Former JP Morgan financial advisor Randy Fernando got the idea for his fintech startup Vault — selected as audience choice for the startup battlefield here at Disrupt London — after his mum asked him whether there were any retirement plan benefits she could offer staff as a hiring incentive at her small business pre-school. Read More
Cloud computing has made collaboration across coworkers easier than ever, but that doesn’t mean that workers are as productive as possible when they’re on the go. Open As App aims to change all that. Launching today in the Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt London, Open As App offers a platform that lets businesses instantly create apps from their data. Businesses can simply… Read More
Meet Oxehealth, a startup that plans to turn any regular security camera into a health monitor. The British company wants to make it easier to monitor patients in a hospital, police station, psychiatric hospital or an assisted living residence. It’s a non-intrusive way to make sure that everybody is doing well. The startup is launching onstage at Disrupt London. Finger pulse oximeters… Read More
While the IPO window might be quite a little more narrow these days and there’s plenty of uncertainty, it doesn’t necessary mean the end of the venture capital world — at least, not yet. Instead, it would seem that a lot of the VC world is in a holding pattern while they wait for everything to shake out — whether that’s for additional private capital to return,… Read More
What is Boston Dynamics? The easy answer for that: a company that makes crazy advanced robots that can walk — be it on two feet or four — better than just about any other robot in the world. We’ve seen this in countless YouTube videos of the company’s robots stomping its way across countrysides, opening doors, and traversing up and down stairways. But what is the… Read More
Section 32, the new healthcare-focused venture fund reportedly being launched by Bill Maris, was apparently named in homage to Section 31, an intelligence agency from the Star Trek universe. If that’s not a bit of pre-emptive nerd cred, I don’t know what is.
According to a report from Recode, the GV (nee Google Ventures) founder/former-CEO is raising $230 million for the project… Read More
Station F (formerly known as la Halle Freyssinet) is quite an ambitious project and is bound to change the face of the tech ecosystem in Paris. Financed by Xavier Niel and directed by Roxanne Varza, Station F is going be the world’s biggest startup campus with companies like Facebook and TechShop opening offices there. “We’re talking about a startup campus because… Read More
When companies are looking to secure the information they have in their databases, it’s a pretty big challenge no matter how you slice it. Unless you have a large security budget that can manage permissions and figure out who is doing what, you are probably cobbling together whatever technology you can from open source locations, strongDM CEO Elizabeth Zalman says. So there needs to be a… Read More
If you’ve played games designed by Fumito Ueda before, then you’ll feel right at home in The Last Guardian, the new release published by Sony for PS4, and developed by genDESIGN and SIE Japan Studio. The world feels like a natural extension of the worlds created for both 2001’s Ico and 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus, and the most interesting question it brings up is… Read More
Let’s say you want to know where one of your digital marketing campaigns is getting the most traction: Twitter or Facebook. You might need to check several dashboards across your social accounts and Google analytics to compile the data — and even if you conclude that one platform is outperforming the other, that might change next week as users shift their attention to… Read More
Photo-editing app Infltr is best known for giving Instagram a run for its money with an app that lets you choose from an infinite number of photo filters – well, technically, it’s just over 7 million. The idea is that you can use color combinations to give your photo a unique look, instead of relying on built-in filter presets. Now, Infltr is bringing its photo editor to the… Read More
Accompany, an app that Amy Chang bets will be able to replace the chief-of-staff or personal assistant of an executive, launched just a few months ago. The app had been in the works for a while, and now that it’s finally out the door, it’s time to step on the gas — so it’s launching in the U.K. in a beta. Chang’s bet is that there’s a slot for an app that… Read More
E-commerce company Shopify is doubling down on its mobile product ambitions with today’s acquisition of digital product studio Tiny Hearts. The studio has released a number of mobile apps, games and bots over the past several years, including popular consumer-facing apps like Quick Fit, Next Keyboard, InstaMatch, and Wake Alarm. Prior to the deal, the team had also worked with… Read More
While this year undeniably saw the entrance of quite a few major hardware initiatives from the major players (Google, Oculus, HTC, Samsung and Sony to name a few), 2016 still had quite a tough time grappling with some of the virtual reality industry’s most burning questions.
Making VR cheaper and making sure it works on a device you already own have been a couple of those issues. Read More
Drones are fairly off-the-shelf affairs for most people; there’s a wide range of companies making them for both commercial and consumer uses, but ultimately these are all remarkably similar. They tend to favor a quadcopter structure, and are often configured with photography in mind as a primary use. But MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab has come up with a… Read More
The straight-forwardly named “Just Walk Out” technology ought to give you a pretty good idea of what Amazon Go is all about. Launching in beta this year to Amazon employees at a single 1,800 square foot location in its native Seattle, Go is a “new kind of store with no checkout required.” Customers use the Go app to enter the store, and once inside, some combination… Read More
Seeds unveiled its drag-and-drop SDK for developers to integrate social good contributions directly into their apps today at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016. Seeds also announced a partnership with Amazon app store, in which Amazon markets Seeds directly to its roughly 600,000 app developers. The idea is that people are incentivized to spend money inside an app if they know it’s going to… Read More
Most startups have a pitch. The team behind Iris AI has two: right now they’ve created an AI-powered science assistant that functions like a search tool, helping researchers track down relevant journal papers without having to know the right keywords for their search. But in future their big vision is their artificially intelligent baby grows up to become a scientist in her own right… Read More
With the coming destruction of Pebble and the announcement by Motorola that it doesn’t “see enough pull in the market to put [a new smartwatch] out at this time,” you would be excused for thinking the smartwatch world is contracting. This is correct, but this is not the end of for wearables. Apple sold 1.1 million Apple Watches in 2016, 73% less than it sold in 2015. The… Read More
Let’s say you’re hosting an event. Maybe it’s a marathon or a fundraiser or a concert. You want a video recapping the event, be it for promotional reasons or just for the memories. Tradition would have you hire a film crew, but film crews — or at least, film crews alone — might not always be the best answer. They tend to be pricey — and unless you get crazy… Read More
