Verizon today has made another acquisition to build out its IoT business: the carrier has purchased LQD WiFi, a developer of outdoor interactive displays that provide WiFi connectivity along with news, emergency alerts and community information. They also act as sensors collecting crowd, weather and other data. The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. LQD WiFi, based out of… Read More
Wireless VR will do a lot to help the tech become more viable, since dealing with your heavy cable umbilical on Oculus and HTC Vive right now is a pain. MIT has created a new wireless communication system designed specifically for VR that could unburden us for truly immersive VR experiences. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab came up with “MoVR” as a way… Read More
The resurgence of Q&A is upon us.
Entering the ring with Justin Kan’s newly announced Whale, Yam is looking to offer a video-based question and answer platform that puts focus on story-telling.
The idea for Yam came when founder Michael Cho was using Reddit for an AMA about a near-fatal plane crash he was in.
“Some questions are better answered with video,” said Cho. Read More
Pan-European medical booking platform Doctena just got a little more pan-European. Already operational in Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland, the company has acquired Germany’s Doxter — which it claims is the number 1 player in Germany. Read More
Google today announced the launch of a new version of its Google Play Music service, in an effort to better compete with rivals like Spotify and Apple Music in terms of personalization. Like the other top streaming services, Google Play Music will now cater to its audience’s unique tastes and interests in order to suggest songs you want to hear, as well as match you with the right… Read More
Are you at least as good as Matt Damon when it comes to surviving the harsh Martian landscape? You can find out tomorrow, when The Martian VR Experience lands on HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. The collaboration between Fox’s Innovation Lab, RSA Films and The Virtual Reality Company attempts to replicate the plot of The Martian, in a first-person immersive virtual reality experience. You… Read More
The Touch Bar is an interesting proposition. Part innovation, part work around. The technology is Apple’s attempt to embrace a new form of input while continuing to eschew touchscreen on its computers. I was mostly pleasantly surprised by the technology, in terms of its capability, versatility and responsiveness, but for now, it’s not exactly a game changer.
The Touch Bar is an… Read More
There are plenty of coworking spaces out there, but while the like of WeWork and TechHub focus on major capital cities, others have seen a fertile space emerge in developing economies. Thus coworking network Talent Garden has landed a €12M funding round from investors including Endeavor Catalyst (supported by LinkedIn), 500Startups and Italy’s largest investment bank, Tamburi… Read More
Amazon is beefing up its Home Services business — a marketplace rival to the likes of Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack and Handy for helping people find and hire contractors for everything from plumbers to at-home reflexologists. Today, the company added 20 more metro areas, one of its most significant expansions of Home Services since launching in March 2015, and bringing… Read More
The next Spectacles vending machine location is on again, with a little under 24 hours to go as of this writing on Monday morning. The next location is still a secret, of course, but the first two have been LA and Big Sur in that order, so there’s precedent for both a big city or a small town scenic spot.
Snapchat’s launch strategy with the Spectacles, a pair of video-capturing… Read More
Cray has a new supercomputer called the XC50, the successor to its XC40 model and the first supercomputer from the company that can deliver one petaflop of performance (at peak) in a single cabinet. The XC50 supports the NVDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerator, as well as nex-gen Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors, and is targeted at uses including deep learning algorithms, which Cray says are… Read More
When Apple debuted the new Touch Bar MacBook a few weeks back, the company spent a majority of its time on-stage focused on the ways in which its own software interacted with the new feature. No surprise there, really. After all, Apple had a vested interest in showing off its own wares – and a tighter controller of what it develops in house, The company is also acutely aware that if… Read More
My MacBook Pro is on its last legs. The anti-glare laminate began bubbling up some time ago, spreading across the screen like an untreatable rash, fogging up the webcam in the process. The hinge is loose, so the screen shakes when someone walks by. The little black rubber bumpers have fallen off the bottom and, every so often, there’s an audible buzz of a fan rumbling from under the… Read More
What happens when you pair a global payment company like MasterCard with a rising online money transfer service like WorldRemit? Conventional wisdom has it that fintech startups are going to eat financial company’s lunch in no time. And yet, existing financial companies have been surprisingly resilient. That’s why I’m excited to announce that MasterCard President of… Read More
I’m in Barcelona for a few days and I’d love to meet some of the local startups so I’d like to run a mini-meetup somewhere in the city. That said, I have no idea where to hold it so I need your suggestions. I’m thinking we hold something small at a pub in the city center on Thursday night. If it works out we can possibly have a mini-pitchoff and I’ll have some… Read More
While some entrepreneurs are independently wealthy and have no need for a day job, most of them aren’t. That’s why Marta Diana Koziarska and Borys Musielak created ReaktorX, an accelerator for folks who are working or have no time or acumen for creating a business from scratch and want to connect with like-minded professionals. Koziarska and Musielak also run Reaktor Warsaw, a… Read More
According to Internet security team Volexity has detected an active spear-phishing effort by Russian hacker groups including Cozy Bear and the Dukes. The targeted phishing emails feature subject lines like “The “Shocking” Truth About Election Rigging” and a false “FYI” from the Clinton Foundation. You can read about the efforts on Volexity’s own site… Read More
Facebook has been putting a big effort into growing Messenger as a bot platform this year. Now there are 34,000 of these bots in existence, built to automatically feed you news and entertainment, let you shop, and more — expanding Messenger’s use beyond simple chats with friends. And today, that strategy is getting a significant boost: Facebook says it will now let… Read More
Fans of cross-platform coding will be happy to know that Visual Studio, “a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#,” will arrive for Mac during the Connect() conference in November. The move places Microsoft’s IDE on Macs. The IDE follows Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s code editor, to OS X. Why is Microsoft seemingly abandoning the quest for… Read More
Amazon’s new on-demand, streaming music service, Amazon Music Unlimited, has taken its first steps abroad after launching last month in the U.S. to go head to head with Apple Music, Spotify, Google and the rest. The service — which offers some 40 million songs on tap — is now live in the UK and will also go live in Germany and Austria later today, a spokesperson tells me. Read More
