If you tend to turn to email to send yourself short reminders, instead of using a more feature-rich to-do list or task-management application, a new app called Later wants to help. Later aims to offer an alternative to Apple’s sometimes cumbersome Reminders by giving you an easier, faster way to set times to be reminded about upcoming tasks, as well as a way to get alerts when you… Read More
Here is a small but very useful (and long overdue) update to Google’s G Suite apps: Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms are getting support for creating custom, reusable templates that you can share with your co-workers.
While you may not use templates much in your day-to-day G Suite life, this is a necessary feature for businesses. You don’t want to have to recreate your report or… Read More
A group of Dutch entrepreneurs is hoping to build a business out of helping smartphone users manage their device addiction — via a Faraday cage housed inside a fancy looking hexagonal aluminum case designed to accommodate up to six handsets at a time. So enough space to take an entire dinner party offline. Read More
Dropbox is getting much more serious about its Dropbox Business product, and today it announced a partnership with security vendor Symantec as part of a broader update to its business products designed to make it more attractive to larger businesses. Rob Baesman, Dropbox’s head of product for pro, business and enterprise versions, says the idea behind the admin tool update is to provide… Read More
Wifi is hot again.
Recently products like Google Wifi, Eero, and now the Almond 3 are being released with the goal of changing the Wifi experience, something that really hasn’t really been tried since the technology became widespread in the late 90s.
These devices all promise a few things:
First, mesh networking that actually works (previous systems, including Apple’s Airport… Read More
Agricultural tech, or agtech for short, has gradually become a fascinating vertical for startups. It’s a huge, traditional market, just waiting for the new tools provided by the cloud. In Europe, a huge food producer, it’s of particular significance. But it’s in emerging markets that it could have the biggest impact. Something like 500 million small-scale farmers around the… Read More
Prynt just raised a $7 million Series A round led by GGV Capital. Prynt turns your smartphone into a Polaroid camera thanks to a phone case that can print instant photos. In addition to the hardware component, Prynt also has a nifty app that lets you scan photos to view short video clips. The Prynt phone case started as a popular Kickstarter project, raising more than $1.5 million. You can… Read More
Surely the inherent irony of never leaving the couch to play a sports video game isn’t lost on many players. And while the occasional innovation like the Wii, Kinect and VR have offered some opportunity to add a little movement to the process, the act of simulating one of the more athletic major league sports has remained a sedentary one. A new partnership between Fitbit and game… Read More
Google may have just launched its major consumer virtual reality effort, Google Daydream, last week, but the company is showing no signs of slowing development on other platforms as it looks to give VR some broader use cases. Today, Google announced on its blog that it’s bringing Google Earth to virtual reality by way of the HTC Vive. “With Earth VR, you can fly over a city, stand… Read More
It was a big day for IBM today as it opened its shiny new security headquarters in Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, complete with what the company is calling the first commercial cyber range. A cyber range is a network security testing environment, and is typically run by the military or military contractors. This one, dubbed X-Force Command, however, is much more than a couple of terminals in… Read More
Spotify’s streaming music service has been at the forefront of figuring out new ways to spark music discovery, in terms of personalized playlists and other recommendations. Now the company is taking its collaborative playlist feature and pushing it for use at parties. The “Playlist Potluck,” as this experience is called, allows a Spotify user to invite friends to an event… Read More
Veteran security firm Kaspersky Lab is looking at launching a real-time encrypted back-up service for social media users to store their data outside the walled garden of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google+. Read More
Given that Microsoft already mistakenly published this announcement earlier this week, the fact that the company is launching Visual Studio for Mac doesn’t come as a major surprise now that it has made this official. Still, let that sink in for a moment: Microsoft is bringing its flagship developer tool to macOS. It’s doing so by leveraging the work of Xamarin, the… Read More
Microsoft’s announcement that it was bringing its flagship SQL Server database software to Linux came as a major surprise when the company first announced this in March. Until now, the preview was invite-only, but as Microsoft announced today, anybody who wants to give it a try can now download the bits. That public preview is part of the launch of the next version of SQL Server, which… Read More
How is this for a surprise: Microsoft today announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a high-paying Platinum member. “This may come as a surprise to you, but they were not big fans,” Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told me about his foundation’s history with Microsoft. The new Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella, however, is singing a very… Read More
Spoiler Alert has raised $2.5 million for enterprise software that helps manufacturers and farms put excess food inventory to good use, instead of tossing it out. Since it was founded in 2015, the Boston-based startup has been working with large food producers and farms, including a recent partnership with Sysco Corporation. The publicly traded juggernaut racks up about $50 billion in… Read More
Microsoft is hosting its annual Connect(); developer event in New York today. With .NET being at the core of many of its efforts, including on the open source side, it’s no surprise that the event also featured a few .NET-centric announcements as well. For the most part, these center around the .NET Foundation, the open source organization Microsoft established to guide the future… Read More
If you haven’t heard of Zwift, founded two years ago in Long Beach, Ca., you aren’t alone. But investors have been following the company. Its massive, multiplayer video game technology, which right now caters to indoor cyclists, just attracted $27 million in Series A funding in a round that brings Zwift’s total funding to $45 million. The round was led by the private… Read More
After taking the top spot at Disrupt San Francisco’s Startup Battlefield, Mobalytics has been hard at work preparing to roll out their analytics-driven competitive gaming coach to more and more of the nearly 20 thousand users that have signed up for early access.
In the six weeks since Disrupt SF, the company has been raising capital so they can recruit more talent and expand their… Read More
Amazon Music Unlimited, the company’s recently launched music service offered at a discount to Prime members, is today debuting its own Family Plan. Like its competitors, including Spotify and Apple Music, the Family Plan allows up to six people to share an account for the rate of $14.99 per month. The new plan is live now in the U.S.
While Amazon Music Unlimited’s plans for… Read More
