Yelp has acquired restaurant reservation app Nowait for $40 million, in an all-cash deal, the companies announced this morning. The move will bring Nowait’s waitlist system and seating tool to Yelp, where it’s been integrated in the Yelp app, to complement the existing Yelp reservations product and its mobile food-ordering system, Yelp Eat24.
Founded in 2010 by Ware Sykes… Read More
A group of coding boot camps and white-collar training programs from around the country are banding together to create a single standard for reporting graduation and job placement data. The move comes as these “accelerated learning programs” across the country push for greater validation among educational institutions — and a share of the massive state and federal dollars… Read More
Google today announced that it is donating gRPC, its high performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF is already the open-source home of the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration tool and similar projects that all aim bring software containers and microservices to the mainstream. GRPC is the sixth project in the… Read More
Wander the flashy hall 3, where smartphone makers have traditionally bagged most of the prime carpet-space to show off their latest glass slabs, and you’ll find a sprawling Ford booth and a slew of parked cars being used as props by carriers and chip companies keen to flog the 5G future. Read More
PayPal was targeted with a class action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Chicago which focuses on the way the payments company handles charitable donations. The suit alleges the company’s charitable arm, the PayPal Giving Fund, is misleading consumers who believe they are giving directly to the charities listed on the company’s homepage, but whose funds are sometimes being redirected… Read More
What comes after Spectacles for the “camera company”? Snap has explored 360 cameras as a future product, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Snap brought in a camera developer with expertise in 360 cameras and stereoscopic cameras to pitch the company potential hardware options. Read More
The latest rumors put Apple and Samsung on a direct collision course. If they pan out, the next iPhone and Galaxy will look very similar with curved screens and thin bezels. But then there’s the price. One option is going up market, while the other will probably stay mainstream. Once upon a time Samsung blatantly copied Apple to the point the courts agreed and forced Samsung to pay… Read More
In the last couple of years, venture and seed investors have backed at least twenty companies deploying technology in the political realm, according to Crunchbase data. Funded companies are developing tools to provide higher accuracy alternatives to polling, monitor geopolitical sentiment, and improve civic engagement. Read More
Snap’s camera company ambitions included exploring drones as a possible product line, according to a new report from the New York Times. The drone plans would’ve given users the potential to take photos and videos from an eagle-eye perspective to share on Snapchat, its social network, and would’ve offered another hardware option alongside Spectacles as a way to help users… Read More
Freenome, a two-year-old liquid biopsy diagnosis platform that detects the cell-free DNA sequencing of cancer, has raised a huge Series A round — $65 million — led by Andreessen Horowitz, which also led the company’s $5.5 million seed round less than a year ago.
Other investors in the deal include GV, Polaris Partners, Innovation Endeavors, Spectrum 28, Asset Management… Read More
Nintendo’s long-awaited Switch has arrived, alongside the even more long-awaited New Zelda. The Switch combines the convenience of a handheld with the power of a home console — at least, that’s the pitch. And while the two roles make compromises in order to accommodate one another, the result may be said to be more than the sum of its parts. Or at least it could be once a… Read More
Palo Alto-based Cobalt Robotics Inc. today introduced a new line of robot security guards for indoor use. The roving robots use the same kind of components you’d expect in a self-driving car to sense people and problems in a building. Cofounders Travis Deyle and Erik Schluntz, who are former GoogleX and SpaceX engineers, say they designed the robots to complement, not replace, human… Read More
Caviar, the on-demand food delivery startup owned by Square, is expanding into the pickup game. Starting today, customers in San Francisco, the San Francisco East Bay Area, Los Angeles and Portland can order food via Caviar for pickup.
“With pickup, our goal is to expand Caviar from a delivery service to a more robust and fully fledged food ordering platform for restaurants and… Read More
Making good on its promises to more seriously tackle abuse on its network, Twitter this morning announced several more updates to its service aimed at silencing abusers, helping users better filter Twitter’s content, as well as making the abuse reporting process more transparent. The changes are one of many Twitter has rolled out in the past few weeks. Earlier this month, it said… Read More
Big data. Everyone has it. And no one has a way to organize, store, and access it in the most cost-effective manner. Well, GV (the former Google Ventures) is leading a $10 million round into Incorta, an analytics platform that purports to make the modern data warehouse a thing of the past. That new $10 million for San Mateo-based Incorta is cash to get its new product, a “direct data… Read More
By now you’ve probably heard that Amazon’s S3 storage service went down in its Northern Virginia datacenter for the better part of 4 hours yesterday, and took parts of a bunch of prominent websites and services with it. It’s worth noting that as of this morning, the Amazon dashboard was showing everything was operating normally. While yesterday’s outage was a big deal… Read More
The top audio equipment makers are teaming up in a massive deal. Sound United, owner of the Polk Audio and Definitive Technology speaker brands, announced today that it’s acquired D+M Group, owner of the Denon and Marantz receiver brands plus Boston Acoustics speakers and Heos multi-room audio. The combined companies will be known as Sound United, led by its existing CEO Kevin Duffy.… Read More
If somehow you have really great Facebook friends who share interesting videos, the new Facebook Video app on the Apple TV is for you and it’s available now. Facebook’s VP of Partnerships Dan Rose already announced that a Facebook app for your TV screen was on its way. But it looks like it’s coming sooner than expected. Facebook has been trying hard to convince people that… Read More
In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent manifesto, he wrote about how Facebook is in a unique position to help prevent people from doing harm to themselves. Worldwide, there is a suicide attempt every 40 seconds, according to the World Health Organization. Among those aged 15-29 years old, suicide is the second leading cause of death. Today, Facebook is unveiling new tools to… Read More
Neverthink might just be the most ‘lean back’ online video experience yet. The site (and as of today, iOS app) takes content sourced from YouTube, Reddit and elsewhere and re-packages it into non-skippable channels. The result is a TV-like experience that, say its creators, is more “on-demand distraction” than on-demand video. Read More
