I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Flowers in his new role as a What Works Cities (WWC) Senior Fellow. As a What Work Cities Senior Fellow, Flowers will oversee a new Analytics Kick Start Program run by WWC partner the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopki … | Continue reading
Juicero.com a food tech startup that makes internet-connected kitchen appliances, raised $70 million in Series B funding in a round led by Artis Ventures. Juicero’s flagship product is a $699 counter top device that cold presses juice out of “packs” of already prepped fruit and v … | Continue reading
Knowre, a Seoul-based learning app developer, has taken a big step forward in its American expansion plans. The company announced today that its math programs, which gives kids personalized recommendations, will be used in Sylvan Learning tutoring centers. Sylvan is the largest p … | Continue reading
All sports fans love a good playoff game. But actually attending one is something most folks never have the chance to do. The ticket prices for these games, from pro basketball to college football bowl games, is exorbitant. Plus, you don’t even know if your team is going until wa … | Continue reading
Amazon this morning announced an expansion of its Dash Buttons product line – those Wi-Fi connected, push-button devices that let you buy products from its site with just a press. One year after the buttons went live, and apparently not the April Fool’s joke people once imagined, … | Continue reading
Today IBM announced the newest iteration of their iPad app for the 2016 Masters Tournament, which offers a live broadcast of all four tournament days. While the app was built from the ground up to work on all iPads, the update has some new features designed to take advantage of t … | Continue reading
Programs from Facebook and Google have made the idea of getting internet access via a balloon or drone possible, but how about going online via a network of taxis in your city. That could become a possibility in the future thanks to a new program from Ola, the on-demand car start … | Continue reading
Popular YouTuber Casey Neistat has a knack for viral hits. He’s called out Apple, blew through the entirety of Nike’s #MakeItCount filming budget traveling around the world and still got the shoe brand to showcase the video on its site, and Neistat most recently gained notoriety … | Continue reading
Airware used to sell drone operating systems. Now it’s swiveling to sell the whole flying kit and caboodle: drone hardware, the software to control them, and the cloud where their data goes. It discovered that big enterprise companies didn’t know how to piece together drone syste … | Continue reading
Citymapper is making a significant change to its routing app with the news that it has added what it is calling a “SuperRouter” capability. This effectively combines public transit with cabs to create completely new integrated routes. In simple terms, it means you could ask Citym … | Continue reading
Garena, a Singapore-based company that makes mobile gaming, e-commerce, and payment apps, said today that it has raised a $170 million Series D. Read More | Continue reading
This week, two different amateur astronomers released footage of an impact event on Jupiter. The separate observations, one in Austria and one in Ireland, show a brief, small flash of light at the exact same time. Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy writer for Slate, said the footage revea … | Continue reading
The FBI, which just a few days ago was attempting to convince the country of its helplessness in the face of encrypted iPhones, has generously offered its assistance in unlocking an iPhone and iPod for a prosecutor in Arkansas Read More | Continue reading
Today in local news, Los Angeles Assemblyman Mike Gatto has introduced a bill that would allow Californians to cancel their Internet or cable services online with ‘one click’. The bill, which has no official nickname but I am hereby dubbing ‘Ryan’s Law’ for reasons that will beco … | Continue reading
As a former patent examiner, I recognize that the patent system, in its purest form, should protect and incentivize innovation through a limited-term contract, offering exclusive monopoly rights covering a technology, product or design element. In practice, it’s much uglier, and … | Continue reading
“Fresh air” is a concept most often associated with the “great outdoors”. Dyson is looking to make your home nature fresh by ridding it of indoor pollutants with the Pure Cool Link purifier fan. Hopefully, the engineering that went into James Dyson’s new gadget is better than the … | Continue reading
We’ve been at Microsoft’s Build conference all day, getting up close and personal with the latest and greatest from Microsoft. With announcements about Xbox, Cortana, Windows 10, new developer tools, the introduction of a Bash shell to Windows (!), cool new API tools for develope … | Continue reading
When a new category of gadget appears, it’s understandable when the vanguard devices aren’t the most well designed, or are resistant to disassembly and repair. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case with the first headset from Oculus, iFixit has found. Read More | Continue reading
Most mapping companies are pretty good at getting you from point A to point B. They usually optimize for the quickest or shortest route, but rarely take into account the risks of navigating the shady end of town. RedZone, an iOS app launched today, adds a soupçon of street smarts … | Continue reading
“Nature’s ready-made robot platforms.” That’s how a new paper from researchers at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University describe insects — it’s excellent shorthand for the level of “playing god” we have attained, whether you find it fascinating or abhorrent. Read More | Continue reading
Want to know if you have the “athlete gene” or if you’re actually related to the weirdos who claim you as a family member? Get your collection tubes ready, citizen scientists, Bento Lab’s DIY DNA analysis kit is here and ready for the in-home lab.Normally you’d order a kit somewh … | Continue reading
San Francisco-based Branch International, or Branch.co, raised $9.2 million to bring digital financial services to mobile phone users in Sub-Saharan Africa. Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A round.Branch’s free-to-download Android app is a kind of “branchless bank for the next … | Continue reading
This week on Bullish, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the queen of Imgur, a.k.a. Sarah Schaaf, head of community at Imgur. We talked about IRL communities versus digital communities, what it takes to build and sustain virtual communities, and the role these places have in … | Continue reading
In an article in The Information, Fadell said that he didn’t think Dropcom cofounder and CEO Greg Duffy had “earned” the right to report to him directly. Fadell also explained away an exodus of Dropcam staffers by suggesting they were subpar. “A lot of the employees were not as g … | Continue reading
It’s easy to get caught up in the new, cool thing aspect of transportation tech and apps, but there’s some real social benefit and freedom to be found here. Take, for instance, Moovit’s latest upgrade. The public transportation app recently added features to make it easier for bl … | Continue reading
Microsoft’s recently launched, A.I.-powered bot Tay may have embarrassed the company when Twitter users taught the machine how to be racist, but Microsoft hasn’t given up on the future of bot development. It’s just getting started. At Microsoft’s annual Build conference in San Fr … | Continue reading
In case you thought the recently and abruptly terminated fracas in San Bernardino was an isolated incident, the ACLU has put together a handy map of cases around the country where the All Writs Act has been used to justify an order to unlock a smartphone. Read More | Continue reading
Scentbird, the subscription-based service for perfumes and colognes, has added another $2.8 million in venture funding to its $1 million seed round as it launches a new service that expands beyond the subscription model. Read More | Continue reading
On a recent episode of our podcast we spoke about the VR industry with Matt Hartman, director of seed investments at Betaworks. When evaluating VR companies, Hartman looks for whether the company is delivering a “10X experience.” Ultimately, can you deliver 10 times the value of … | Continue reading
Expa, the startup studio led by foursquare cofounder Naveen Selvadurai and Uber cofounder Garrett Camp, has today announced the close of a $100 million fund that will go towards both Expa Studios and Expa Labs, a new incubator. Investors in the fund include Garrett Camp, TPG foun … | Continue reading
The power of the cloud is a bit fuzzy to most of us, but Microsoft wants to improve that by giving developers a series of API tools it has dubbed Cognitive Services to make their software far smarter, including tools for trainable speech-to-text processing and a whole new grade o … | Continue reading
Apple today announced it’s expanding its efforts in the area of web development, with the launch of a new version of its Safari web browser, designed specifically for developers. Called Safari Technology Preview, the company says this browser will allow developers to get an early … | Continue reading
In an announcement met by hoots and hollers from the developers at Build, Microsoft introduced the ‘Centennial’ desktop app converter. With this, developers can convert their Win32 and .NET apps into the AppX app format for use in the Windows store, turning legacy apps into curre … | Continue reading
Boompi starts off by following the now well-trodden Tinder-esque location-based dating path. But here’s the clincher: Women on the app can invite friends to eavesdrop and secretly comment on their private conversations with prospective dates. If that feels like privacy violation … | Continue reading
Being able to log in to an app with the help of the fingerprint scanner is quickly becoming a standard feature on mobile. But while Windows PCs and laptops have long had fingerprint scanners to allow you to securely log in to your machine, that protection didn’t extend any furthe … | Continue reading
Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant competes against the likes of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the unnamed mystery voice behind Google Now. It’s part of a new wave of services that are slowly making talking to computers mainstream, but because of Microsoft’s weak position … | Continue reading
The Xbox One is about to become a far more interesting (and accessible) platform for indie game developers — and regular users will soon be able to use their console to chat with Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant, too. Ever since Microsoft launched its Xbox One console, the … | Continue reading
Microsoft Build 2016 - March 30 — April 1, 2016 | Continue reading
Here is an announcement from Microsoft Build you probably didn’t see coming: Microsoft today announced that it is bringing the GNU project’s Bash shell to Windows. Bash (Bourne Again SHell) has long been a standard on OS X and many Linux distribution systems, while the default te … | Continue reading
Windows 10 and early versions of Windows have long supported pen input. For the most part, though, that support was relegated to specific apps. As the company announced at its Build developers conference in San Francisco today, it’s now expanding pen support across its operating … | Continue reading
Virtual reality is great for gaming and movies, but when it comes to real-world use cases there’s still quite a bit of room for VR to prove itself. Google is hoping to kickstart this process by making 360 VR content a bit more simple to implement and, in the process, way more spo … | Continue reading
Late last year, Mozilla debuted the public version of its Firefox for iOS web browser, and today the organization is rolling out a notable update in terms of its security. According to an announcement published to Mozilla’s blog, the browser will now introduce several features ai … | Continue reading
Uber’s help desk has relocated from email communications to within the app. The reason? Many parts of the world where Uber is keen on gaining a large chunk of the market share, such as China and India, don’t use email like the Western world. Strange to think about for those of us … | Continue reading
Microsoft today announced the next major update of Windows 10 at its Build developer conference in San Francisco. The “Windows 10 Anniversary Update” is scheduled to arrive — you guessed it — on the one-year anniversary of the Windows 10 launch: later this summer. Windows 10 laun … | Continue reading
Following from the unmitigated disaster that was Windows 8, Windows 10 has been doing rather well for Microsoft. After announcing that its flagship operating system ran on 200 million monthly active devices in January, the company today used its Build keynote to announce that thi … | Continue reading
Gett, the on-demand taxi app looking to take on the likes of Uber, has just announced that it has launched a bid to acquire Radio Taxis in London. The deal would bring the total number of black cabs available to users to 11,500, which is equivalent to half of all the licensed tax … | Continue reading
CockroachDB, a 1.5-year-old, New York-based open-database company that aims to keep the applications of its enterprise customers up and running, even when their data centers and cloud infrastructure suddenly goes offline, has raised $20 million in Series A1 funding. The capital c … | Continue reading
Asana, an enterprise app that lets people set and track projects and other goals, has hit a goal of its own: today, the company is announcing that it has raised $50 million. The Series C round — led by Y-Combinator’s Sam Altman — values the company at $600 million, the company te … | Continue reading