Vancouver, Canada-based Mojio started out as a connected car gadget and platform that wasn’t unlike Automatic and similar services. That approach didn’t really work out for the company, though, and in late 2015 Mojio pivoted from targeting consumers to going after the B2B2C market with a focus on its platform play.
In the process, the company’s founder and CEO Jay Giraud… Read More
Samsung has said it has terminated the contract of one of the labor supply companies it works with in Malaysia following an investigation after media reports last month alleged serious abuses of working conditions among the contracted workers. Read More
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was born with the best of intentions — to create a record of customer interactions. The problem, salespeople will tell you, is that it becomes a chore. Tact has been designed to add an intelligent layer to CRM — and today it got $15 million to make CRM easier to use. The Series B round was led by Upfront Ventures. Microsoft… Read More
Back in 2013 we covered the seed funding of Wallarm, a “next gen” web security startup which aimed to protect businesses from application level hacker attacks. The team of ex-white hat hackers had previously helped Russian companies like Mail.ru, Yandex, and Parallels to block security threats. It’s perhaps little surprise that, with Russia being a tough place to raise… Read More
Heaven knows there are few enough institutional investment funds focusing specifically on Eastern Europe, but today followers of the scene there have reason to celebrate. LAUNCHub Ventures, the Seed stage Venture Capital firm based in Sofia, Bulgaria, has now closed its second fund at €18 million. Existing portfolio companies will benefit as will new early stage startups in Bulgaria and… Read More
A wave of enterprise apps, from Slack through to Facebook’s Workplace, is tackling and changing how employees communicate with each other when they are both far apart and nearby. Now another startup in the same neighborhood as these has raised a significant round of funding to scale up. Dynamic Signal — which has built a platform that lets large businesses (customers include… Read More
Richard Craib believes that some of the best stock pickers aren’t on Wall Street. The former hedge funder came to the realization that tech’s machine learning experts may be able to build better predictive models than those with finance backgrounds. Craib carried this thesis forward when he launched Numer.ai last year, a crowdsourced hedge fund. The startup hopes to attract the… Read More
Danish banking app Lunar Way is one of a plethora of startups in Europe attempting to update the retail banking experience with a mobile-first offering. Read More
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla, Jack Ma, John Doerr and 15 other high-profile investors have formed a new venture firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, that will pour at least $1 billion into cleantech companies over the next 20 years. The firm’s goal, according to its own website will be: “to provide everyone in the world with access to reliable, affordable power, food,… Read More
If you’ve watched or been to a professional sports game in the past year you’ve no doubt seen advertisements for daily fantasy sports companies like DraftKings and FanDuel. In just a few years the industry has become the hottest thing in the sports world probably since cable TV. Read More
Southeast Asia’s Grab, a ride-sharing rival to Uber, has welcomed a new backer after Honda announced an undisclosed investment in the company today. Read More
The Honest Company has become a beloved brand in many homes in its five-year history. But the consumer products business has also taken its lumps in 2016. It’s currently fighting civil lawsuits brought against it by consumers who say they were misled by the company’s labeling of various products, including its laundry detergent and sunscreen. Relatedly, Honest was called out by… Read More
America’s dependence on technology and web-based communication has forever changed the way government functions at every level. But it’s not only highly sensitive data and intellectual property that government officials must keep secure; America’s access to drinking water, electricity, transportation networks and countless other types of critical infrastructure are at risk… Read More
Should companies buy stolen data from third parties to combat credential reuse attacks against themselves? Herein we discuss the rampant, and quiet, practice of legitimate companies buying stolen data off the dark web. Read More
Uber and Disney are giving Star Wars fans a bit more incentive to hail a ride to the premiere of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story with a new promotion that begins rolling out Sunday and should be available in the Uber app in hundreds of cities by Monday. The in-app features, which are available on an opt-in basis (so die-hard Trekkers don’t have to endure the pain) will replace the little… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, December 10, 2016. Augmented reality meets the Beatles, Twitter-in-chief, Netflix does downloads, Snap go the Glasses, and Apple floats a two week window. What, no Mitt Romney?
@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @fradice, @kteare
Produced & directed: @tinagillmor Read More
I have long held that Atlassian’s ubiquitous JIRA bug-tracker / feature-planner serves a valuable purpose in the software biz: it gives project teams a common enemy to bond together against. Alas, it’s not worth it. JIRA’s design is fundamentally antithetical to good software development, if it is used for anything more than simple bug tracking. Allow me to propose a better way. Read More
We tend to think of machines, in particular smart machines, as somehow cold, calculating and unbiased. For some of us, this is a bug: Machines should not be empathetic outside of their rigid point of view. For others, it is a feature: They should be freed of human bias. But in the middle, there is the view they will be objective. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Read More
Sure it’s sometimes tough being a soccer fan in America. For instance, the MLS Cup (the championship game for the major soccer league in America) hasn’t even been broadcast live on an English-language network since 2008! But tonight that changes. Fox is airing the MLS Cup tonight between Toronto FC and the Seattle Sounders starting at 8pm ET. And to make up for the lack of… Read More
We are approaching a new phase of enterprise software, where every niche of Software-as-a-Service has been filled and cloud companies are being consolidated into larger companies. Markets have a tendency to cycle from bundling to unbundling, and software is due for a bundling event. Read More
