Having spent a good deal of time flying UAVs like DJI’s Inspire 1 and Phantom 4, I like to consider myself experienced with drones. So when I came across Horizon Hobby’s Vortex 250 Pro racing drone, I didn’t think twice that it was labeled for “the experienced pilot”. I thought I … | Continue reading
The Play Store is coming to Chrome OS, Google announced at its I/O developer conference today — and with that, you will soon be able to install and run virtually any Android app on your Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.It’s no secret that Google has been working on this project for qu … | Continue reading
It’s been a big month for trucking innovations. In addition to Otto’s autonomous truck announcement, there’s the unveiling of Nikola Motor Company’s electric long-haul rig concept. The Nikola One, as it’s called, has “6×6 all-wheel drive,” with 800-volt AC motors and regenerative … | Continue reading
A Los Altos startup called Afero raised $20.3 million in a new round of venture funding to secure connected devices, from toys and arcade games to medical equipment. The company’s technology works even when WiFi isn’t, employing 4GLTE and other radio sensors. Afero works with lar … | Continue reading
Music blasting into your ear-holes not immersive enough for you? Rhapsody’s new VR app brings you as close to the music as you can get without getting sprayed with spit, sweat and god knows what else that gets flung about on a music stage these days. Available on Android and iOS, … | Continue reading
It’s easy to imagine that they’ve been happening regularly across the startup industry. The pace of funding in recent years as been feverish, giving investors less time than ever to assess the startups they’re funding. That once-celebrated companies like the blood testing outfit … | Continue reading
Google dashed the rumor-fueled hopes and hype of many yesterday when it failed to bring any real VR hardware onstage and instead spent much of its time detailing the Daydream platform they would be pushing out with Android N this fall. Today, the company snuck in an announcement … | Continue reading
What if the apps on your phone knew where you were, what you were doing, what’s nearby, and even what the weather was like outside, and then combined this information to react intelligently to your current situation? Would that be creepy or amazing? We will soon find out, it seem … | Continue reading
VR developers looking to get started on readying content for Google’s new Daydream VR platform can get started today thanks to an Unreal Engine preview version (4.1.2) that adds support for the Google platform. In addition, Google Product Manager Nathan Martz told the audience of … | Continue reading
Eduardo Saverin — yes, that Eduardo Saverin of Facebook fame — is already a prominent investor in Asia’s tech scene, but his profile and spending is about to increase significantly after a new fund he is running made its first close. Read More | Continue reading
The accessibility software on all of Apple’s platforms empower those with disabilities, myself included, to partake in the experience Apple intends for all users. Put another way, Apple products are inclusive by design. Read More | Continue reading
SoftBank is starting to ramp things up ahead of the US launch of its friendly and versatile humanoid robot, Pepper. After holding down a factotum of service industry jobs in and around Japan and Europe, the company announced this week at Google I/O that the ‘bot is being opened m … | Continue reading
Sempre Health, one of the companies launching in the latest batch of the Alchemist Accelerator, is looking to lower the cost for prescription medication by rewarding healthy lifestyles. It’s a plan to gamify healthcare or incent good behavior in a way that the company’s founders … | Continue reading
When the Supreme Court authorized changes to Rule 41 that would expand the government’s hacking authority, Senator Ron Wyden immediately indicated that he would try to block the ruling. Now, Wyden and several other senators have introduced legislation to counter the Rule 41 chang … | Continue reading
Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page defended his company’s development of the Android platform today during an ongoing legal battle with Oracle. Oracle sued Google in 2010, claiming that Android developers copied sections of proprietary code from Java. Google has mainta … | Continue reading
The mobile healthtech industry is exploding. There is an estimated $42 billion annual market for personalized medicine and a mad dash to come up with the “next big thing.” The tech world is built and rewarded on hockey-stick growth: The faster, the better. This culture collides w … | Continue reading
Ransomware makers TeslaCrypt have shut down after saying sorry for all the damage they caused. This move, which has allowed anti-ransomware researchers to create a fool-proof decryption app, TeslaDecoder. The ransomware would hunt down and encrypt video games on your Windows PC, … | Continue reading
Apple device owners in the same family can share content like music, videos, e-books and apps through iCloud’s Family Sharing. Now, it appears that Android owners will have a similar option. Just ahead of Google’s keynote at its I/O developer conference yesterday, the company upd … | Continue reading
Adobe this morning launched a new suite of apps called Adobe Spark, which allow both web and mobile users to create and share visual content – like posts for social media, graphics, web stories, and animated videos. On mobile, the Spark collection is effectively an upgrade and re … | Continue reading
PRX, the nonprofit organization that operates a marketplace for public radio programming like This American Life, announced today that it’s spinning out a for-profit company, RadioPublic. For public radio fans, this means you’ll soon get mobile apps that offer access to the full … | Continue reading
Philip Kaplan’s DistroKid is a system designed to let musicians post their music to streaming services like Spotify and iTunes and then get royalties when their music is played. Thus far Kaplan and his small team have been sending one payment out to each musician and the musician … | Continue reading
Uber has finally confirmed testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, PA, according to a report out of the Pittsburgh Tribune. Though we’ve known about Uber’s autonomous vehicle ambitions, especially considering the opening of its Pittsburgh-based Advanced Technology Center more th … | Continue reading
The Boosted Board is the best electric skateboard on the market, but it’s biggest flaw a troublingly low range of 6 miles. Today, Boosted opened pre-orders of its Gen 2 boards for $999 to $1599, solving the problem with extended and swappable battery options that let them go almo … | Continue reading
SaaS startup Showpad which has built a platform designed to improve other businesses’ sales productivity has closed a $50 million Series C funding round, led by Insight Venture Partners — with IVP MD Jeff Horing now joining the Showpad board. Read More | Continue reading
It’s a common revenue generation model, but one that seems to have taken some time for other tech platforms reliant on the community to develop. The 10-year-old Twitter and 5-year-old Snapchat are still experimenting with monetization strategies and Pinterest, going on seven year … | Continue reading
While Google shows off its latest developments at the I/O event in California, there’s been another development in the ongoing legal fallout from the 2014 Right to be Forgotten ruling in Europe. Today, Google said that it has filed an appeal in France’s Supreme Administrative Cou … | Continue reading
The Nima was the hit of CES 2016. As a tiny gluten tester, it won our Startup Battlefield and made an impression on the tech press. And the company today is announcing it has raised a $9.2 million round to expand beyond testing just for gluten. The company also announced today th … | Continue reading
ThoughtSpot, which you should think of as a Google for data analysis within a business, has raised $50 million in Series C round of funding, because its technology is pretty damn cool — at least, if you geek out about data and enterprise stuff… then it’s pretty cool. Read More | Continue reading
India’s smartphone market is heralded as the largest opportunity in mobile right now, but the country’s top players are being disrupted as newcomers, mainly from China, rush into the country. Read More | Continue reading
If you, like Dick Van Dyke, love to laugh loud and long and clear, then Laugh Radio hopes you’ll tune in. This standalone audio app offers a searchable achieve of streaming comedy for fans of chortling, guffawing, and snorting. “We’re building great technology from the ground up, … | Continue reading
Apple CEO Tim Cook met with China’s main Internet and telecommunications regulator this week during his visit to Beijing. According to a short statement posted today on the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s site (link via Google Translate), its chief, Miao Wei, an … | Continue reading
Sweden’s Tink, a mobile banking app, has raised $10 million in Series B funding in a round led by Swedish investment firm Creades, and SEB Venture Capital, the venture arm of Swedish bank SEB.The new capital will be used to help the startup expand internationally and, by taking … | Continue reading
If you’re wondering which demographic is driving usage of ride hailing apps in the U.S., new research by Pew suggests it’s very much young people who have their foot on the gas here. Read More | Continue reading
Now that you are giving up on check-ins and sharing your location with your friends, a French startup is coming up with better technology and new use cases to make location cool again. Zenly has been quietly working on location for years, and teenagers are now getting addicted to … | Continue reading
Berlin-based eSports startup Dojo Madness is on a mission to help gamers level up. It does this via a mobile app, initially targeting League of Legends, that essentially turns your phone into an eSports coach, offering tips on strategy before and during gameplay, and analysis aft … | Continue reading
Those of us who’ve found ourselves in the unfortunate position of being in charge of an event will welcome with open arms Events.com’s new Event Assistant app. Launching today, the new software — available for Android and iOS — is designed to help organizers of events big and sma … | Continue reading
BeMyEye, one of a number of ‘mobile crowdsourcing’ apps that lets companies pay to have people carry out mobile tasks, such as photographing in-store promotions to ensure that are actually happening, has raised €6.5 million and acquired a competitor. Read More | Continue reading
Razer, the billion-dollar firm often labeled the Apple of PC gaming, is finally opening its first concept store in the U.S. this weekend. Read More | Continue reading
Apple CEO Tim Cook is having a busy week traveling to Asia’s two biggest countries. Last week, he was in China where Apple announced a landmark billion dollar investment in Uber rival Didi Chuxing, this week it is India where the announcements are continuing to flow. Read More | Continue reading
Troubled bio-tech startup Theranos has told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that it voided two years of results from the blood tests that it once staked its future on, reports the Wall Street Journal. All results taken from its Edison blood-testing devices in … | Continue reading
Gogoprint is a new company based in Thailand that wants to bring the benefits of the Internet to the printing industry in Southeast Asia. Read More | Continue reading
Tattoo culture has pretty much gone mainstream. Tattooing is the sixth fastest growing market in the retail industry with about 30% of Americans getting them now. Thus Tattoodo started out as a “digital lifestyle hub for all things tattoo-related,” with content, community and a m … | Continue reading
Orion Health is a New Zealand-founded (now global) provider of technology products developed for the health sector. Orion’s founder and CEO, Ian McCrae, argues that current approaches to patient information are akin to the Victorian era, when a surgeon’s blood-stained uniform was … | Continue reading
An accelerator called HAX held its eighth Demo Day for hardware startups in San Francisco yesterday. Best known for bringing companies in its portfolio to Shenzhen, China for about 15 weeks to get to know everything they can about manufacturing there, Hax is funded by SOS Venture … | Continue reading
The HAX hardware accelerator held its 8th Demo Day in San Francisco yesterday. While all fifteen companies in the latest batch hold promise, and encompass some very wild ambitions, these three stood out thanks to creative applications of advanced tech to sometimes overlooked, but … | Continue reading
Another year, another Google I/O Keynote slammed with back-to-back announcements.Miss our liveblog earlier? Don’t have time to catch up on every last bit of news? Don’t sweat it: we’ve compressed the most important bits into bite-sized morsels for lightning fast perusal. Ready? R … | Continue reading
French startup Shift Technology just raised a $10 million Series A round from Accel, with existing investors Elaia Partners and Iris Capital also participating. Shift Technology uses big data and machine learning to detect patterns of fraudulent insurance claims. This way, insura … | Continue reading
More evidence of European VC stocking up before a potential LP winter. This time it’s the turn of e.ventures, which has closed a new $150 million early-stage fund to invest in European startups. Read More | Continue reading