Rishi Garg has joined the early-stage venture firm Mayfield as a general partner. The move seems a natural one, given Garg’s career arc to date. While readers might recall that Garg’s last full-time gig was Twitter’s VP of corp dev, a role he left in July 2015, he spent the previous two years leading M&A at the payments company Square and before that, logged time… Read More
A space has opened up in the last few years as 3D printers have become more affordable, and that is the space for simple 3D designing tools. As VR takes off, that will also be a brand new space for such tools, in order to design new objects and environments. In this area is Thingiverse, a large online 3D printing community, although it lacks 3D modelling functionality. There is also Autodesk… Read More
Can a chatbot help you manage your money? Three London-based fintech startups are betting on the answer being yes and have jumped aboard the messaging gravy train as they seek to entice millennials to their respective platforms. Read More
The Smart Fitness Bar is hardly the first smart piece of gym equipment. If anything, it’s part of a growing trend, an attempt to capitalize on a growing fascination with connected fitness and the ongoing compulsion to add smartify every dumb product we have. Heck, back in July, I tried a set of “smart dumbbells,” and indeed, you don’t have to be a smart dumbbell to… Read More
Just Eat, the online takeout ordering behemoth, has invested in U.K. startup Flypay, which has built a platform to help restaurant and pub chains consolidate their various and disparate technology solutions. The size of the round is £3.5 million and serves as an extension to the company’s previous Series A that saw it pick up £7 million led by media brand TimeOut. Read More
A little over a month after issuing a recall of its high-end handset and at the end of weekend littered with multiple reports of malfunctioning replacement units, Samsung has reportedly suspended production on the Galaxy Note 7. In the wake of announcements by AT&T and T-Mobile that the carriers will halt sales of the phone, Korean news agency Yonhap is reporting that the electronics… Read More
You know what? It might be time to just go ahead and trade in that new Galaxy Note 7 for something else entirely. Thankfully, most of the major carriers here in the US have made it fairly easily to trade the problematic handset in for a completely different phone. And AT&T and T-Mobile have since taken things a step farther by halting sales of the device as the US Consumer Product… Read More
Ask a set of healthcare professionals about the future and they’ll answer: “Mobile.” But after a number of recent discussions with healthcare executives, I’ve noticed the industry is lacking a clear definition of what “mobile” really means. Read More
Apple’s latest Watch was met with great applause when the company announced in September the thing could take a dive in the pool and keep on ticking. But the price and other bells and whistles of the Watch might be too much for those just looking for a simple way to track steps, laps and calories. Enter Fitbit’s Flex 2, which starts shipping tomorrow morning. It’s a… Read More
Sean Ammirati has many identities: serially successful start-up entrepreneur, Carnegie Mellon University professor, venture capitalist at Birchmere Ventures, best-selling writer and lifelong Republican. He certainly proud of the first four of these identities. But the fifth thing – his status as a lifelong Republican – is now causing him severe embarrassment. The Grand Old Party… Read More
Sean Ammirati has many identities: serially successful start-up entrepreneur, Carnegie Mellon University professor, VC at Birchmere Ventures, best-selling writer and lifelong Republican. He certainly proud of the first four of these identities. But the fifth thing – his status as a lifelong Republican – is now causing him severe embarrassment. The Grand Old Party of Lincoln… Read More
Sean Ammirati has many identities: serially successful start-up entrepreneur, Carnegie Mellon University professor, VC at Birchmere Ventures, best-selling writer and lifelong Republican. He certainly proud of the first four of these identities. But the fifth thing – his status as a lifelong Republican – is now causing him severe embarrassment. The Grand Old Party of Lincoln… Read More
There is no denying that the U.S. and Canada have been losing jobs to offshore competition for almost half a century. From 2000-2010 alone, 5.6 million jobs disappeared. Interestingly, though, only 13 percent of those jobs were lost due to international trade; 85 percent of job losses stemmed from “productivity growth” — another way of saying machines replacing human workers. Read More
Tesla will unveil something on Monday October 17, according CEO and founder Elon Musk. It’ll be a new product, he said in a Tweet on Sunday, which will be “unexpected by most,” and which will be separate from a Tesla/SolarCity product unveiling on the 28th.
Tesla product unveiling on the 17th (unexpected by most), followed by Tesla/SolarCity on the 28th
— Elon Musk… Read More
When digital comics startup Madefire announced its latest funding round a few days ago, co-founder and CEO Ben Wolstenholme said the company was getting ready to move into virtual and augmented reality. He lived up to that promise in very short order, launching a preview app for Samsung’s Oculus-powered Gear VR platform and demonstrating it at New York Comic Con. Wolstenholme has told… Read More
Game developer Disruptor Beam has already adapted Game of Thrones and Star Trek to the world of smartphones and tablets. Now it’s adding The Walking Dead to that list. CEO Jon Radoff said The Walking Dead: March to War will be a multiplayer strategy game for iOS and Android, where players (potentially tens of thousands of them on a single map) compete with each other for resources and… Read More
Investors have turned Iran into the latest country to embrace the ride sharing and car-hailing app phenomenon. The Iran Internet Group has secured a €20 million Series A round of financing for its ride-sharing application, Snapp. The South African mobile phone company MTN led the round and is the sole investor. MTN is also a major shareholder of Irancell and Iran Internet Holdings. The… Read More
You were a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group for many years but recently left to found Pioneer Square Labs. You employ a different model for building startups i.e. it is neither a venture capital firm nor an accelerator. How is this new model different or better? The traditional way of starting a company will remain the most common, which is you have an idea and bootstrap it or… Read More
Recently, Google launched a video calling tool (yes, another one). Google Hangouts has been sidelined to Enterprise, and Google Duo is supposed to be the next big thing in video calling. So now we have Skype from Microsoft, Facetime from Apple, and Google with Duo. Each big company has its own equivalent service, each stuck in its own bubble. These services may be great, but they… Read More
There are three types of science fiction (in my view): crap, serialized crap and hard-science science fiction. The last type contains a wealth of visions of the future, many of which we enjoy today, and is referenced in the names of, or has influenced, many tech startups and world-class entrepreneurs. Read More
