Many smart home gadgets focus on convenience or automation of typically manual tasks, but Flume’s smart water sensor provides a potentially much more vital service: The ability to track how much water you’re consuming, and alert you to potential leaks in you home’s plumbing. The company just released its second-generation Flume Smart Home Water Monitor […]
Ad-based platforms can face a lot of heat from advertisers when they can’t control how and where their ads run: just look back to the ad boycott against Facebook earlier this year (or earlier boycotts against YouTube and others) as examples of when it all goes wrong. One of the ways this is getting addressed […]
With many restaurants forced to rely entirely on the delivery and takeout business during the pandemic, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether the industry can survive while paying hefty fees to delivery platforms like Uber Eats and Grubhub. Lunchbox, on the other hand, is a startup that allows restaurants to build ordering experiences on […]
There’s a new company that’s sitting on top of some of the fastest growing consumer-facing businesses in the world — liquor and marijuana delivery — and its name is Pacific Consolidated Holdings Group. The investment firms and executive teams behind the Los Angeles-based delivery liquor delivery company, Saucey, along with Inception Companies, the backer of […]
Kandji, a mobile device management (MDM) startup, launched last October. That means it was trying to build the early stage company just as the pandemic hit earlier this year. But a company that helps manage devices remotely has been in demand in this environment, and today it announced a $21 million Series A. Greycroft led […]
Enso Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building a new application security platform, today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed funding round led by YL Ventures, with participation from Jump Capital. Angel investors in this round include HackerOne co-founder and CTO Alex Rice; Sounil Yu, the former chief security scientist at […]
Thuan Pham, who stepped down as Uber’s chief technology officer and longest-serving top executive in May, has a new job in South Korea. Coupang, the country’s largest e-commerce company by market share, announced today it has hired Pham as its new CTO. For Pham, joining Coupang, a SoftBank-backed unicorn that holds a 24.6% market share […]
Alphabet’s Loon, the company focused on creating new networking capabilities using stratosphere-based infrastructure, has set a new world record for a continuous stratospheric flight. One of Loon’s ultra high-altitude balloons flew for 312 days straight, beating the existing record of 223 days by a considerable margin, and nearly racking up a full year of sustained […]
Mike Wiacek is back with a new company, a year after departing his role as chief security officer at Chronicle, Google’s moonshot cybersecurity company. Wiacek spent 13 years at Google, founding the company’s Threat Analysis Group, a unit dedicated to countering government and state-backed hacking efforts, and also co-founding Chronicle, which was rolled into Google […]
Italy’s competition authority has opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s display ad business — adding another allegation of abuse of a dominant position to the tech giant’s regulatory woes. In a press release announcing the action the AGCM said it “questions the discriminatory use of the huge amount of data collected through its various applications, […]
In a move to shore up institutional support in what’s likely to be it’s last fundraising as a private company, the Los Angeles-based mobile gaming behemoth Scopely has raised $340 million in its latest eye-popping round of funding. Acting as if there’s not still a global pandemic raging throughout the world, some of the largest […]
We’ve seen our fair share of business intelligence (BI) platforms that aim to make data analysis accessible to everybody in a company. Most of them are still fairly complicated, no matter what their marketing copy says. MachEye, which is launching its AI-powered BI platform today, is offering a new twist on this genre. In addition […]
Microsoft says hackers backed by the Iranian government targeted over 100 high-profile potential attendees of two international security and policy conferences. The group, known as Phosphorus (or APT35), sent spoofed emails masquerading as organizers of the Munich Security Conference, one of the main global security and policy conferences attended by heads of state, and the Think […]
Amazon is the biggest online retailer in Europe, and today it took the next step in making that effort more localized. The company has launched a dedicated portal for Sweden at Amazon.se — giving Swedish shoppers, third-party merchants, and itself, a local URL — and a local logistics system, and a local marketing push — […]
Streetbees started out as an app for consumers to snap pictures of supermarket shelf layouts and get paid. Consumer brands wanted to know if the supermarkets really had put them at eye level or not. Quickly, the startup realized it could interrogate consumers about how they felt about the brands themselves, turning their app into a […]
Nordic digital therapeutics company, Sidekick Health, has closed a $20 million Series A led by pan-European VC Wellington Partners and healthcare focused VC Asabys Partners. Existing investors, Novator and Frumtak Ventures, also participated in the oversubscribed round. The 2014-founded startup has built a gamified digital care platform that targets chronic and lifestyle disease management via […]
Harley-Davidson has spun out a new business dedicated to electric bicycles and plans to bring its first line of products to market in spring 2021. The new business called Serial 1 Cycle Company started as a project within the motorcycle manufacturer’s product development center. The name comes from “Serial Number One,” the nickname for Harley-Davidson’s oldest […]
The CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google will appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday in big tech’s latest showdown with Congress. The Senate hearing will have a narrower, more policy-centric scope than other recent high profile tech hearings, focusing specifically on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That short law might sound […]
Amid a pandemic that has closed down fitness centers worldwide, a spate of companies has muscled their way into the booming at-home fitness market. In just the last two weeks, three-year-old Future, which promises at-home customers access to elite training, closed on $24 million in Series B funding; and Playbook, a nearly five-year-old fitness platform […]
