At Harvard Business School, students pay top dollar to learn everything from how to manage international trade to scaling technology ventures. They’re also schooled in the art of venture capital. Among the case studies they learned last year is the story of Rothenberg Ventures (RV), a four-year-old seed stage firm. Whether the San Francisco firm should have been part of their curriculum… Read More
Project management service Trello today announced that its Power-Ups, which are essentially third-party integrations, are now available to all of its users, including those who are on the service’s free tier. Until now, only paying users were able to use this feature, which includes integrations with products like SurveyMonkey, join.me, Github and Slack, among many others.
With… Read More
Karmic Bikes today began accepting pre-orders for their newest model, the Karmic Kyoto, a “pedelec” (or pedal electric bike) designed for women.
The upright street bike features a 500Wh battery, Shimano’s SLX 11-speed components, a step-through frame, fenders, lights, and hydraulic disc brakes. It is available in white, light blue, and purple.
The Kyoto was created in… Read More
Content marketing company ScribbleLive announced today that it has acquired Linkdex. In a blog post, ScribbleLive’s Geoffrey Gualano said the deal will combine his company’s content marketing platform with Linkdex’s capabilities in search engine optimization: This acquisition streamlines content marketing and SEO software to empower an all-in-one marketing platform. Marketers… Read More
Slice, a company best known to consumers for its mobile shopping assistant that helps you find the best deals, track packages, organize your receipts, and more, is out today with a new service aimed at helping online shoppers save. Called Slice Watch, its latest app lives in your web browser instead, allowing you to track price drops on items you find online.
The idea is something akin to a… Read More
Centricient, a new customer service messaging management toolkit, is throwing its hat into the increasingly crowded market of companies competing to help businesses transition to using messaging platforms as a key point of contact for customer service. To say that messaging — whether via sms or tools like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, or WeChat — has become the dominant medium… Read More
Mobileye, a key supplier of components like image processing and computer vision systems for automakers, announced a partnership with self-driving software and hardware provider Delphi today to be able to bring Level 4 and 5 automation ready for market to car makers by 2019.
The two companies are coming together with the intend of giving OEMs an end-to-end solution they can use to bring… Read More
The rise in consumer usage of ad blockers is leading to a few creative alternatives to try to achieve a ‘better relationship’ between ad tech and web browsers. To wit Russia’s Yandex, which has just announced it’s adding a complaint button to its Android browser to lets users report ads they find annoying. Read More
We are the Uber of our industry, applying curated, user-generated gamification to the sharing economy. That’s pretty much it. That’s the sentence you’d craft if you’re looking to turn off venture and angel investors with a mission statement containing buzzwords that are losing popularity or were never compelling in the first place. Using CrunchBase data, I queried… Read More
Coda Payments, one company that helps simplify the complexity of alternative payments in Southeast Asia, has raised $2 million in new funding. Read More
Faraday Future is driving a camouflaged version of a real upcoming production EV in LA, according to Electrek. The site reports that a candid shot of a covered-up SUV is actually a test vehicle from the Californian would-be Tesla competitor backed by Chinese consumer gadget company LeEco. The vehicle looks like a crossover-style SUV, similar to a Tesla Model X, and this is in line with… Read More
CrunchBase, the database of startups, announced today the launch of its iOS app. The app allows users to look up information about companies, acquisitions, investors, funding rounds and business news, just as the website does.
“Now our users have the fastest way to search for innovative companies and leaders, read the CrunchBase Daily, and see what’s trending right at their… Read More
Bitfinder, the company behind the Awair air quality monitor, has today announced the close of a $4.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Samsung Ventures. Bitfinder first launched on the scene as an R/GA accelerator (powered by TechStars) company in February of 2015. The company launched the Awair air quality monitor, which doubles as both… Read More
Amazon wants to do what it does best, selling subscriptions with a competition-beating value prop. This time around, it hopes to provide a subscription music streaming service for $4 or $5 per month, with the catch being that only Amazon Echo owners would be able to use it, according to a new report from Recode. A cut-rate rival to Spotify, Apple Music et al. might be an interesting offer… Read More
NGINX, the company behind the popular open-source NGINX server, launched the latest version (R10) of its NGINX Plus commercial offering today. Like similar open-source companies, NGINX offers its core product for free, but then charges for more advanced features and services. Today marks the tenth major update to NGINX Plus and, as the company’s CMO Peter Guagenti and technical… Read More
It’s every founder’s dream: you launch a product, and by the next day it’s a worldwide phenomenon. But it’s never quite that simple. For most people, Pokemon Go came out of nowhere. Seemingly springing forth from the ether, it was a household name overnight. But for John Hanke — CEO of Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go — it was another step in a… Read More
Walk through a bookstore and you can see $5.99 paperbacks along one wall and omg-how-much? college textbooks along the other. E-textbook company RedShelf today announced it raised a $4 million Series B from Coniston Capital, with participation from existing investors, including the National Association of College Stores. Read More
Earlier this year, Opera launched its free and unlimited VPN service for iOS; today it is bringing the same functionality to Android. Like the iOS version, the Android app is based on Opera’s acquisition of SurfEasy in 2015 and allows you to surf safely when you are on a public network. While Opera’s marketing mostly focuses on safety, Opera VPN also allows you to appear as if you… Read More
As entertaining and interesting as made-for-TV lawsuits (like the O.J trial) are, they always leave out one key element. The hundreds of hours of research that goes on behind the scenes to prepare for an important trial. Before any big trial a lawyer (and their associates and interns) has to find, organize and examine thousands of documents. The process is officially called Discovery, and is… Read More
Shopify is launching its retail hardware and point-of-sale app for merchants in the UK. The reader supports tap, chip and swipe payments, letting retailers accept both contactless and traditional card-based payments, and the free app works in tandem with the reader device on either iPhone or iPad. The Shopify app and reader combo means sellers can accept a range of payment options at… Read More
