BloomReach, which helps ecommerce companies personalize buying experiences using data and algorithms, announced today that it was acquiring Amsterdam-based web content management vendor, Hippo for an undisclosed amount. It’s an interesting deal in that it brings together a company that offers personalization and optimization in an ecommerce context with one that helps manage web… Read More
Culture Trip, a London-based media startup with a heavy tech bent (or is that the other way round?) has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round is being led by the PPF Group, the fund managed by entrepreneur Petr Kellner. Read More
Business risk intelligence firm FlashPoint has put out a preliminary analysis of last week’s massive denial of service attack against Dyn DNS, and its conclusion is it was likely the work of amateur hackers — rather than, as some had posited, state-sponsored actors perhaps funded by the Russian government. Read More
Perkbox, a U.K. startup that offers an employee engagement platform to help companies retain employees (and customers), has picked up £2.5 million in backing from publicly-listed European VC Draper Esprit. Read More
The two-day conference (preceded by a two-day hackathon), kicks off on December 5 in the former Olympic Village’s Copper Box Arena, and wraps the following day with the finals of Startup Battlefield where one startup will take home £30,000 in cash. Deep learning legend Dr. Michael Lynch will talk about the future of AI and investing. The founder of hot London startup Citymapper,… Read More
Once upon a time, Google’s Dart programming language seemed ready to take on JavaScript as the default language of the web. Google was even going to give it equal billing with JavaScript in its Chrome browser. But by the time Dart was ready for prime time, JavaScript — and the massive ecosystem around it — was already miles ahead. About a year and a half ago, Google gave up… Read More
Its founders, including CEO Fabian Dudek, left the company in May having already lost majority ownership to Rocket Internet, while the pivot sees the company become an aggregator — or meta-search engine — for furnished apartment rentals. Read More
French startup Selency (formerly known as Brocante Lab) has raised a $3.3 million Series A round (€3 million) led by Accel with Kima Ventures participating. Many of you should be familiar with online furniture retailers like Made.com. But what about second-hand furniture? Right now, you still have to go to an antique shop, or maybe look for classified ads on the web. Or maybe you’ll… Read More
Six months ago, CoreOS, the purveyor of fine, small Linux distributions and container management services, demoed a project that would allow its users to easily deploy the notoriously complex OpenStack private cloud platform with the help of containers and Google’s Kubernetes container management tools. Today, it’s ready to actually launch this tool as a technical preview and… Read More
Stop procrastinating and nominate your favorite startup, founder or investor for a Crunchie. Nominations will close on Thursday, November 3, 2016. We’re looking for the input of the tech community. Who was the hottest new startup? Who launched the best new technology? Which company had the best launch video? There are 11 categories in all. This is the 10th anniversary of the Crunchies… Read More
Okay, this is actually pretty cool. I’ve only been playing around with it a bit, but I can definitely see it becoming addicting — particularly if the service’s creators can bring more musicians on board. As it stands right now, 8Stem’s collection of remix-able music is fairly limited — perhaps not surprising for a service that only launched out of beta today. I… Read More
Who wants to read up on candidates’ policies, attend rallies or even watch a debate? You just want to jump into the bed of democracy with the one who turns you on politically, right? Who would bother to vote in the future if a set of sophisticated algorithms just identified, by trawling your data mine, your ideal candidate? Read More
Wait, wait, wait! Before your eyes glaze over at the word “slideshow,” stay with me for a moment. Yes, we’re all bored to tears with slideslows, but Sharalike’s brand new VR app has been rubbing its medical paddles together to try to jolt some life into your old 2D photos by teleporting them into your VR headset. Read More
Apple is working to match the demand for the iPhone 7 Plus as best as it can, but it might not meet all the demand by the end of the year, CEO Tim Cook said on the investor call discussing its fourth-quarter earnings.
“It’s hard to say,” Cook said in response to an investor question about whether the iPhone would hit supply/demand equilibrium by the end of the next quarter. Read More
Many Americans learned through Lending Club that they can refinance their credit card debt online; now, the lending marketplace is hoping they’ll start refinancing their automotive loans using its platform, too. Indeed, though automotive lending is a massive market, car refinance is far smaller owing to a lack of awareness, suggests Lending Club CEO Scott Sanborn, with whom we spoke… Read More
Y Combinator’s ambitious New Cities project has a new leader today as Ben Huh, former CEO of The Cheezburger Network, joins the effort. The initiative, previously announced back in June, aims to take a fresh, entrepreneurial approach to city building. Details have been hard to come by, but the group was hiring researchers for a short time at the tail end of the summer. In a blog post,… Read More
Udacity, the education platform focused on helping workers gain skills they need for great careers in tech, has partnered with IBM Watson, Didi Chuxing and Amazon Alexa to offer a new nanodegree in artificial intelligence, the companies announced today at the IBM World of Watson conference. IBM Watson is co-developing the curriculum of the course with Udacity. Chinese ride-hailing company… Read More
New York City startup IrisVR is announcing that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. The company has built virtual reality tools for the architecture and design industries. Iris Prospect allows customers to take their 3D plans and blueprints and turn them into VR experiences viewable on devices like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, GearVR and Cardboard. Iris Scope, meanwhile, converts… Read More
Eero, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of a smart wireless routing system, is asking employees to help one of their colleagues after his special-needs son was burned in a fire set by some of his same-age peers. According to a report in Fox News, the 10-year-old was placed in an induced coma earlier this month after being lured into a shack near his Kerrville, Texas home, doused… Read More
The two non-Zuck leaders of Facebook had a lot to show and tell onstage today at the WSJDLive conference, where they demoed potential products, labeled Facebook a tech company not a media company and touted the company’s success at voter registration.
If you liked Prisma, you’re going to enjoy what Facebook’s cooking up. Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox demoed an… Read More
