The Brazilian on-demand food delivery company, iFood has picked up $30 million in new financing to expand regionally and solidify its grip over the online food delivery market outside of the US. Read More
Among other things, CareSkore wants to use machine learning to anticipate mortality. However, the newly endowed platform is more than just a Facebook poll that tells you how you’ll meet your end this Christmas by being squashed by a falling piano. Storm ventures, Cota Capital, Rising Tide Fund and Liquid 2 Ventures are rallying behind the Y Combinator graduate with today’s… Read More
Twilio recently exceeded expectations with an IPO that priced them at over $1 billion. For some, this proves that developers are the future of business. While they are certainly an indispensable asset, as more and more businesses turn to the cloud, what about the rest of us? What about the admins and the marketers and those who are equally important to a business but don’t code? Read More
Yelp and Nowait announced a partnership that will enable Yelp users to check nearby restaurants’ wait times and “get in line” remotely from the Yelp app. Yelp will be making an $8 million strategic investment as part of the partnership, which was announced as part as Yelp’s 2Q earnings release yesterday. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Nowait is a mobile platform that has… Read More
Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a Toyota R&D organization headquartered in Silicon Valley, is providing $22 million over four years in an initial research grant with the University of Michigan. The funding follows Toyota’s opening of a third research facility for TRI at the U of M campus, which it officially announced in April this year. The funding is earmarked for… Read More
Hi, and welcome to my obligatory hot take on the nearly confirmed no-headphone-jack iPhones we’re about to see rolling out of Apple. I’m not an absolute fan of this idea, but we’ve seen this sort of behavior from Apple before — most notably the move from the 30-pin dock jack that probably caused a bit of an e-waste problem, forcing users and most notably hotels to… Read More
Technology has made it simple to record and archive our digital memories through posts, snapshots, videos and more, but it can sometimes be a struggle to surface our past – our memories, activities and other experiences – in an easily accessible way. A new mobile application called Fabric, built by two former Facebook engineers, aims to solve that problem.
Co-founders Arun… Read More
The space exploration game No Man’s Sky features biodiversity that would make Earth weep with envy, and players are incredibly avid taxonomers. Hello Games founder Sean Murray tweeted today that players have racked up over 10 million species discoveries thus far in-game, which is around five to 6.5 times the number of known species on earth, depending on whose numbers you trust. While… Read More
NASA is serious about going to Mars, and not just for a quick visit, either. It just committed $65 million, spread over two years and six companies, for the purpose of developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used on the way to — and on the surface of — the Red Planet. Read More
Rugged is just kind of Kyocera’s thing, when it comes to handsets, and the new DuraForce Pro does its best to uphold that tradition with a Military Standard 810G grade rugged body and IP68 certification, which its dustproof and can withstand a two meter dunking for up to 30 minutes. None of that’s really all that different for the line, but the Pro does bring a newfound focus on… Read More
Abhinav Shashank was working on an academic project at Harvard with his colleagues Kanav Hasija and Sandeep Gupta — figuring out how to pool together large data sets from hundreds of different sources and APIs and manage them — when his business colleagues started asking him to help apply those tools.
The result was Innovaccer, a set of software that mashes together data from… Read More
Quizlet, the popular app that lets students create interactive study sets and prepare for tests in any subject, is unveiling a redesign today, including a new website, logo and redesigned mobile apps soon to come. The new Quizlet was created with an eye on international expansion. The San Francisco edtech startup now offers translated and localized versions of its study tools in German,… Read More
Close your eyes. What do you see when you think about artificial intelligence? Hal 9000 defying human orders? Ava savagely murdering her maker? What about ARIIA taking over the country from deep inside the Pentagon? With a new competition, XPRIZE and IBM Watson challenge us to think slightly more pragmatically (or at least less apocalyptically dystopian) about the implications of… Read More
Pro-privacy organization Tor, which distributes anonymizing web browser tools, has published a social contract — promoting what it dubs its commitment to ‘advancing human rights’. Read More
Facebook has to train people how to make great video if it wants it “at the heart” of its services like Mark Zuckerberg promised, so today it launched a slew of new video analytics. Creators can now see the audience demographics of their video viewers, what moments were most engaging in their live broadcasts, and how shares and cross-posts boosted their view counts. But… Read More
Silk‘s co-founder and CEO, Salar al Khafaji, announced today that private data analytics unicorn Palantir would be acquiring the company. The transaction appears to be an acqui-hire, with members of the Silk team directly joining Palantir in new roles. Founded in 2010, Silk helps data journalists, activists, NGOs and businesses produce data visualizations in the cloud without the need… Read More
Service-level agreements (SLAs) are key when it comes to choosing a service that is going to play an important part for your own service. Cloud hosting services have an SLA, software-as-a-service products have an SLA, even airlines have SLAs. Software-as-a-service startup Algolia just revamped its SLA, and it’s interesting to see how the company is wording its policy. SLAs are simple: if… Read More
The Flex Company, the makers of a disc-shaped tampon alternative, has raised $1 million from Y Combinator, Amplify.LA and several others and acquired menstrual disc competitor Softcup for an undisclosed amount. Flex now owns all of the market’s menstrual disc products, which the company says are ultimately easier to use than tampons and menstrual cups. The discs, which have not… Read More
Listen up, would-be TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 attendees. Time is quickly running out to get your hands on tickets to the best startup show in the Bay Area at the deeply discounted, early-bird price point of just $1,995 apiece, so get on over to our ticketing page today before prices jump on Saturday, August 13. Read More
Since news broke of the fatal accident involving a Tesla Model S that was on “Autopilot,” the media and various experts have been locked in high-speed Socratic dialogs on the pros and cons of self-driving cars. To date, most questions have focused on three key areas: liability, the technology and ethics. Read More
