Cyanogen, a startup behind its own, alternative version of the Android operating system, now has a new CEO. In the wake of reports that the company exaggerated its success in terms of active users, layoffs, and difficulties scaling, Cyanogen’s co-founder and CEO Kirt McMaster will be transitioning into an “Executive Chairman” role, while Lior Tal, previously COO, will now… Read More
It’s easy to feel like you’re missing out on a great restaurant or a nice museum when you’re walking around an unknown city. Journy wants to help you get the most out of your next vacation by planning the best itinerary for you.
Unlike many startups out there, Journy isn’t a concierge app to book flights and hotels. Journy is (mostly) about all the other… Read More
After 20 months in a closed beta under the working title Facebook at Work, (as we predicted it would the other week) today Facebook is finally bringing its enterprise-focused messaging and social networking service to market under a new name, Workplace. It’s not only armed with a new brand: Workplace is launching with a new kind of pricing model based on Facebook-style… Read More
Apple’s newest mobile operating system, iOS 10, has seen faster adoption than any other OS version, according to data released by mobile marketing firm Fiksu. Currently, iOS 10 is installed on 66.7 percent of active devices, roughly a month after its launch. That means the majority of iOS device users are now running the latest OS – which is something of a surprise, given that… Read More
Two European Airbnb rivals have agreed to join forces. An early Rocket Internet Airbnb clone, Wimdu, and another accommodation platform originally headquartered in Germany, 9flats, are merging some five years after firing up their respective businesses. Read More
Millennials hate advertising and don’t respect brands – so what is a self-respecting 21st century marketer to do? Callum Negus-Fancey and his company StreetTeam would have you leverage the power of the upwardly mobile ambitious twenty-somethings themselves.
StreetTeam helps brands build, deploy, and manage large decentralized ambassador programs to sell more goods. The English… Read More
After doing heavy damage to KrebsOnSecurity and other web servers the creator of the Mirai botnet, a program designed to harness insecure IoT devices to run massive denial of service attacks, has apparently released the source code on Github. The compact C code is designed to run on IP cameras and other Internet-connected devices. It tries various hardcoded root passwords, infects the device,… Read More
During a contentious election filled with accusations of lies and denials, not to mention overworked fact-checkers, a company that can help journalists more easily find soundbites in audio recordings, Deepgram, is making its service free to journalists. The audio search technology relies on artificial intelligence, and has been likened to a “Google for sound” – meaning that… Read More
Researchers at Disney Research in Pittsburgh have built a single-legged hopping robot that can currently bounce around 19 times without falling over. The project by Zachary Batts, Joohyung Kim, and Katsu Yamane began as a computer simulation and finally a hardware product. The researchers based their system on Marc Raibert’s hopping controller and it’s controlled by a linear… Read More
This is probably about as close to a full confirmation of last night’s reporting that Samsung has temporarily halting production of the Galaxy Note 7. In another cautiously worded statement issued this morning, the hardware maker told TechCrunch, We are temporarily adjusting the Galaxy Note7 production schedule in order to take further steps to ensure quality and safety matters. The… Read More
It’s hard to remember a time when Microsoft Paint wasn’t shorthand for something ham-handedly drawn on a free computer art program. And the while, the software giant has upgraded the app with some regularity in the 30+ plus years since it was first introduced along with Windows 1.0, it will take a lot of doing to remove its association with poorly crafted memes. It seems likely… Read More
Soundtrap, a cloud-based music and audio recording platform, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Nordic VC firm Industrifonden led the round, with participation from an array of existing investors and other new backers, including Peter Sterky, former CFO and COO of Spotify. It brings total funding to $8.5 million. Read More
Glisser, a London-based startup on a mission to end tedious presentations by letting presenters include real-time polls and Q&As, has closed a $1 million seed round. Read More
Rishi Garg has joined the early-stage venture firm Mayfield as a general partner. The move seems a natural one, given Garg’s career arc to date. While readers might recall that Garg’s last full-time gig was Twitter’s VP of corp dev, a role he left in July 2015, he spent the previous two years leading M&A at the payments company Square and before that, logged time… Read More
A space has opened up in the last few years as 3D printers have become more affordable, and that is the space for simple 3D designing tools. As VR takes off, that will also be a brand new space for such tools, in order to design new objects and environments. In this area is Thingiverse, a large online 3D printing community, although it lacks 3D modelling functionality. There is also Autodesk… Read More
Can a chatbot help you manage your money? Three London-based fintech startups are betting on the answer being yes and have jumped aboard the messaging gravy train as they seek to entice millennials to their respective platforms. Read More
The Smart Fitness Bar is hardly the first smart piece of gym equipment. If anything, it’s part of a growing trend, an attempt to capitalize on a growing fascination with connected fitness and the ongoing compulsion to add smartify every dumb product we have. Heck, back in July, I tried a set of “smart dumbbells,” and indeed, you don’t have to be a smart dumbbell to… Read More
Just Eat, the online takeout ordering behemoth, has invested in U.K. startup Flypay, which has built a platform to help restaurant and pub chains consolidate their various and disparate technology solutions. The size of the round is £3.5 million and serves as an extension to the company’s previous Series A that saw it pick up £7 million led by media brand TimeOut. Read More
A little over a month after issuing a recall of its high-end handset and at the end of weekend littered with multiple reports of malfunctioning replacement units, Samsung has reportedly suspended production on the Galaxy Note 7. In the wake of announcements by AT&T and T-Mobile that the carriers will halt sales of the phone, Korean news agency Yonhap is reporting that the electronics… Read More
You know what? It might be time to just go ahead and trade in that new Galaxy Note 7 for something else entirely. Thankfully, most of the major carriers here in the US have made it fairly easily to trade the problematic handset in for a completely different phone. And AT&T and T-Mobile have since taken things a step farther by halting sales of the device as the US Consumer Product… Read More
