. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Today was Y Combinator’s 24th Demo Day, where the accelerator shows off its fresh companies to investors. International, AI, and hardware products were the emergent themes of the 52 companies that launched. “The international tour seemed to work” says YC President Sam Altman, who helped put on ‘Startup School’ events across the globe to boost the… Read More
Farmers know how hard it is to predict yield accurately. High-value crops like grapes or almonds prove particularly challenging. Farmers expect, and settle for, twenty to forty percent uncertainty with these crops. Vinsight founder and CEO, Megan Nunes, who grew up in the farming business, found that unacceptable. After almost a decade-long career in the satellite industry, she turned her… Read More
As any fan of Kitchen Nightmares may know, the restaurant business is not for the faint of heart, nor is it likely to generate fat margins. Now, a startup called PlateIQ has raised $4 million in new funding to help restaurants automate accounts payable, and nail all their other accounting work so they can focus, finally, on the food and front-of-house. Eileses Capital led the round… Read More
Twitter is about to make it much easier for media publishers to post live video broadcasts with the launch of a live video API tomorrow morning. The API will let companies hook up professional broadcasting and video editing equipment to Twitter with more powerful integrations than Twitter’s existing Periscope Producer feature.
The forthcoming API was first reported last week by The… Read More
Formlabs’ Form 1 Kickstarter project was the first stereo lithography printer that ended up on peoples’ radars. Its successor, the Form 1+, looked identical but had upgraded internals for increased speed and reliability. Following Formlabs’ $35 million raise last year, the company has focused its attention on its more professional-grade Form 2 printer instead. Read More
According to numerous reports, U.S. authorities today alerted a number of Middle Eastern and African airlines that starting soon, their passengers will have to check any electronic items larger than a cell phone. That means passengers on these flights will have to put their laptops, tablets, Kindles and portable game consoles into their checked baggage. Read More
While Foursquare started as a social check-in app, the company has always said there is a bigger picture — mainly related to unique ways of leveraging its database of check-ins at nearly 100 million public places. Today the company is announcing Foursquare Analytics, a foot-traffic dashboard for brands and retailers. Read More
A Congressional committee is grilling FBI director James Comey and NSA chief Admiral Mike Rogers on a Russian-led cyber campaign to influence the 2016 election, but representatives’ questions have veered from political hacking into debates about prosecuting journalists for publishing leaked documents and, of course, questions about President Trump’s Twitter habits. Read More
Google Maps has just added a handy feature that will help users remember where they parked. This appears as a new menu option when you tap the blue dot, and will place a “P” icon on the map so you can find your way back to your spot. While remembering your parking location is something Apple Maps has done since the launch of iOS 10, Google’s implementation is a bit more… Read More
One of the unique things about Instagram Live is that the videos have always disappeared. After your live stream is over the content is deleted forever — unlike Facebook Live or Periscope, which save your video so audiences can view it after the fact. Until now. Read More
Marty Pichinson and the firm he co-founded specialize in selling off the assets of startups when they fail. He’s been given every kind of death-related moniker as a result, from the Terminator to the Undertaker. Pichinson doesn’t mind any of them, as long as they help keep Sherwood at the top of its game. We chatted with Pichinson to ask what he’s seeing in the current market. Read More
Like all good games, Kendama is easy-ish to learn and frustrating as all ever-loving £%&*@£^% to master. What’s a poor entrepreneur to do when a game hasn’t changed for 400 years? Rename it Dendama, add a boat-load of electronics, invent a slew of multiplayer games and launch a Kickstarter campaign, of course. Read More
There are still a lot of unknowns in the medical world when it comes to pregnancy — including which factors lead to carrying a healthy fetus to term. WebMD and Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) have launched a new investigative study and are teaming up with Apple’s ResearchKit to recruit participants to look at what contributes to a healthy pregnancy. Read More
Entrepreneurs, investors, press and other tech enthusiasts are flocking to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View later today to take part in yet another Y Combinator Demo Day. Diversity hasn’t always been a priority at YC, but its president Sam Altman has been relatively vocal about diversity and the accelerator’s push to increase it in recent years. In YC’s Winter… Read More
The iMessage App Store may have its struggles, but one app aimed at bringing group video chat into the iMessage experience is reportedly taking off. Smack, the company behind the video chat app called Fam, has raised $1.8 million in funding for its Top 25 Social Networking app on the App Store that allows groups to chat with one another via iMessage with just a few taps. Read More
SirionLabs, a startup providing vendor management software to enterprises, is adding a U.S. headquarters to its footprint. The company was initially founded in India and has raised $16.95 million from Sequoia Capital India, Canopy Ventures and Qualgro VC to extract data from contracts to ensure transparency and accountability. The establishment of a U.S. presence represents a strategic… Read More
Mass Effect is a video game series that attracts ardent fans and invokes emotional reactions from those fans via its storytelling decisions. The franchise builds on the legacy BioWare built with its stewardship of the Star Wars universe with the Knights of the Old Republic, but offers truly unique science-fiction storytelling in expansive action RPG games. Read More
French startup Akeneo just raised a $13 million Series B round led by Partech Ventures, with existing investor Alven Capital also participating. Akeneo is a product information management (PIM) service to manage all information about your products in your stores, online and in your good-old paper catalogs. Read More
