Users, subscribers, growth, global expansion, minimal marginal costs, the promise of future success; this all sounds a bit like the verbiage of a tech company — and that’s because the industry has fallen in love with the idea that every trendy fast-growing company is a tech company. Read More
The Chinese market for electric vehicles is hot, and the latest indicator is a $1.08 billion raise from China’s LeEco, a Beijing-based web video company (which now dabbles in everything from televisions to transportation) that’s targeting Tesla with its own electric sports car plans. Funding for its first car is coming from Legend Holdings Corp., Yingda Capital Management Co.… Read More
Once again, a big retailer in the UK is pulling away from its ambitions to move into digital media. Supermarket giant Sainsbury’s preparing to exit the digital entertainment business. As part of that it will be outsourcing its e-book operations to Kobo, the online bookseller and maker of e-readers, owned by Japan’s Rakuten. The digital entertainment business, which is marketed… Read More
No TV? No problem – you can still catch the debates. This morning, ABC News and Facebook announced they are again teaming up to bring live coverage of the U.S. 2016 Presidential election to the social network, with live video of the general election debates. In addition, the network’s Facebook Page will feature live streams throughout the day from the host cities, as well as… Read More
Danish startup Spiri revealed their on-demand carpooling service in late August, and is now ready to show off its first prototype vehicle. The company decided to build its own all-electric car from the ground up, using an engineering team with talent from Aston Martin, Tesla and more, in order to arrive at a final product that best suits the needs of frequent, multi-passenger urban… Read More
Photographic cues have helped systems like Microsoft’s Emotion API detect human feelings with decent accuracy, but a new research project from MIT’s Computers Science and Artificial Intelligence lab can interpret emotions with a greater degree of accuracy, using only wireless radio signals. Researchers at CSAIL have created a device they call the EQ-Radio, which can pick up… Read More
Surprising no one, The Pokémon Company’s CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara told the WSJ in an interview that Pokémon games will appear on Pokémon’s upcoming console, which is codenamed the “NX” and which Nintendo says is launching around March 2017. It’s not clear whether Pokémon games will be available for NX in time with launch, but assurance that the maker of the… Read More
Progressly, a new platform for supporting growth within large enterprises, just got a big boost in both money and staffing. Ruslan Belkin, a former top exec from Twitter and LinkedIn will be joining the roughly two year old company. With the spotlight drawn, Progressly is taking the opportunity to formally announce a $6 million Series A, led by 8VC, as part of its official coming out… Read More
Higher resolution is making for larger video and images, but luckily, flash memory capacity seems to be keeping pace. A new SDXC card from SanDisk unveiled today has 1TB of space available, which basically means you can put t in a camera and essentially forget it even has a storage cap at all. The new 1TB capacity is just a prototype for now, meaning there’s not pricing or availability… Read More
Tinder is teaming up with Spotify to give users a new way to judge each other.
Just as Tinder allowed folks to connect their Instagram accounts to their Tinder profile, the same is now true for Spotify. Users will be able to check out each others’ most-played songs on Spotify.
But even if you don’t have Spotify, Tinder will still let you use Spotify to add your ‘Tinder… Read More
CloudFlare is encrypting its corner of the internet. The company announced today that it has rolled out new encryption features for all the websites it protects: TLS 1.3, automatic HTTPS rewrites, and opportunistic encryption upgrades. The technical upgrades will occur behind the scenes, so CloudFlare’s customers won’t notice much of a difference (except perhaps a slight uptick… Read More
Back in 2013, Runnable launched with the mission to become the “YouTube of code” that allowed its users to find and run code snippets on its site. Times have changed, though, and the well-funded company is going into a slightly different direction today. Runnable today is a tool for enterprises that want to give their developers the ability to quickly spin up full-stack… Read More
I’m a bit surprised Canary didn’t just go ahead and make the Flex its flagship. For starters, the camera is just a heck of a lot nicer looking than its predecessor, a white (or black) pill-shaped product with a glossy black frot and a glowing power ring on the bottom that brings nothing more to mind than HAL-9000, that ultimate bastion of home security. It there’s a complaint… Read More
I didn’t expect that a career in tech journalism would one day leave me crowded in my bathroom with tech execs hiding from a high-powered, depth-sensing VR camera, but here we are.
Earlier this month, I had a chance to host Matterport CEO Bill Brown and his team in my newly-moved-into San Francisco apartment to check out the company’s Matterport Pro camera and perform the VR… Read More
When you see or hear something happen, you can instantly describe it: “a girl in a blue shirt caught a ball thrown by a baseball player,” or “a dog runs along the beach.” It’s a simple task for us, but an immensely hard one for computers — fortunately, IBM and MIT are partnering up to see what they can do about making it a little easier. Read More
Anyone interested in the intersection of travel and technology knows that Hotel Tonight basically revolutionize the same-day hotel booking industry. Launched in 2011, Hotel Tonight’s app let you book a heavily discounted hotel room on the day of your stay in just a few taps. But in pursuit of sustained growth the startup began expanding its booking parameters – first by letting… Read More
Gunning to become the top seller of used cars online, Vroom Inc. has raised $50 million in a Series E round of equity funding, bringing its total capital raised to $218 million. The market for used cars in the U.S. alone surpasses $400 billion annually. According to the Edmunds.com Used Vehicle Market Report, retailers sold 38.3 million used cars in 2015 at an average price of $18,500. When… Read More
Reports may be swirling about Twitter exploring a sale of all or a part of its company, but in the meantime, the social media platform is trimming down internationally. Twitter is shutting down its engineering operations out of Bangalore, India, and it is laying off around 20 engineers in the process, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. “As part of our normal business review,… Read More
Healthtech, Fintech and AI dominated Techstars London Demo day today in London. At a packed venue (the famous Royal Institution, no less) the teams demo’d their products in short pitches. Here is a run-down of the teams, with some more details of those that stood out. You can watch a Facebook Live recording of the demos here. Didimo They say: “Didimo creates Virtual Avatars ready to… Read More
When we last saw Robo Wunderkind, the company was on stage as part of the Startup Battlefield competition at Disrupt SF 2015. This week it is announcing that it has closed an additional $500,000 in funding. The round was led by Arkley VC, angel investor Juergen Habichler and the Austrian Federal Promotional Bank (AWS) also participated. Read More
