European antitrust regulators now have until almost the end of the year to take a decision on whether to green light Google’s planned acquisition of Fitbit. The tech giant announced its intention to buy the fitness tracking wearable maker in November 2019, saying it would shell out $2.1 billion in cash to make off with […]
Spotify today is introducing a new feature designed to make podcasts more interactive. The company says it’s beginning to test “Polls,” a tool that will allow listeners to engage with podcasts by answering questions posed by the podcast hosts during the show. The polls will appear in the Spotify app, and can be found either […]
One thing Samsung knows for certain: it’s interested in budget flagships. The category makes sense these days, as users are increasingly unwilling to spend north of $1,000 on new phones. That’s doubly the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, with people leaving the house far less often and simply not possessing the same sort of disposable […]
Yext is making its site search product Yext Answers available to a broader set of customers today with the launch of a new program that it calls Hitchhikers. The company launched Yext Answers in October 2019 with the goal of making a brand’s website — rather than whatever shows up via Google search — the […]
Digital technologies now serve as the central nervous system for the global economy, and making that nervous system work depends on networks of massive data centers that hoover up enormous amounts of power to keep businesses operating around the world. It’s not just keeping those data centers on, but keeping the rows and rows of […]
Over the past several months, it’s become painfully clear that COVID-19 isn’t a problem that we’re going to leave behind in 2021. After hemming and hawing a bit, the CTA ultimately pulled the trigger for an online-only version of the show in January. Other tech shows are similarly — at best — still up in […]
Last week, we talked a bit about how investors are seeking new techniques to bring humanity back to their deal flow and sourcing mechanisms, beyond the boring Zoom call. The newest strategy I’ve seen is PrimeTime VC, a game show that pits venture capitalists against each other to debate on topics like TikTok to Y […]
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on Twitter Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: How […]
Pinterest is announcing its spin on the increasingly popular stories format today — Story Pins, which combine multiple pages of images, videos, voiceover and overlaid text. We wrote about Story Pins back in June, and apparently various versions of the format have been in the works since last year. But the company is only officially […]
We’ve probably all been there: you’ve been poking around your phone for an hour, deep in some sort of Google research rabbit hole. You finally find a link that almost certainly has the info you’ve been looking for. You tap it.. aaaand it’s a fifty page PDF. Now you get to pinch and zoom your […]
Nature, a Japanese hardware startup that focuses on IoT home devices, announced the launch Remo 3, its home appliance smart remote, in the United States and Canada today. Priced at $129, the Bluetooth-enabled Remo 3 allows people to control multiple appliances that uses an infrared remote, including air conditioners, TVs, robot vacuum cleaners and fans, […]
Five years ago, Traefik Labs founder and CEO Emile Vauge was working on a project deploying thousands of microservices and he was lacking a cloud native application proxy that could handle this kind of scale. So like any good developer, he created one himself and Traefik was born. If you go back five years, the […]
Yesterday, a fitness equipment maker called Echelon Fitness announced its latest product, the so-called Prime Bike. At $500, it’s nearly a clone of Peloton’s $1,900 product. The company said it had developed the bike “in collaboration with Amazon”. Amazon is now saying that’s not true and has removed the product from its site and issued […]
After operating in stealth mode for about two years, First Resonance, a company founded by former SpaceX engineers, is finally showing the world their software toolkit designed to let manufacturers make things using the processes employed by their former boss. It’s a suite of software products that can allow for more flexible manufacturing processes and […]
Zoom was never created to be a consumer product. Nonetheless, the video-conferencing company’s accessibility made it the answer to every social situation threatened by the pandemic, from happy hours to meetings. Months later, we’re realizing that force-feeding social experiences into an enterprise software company isn’t a perfect solution. Zoom School is a perfect example of […]
Facebook’s head of global policy has denied the tech giant could close its service to Europeans if local regulators order it to suspend data transfers to the US following a landmark Court of Justice ruling in July that has cemented the schism between US surveillance laws and EU privacy rights. Press reports emerged this week […]
The pitch for Berlin-based Endel is pretty straightforward, according to its co-founder and CEO Oleg Stavitsky. “The way I usually describe Endel is: This is a technology that is built to help you focus, relax and sleep,” Stavitsky told me. “Of course, the way we do that is a little more complicated than that.” The […]
As traditional brands grapple with a new world where selling online is as much or perhaps even more important than how you are positioned in a physical store, a startup that helps them get all their inventory, marketing and selling strategies all on one page has raised a significant round of funding. Salsify, which provides […]
It used to be the case that in order to scale globally, European companies needed to spend big on launching in the US to achieve the kind of growth they wanted. That usually meant re-locating large swathes of the team to the San Francisco / Bay Area, or New York. New research suggests that is […]
Freeletics, the “AI-powered” fitness coaching app, has closed $25 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is U.S.-based JAZZ Venture Partners and Causeway Media Partners, with support from KKCG. The fresh injection of capital follows $45 million in Series A funding in late 2018. It will be used by the company to develop new […]
