OurCrowd, the crowdfunding platform that gives backers equity in the companies they support, today announced that it has raised $72 million in a Series C round of funding, and expects the final figure to be closer to $100 million. Half of the capital will be used to build out its offices globally and develop its platform; and half will be used to match investments made on OurCrowd, according… Read More
With Unleashed, Foolography is launching the smartest SLR camera remote control yet. Instead of using the camera’s remote control port or trying to futz about with Wi-Fi, the company chose a third option… Using a custom Bluetooth dongle that plugs into the camera’s USB port and leaches power from its HDMI port, Unleashed unlocks the power of your camera from your smartphone. Read More
“We’re not a bunch of startup dudes saying we’re disrupting insurance… we’re not a bunch of arrogant pricks,” FinanceFox co-founder and CEO Julian Teicke told me during a call late last week. The company, which is announcing $28 million in Series A funding today, is one of a number of European ‘insurtech’ startups who are attempting to bring… Read More
Google first announced Allo and Duo, its new messaging and video chat apps, at its I/O developer conference earlier this year. Duo launched about a month ago and today it’s Allo’s turn. With Allo, Google is combining everything it has learned from its previous messaging products with the company’s machine learning smarts. Indeed, Allo marks the first time you’ll be… Read More
Etsy buys machine learning company Blackbird, Ludela is launching a smart candle, The new MacOS Sierra is out, LeEco closed a billion-dollar round for an electric car and Uber rival Grab raises $750 Million. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Asteroid mining is coming soon to a planet near you: this planet, and in 2021, to be specific. But NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission has lots of work to do before that point. Today the space-faring organization issued an official “request for proposals” from four partners on how they would go about creating the robotic spacecraft that would perform the actual asteroid… Read More
But the tech-filled vehicles will become data goldmines for governments, manufacturers, and hackers — and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is making sure it gets access to the rich repository of information. The agency today released its Federal Autonomous Vehicles Policy (PDF), a document that will govern the way self-driving cars are developed, regulated, and policed… Read More
Oculus is just months away from releasing the Touch controllers and we now have a better idea of just how much they’ll hurt your wallet.
A GAME store display revealed that the launch price of the controllers will be £190 in the U.K. That’s about $212 in the U.S., which is a bit more than many Rift owners hoped for, though the U.S. price is more than likely to sit pretty at… Read More
North Korea is famously secretive and restrictive — the regime goes to great lengths to both prevent the outside world from learning what goes on there and prevent its citizens from learning about the outside world. An IT error just gave us a glimpse at the country’s online ecosystem — and it’s a pretty meager one. Read More
“Demand for GoPro is better than it’s ever been,” Nick Woodman explained to a rapt audience at GoPro’s mountain press conference yesterday. “Demand is kicking tail,” he said as the crowd cheered loudly. That’s how it went pretty much all day. Enthusiastic uniformed GoPro employees as far as the eye can see, beginning with a morning press conference… Read More
I’m writing this from a plane. As we boarded, the flight attendant asked that we not use or charge our “Samsung 7” phones on the plane. The wording was a little awkward, but she more or less got the point across. It’s been a rough few weeks for Samsung. What was supposed to be the company’s moment of triumph has proved to be one of the biggest consumer… Read More
As we first reported last month, Mike Rothenberg, the beleaguered founder of the San Francisco-based venture firm Rothenberg Ventures, has been involved in an ongoing SEC inquiry into possibly deceptive financial practices within his firm that include wire fraud, bank fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and retaliation against a lower-level employee who was fired and allegedly threatened with… Read More
Mark your Google calendars because from today ‘Don’t be evil’ rides again, via the DeepMind AI division of the Alphabet ad giant, as a hippocratic assurance to ‘Do no harm’… Read More
Tumblr today is bringing Live Photos to the web version of its service, while also rolling out tools that will allow other web developers to do the same. The company has released an open source JavaScript library it calls “Laphs” — or Live Anywhere Photos — which lets you support Live Photos on any website. To activate a Live Photo on the web, you use a… Read More
Last week we wrote about Timeular, a nifty little box that makes the dreaded chore of tracking your time at work easy, and now it is available on Kickstarter. Read More
Cancer is like a computer virus and can be ‘solved’ by cracking the code, according to Microsoft. The computer software company says its researchers are using artificial intelligence in a new healthcare initiative to target cancerous cells and eliminate the disease. One of the projects within this new healthcare enterprise involves utilizing machine learning and natural… Read More
Just over four years ago, I sat through what still is the most viscerally disturbing information security talk I’ve ever seen. The late Barnaby Jack, a brilliant security researcher, had just demonstrated in front of 300 people how he could wirelessly take control of an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator and cause it to discharge enough electricity to jump a 12 mm spark gap. Read More
The promise of premium home 3D printing hasn’t panned out. Hobbyist printers are common and cheap these days – there are plenty of models at around $500, the price of a really good laser printer – but the original vision of a 3D printer on every desk didn’t quite pan out. And Makerbot learned that piece of news the hard way. When the company started it was the brand… Read More
While it’s easy to point to products like the Pebble Smart Watch as a sign that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are gaining ground against traditional institutional financiers and angels, the reality is that the vast majority of projects were never in the sights of Sand Hill Road. Rather, Kickstarter is illustrating that all it takes to sustain innovation outside of Silicon Valley… Read More
Probably the first time I saw Clive Owen, it was in a “film” commissioned by BMW to advertise its cars. At the time, I didn’t really care all that much about cars (I had one, and it was fine, and that was all I needed to know about that) but these short movies still had a considerable impact on me, mostly because they were so well-made. The original series starred Owen as the… Read More
