An initiative to encourage more websites to encrypt connections by offering free digital certificates has today exited beta, six months on from its initial launch — the idea behind Let’s Encrypt being to lend an automated hand to smaller websites that might not have the resources … | Continue reading
I like the Microsoft Surface, but you know what has been missing all this time? Keyboard covers that have “a blend of technology and style”, combining “Italian luxury, a Finnish minimalistic design aesthetic and durability that helps it improve with age, like a good leather jacke … | Continue reading
Yuri Milner is pushing forward with the hunt for intelligent alien life beyond our planet, and is investing another $100 million in a more proactive approach after putting up the original $100m last year. In July of 2015, Milner and I sat down and discussed the greatest question … | Continue reading
In the world of venture capital, there is nothing more fundamentally important for an entrepreneur than building a strong board of directors. Read More | Continue reading
Vimeo is ramping up its efforts focused on getting its programming in front of an adult audience interested in indie video content, with the announcement of a partnership with Spotlight Cinema Networks that brings its short-form videos to the silver screen. Spotlight, which is ow … | Continue reading
E-commerce has become increasingly popular as a business model for the Internet of Things in the consumer space. A toothbrush example, as simple as it may sound, helps demonstrate. Read More | Continue reading
Zuora has always been a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to the subscription economy. Company founder Tien Tzuo recognized something in 2008 when he left a comfortable job at Salesforce to launch a new company. The world was about to change dramatically with a huge influx of … | Continue reading
Google says it’s expanding its efforts at keeping web surfers better protected from deceptive content online through an update to its “Safe Browsing” initiative. The search giant will now flag and warn users when they encounter web sites with what Google calls “social engineering … | Continue reading
Chatbots, Live video, and VR technology are all on the docket for Facebook’s F8 developer conference, and you can watch the livestream here at 9:30am PST with Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote starting at 10am. There’ll also be more streamed sessions all day today and tomorrow.Here’s the … | Continue reading
Education tech venture Quizlet has finally created a product specifically for use by teachers in their classrooms, dubbed Quizlet Live. It’s an online, question-and-answer matching game for small teams to play face-to-face in the same room. Previously, Quizlet gained popularity a … | Continue reading
Starbucks this morning announced the overall of its mobile application, now used by 17 million people, in an effort to create a more personalized experience for its customers. The changes rolled out alongside an overhaul of the company’s popular customer loyalty program, Starbuck … | Continue reading
The European Union has launched a public consultation on rules governing the use of personal telecoms data. The so-called ePrivacy Directive also covers the use of tracking cookies by online services Read More | Continue reading
A Tel Aviv startup that wants to help farmers produce more food with fewer resources, CropX, has attracted sensor manufacturers Robert Bosch and Flextronics International as strategic backers. Specifically, Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH and accelerator Flex Lab IX added $1 mi … | Continue reading
May is just a few short weeks away, and Hardware Alley at Disrupt NY 2016 is almost full. Hardware Alley is, as the name suggests, our annual showcase of all things hardware, a day at Disrupt where hardware startups take over and fill the show floor with robots, 3D printers and a … | Continue reading
Back in February, we told you GGV Capital was raising a more than a billion dollars from its investors. This morning, the 16-year-old, cross-border venture firm is making it official. The final tally, says GGV, is $1.2 billion, including a $675 million main fund; a $225 million “ … | Continue reading
Fleet, a marketplace that lets companies compare quotes from logistics providers, has landed a $4 million seed round. The funding was led by Hunt Technology Ventures, with participation from other investors including Placid Ventures, David S. Hunt, 1517 Fund, Latam Partners, Grow … | Continue reading
Will Verizon snap up Yahoo’s web assets — and what might that look like? We don’t have an answer just yet, but there’s one person who might have some ideas about what it would look like: Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, who will be joining us at Disrupt NY in May this year.And naturally, i … | Continue reading
resh out of development from the company labs in Taiwan, the HTC 10 is not only a new flagship smartphone: it’s a near-complete overhaul. I’m one to enthuse over specifications, so let’s get to them right away. The HTC 10 uses a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor, … | Continue reading
For several years, Box CEO Aaron Levie has been trying to get people to understand his company is not in the storage business. To drive that point home Box announced Box Zones today, a product that lets customers choose a storage component from another vendor, enabling customers … | Continue reading
Later today at its f8 developer conference Facebook is expected to unveil a big push into bots on its Messenger platform. So little surprise that rival messaging platform Telegram has taken the opportunity to remind people it launched its own bot platform back in June 2015 — by a … | Continue reading
Alibaba just took a big step in its Southeast Asian expansion journey. The company said today that it has pumped a total investment of about $1 billion into Lazada, in a deal that makes it the e-commerce platform’s controlling shareholder. Read More | Continue reading
When DataStax acquired Aurelius, a graph database startup last year, it was clear it wanted to add graph database functionality to its DataStax Enterprise product, and today it achieved that goal when it announced the release of DataStax Enterprise Graph. The new enterprise graph … | Continue reading
I published my first book, The End of Software, in 2004. At the time, I was president of Oracle On Demand, which served as a starting point for Oracle’s billion-dollar cloud business. In the book I discussed the fundamental economic reasons software should be delivered as a servi … | Continue reading
Good news, everyone. Facebook Messenger has two new features! No sense saving them for below the fold: it’s Dropbox integration and live video Chat Heads. It’s even in the headline. Read More | Continue reading
NASA experienced a close call this weekend with its planet-seeking Kepler space telescope. On April 7th, during a scheduled contact, mission operations engineers discovered that Kepler was in Emergency Mode (EM). It was the first time the spacecraft had been in EM in its 7-year l … | Continue reading
Despite the increasing ubiquity of online videos, making a professional-looking one is still a complicated process that usually involves chains of emails and uploads. 90 Seconds wants to fix that problem with its cloud-based platform, which lets users handle almost every part of … | Continue reading
Accel is on a roll. Shortly after announcing a $500 million seed fund and a $1.5 billion growth fund for U.S.-focused investments, the venture firm has yet another fund. This time, Accel raised $500 million for Accel London V, a fund focused on Series A and B investments in Europ … | Continue reading
Frame.io today launched Frame.io for Adobe Premier Pro, an extension that will enable video editors to use the video collaboration tool inside the video-editing program. When Frame.io CEO Emery Wells asked me to join the beta program for the company’s Premier extension, I jumped … | Continue reading
The problem with Facebook isn’t the amount of pictures of dogs, it’s the lack of pictures by dogs. Finally someone is addressing this scourge — unfortunately, it’s an ad agency. So this isn’t a sponsored post, but it may as well be. Read More | Continue reading
I’m not the only one that thinks this way about riding a piece of bamboo with wheels and a motor. YouTube personality and entrepreneur Casey Neistat made it his main form of transportation around the city. If you’re a daily watcher of his vlogs, then you’re all too familiar with … | Continue reading
In January of this year, AAA conducted a phone survey of nearly 2,000 drivers over the age of 18 and found some surprising results: 75 percent of respondents “would be afraid to allow an autonomous vehicle to drive itself with them in it.” Another 20 percent were cool with the id … | Continue reading
Lyft and Didi Kuaidi are gearing up this week to launch a public beta of its collaborative service in the U.S. for Chinese travelers visiting America. This is by way of interlinking APIs so that customers of one app can hail cars in the other’s market. In the next few weeks, Lyft … | Continue reading
When I met with Buzz Aldrin to discuss his new book No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons From A Man Who Walked On The Moon, he described himself as possibly “among the luckiest guys.” After all, his mother was born in 1903, the same year that the Wright brothers made their first fl … | Continue reading
“Why do you need money from me when you have every great investor on earth?” That’s the question that caused Backplane to buckle under the weight of its own early buzz. Lady Gaga’s social network builder startup has run out of money, gone out of business, and sold its assets to a … | Continue reading
In late 2013, Tim Draper left the decades-old firm he’d cofounded, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, but he suggested he might be back some day.Specifically, he told this reporter, “I am not leaving DFJ. Ever. I am just skipping a fund to do some work building Draper University” — which i … | Continue reading
In 2006, Aydin Senkut was an unlikely candidate for a venture capitalist. A Turkish immigrant who arrived in Silicon Valley by way of Boston, Philadelphia and Istanbul, Senkut held product positions at Silicon Graphics and a small startup named Google. Now, a decade later, Senku … | Continue reading
Throughout my business career of some 60 years, I have always been fascinated by change — the dynamics of change and how businesses, governments and people respond to change. Or fail to respond. Throughout history, major technological trends have had a profound, and often invisib … | Continue reading
Apparently, Facebook, which is just 32% female worldwide, doesn’t have a gender pay gap, according to Lori Goler, head of people at Facebook.In the United States, women make about 76 cents for every dollar men earn, according to a 2016 Glassdoor study. The tech industry’s gender … | Continue reading
Who doesn’t like instant film? Get out. The rest of you, stay and marvel. The Impossible Project, which 7 years ago started the, well, nearly impossible project of reverse-engineering Polaroid’s instant film manufacturing process, has graduated to making its own Polaroid-type cam … | Continue reading
A new site launching today wants to be the app store for bots. Botlist, as it’s called, is a third-party database that’s a catalog a lot of the bots currently available across platforms, including email, web, SMS, Slack, mobile, apps, and more. There’s no question that bots are a … | Continue reading
Tesla is voluntarily recalling 2,700 of its Model X vehicles over a flaw in the third-row seat that may be dangerous in an accident. In the meantime, the company has advised owners via email that they should not use the third row seat until it is replaced. Read More | Continue reading
I fear that overhyping minor vulnerabilities by branding them, pushing the topic with the media and yes, pre-announcing them will cause people to go numb to these announcements. Read More | Continue reading
Altitude Digital says it has poured $20 million into its just-launched Arena platform for publishers. That sounds like a lot of money for one product, but Altitude is also announcing that it has raised $17.5 million in new funding. Arena is Altitude’s customizable, self-serve SSP … | Continue reading
Online street maps have become incredibly accurate over the last few years, but most maps aren’t all that precise when it comes to knowing exactly where on a street a store, restaurant or other business is located. That’s why your Uber driver sometimes wants to drop you off in th … | Continue reading
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos teased a new Kindle device for this week. While the company has yet to make an official announcement about the new ereader, Tmall.com’s official Kindle page leaked the device. Tmall quickly removed the device, but Kindle Fere spotted the mistake and The Digi … | Continue reading
Technology’s neverending story has always, apparently, been the quest for The Next Big Thing. Whether that thing is something entirely new and transformative — unimaginable except within the fantastical confines of the sci-fi genre, say. Or just a far faster/more powerful iterati … | Continue reading
The goal of self-driving cars is initially to make them as good as human drivers, but Ford has another trick up its sleeve to nudge things to the next level. By using Lidar, it recently showed that its autonomous vehicles can drive in complete darkness without human intervention. … | Continue reading
Many in Silicon Valley may be worrying more and more about how to transform their startup stakes into cold, hard cash. But that’s not stopping institutional investors from writing out some very big checks to venture capital firms. Somewhat astonishingly, U.S. firms just closed on … | Continue reading