French startup Qonto has some ambitious goals and wants to become the best bank account you can get when you start a company in France. Just like N26 wants to be a more modern bank for everyone, Qonto wants to do the same thing, but for business accounts. The company recently raised $1.7 million (€1.6 million) from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures and Alven Capital. Valar Ventures is also… Read More
The way children watch TV is changing – shifting away from the big screen in the living room to tablets and other mobile devices. In order to better cater to the needs of this more digital audience, PBS has now launched a new 24/7 TV channel, PBS KIDS, which is available on television through PBS member stations, but also as a streaming service via the web and the PBS KIDS app.… Read More
As Amazon, Apple and others tee up smart home strategies with apps, hubs and new devices, Google is also turning up the temperature, so to speak, on its own ambitions. Today, Nest — the smart home business that Google acquired for $3.2 billion a few years ago — announced at DLD in Munich that it would be expanding sales of its thermostat, camera and smoke alarm products in four… Read More
Tesla has begun deploying the Autopilot update for HW2 vehicles (those with updated sensor and computing hardware designed to eventually provide full self-driving capabilities). All Tesla cars with the HW2 kit, including Model S and Model X vehicles, are now receiving the over-the-air software update that includes the updated Autopilot features, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk notes that it’ll… Read More
The $199 device (or $299 for a larger version with a built-in 500GB hard drive) has big ambitions: Nvidia wants Shield TV to be not only the only streaming TV box you need, but also a gaming console, a smart home device and a personal digital assistant all in one. Yet it’s also virtually unchanged in terms of internal hardware from what Nvidia first released in 2015. Software makes it… Read More
Airbus is not kidding around about flying cars – the maker of airborne transportation vehicles plans to test out a prototype self-flying small urban transport made for single-passenger travel by the end of this year, according to Airbus CEO Tom Enders (via Reuters). Airbus has been developing its autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) concept through Project Vahana, an… Read More
Facebook is expanding its trial of measures to combat fake news beyond the U.S. for the first time — and will shortly be rolling out the updates in Germany. In a blog post yesterday the company said it will be introducing the updates to the market “in the coming weeks”. Read More
Budget airline AirAsia is the latest corporate to get into hackathons. The company just revealed plans to host its first-ever hack event on March 18 at its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Read More
Fraugster, a German and Israeli startup that has developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to help eliminate payment fraud, has raised $5 million in funding. Read More
Just weeks after revealing its first court case against counterfeiters, Alibaba has again pledged to increase its focus on fake goods after it announced a partnership with 20 global consumer brands. Read More
Samsung is still getting over the Galaxy Note 7, but already an investigation into alleged bribery in its native South Korea is threatening to plunge it into yet another crisis. Read More
Well, 2016 is officially in the past. Between the election drama, the stock markets tossing and turning, celebrities moving on and Harambe, it was a doozy. Read More
Shifts in a rapidly changing retail world and dramatic changes in consumer behavior continue to be a challenge for some traditional retailers. Legacy retailers that have remained stagnant with their old-guard ways are struggling to maintain sales and stay relevant with today’s consumer. The successful brands all have one thing in common: They don’t fear change. Read More
Why don’t we set our goals around giving sincerely and unconditionally in our personal lives and careers. Forget about what you want to receive back — the universe returns back a more meaningful and lasting ROI than any other market ever could. Read More
Puerto Rico is steeped in more than $70 billion of debt that has been accruing for the better part of a decade. As part of its new economic development plan, Puerto Rican officials are looking to technology and entrepreneurship to revitalize the economy, attract its bright minds back to the island and solve the sustainability problems bedeviling the commonwealth. Read More
New consumer-facing financial applications are being built on top of old banking infrastructure, while other startups are going around financial infrastructure altogether. Together, they are unbundling the roles of banks and other financial incumbents. Read More
Drones feel a bit like old news already, don’t they? At least in the Valley, with its hyper-fragmented mayfly attention span. The military has used them for decades. DJI, the undisputed (consumer) polycopter industry leader, was founded in 2006. We tech journalists can’t stop talking about drones, but they’re still mostly playthings, curiosities. One might well ask: what… Read More
Everywhere you turn these days, there’s talk of automation replacing people. Technology is surely advancing at a rapid rate, and in today’s click-driven media environment, sensationalism sells, but just because tech can replace a human worker doesn’t mean we’re always going to want that. In some instances, even when tech can do an adequate job, we still want to deal with… Read More
My 1st Years, a U.K.-based e-commerce startup that offers personalised gifts for babies and children, has picked up £5 million in growth funding. Read More
Sometimes even just defining the problem you’re trying to solve is the hardest part. We need human intelligence to decide how and when to use machine intelligence, and the more sophisticated the uses we make of machine intelligence, the more critically we need human intelligence to ensure it’s deployed sensibly and safely. Read More
