It’s a tiny-but-still-annoying part of almost every meeting and phone call — once you agree to meet someone or call them, there’s still another flurry of emails as you try to decide on a time. Tech companies large and small have tried to improve the meeting process. (I’m a fan of Doodle, myself.) Now Y combinator-backed startup Meetingbird has taken a stab at it… Read More
Yik Yak crashed and burned after raising $73.5 million… then laying off most of its employees as users ditched its anonymous message board app. But now Yik Yak appears to be taking another shot at the college demographic with an app for chatting up people with the same classes, major or interest. Last week, an app called Hive appeared in the app stores. It was built by Richard Guy,… Read More
Nikon’s plan to restructure in the face of challenges to the digital imaging space has proven more costly than expected in more ways than one. A rough quarter means the company will not only miss profit expectations, but will have to buy out a thousand employees and end its DL line of compact cameras. Read More
Everyone loves being in pictures taken by a professional photographer. Because as good as our iPhone cameras are these days, there’s just no comparison to a picture taken by a professional on a high-quality DSLR. But most of us don’t often get this opportunity, because professional photographers are usually only hired for large-budget, high-profile events — not your… Read More
It’s becoming harder and harder to read the news. We’ve gone around the bend from carefully balanced op-ed pieces from clearly identified special interest parties to a president whose grasp on the truth is tenuous, at best. Media accelerator Matter has thrown down the gauntlet and is challenging startups to load up their slingshots of truth and go to town. Read More
For the celebrity-obsessed, AR may offer the bizarre opportunity to get closer than ever to pop culture’s most recognizable stars and performers. For the last several years, 8i has been embracing a technology called volumetric capture that trains several cameras on a figure and stitches the feeds together to create a three-dimensional model that can seamlessly be placed in any environment. Read More
If you ever find yourself in danger, trying to whip out your phone, switch it on and open the Phone or Message app is just far too slow, especially when time is of the essence. So the makers of a new device had an idea: place an emergency panic button on the inside of a ring, which is connected to an app on your phone: press the button and help comes running. Read More
Making payments and sending money to friends and family in Nigeria can be cumbersome. Y Combinator-backed Kudi, which recently launched in Nigeria, is aiming to make it easier for people to pay bills and pay each other via messaging. At its core, Kudi is a chatbot, which lives inside Facebook Messenger and eventually Skype, that helps you transfer money, buy airtime for your phone, pay bills… Read More
How can Facebook and Instagram make their amateur videos more interesting than those you see on Twitter or Snapchat? A killer soundtrack. That’s why Facebook is now pressing record labels even harder for a licensing deal.
Successful negotiations could allow users to either edit popular music into their creations or record clips with popular music in the background without their videos… Read More
The Humble Bundle is a reliable source of good deals on games, usually organized around some theme or another. This week’s bundle, however, is not only one of the best gaming deals of all time, but all proceeds are going to support charities that work with immigrants and refugees. Read More
Since Yelp opened its bug bounty to the public six months ago, the company has paid out more than $17,000 to hackers who have discovered vulnerabilities in its products. But the bug bounty program doesn’t just improve security, Yelp executives say, but also helps attract security talent to join Yelp full-time. Bug bounty programs give hackers an avenue to report vulnerabilities to… Read More
MIT announced today that it’s developed a speech recognition chip capable of real world power savings of between 90 and 99 percent over existing technologies. Voice technology has, of course, become nearly ubiquitous in mobile devices, thanks to the exponential growth of smart assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home – but the new chip could help branch out in much simpler… Read More
Yahoo, model Apache Spark citizen and developer of CaffeOnSpark, which made it easier for developers building deep learning models in Caffe to scale with parallel processing, is open sourcing a new project called TensorFlowOnSpark. The pairing of Spark and TensorFlow should make the deep learning framework more attractive to developers who are creating models that need to run on large… Read More
When you look at the size of the cloud market, it’s astonishing that AWS is the undisputed leader, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Considering the competition is the likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle; AWS’s big lead is even more surprising. The question is how did AWS build such dominance? The simple answer is that it was first, but as Andy Jassy, the AWS… Read More
Twitter continues to bleed cash and its advertising business has begun shrinking, so it’s time for a change. Twitter will pare down three areas of its ad product, according to sources who spoke to TechCrunch. Twitter foreshadowed the shift during last week’s lackluster earnings report that showed a year-over-year decline in Q4 ad revenue. Meanwhile it saw little growth in… Read More
As we look to the next evolution of our digital ecosystem, it seems certain that virtual goods will play a much larger role. From vanquishing new breeds of digital monsters to defining a modern asset class, virtual goods will enable new experiences and redefine traditional ones. Indeed, this new gold rush will create opportunities for the enterprising prospector and shovel-seller alike. Read More
Practical use of self-driving cars requires changes to existing regulatory frameworks – or at least that’s what GM and Toyota are prepared to tell U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday, at a panel convened to review the state of self-driving regulation and proposed guidance on their use and testing set out last year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). GM and Toyota… Read More
Yahoo may be a troubled company, with its multiple data breaches, SEC investigation, and delayed acquisition* proceedings, but its Yahoo Mail product still has 225 million monthly active users. Today, the company is rolling out a few changes to that service in an effort to boost adoption of the Yahoo Mail mobile app. Now, the app will do more than deliver your mail, it will also sync… Read More
For better or worse, drones are about to become a lot more prevalent in US airspace. The FAA expects sales of drones to spike domestically from 2.5 million last year to 7 million by 2020. Now, a startup that detects drones and helps prevent unwanted aerial intrusions, Dedrone, has closed a $15 million Series B round of venture funding.
Investors in San Francisco-based Dedrone included Cisco… Read More
Pitching a bird’s eye view of customer feedback based on social media comments and push surveys from the company, BirdEye (get it?) has raised $25 million in new financing.
The software developer can thank new investor World Innovation Lab and previous investor Trinity Ventures for the new financing.
Beyond simple customer feedback, BirdEye chief executive Naveen Gupta says that the… Read More
