Shenzhen Valley Ventures in Palo Alto, Calif. is launching an incubator for hardware startups in partnership with one of its largest limited partners, Zowee, a factory that works with hardware giants like Xiaomi Technology Co. and Samsung Ltd.Zowee’s Shenzhen facility includes un … | Continue reading
Uber wants to be your car, and the billboard. It’s turning its frequently used app into a surface for external commerce promotions in hopes of rewarding users with special deals. If Uber will give you $20 off for shopping with its partners, you might stick with it over competitor … | Continue reading
In 2013 Lara Setrakian was fed up with the news business. A longtime correspondent for both ABC News and Bloomberg Television, Setrakian had reported in and on the Middle East for years. From the Iran election crisis in 2009 to the Arab Spring uprisings throughout 2011, Setrakian … | Continue reading
The increase of smartphone ownership in India is fueling the rise of mobile wallets in India. One company leading the charge, MobiKwik, has topped up its own funds with a $50 million Series C round announced today. Read More | Continue reading
Coffin Dodgers is named for the slang expression for the geriatric. It’s a racing game where instead of motorbikes, cars or skateboards, you are on a race against death on mobility scooters. Yes, it’s every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. Tasteless? Perhaps, but also a tremendous … | Continue reading
“There are not a lot of toys targeted at children with special needs,” says Ladislas de Toldi. “Because of their special needs, it’s harder for them to focus and progress. So how do you make an exceptional child learn and progress?”The Paris-based engineer is making the hard sell … | Continue reading
By the time the Form 1 began shipping to Kickstarter backers, the market was already flooded with countless 3D printers built around the same basic plastic extruding technology.But Formlabs offered something different. The Massachusetts-based startup eschewed the RepRap process o … | Continue reading
Google’s charitable arm is today announcing several grants and donations aimed at helping the residents of Flint, Michigan respond to their ongoing water crisis. With a total amount of $250,000, the funds will be used to pay several local researchers and address health concerns c … | Continue reading
It’s May, and students everywhere are making last-minute preparations for the prom and eagerly watching the clocks tick down to summer break. But HP’s here to remind you that back-to-school season is just around that next corner, as the world continues mercilessly spinning forwar … | Continue reading
Zooz’s series C round more than doubles the total amount invested in the company to $40.5 million, raised in four rounds. The latest round included Fang Fund, iAngels, Kreos Capital and existing investors Blumberg Capital, lool ventures, Rhodium, Claltech (Access Industries’ Isra … | Continue reading
Ad blockers are often painted as the enemy of online publishers, but sometimes things are more complicated. AdBlock Plus, for example, just announced that they’re working with startup Flattr on a new product that allows readers to pay the publishers who produce the content they r … | Continue reading
Alternative mobile OS maker, Jolla, whose Sailfish licensing business aims to compete with Google’s Android platform by offering OEMs the ability to tailor the mobile platform to their needs, has closed out a $12 million Series C financing round. Read More | Continue reading
A 2014 change to housing law in Berlin, aimed at protecting property supply and combating surging rent rates, came into effect on May 1 — banning short term tourist rentals of entire apartments without a city permit.Partial rentals, where a host rents a room or rooms within their … | Continue reading
Fashion retailer Asos already has its own corporate venture arm, the aptly-named Asos Ventures. And now the publicly listed U.K. company is getting into to the startup accelerator business with a new fashion tech program being run in partnership with (and by) Telefónica’s Wayra. … | Continue reading
Uber today expanded its partnership with Alipay, a Chinese payment app owned by Alibaba that boasts 450 million active users. The partnership will allow Chinese travelers to pay their Uber fares using Alipay in any of the 68 countries where Uber does business, and allow riders to … | Continue reading
When Casey Neistat launched his new social networking app Beme last Summer, nothing was really ready yet. The product was underdeveloped, the team understaffed, and users weren’t exactly sure why they needed a version of Snapchat where the only main difference was that you had to … | Continue reading
Lead generation has come a long way. The way in which leads were developed during Roman times was through word of mouth. As technology advances, the way in which leads are acquired also changes. Before understanding how far we’ve come today, and where we’re going, we must underst … | Continue reading
More changes at publishing platform Medium: Evan Hansen, who’s been overseeing the company’s editorial strategy, is departing. Hansen joined Medium three years ago. (He was previously editor in chief at Wired.com.) His role has been described variously as senior editor, editorial … | Continue reading
A monthly roundup of stories on African tech companies. Read More | Continue reading
What are you planning on doing this summer? Probably not designing a revolutionary new bioreactor in which a thousand “mini-brains” can undergo testing. You’re probably not designing a bioreactor at all! But New York high schooler Christopher Hadiono did just that, and his powerf … | Continue reading
A wave of venture investment into new manufacturing startups looks set to transform American manufacturing. While the foundations for these companies may have been laid in cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco, the startups that are driving this next industrial revolutio … | Continue reading
A key tenet of e-commerce is the recommendation engine. If implemented correctly, it can be a major sales driver for online retailers. However, most sites normally just implement a basic engine that guess what shoppers want, without any input from the shoppers themselves. Shoppin … | Continue reading
Now that SoundCloud has inked licensing deals with all of the big music rightsholders, the startup is wasting no time rolling out subscription services and advertising to a wider number of markets to better monetise its 175 million users, and to compete better against the likes o … | Continue reading
Tesla today shared details of how effective its particulate filters are. Spoiler alert: They are so good, not only do they clean up the air inside the car, they make the world outside the car cleaner, too. It may not be obvious why this matters: The company is aiming squarely at … | Continue reading
If you’ve ever forged a connection with someone because you had the same favorite movie or TV show or book, a new startup called Tastemates has built a social network around that experience. Or as CEO Jon Vlassopulos put it, “We’re trying to codify serendipity” — those surprising … | Continue reading
Michael Dell revealed the new names, and yes we are talking multiple names, for the artist formerly known as the Dell-EMC deal today. EMC will be deprecated for the main branding Dell Technologies, but will live on for the enterprise brand Dell EMC while the client services busin … | Continue reading
Shyp has finished rolling out a new packaging pricing model to all its customers that includes variable shipment pricing based on the packaging that the company provides. Shyp is still playing around with its business model and, to be sure, over time these tweaks will add up. The … | Continue reading
The online textbook service Chegg today announced that it has acquired Imagine Easy Solutions for $42 million. Imagine Easy is the company behind online bibliography and research tools like EasyBib (which was also its first product) and similar tools like Citation Machine, BibMe … | Continue reading
While many factors are driving the tipping point in the online distribution of insurance, the thread that ties it all together is simple: changing demographics. Insurance companies cannot expect to sell the same way to a cohort with fundamentally different purchasing habits and e … | Continue reading
Efficient growth has always been rewarded by the market, but as cash becomes more constricted, particularly at the late stage, this efficiency will become more and more important. Read More | Continue reading
Smartphone users shoot a lot of video, but turning those videos into something special still takes a lot of work. A newly launched app called Videorama aims to solve that problem by offering a powerful video editor that’s also super simple to use. In other words, you don’t need t … | Continue reading
Less than a month after Uber settled two class-action lawsuits in California and Massachusetts, another one has popped up. This time, the suit pertains to all current and former Uber drivers in the United States, except for those in California and Massachusetts.The suit, filed ye … | Continue reading
Connected cars can talk to each other (vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V), and they’re starting to be able to talk to the city they’re driving around (vehicle-to-infrastructure, or V2I). That also means baddies can potentially talk to our cars, as we’ve seen in the experimental hack of … | Continue reading
Most fitness trackers are all about numbers. How many steps did you take? How many flights of stairs did you climb? How many projected calories did you burn? But there is one number (an important one, if you’re a health nut) that is left out of almost every fitness tracker on the … | Continue reading
WhatsApp, Facebook’s messaging service that recently rolled out end-to-end encryption to its users, will be blocked in Brazil for 72 hours, starting this afternoon.A Brazilian judge ordered telecom providers in the country to block WhatsApp today in a dispute over access to encry … | Continue reading
Google has acquired Synergyse, a Toronto-based interactive training service for Google Apps for Work that was launched by a group of former Google employees in 2013. As part of this acquisition, Google will make Synergyse Training for Google Apps available for free to all Google … | Continue reading
Productivity app maker EasilyDo is best known for its smart assistant for iPhone that lets you do things like organize your travel plans, track shipments, update your contacts, create personalized email alerts, and more. Now the company is taking some of its best features to a ju … | Continue reading
Elvis Costello once famously said that writing about music was like “dancing about architecture” — or maybe it was Martin Mull or Laurie Anderson or Frank Zappa, but that’s beside the point really. Reporting on VR carries a similar caveat. You just really have to try to get it. R … | Continue reading
I dare say that nobody wants to be the target of malicious hackers, and certainly doesn’t want private data out there in the hands of unknown third parties. As individuals, we keep secret our most personal information — bank accounts, passwords and medical information — because w … | Continue reading
Sling TV may have some new competition. According to a Sunday night report from The WSJ, Hulu is nearing agreements to license channels from its co-owners Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century Fox, in order to flesh out a new, cable-TV like service. Hulu is aiming to launch this servi … | Continue reading
So we probably have our Satoshi. The Economist, GQ, and the BBC have all posted semi-breathless stories on their personal interactions with Craig Steven Wright, an Australian computer scientist and inventor. Dr. Wright was unmasked last year by Wired and Gizmodo who pointed to le … | Continue reading
Last week Oracle bought Textura for $663 million, giving the database giant a vertical construction solution in the cloud. Today it bought Opower for $532 million giving it a vertical utilities cloud solution. I can’t be sure, but I think I see a pattern here. Opower provides clo … | Continue reading
The next version of SQL Server, Microsoft’s flagship database product, will launch on June 1, the company announced today. The release follows Microsoft’s usual round of public previews and release candidates since the company first announced this update in 2015. Maybe the bigges … | Continue reading
Vimeo, which has been moving over the past several months to further invest in its orginal content and creator community, announced this morning it has acquired VHX, a company providing a platform for premium over-the-top subscription (OTT) video channels. Deal terms were not rev … | Continue reading
It’s safe to say that everyone can get down with food. That’s probably why the tech industry has seen so many startups — some more successful than others — attempting to tap into the food space. Last year, the food tech space really took off, with global funding for food tech sta … | Continue reading
The tech community is currently poring scorn on the news that Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright has revealed himself to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. They say the story does not add up, given that his ‘proof’ could simply be an old signature signed by Satoshi and what w … | Continue reading
Grab, Uber’s rival in Southeast Asia, has expanded its C-level team after hiring its first CFO. Linda Hoglund has joined the company from HOOQ, the Singapore-based video streaming company founded by telco giant Singtel. Read More | Continue reading
Android commands more than 80 percent of the mobile OS market share globally, and just less than 60 percent in the U.S. But you wouldn’t know it here in Silicon Valley — almost everyone I know has an iPhone. As the consumer technology landscape evolves over the next five years, h … | Continue reading