Katie Fanelli — a former chief of staff of Rothenberg Ventures — has brought a proposed class-action lawsuit against the beleaguered San Francisco-based investing outfit, saying it routinely failed to pay contract workers their final paycheck across its four-year history, and that it failed to compensate Fanelli and other hourly workers for overtime.
The suit aims… Read More
At an SXSL panel on Monday, President Obama, actor, environmentalist and philanthropist Leonardo DiCaprio and scientist Katharine Hayhoe discussed climate change and what we can possibly due to curb it. Hayhoe, who is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, and CEO of ATMOS Research & Consulting, helps organizations like airports and public water utilities… Read More
Humans have lived for approximately 8,000 generations, but only in the past four has life expectancy taken dramatic leaps upward thanks mostly to societies addressing some of the most basic life issues. In 1907, the average human life expectancy was 46 years; in 1957, it rose to 66; in 2007, it reached 76. But I predict we won’t stop there. Read More
Last month, we reported that Rover was closing a $40 million round. Looks like the deal has closed — the pet-sitting startup announced today that it has raised, yep, $40 million in a Series E funding.
The round was led by Foundry Group and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Madrona Venture Group — all existing investors. Rover has now raised more than $90 million in total… Read More
The FAA released some staggering numbers as it welcomed Part 107, otherwise known as the rules governing the commercial drone industry in the U.S.: Within one year, they estimate 600,000 drones will be active in commerce in the U.S. But where are the pilots coming from, and what are they going to do with those drones? Read More
A study from Cambridge University documents an immense drop in complaints against police officers when their departments began using body cameras. But even more surprising is that the data suggests everyone is on their best behavior whether the cameras are present or not. Read More
Let’s face it. Our country is not the land of equal opportunity, and the so-called American Dream — that everyone can succeed with hard work and determination — is a myth. The existence of systemic racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and anti-semitism makes it so that the American Dream will never come true for so many people. Those… Read More
Every member of the Facebook family of apps is pushing to bring copies of Snapchat’s best features to international audiences before Snapchat blows up abroad. There was the Facebook Camera Feed, Instagram Stories and Messenger Day — and now WhatsApp is cloning Snapchat’s creative tools. Now you’ll be able to add overlaid text with multiple colors and fonts, drawings… Read More
Salesforce is making yet another acquisition, once again to build out its footprint in marketing and adtech. The company has just confirmed that it is buying Krux, a company that tracks traffic (“data signatures”) across multiple devices — e.g. desktop, mobile, tablet, set-top — and channels — display, social, search, video. In a statement to the SEC,… Read More
Today, food and agriculture entrepreneurs took the stage at the White House lawn for SXSL 2016 to discuss the potential and limits of technology to feed a burgeoning world population. According to the most recent available estimates from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 793 million people in the world do not have enough to eat today. And with a… Read More
As we reported in September, iTunes has today launched a new section called “Spoken Editions,” which will feature narrated content from a number of online publishers in the form of audio-only podcasts. These Spoken Editions are available both in the iTunes storefront, as well as in Apple’s Podcasts app, for easy access. We first spotted the Spoken Editions in the wild,… Read More
Amazon is making a significant change to its Community Guidelines, announced today, which will eliminate any incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its own Amazon Vine program. This program allows Amazon – not the seller or vendor – to identify trusted reviewers, and has a number of controls in place in order to keep bias out of the review process. Amazon… Read More
Of late, Mophie seems to be intent on letting the world know that it’s more than just charging cases – but hey, at the end of the day, there are worse things to be than virtually synonymous with a given space. And hey, when Apple unveiled its first proprietary charging case a year or so back, everyone was quick to drop the hardware startup’s name like it was going out of… Read More
The criminal justice system in our country is broken. Just imagine if technologists put their resources and knowledge toward solving some of our country’s biggest issues, instead of toward the next dating app. Today at South by South Lawn, the White House’s first-ever festival of art, ideas and action, I got a glimpse of what that world might look like.
My first stop was to… Read More
Pull on your commenting pants because I’m going to offer up some wild speculation coupled with real-world experience to come to a conclusion that some of you might find ludicrous and others will find just weird. Here we go: I think the Apple Watch’s Mac unlock feature is one of the most compelling things about the watch itself and could turn the smartwatch tides if more… Read More
A bunch of Nobel awards went out to recipients today, but the inventors of the gene-editing breakthrough CRISPR were not among them. The mechanism to snip out unwanted genes seemed the discovery of the century and two of the scientists behind this breakthrough, Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and her colleague now at Berlin’s Max Plank Institute, Emmanuelle Charpentier, were up for… Read More
How do you prove you’re serious about making electric cars? A partnership with one of the suppliers currently producing batteries at scale for shipping vehicles is a good start. Faraday Future announced such a union today, with a new agreement with LG Chem, the lithium-ion cell manufacturer that provides the powerhouses for vehicles including the Chevrolet Bolt EV. The partnership… Read More
Walmart probably isn’t the first company that comes to mind when you think about open-source software (or the second or third, really), but WalmartLabs, Walmart’s innovation-focused tech division, has already launched a number of open-source projects into the wild. The most interesting of these so far was OneOps, its DevOps platform, but today it is launching a similarly… Read More
Apple TV is getting its first ticketing application today with the launch of StubHub, which will allow owners of the fourth-generation Apple TV device to search for concert tickets, and even see what the view from a given section of seats would look like. However, when it comes time to actually make a purchase, the Apple TV app will redirect you back to your mobile phone to complete the… Read More
Dohop (as in “Do hop on a plane and bring those human transplant organs with you, would you, dear?”) is a newly reorganized flight, hotel, and rental car search service that was launched in 2005 but relaunched worldwide a few years ago.
The service now offers FLYR Fare Protection, as well, which means you can “hold” a fare for 30 days without worrying about price… Read More
