Here’s something I asked myself a lot last weekend: Am I really a serious Star Trek fan? The obvious answer: Well, sure. I’ve watched hundreds of hours of Star Trek on TV, I’ve seen all of the movies multiple times and I pride myself on being able to recall more random Star Trek trivia than almost (almost!) anyone I know. And if I didn’t love Star Trek, what was I doing… Read More
On-demand restaurant food delivery startup Deliveroo is facing more protests in London this week over a new pay structure it’s trialling in the U.K. capital that seeks to switch drivers to a fixed fee of £3.75 per delivery, rather than the £7 per hour plus £1 per delivery they earn under the old pay structure. Read More
Google has a new operating system called Fuchsia in development, with the early results publicly available on Github (and you can even compile and run it yourself, should you feel daring). The new OS differs from both Android and Chrome OS since it doesn’t run on a Linux kernel, and instead uses as its core code something called Magenta, which might make it better suited to running on… Read More
Nothing says “professional business document” quite like finger drawn scribbles. Sure, it’s not likely to become anyone’s default method of expressions for Microsoft’s various iPhone Office apps, but when it comes to doing things like highlighting tidbits and adding notes on the fly, it could prove a useful tool for some. An update to that dropped in the App… Read More
Just in time (fingers sweatily crossed) for it to start being a little less excruciatingly hot outside, Jabra will be offering up refreshes to its line of fitness-tracking wireless headphones. The higher-end Sport Pulse bring VO2 Max tracking to the proceedings. What, you ask, is VO2 Max tracking? Don’t feel bad, I wasn’t 100-percent sure, either, but the technology has been offered… Read More
Salesforce’s efforts to turn its Inbox app into a central resource for salespeople has a new trick: An integrated calendar built from its acquisition of Tempo that pulls in contact data from your Salesforce database, giving you a way to quickly find out more about the people you’re meeting with. Only CRM data is pulled right now, but in the future, the product will draw in… Read More
An Oakland-based startup called MegaBots is making giant fighting robots a reality, and forming a league for them to fight each other under clear and fair rules, something akin to Formula 1 or UFC. Taking time away from all the test drives and trash talk that entails, MegaBots’ CEO Guy Cavalcanti will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco to discuss the unique design and… Read More
Twitter made its stickers for photos available to everyone at the end of last month, and now the company has quickly followed that up with the launch of its first branded stickers. Read More
Outfittery, a curated shopping service for men’s clothing, has raised $22 million in a new funding round led by London and New York-based VC firm Octopus Ventures. The so-called “U-Start Club” also joined the round — they are an Italian group of investors which incorporates several family offices tied to the fashion industry in the country. You’d expect Italian… Read More
HeavenHR, a cloud-based HR management platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has closed €6 million in Series A funding. Leading the round in the Berlin-based startup are Target Global, and Open Ocean. Read More
Marketing technology is in the midst of a worldwide boom. Given the expansion of the internet, social media and various other forms of digital technology, there are a growing number of ways to market products and services to consumers. Like all technological trends, the rapid expansion of marketing technology companies has made its way to Israel. Read More
A confluence of factors puts China at the financial technology (“fintech”) forefront: economic advancement, investor behavior, mobile technology, big data, financial industry liberalization, and regulatory acquiescence. Read More
Winter came, and now it’s time for a season of shut downs, sell outs, and saving face. The circle of life includes the stage of death. That doesn’t mean these founders did anything wrong, just not quite enough right. Their experiments are coming to an end.
Two years ago a bunch of startups raised two years of runway. An abundance of early capital had emerged. Angels and VCs… Read More
In 2004, Google finally went public in a long-awaited offering that lit the public markets on fire. But Google’s S-1 filing was probably as unusual as anything the technology markets had ever seen: The company promised to not deliver quarterly guidance to investors, and instead promised to invest over the long term to preserve the culture of innovation that the company so fiercely protected. Read More
Imagine a future where individuals can illustrate their progression of lifelong learning and training and its links to their real-world performance. In this version of the future, the once-ubiquitous résumé has been ousted by the experience graph. Read More
Livestreaming app Blab, which amassed 3.9 million users in just one year, shut down this weekend, its CEO Shaan Puri announced with a post on Medium late Friday. The app, which competed with Twitter’s Periscope, Facebook Live, IBM-owned UStream.tv and other media companies in the livestreaming game, was created at Monkey Inferno, a tech incubator self-funded by the founders of Bebo,… Read More
As the Internet of Things becomes more widespread, consumers must demand better security and privacy protections that don’t leave them vulnerable to corporate surveillance and data breaches. But before consumers can demand change, they must be informed — which requires companies to be more transparent. Read More
Niantic Labs, a small gaming company previously owned by Google, has gone from a somewhat obscure gaming shop to one of the most prominent developers overnight. The company launched Pokémon Go in July 2016, the first very long-awaited smartphone version of a Pokémon game. After holding out for nearly a decade, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have finally unleashed one of its most… Read More
It’s time: We need a drone with automated follow features that not only includes a camera for cataloging your many feats, but also has an on-board voice assistant to and a cellular connection to get stuff done for you while you’re out and about. It’s time for friendly flyers; it’s time we each had a companion ship. I don’t know who gets this done –… Read More
Clicks. Once upon a time they were the most powerful tool in assessing online ad performance. A humble beginning, but much has changed. The data-driven measurement and predictive analytics technologies that launched adtech and expanded to marketing are now being applied to nearly everything — and yet, it’s easy to forget the road that led here. Read More
