Just in time for New York Comic Con, Madefire is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series B funding. Madefire co-founder and CEO Ben Wolstenholme said the funding — which was led by Santa Monica-based Plus Capital — will help his company build more connections with the media and entertainment world. It’s not that Madefire (which previously raised $6.3 million… Read More
Zenefits announced this week, it was making a licensing compliance app it created in-house to ensure its sales people are properly licensed to sell insurance in a given state, available for free to anyone to download from the Salesforce App Exchange. Last winter Zenefits was sailing along providing HR services in the cloud for small and medium businesses when a bombshell hit. Buzzfeed… Read More
If you’re an executive at an industrial company, you’ve likely been grappling with the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). The rapid development of technologies that connect every part of our lives has moved from our smart phone to the jet engine. IoT’s emergence is causing leading manufacturers to rethink their go-to-market strategies and take a page from the technology… Read More
It isn’t quite as lovable as the spherical droid from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but this robot from Carnegie Mellon University has the benefit of being more than a special effect (however cool). And believe it or not, it basically has no moving parts. Read More
There are a number of ways to save links from the web for later access, whether that’s marking articles to read later via apps like Instapaper or Pocket, pinning shopping inspiration to Pinterest, creating playlists on YouTube or even just using a browser’s bookmarking feature. But a new app called Stash, available for both iOS and Android, wants to offer a better link-saving… Read More
CRISPR, the gene-editing technology revolutionizing the biotech industry, has failed to take home the Nobel prize in chemistry for the second year in a row. Instead, the award went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa – three men who developed the world’s smallest machines using molecular physics. Each will share equally in the 8 million Swedish kronor,… Read More
Competition breeds progress, so it’s a bit thrilling to hear Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg say that he’s going to beat SpaceX to Mars in terms of delivering real humans to the surface of the red planet.
Muilenburg said that he’s “convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket,” speaking at a conference in Chicago Tuesday… Read More
Virtual reality is pretty convincing when you’re all jacked in and wired up — but even the best headsets today aren’t particularly sharp. Sharp, taking notice of this, has produced a display specifically for VR that’s double the resolution of what’s out there right now. Read More
A National Security Agency contractor was arrested in August for the theft of classified material, which reportedly contained hacking codes for government systems in Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. The charges against Harold Martin III, a 51-year-old contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, became public today: He’s facing counts of theft of government property and removal or retention… Read More
Chicken, peas, beef, sweet potatoes and blueberries, the stuff of $40 meals in places like Hayes Valley and Greenwich Village — and starting today, also the stuff of dog food. Ollie, a new startup founded by Alex Douzet, Gabby Slome and Randy Jimenez, is aimed squarely at disrupting the premium pet food space by offering something like a Sprig or Maple for dogs. With a new $4.4… Read More
With food technology and startups becoming a greater focus for an increasing number of investors, AccelFoods, the investment fund focused on new food brands, has announced its latest cohort of companies.
Brami: A New York-based company that has repurposed an ancient Roman snack for modern consumers. Roman soldiers ate lupini beans as a source of protein on marches. The beans have the… Read More
Southwest Airlines has confirmed with TechCrunch that a flight from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated while still at the gate after a device began to emit smoke. “All customers and crew deplaned safely via the main cabin door,” a representative explained. “Customers will be accommodated on other Southwest flights to their final destinations.” No passengers were… Read More
With online video exploding as the fastest medium for digital content, publishers are struggling to find ways to take advantage of their own libraries and keep more of their audience on their sites.
Right now audiences are being siphoned by Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, costing publishers hundreds of thousands of dollars on the millions of page views generated by the content they own.
As… Read More
Happy Twitter-versary (for the nth time around), Jack Dorsey. Things haven’t been going well, it seems, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel — Twitter may be acquired by someone somewhere in the tech (or entertainment) industry, perhaps. To be perfectly fair, the company Dorsey inherited from his predecessor(s), including an array of former product leads as well as CEO… Read More
Get ready for furry surfers: MIT engineers have created “fur-like, rubbery pelts” that mimic the insulating behaviours exhibited by beavers. The new design could pave the way for more effective wetsuits, which can insulate human bodies in cold water, but also quickly dry off for time spent up in the air. The concept of a warm, dry wetsuit is a surfer’s perfect dream… Read More
It’s time to call it: the mobile wars are over. The mobile market was once vibrant and variegated, a virtual coral reef of odd devices aimed at specific users. There was phone with a 3D camera! There was one with weird version of Android that catered to the security-conscious! There was one with a bigger, removable battery and another made up of small parts that you could put together. As… Read More
With Flow, Built.io has long offered an integration tool that allowed technical users (think IT admins and developers) to create complex, multi-step integrations with the help of an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. Now, however, the company has also launched a more basic version of Flow that is aimed at business users who want to create IFTTT-like integrations between applications like… Read More
Metamorphic Ventures, a six-year-old, New York-based seed-stage fund, is officially taking the wraps off a $50 million fund — its third. The firm is also rebranding itself simply as Compound. (One-word names seem to be a growing trend; you might recall that Pejman Mar Ventures is now simply Pear.) The name change is a nod to the way that the firm sees itself — as an element that… Read More
Things have changed a lot in the four and a half years since Pebble first took to Kickstarter to help fund its first device. Apple’s entered the space, Samsung has released about 200 different devices and Google has attempted to create some semblance of consistency among dozens of new players — all while fitness wearable manufacturers have continued to blur the lines of what an… Read More
Google’s celebrating another milestone in its self-driving car project – a 2 million milestone, in fact. The search giant’s autonomous test cars have now racked up that many miles in public road testing, which it notes adds up to about 300 years of human driving based on the average person’s yearly total.
What’s interesting about the volume of miles Google has… Read More
