In January, Twitter revealed that several of its key executives were leaving the company. We learned that former product head Kevin Weil landed at Instagram, and now Brian “Skip” Schipper, the former vice president of human resources at Twitter, is joining Yext, the fast-growing … | Continue reading
A driverless car was involved in a traffic accident on a California city street earlier this year. No one was hurt in the small fender bender, but the accident does signal we are making incredible leaps forward on the road toward driverless cars. It may sound counterintuitive, bu … | Continue reading
We’ve come a long way from the days of pale beige IP webcams with wonky interfaces and limited recording times. Today’s webcams, like the ZModo Pivot, are motion-sensing, low-light seeing, and notification-rich cylinders that hide out in secret places and store video for days at … | Continue reading
Live mobile video is evolving beyond selfie-stream rants and citizen journalism. Facebook will now allow non-stop, long-form broadcasting as long as the creators don’t mind that they won’t be able to permanently save and share the video. The new Continuous Live Video API enables … | Continue reading
Snapchat just rolled out an update that lets users decorate their Snaps with the 200+ stickers they released as part of Chat 2.0.The new feature works exactly like emojis – they even live inside the same button on the camera screen. Just like the emoji feature you can drag, resiz … | Continue reading
Amazon has quietly ended its price protection policy on all products except for televisions. The change to the company’s policy comes at a time when a handful of startups have launched to help consumers automate the process of requesting refunds when prices change on online sites … | Continue reading
Penny, a personal finance bot we reviewed last fall, has raised $1.2M in seed funding from Social Capital. As a refresher, the app offers a chat-based interface that offers advice tailored to your personal finances. This advice includes things like how much you spend on food each … | Continue reading
Facebook’s newest feature could fundamentally change how you watch video. Until now, you either sat through a video until it got too boring, waited for the interesting part, or fast-forwarded hoping to spy something worth seeing. But for clips that weren’t immediately exciting, e … | Continue reading
SyndicateRoom today announced a £3.1m ($4.5m) Series A from a number of heavy-hitting angel investors. The round was led by Abcam founder Jonathan Milner, who noted he is excited about the company’s “superb leadership and a brilliant company culture”. Unicorn AIM VCT was the lar … | Continue reading
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, long a leading venture firm, is talking with investors about two new funds that would total roughly $1.3 billion, CNBC reported earlier today and TechCrunch has confirmed. Roughly two-thirds of the money would go toward a new growth stage fund; t … | Continue reading
London-based edtech startup Zzish is on a mission to unlock the potential of apps for learning, by making it easier to first create educational apps and then use them properly in the classroom. Read More | Continue reading
Earlier today at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Wickr Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to private communication and uncensored information, announced its first investment in a new secure communications and education app for human rights activists and citizen reporters … | Continue reading
On Wednesday, Xiaomi is going to unveil a new product. While details are still thin, it looks like the electronics company is about to announce a drone.Xiaomi is a well-known phone manufacturer. But the company now also manufactures all sorts of devices, from Android TV set-top b … | Continue reading
We’ve known for some time that Instagram will soon be introducing business profiles, analytics, and features intended to improve the ad-buying experience on the Facebook-owned photo sharing network. Now, a number of other undocumented, non-public features have been uncovered, fol … | Continue reading
Facebook is continuing to devote resources to fine-tuning how 3D audio impacts viewer perceptions in virtual reality.Today, the social media giant and Oculus parent company announced that they have purchased immersive audio company Two Big Ears and will be making their technology … | Continue reading
Comparably, the site that originally launched as a compensation data and culture platform, is officially getting into Glassdoor’s territory with the launch of a company employee reviews feature. Ultimately, Comparably’s goal is to provide more transparency around what it’s actual … | Continue reading
When Iván De Cabo hacked together ‘Steve – The Jumping Dinosaur‘, the super casual game playable from within the iOS Notification Center game, he had no idea what would happen next. Read More | Continue reading
SeamlessDocs, the startup that helps governments move all their forms online, has today announced the close of a $7 million Series B funding round led by Motorola Solutions. Other participants in the round include existing investor Govtech Fund, as well as New York State Innovati … | Continue reading
It’s hard to compete with PAX. While E3 is still considered as the most important gaming event of the year, video game publishers are slowly but surely spending less time and money for the Los Angeles event. The Entertainment Software Association wants to reverse this trend with … | Continue reading
File it under ‘it seemed great on paper’… but Google’s project Ara modular smartphone concept is — for all intents and purposes — dead. If you want to be a little more generous, you can say Google has pivoted away from attempting to engineer the impossible — i.e. total smartphone … | Continue reading
Google’s plan to eliminate passwords in favor of systems that take into account a combination of signals – like your typing patterns, your walking patterns, your current location, and more – will be available to Android developers by year-end, assuming all goes well in testing th … | Continue reading
The company behind a device that helps parents enforce their home’s internet rules and restrictions, Circle with Disney, launched last winter in partnership with Disney for its included media content, will now allow parents to manage children’s devices outside the home. The compa … | Continue reading
Kobo, the e-reading service owned by Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten, has notched up one more key brand among those that turning to the company to build out their e-books business in a collective bid to compete against the might of Amazon and its Kindle empire. Waterstones today … | Continue reading
Meet Ziro, a robotics kit that lets you build all sorts of vehicles using a few motors, a smartphone, a glove and your imagination. Ziro’s default kit comes with four wireless motors and enough pieces to build a small car. You can now back this project on Indiegogo.I’ve talked wi … | Continue reading
Picture a professional sports photographer. What do you see? Someone in a beige vest hidden behind a giant, telescopic camera stationed in the back of an end zone? How about someone standing in a throng of spectators with only an iPhone 6s Plus in their hands and a battery pack i … | Continue reading
Spotify is catching up with the competition when it comes to family plans. Like Apple Music and Google Play Music, families can now subscribe to Spotify Premium for $14.99 per month and get six different Spotify accounts and profiles. Read More | Continue reading
There’s no question the iBOT was ahead of its time. In fact, it’s a jarring to see photos from more than a decade and half ago with inventor Dean Kamen seated in the motorized wheelchair next to Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. All these years later, the mobility device’s capabil … | Continue reading
A funny thing happens when the Federal Communications Commission moves to introduce competition into a consumer market. The industry, once so accustomed to acting the monopoly or duopoly in its sector, must suddenly “deal with” thousands if not millions of unhappy customers and a … | Continue reading
China’s Internet giant Tencent has been expanding its international reach in areas like games and advertising, and as part of that, the company is picking up its dealmaking in Europe. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the owner of the popular WeChat messaging platform is … | Continue reading
To get an accurate view of how VCs spend their time, we surveyed 100 investors from The Twenty Minute VC to determine the most efficient time allocation. Read More | Continue reading
If swiping left and right for your next adventure is starting to feel a bit last year, the team behind 3nder has a trick up its proverbial wizard’s sleeve. The app — arriving for Android imminently — assists its users in establishing less conventional relationships of the triangu … | Continue reading
Hackajob, the Techstars London alumni, claims to have built a platform to make hiring technical talent more “intelligent and data-driven”. Read More | Continue reading
London-based hairdresser booking app Rock Pamper Scissors has picked up £1.2 million in backing from U.S.-based 500 Startups and European pre-seed and seed investor Seedcamp, alongside various angel investors. The latter includes Tom Singh (the founder of New Look, and Just Eat’s … | Continue reading
At a glance Wireless Four-hour battery life New EQ app $200 Pros Compact design Comfortable fit Good sound Cons Mediocre battery Some connectivity issues The search for the perfect pair of Bluetooth earbuds has been a long and largely unfruitful one. After all, an awful lot can g … | Continue reading
TinyOwl, a India-based restaurant delivery service that has raised more than $27 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners, has reportedly stopped service in all cities except for Mumbai. Read More | Continue reading
A friend who recently started his own business couldn’t obtain a mortgage from three banks. I suggested he try marketplace lending platforms like SoFi to take advantage of the ongoing innovation in fintech. However, SoFi turned him down, as well, because it abides by the same und … | Continue reading
For years, the media industry has speculated, somewhat worriedly, that big tech companies wanted to branch out, to take on the TV companies – to acquire rights to premium content. By and large, Silicon Valley firms’ coy response has typically been a demure: “We are a platform com … | Continue reading
Companies that focus on diversity will succeed, because hiring women and minorities makes business sense. But it’s not easy. Scientific research is showing that our brains are hardwired to be biased. Read More | Continue reading
Have you ever tracked all the ways you use data in a single day? How many of your calories, activities, tasks, messages, projects, correspondences, records and more are saved and accessed through data storage every day? I bet you won’t be able to stop once you start counting. Man … | Continue reading
The meteoric rise of e-lending platforms attracted a lot of interest among investors and entrepreneurs. Lending Club and OnDeck have already become public companies, and their competitors, such as Funding Circle, SoFi, Prosper, RateSetter, Zopa, Avant, Kabbage and others continue … | Continue reading
UPS recently entered into a partnership with Zipline, a medical drone delivery startup, to begin aerial transport of healthcare supplies in Rwanda. Read More | Continue reading
As we witness what may be the final days of Yahoo as an independent business, consider how just a decade ago it was running neck-and-neck with Google, now one of the world’s largest companies by market value. It would be silly for anyone to claim they could have predicted how the … | Continue reading
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 20, 2016. Google provides notifications catnip via Firebase, I spend the weekend struggling with 4:3, and oh, thanks a lot for bricking my iPad Pro, 9.3.2. Back to the Mac, my … | Continue reading
In the beginning the Prophet Satoshi brought us Bitcoin. And the cryptogeeks and libertarians looked upon it, and said lo, we smile upon this, for it is good, and decentralized, and solves the Byzantine Generals Problem. For a time all was well. But then came wailing and gnashing … | Continue reading
Over the past few weeks, Twilio has had the opportunity to meet with members of Congress and their staff who have taken on the difficult task of balancing security and privacy. We were struck by the sincere desire to understand how actions proposed by those in Washington impact s … | Continue reading
It’s been almost five years since we heard that “software is eating the world.” The number of SaaS applications has exploded and there is a rising wave of software innovation in the area of APIs that provide critical connective tissue and increasingly important functionality. The … | Continue reading
In the world of kitchen appliances, everyone wants to be the next Keurig, it seems. First, there were single-cup coffee brewers that followed and claimed to be better than Keurig, from Nespresso, Mr. Coffee and Lavazza to name a few. Later came cold drink machines like the Bartes … | Continue reading
I played a lot of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty online when it launched. And by that I mean a lot. I inevitably drifted into watching streams of other players competing in order to improve my game. Eventually I stopped playing as much, and even stopped following the e-sports sce … | Continue reading