Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and Editor-in-Chief at the Huffington Post, is today stepping down from her role at the HuffPost to focus on a new startup called Thrive Global. Huffington announced the news in a tweet this morning. I thought HuffPost would be my last act. But I’ve decided to step down as HuffPost’s editor-in-chief to run my new venture, Thrive Global. —… Read More
Another traditional media company has invested in an online property to help expand its digital footprint and capture the next generation of consumers. Refinery29 — the online publisher that, in its own words, is aimed at “a modern woman’s destination for how to live a stylish, well-rounded life” — has raised $45 million in funding led by Turner, the Time… Read More
Jibo, a cutesy social robot pitched to crowdfunders in mid 2014 as ‘the world’s first social robot’ but since delayed and yet to arrive in the market some nine months after its original due date, is now only going to ship to backers in the U.S. and Canada. Read More
Logitech has a new device called the Pop Home Switch, and it’s a bit different from their usual offerings. A company known for Universal Remotes encrusted with physical keys, touchscreen displays and all manner of interaction options is instead going for single-button simplicity. The Pop is a broad button about the size of your palm, which connects to a hub that plugs directly into an… Read More
The latest on-demand delivery startup to pick up backing is Barcelona-headquartered Glovo. The company operates a local on-demand delivery service similar to Postmates in the U.S. or the U.K.’s Jinn, and is disclosing €5 million in Series A funding. Read More
Palantir acquires Silk, Abundant Robotics has built robots that pick apples, Adidas is building a robot factory to build shoes, and Berkeley Labs is building mini robots to map the galaxy. Macbook Pro could have a second screen and Touch ID, the White House’s new messenger bot lets citizens send messages to the president, Elon Musk wants to build solar roofs. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Bill Maris, who founded GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) in 2009, is leaving the unit at the end of this week, according to a new report from Recode.
Maris, a neuroscience student at Middlebury who cofounded an early web hosting company before joining Google, is reportedly being replaced by David Krane.
Krane is a managing partner at GV; he joined the venture arm in 2010, after… Read More
The Brazilian on-demand food delivery company, iFood has picked up $30 million in new financing to expand regionally and solidify its grip over the online food delivery market outside of the US. Read More
Among other things, CareSkore wants to use machine learning to anticipate mortality. However, the newly endowed platform is more than just a Facebook poll that tells you how you’ll meet your end this Christmas by being squashed by a falling piano. Storm ventures, Cota Capital, Rising Tide Fund and Liquid 2 Ventures are rallying behind the Y Combinator graduate with today’s… Read More
Twilio recently exceeded expectations with an IPO that priced them at over $1 billion. For some, this proves that developers are the future of business. While they are certainly an indispensable asset, as more and more businesses turn to the cloud, what about the rest of us? What about the admins and the marketers and those who are equally important to a business but don’t code? Read More
Yelp and Nowait announced a partnership that will enable Yelp users to check nearby restaurants’ wait times and “get in line” remotely from the Yelp app. Yelp will be making an $8 million strategic investment as part of the partnership, which was announced as part as Yelp’s 2Q earnings release yesterday. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Nowait is a mobile platform that has… Read More
Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a Toyota R&D organization headquartered in Silicon Valley, is providing $22 million over four years in an initial research grant with the University of Michigan. The funding follows Toyota’s opening of a third research facility for TRI at the U of M campus, which it officially announced in April this year. The funding is earmarked for… Read More
Hi, and welcome to my obligatory hot take on the nearly confirmed no-headphone-jack iPhones we’re about to see rolling out of Apple. I’m not an absolute fan of this idea, but we’ve seen this sort of behavior from Apple before — most notably the move from the 30-pin dock jack that probably caused a bit of an e-waste problem, forcing users and most notably hotels to… Read More
Technology has made it simple to record and archive our digital memories through posts, snapshots, videos and more, but it can sometimes be a struggle to surface our past – our memories, activities and other experiences – in an easily accessible way. A new mobile application called Fabric, built by two former Facebook engineers, aims to solve that problem.
Co-founders Arun… Read More
The space exploration game No Man’s Sky features biodiversity that would make Earth weep with envy, and players are incredibly avid taxonomers. Hello Games founder Sean Murray tweeted today that players have racked up over 10 million species discoveries thus far in-game, which is around five to 6.5 times the number of known species on earth, depending on whose numbers you trust. While… Read More
NASA is serious about going to Mars, and not just for a quick visit, either. It just committed $65 million, spread over two years and six companies, for the purpose of developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used on the way to — and on the surface of — the Red Planet. Read More
Rugged is just kind of Kyocera’s thing, when it comes to handsets, and the new DuraForce Pro does its best to uphold that tradition with a Military Standard 810G grade rugged body and IP68 certification, which its dustproof and can withstand a two meter dunking for up to 30 minutes. None of that’s really all that different for the line, but the Pro does bring a newfound focus on… Read More
Abhinav Shashank was working on an academic project at Harvard with his colleagues Kanav Hasija and Sandeep Gupta — figuring out how to pool together large data sets from hundreds of different sources and APIs and manage them — when his business colleagues started asking him to help apply those tools.
The result was Innovaccer, a set of software that mashes together data from… Read More
Quizlet, the popular app that lets students create interactive study sets and prepare for tests in any subject, is unveiling a redesign today, including a new website, logo and redesigned mobile apps soon to come. The new Quizlet was created with an eye on international expansion. The San Francisco edtech startup now offers translated and localized versions of its study tools in German,… Read More
