Last November, we reported on how Airbnb appeared to be experimenting with ways to expand beyond its role as a P2P marketplace for renting private accommodation, to “experiences” — including more detailed local guides and a prepaid card to spend money once you’re there. Now, as A … | Continue reading

As brick-and-mortar commerce continues to shift online – whether that’s to competitors like Amazon, through online ordering systems, or into instant delivery apps – traditional retailers are looking for new ways to accommodate a customer base that now wants the increased convenie … | Continue reading

It’s not much of a secret that the beverage industry is big business, with Anheuser-Busch alone taking a $43bn slice of the cake last year. The beer maker also has a venture arm – ZX Ventures, who operate under the slogan ‘brewing up the future’. I see what they did there. ZX is … | Continue reading

Commercially operated autonomous drones may be on the horizon, especially since Google and Amazon have announced plans to start drone-based parcel delivery in 2017. A policy problem is likely to follow: allocation of scarce airspace and preferred flight paths — an issue complicat … | Continue reading

HBO is getting into virtual reality, too. Amid the ongoing craze for VR videos, which has seen streaming rivals like Netflix and Hulu rolling out their own VR content, HBO and Discovery announced this morning they’ve taken an equity stake in a company called OTOY, which specializ … | Continue reading

LinkedIn — the social platform used by 400 million professionals looking to network or find work —  has taken a major tumble in the markets in the last few months over weak financial guidance amid slowing growth. So this week, ahead of its next quarterly earnings on April 28, Lin … | Continue reading

Rinse Inc. has raised a $6 million Series A round of venture funding to pick up and clean anything in its customers’ closets. According to Chief Executive Ajay Prakash, who cofounded Rinse in 2013 with Chief Operating Officer James Joun, “We never wanted to b Uber for laundry, an … | Continue reading

GitLab.com users have always had free access to the Gitlab programmer’s toolset including GitLab Runner. Today it announced a new feature called Gitlab Runner Autoscale that allows continuous code testing at scale, and to make that even more palatable, the company teamed up with … | Continue reading

Uber has defined the market for transportation-on-demand globally with an app that lets you call up a ride (or courier, or food delivery) and charge it with the click of a button — a business that has now received billions in funding from investors. But Uber’s expansion has come … | Continue reading

Diamanti, a startup aimed at solving the problems around balancing networking and storage requirements in the age of containers, emerged from stealth today with a new appliance and $12.5 million in Series A funding from a prestigious list of investors. Perhaps those investors — C … | Continue reading

Ebay sold off its enterprise unit to a consortium of companies led by private equity firm Permira last year. That consortium included Sterling Partners, Longview Asset Management and Innotrac. Today, eBay Enterprise and Innotrac, a global e-commerce fulfillment firm, are essentia … | Continue reading

Since launching in 2012, theSkimm has built up a big audience for its email newsletter — founders Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin told me they have more than 3.5 million active subscriptions, with a daily open rate of 40 percent. Today the New York City startup is launching its … | Continue reading

In the scramble to build bots that live up to the hype, messaging app Telegram has just announced a $1M giveaway to developers to try to incentivize them to build cool stuff. The messaging startup launched its own bot platform back in June last year, long before Facebook started … | Continue reading

Tyba, the Spanish startup that has created a “junior recruitment market” aimed at allowing companies like tech startups to more efficiently hire university and college graduates, has seen an exit of sorts. Read More | Continue reading

After what I’m told has been a successful 6 month trial in Paris — racking up “hundreds of thousands of deliveries” — Stuart, the on-demand delivery app and platform from the founders of Sparrow and Resto-In, is seeing its official launch today. In addition to the French capital … | Continue reading

Piling on to Theranos woes, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California have started probing into the blood analysis startup for possible criminal activity. The microscope under which Theranos found itself for regu … | Continue reading

Sleep deprivation is the undoing of startup founders, according to Arianna Huffington. “There is this kind of founder myth that if you are a founder you can’t afford to get enough sleep,” she told me over the phone while catching a plane back to New York. “The truth is three-quar … | Continue reading

Apple today is unveiling an overhaul to its App Store developer website, a resource available to the 11 million registered developers worldwide who have helped grow the App Store to now more than 1.5 million applications. The updated site will include new articles and videos aime … | Continue reading

Facebook 86’ed The Shade Room from its platform today for unknown reasons. The celebrity gossip and news publisher attracted about 4.2 million followers on Facebook. We reached out to The Shade Room and to Facebook to learn why its page disappeared. Facebook did not yet reply to … | Continue reading

Mike Vernal, a Facebook VP who has spent the last eight-plus years at the company, most recently leading its search, profile, local, and developer platform product groups, is leaving the company to become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. Before joining Facebook, Vernal sp … | Continue reading

A Supreme Court order issued today closes the book on (or perhaps merely ends this chapter of) more than a decade of legal warfare between Google and the Authors Guild over the legality of the former’s scanning without permission of millions of copyrighted books. And the final wo … | Continue reading

In terms of venture capital dollars, it’s still hard to beat Silicon Valley. The latest figures have Bay Area companies gobbling up about 15 percent of the world’s venture capital. Factor in San Jose and Los Angeles and that share climbs to nearly one-third of the all the money r … | Continue reading

Kanye West’s decision to flip-flop on whether or not his new album, “The Life of Pablo,” would be an exclusive to music streaming service Tidal, has now been met with a class action lawsuit led by consumer tech privacy law firm Edelson PC. The artist originally promised the album … | Continue reading

Technology market analysts at ABI Research predict that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are going to be big business in the next decade — to the tune of $132 billion. But they also predict the decline and fall of night vision in our cars. Night vision systems have been … | Continue reading