On-demand car service Uber announced this morning a new feature designed to make it easier for its customers to pay for rides for their friends and family: Family Profiles. The option was one of Uber’s most frequently requested features, the company notes, and will initially go l … | Continue reading
Ring, the folks behind the self-titled Ring video doorbell, have a two-punch combo’s worth of news this morning: they’re launching a new model called the Ring Pro, and have raised a $61.2 million Series C. Read More | Continue reading
The Oculus Rift is launching March 28 and along with it comes a ton of cool, innovative content that plays to the Rift’s strengths. There are 30 distinct titles that will be available at launch for the virtual reality headset, ranging from more experiential $5 mini games to full … | Continue reading
WillCall had great design and community, but didn’t have tickets to the best concerts. Ticketfly had deep relationships with music venues, but no one was using it to discover shows. Today, Ticketfly’s acquisition of WillCall comes full circle.The parent company is using what it l … | Continue reading
It’s been a while since we checked in with Toymail, the kids messaging startup that piloted its first product on Kickstarter back in fall 2013. Its idea was to turn Wi-Fi-enabled toys into a screen-less connectivity medium that let parents send voice messages to their kids via a … | Continue reading
Borrowing a page from the information technology playbook, Usermind — a newly launched startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures — is selling a service that aims to provide transparency and clarity to business operations. Read More | Continue reading
Verizon Digital Media Services is announcing the acquisition of Volicon, a company offering video capture and monitoring tools for TV broadcasters. Volicon says its products are used for things like compliance monitoring (related to loudness and closed captioning), ad verificatio … | Continue reading
Prenetics, a Hong Kong-based medical technology company, has raised a $10 million Series A round for its DNA testing technology that helps doctors provide more accurate diagnoses and better understand their patients. Read More | Continue reading
Apple’s News app, which is installed on all iOS devices, is now open to all publishers. When it launched in fall 2015, News app’s publishing tools were only available to Apple’s partners, including big media players like Conde Nast, The New York Times, and CNN. Now anyone, includ … | Continue reading
Social media fan Pope Francis already tweets and may soon start posting on Instagram, too. Italian newswire ANSA reports that the pontiff will make his Instagram debut on March 19 using the account name Franciscus, citing a Vatican Radio interview with Holy See spokesman Dario Vi … | Continue reading
On March 22nd, Apple and the FBI will head to federal court to determine whether or not the government can force Apple to open up an otherwise deeply-encrypted iPhone used by terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook leading up to the San Bernardino shootings. The lead up to the hearing has b … | Continue reading
Have you ever noticed that 90 cent charge at the bottom of your phone bill? Little did you know, that is the key to fueling a renaissance in education technology. Read More | Continue reading
InstaRem, an international remittance payments startup headquartered in Singapore, has raised $5 million in a round led by Vertex Ventures. Read More | Continue reading
As a creative, you’re most likely to get hired for a job off the back of your portfolio of past clients and work. Aimed squarely at this market, Moo — the company better known for their business cards — launched Monogram, a free app helping make portfolios more portable. Using th … | Continue reading
Faraday Future has its first U.S. patent in hand for a smaller, more powerful inverter. So it’s definitely not as sexy as the Batmobile-like concept car the company brought to its splashy debut at CES 2016, but it is arguably more useful. Read More | Continue reading
The average Instagram user misses 70 percent of what’s in their feed, including great photos with tons of Likes and posts by their best friends. So today Instagram announced it will start rearranging the order of posts in its feed. Rather than strictly reverse chronological, Inst … | Continue reading
More Star Wars force is coming to virtual reality. At today’s PlayStation VR press event, Sony CEO Andrew House teased onstage that Playstation will be partnering with EA to bring about my (and everyone else’s) fantasy of Star Wars Battlefront in virtual reality. The PSVR employs … | Continue reading
Sony took to the stage today during GDC 22016 in SF to show off the consumer-ready version of its PlayStation VR headset. A good deal was already known about the company’s first foray into console virtual reality, except for a couple key ones: price and availability.Well, we now … | Continue reading
Accounts of racism, sexism and discrimination are unfortunately way too common in the tech industry. The latest comes from Amélie Lamont, a black woman and former employee at website creation company Squarespace, who was fired after slapping a co-worker at a bar. Lamont was a cus … | Continue reading
Campaign season should be more than just stump speeches; it’s a chance for us to evaluate how our future leader will handle the many tech opportunities and challenges ahead. In the absence of a clear vision from any of the candidates, we’ve laid out a tech agenda that could help … | Continue reading
The universal reaction to Atlas, the newly upgraded next-generation humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics (a company owned by Alphabet), was lots of empathy. Unmindful of being punched, pushed and teased, it focused on finishing tasks in a demo video. People who watched the video r … | Continue reading
Around June of last year, Lucasfilm and its usual cohorts — Industrial Light and Magic, Skywalker Sound — announced that they were banding together to form the ILM Experience Lab, or ILMxLab. The new team would focus largely on figuring out how to translate the Star Wars universe … | Continue reading
Proposed new UK surveillance powers are getting a second reading in parliament today, as the government seeks to update and extend the law in this area before the end of the year. Read More | Continue reading
Last April, Julien Arnold quietly left his role as CEO of Numbrs, the mobile-first banking app he co-founded with Swiss company builder Centralway. Now, almost a year on, he’s on the verge of launching his next project: Clinc, a mobile app to make it easier to save money for a fu … | Continue reading
Google today added a new section to its Transparency Report that focuses on the use of encryption on Google’s own sites and across the web. The company says over 75 percent of requests to its own servers are now using encrypted connections (though traffic to YouTube is not includ … | Continue reading
David Lapter, formerly of Fab.com and MakeSpace, is moving on to Dashlane to serve as Chief Financial Officer. Dashlane is a password management service that helps users keep track of their passwords, as well as helping with safe online transactions through a Dashlane digital wal … | Continue reading
We’re excited to announce the launch of our first artificial intelligence-powered news bot on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. We teamed up with Chatfuel to build the bot, and after a month of development we’re thrilled to show it off to the world. If you are already on … | Continue reading
This past week I made it my mission to see what was going on in downtown Manhattan. A well-timed email here, a hastily-caught train there, and I found myself at the headquarters of Priority Cycles — a NYC-based bicycle startup, which got its wheels on Kickstarter back in 2014. Ra … | Continue reading
Just in time for “Mega Tuesday,” Google has rolled out new features to Google Search that will allow you to better track the primaries and learn more about the candidates. One new addition provides easy-to-understand campaign finance information, so you can see things like which … | Continue reading
Google reportedly is working on building its own Uber competitor, and while some believe that this will come in the form of a fleet of autonomous cars, there is a more immediate option for how Google can position itself more prominently in Uber’s world: by searching and aggregati … | Continue reading
French startup Prêt d’Union is one of the biggest fintech startups in its home country, but it has yet to expand its crowd-lending services outside of France. Prêt d’Union is about to go all in on European expansion, a source told me. The company could expand to Italy as soon as … | Continue reading
Inbox by Gmail, Google’s next-gen email client for Gmail users, includes a number of features that aim to make handling your incoming messages easier. One of the best of these has long been Smart Reply, which uses Google’s machine learning intelligence to look at your email and s … | Continue reading
F.lux, the popular color-adjusting application for computers and mobile devices that reduces blue light emissions for better nighttime usage, has now arrived on Android. Unfortunately, the application for now requires users to have a rooted phone in order to take advantage of its … | Continue reading
The Hotaru compact shower holds five gallons of water and, according to the co-founders, a family of three can each take a five-minute, daily shower using the same five gallons of water for up to two weeks. Read More | Continue reading
A couple months ago, I visited Las Vegas for CES. Few people enjoy playing in CES, but no one enjoys going to the city of sin for work. The loud noises coming from the slot machines, the men flicking cards at you with pictures of naked women, and the general sense that everyone i … | Continue reading
Richard Branson is taking to the skies for the inaugural flight of a new route, from SFO to Denver, in the hopes of linking a nascent tech community in the Mile High City with an established one in Silicon Valley. Read More | Continue reading
Do video game geeks want to watch classic cooking shows? A new experiment on the Amazon-owned video game streaming service Twitch is looking to answer that question, as the company today announced the debut of a full-time Food Channel which will include all 201 episodes of Julia … | Continue reading
For the last several years, Groupon has been expanding its business beyond the daily deal to position itself as the platform for local commerce. Some of those efforts have proven to be more challenging than others, however. And so, as Groupon now downsizes in less profitable area … | Continue reading
SpoonRocket has just informed its investors it’s shutting down its on-demand pre-made meal delivery service, after failing to raise the necessary capital to go on, according to a source familiar with the letter to investors. The company had actually reached contribution margin po … | Continue reading
One of the many reasons women are under represented in “tech-sector” engineering disciplines such as software, mechanical, electrical, computer and mechatronics engineering is because we’ve done a terrible job conveying how engineers contribute to society in meaningful ways. Many … | Continue reading
You’ve seen Wolf of Wall Street, you’re handy with some code, you know you can beat the market, but you don’t have the money to invest? What could possibly go wrong. Quantiacs has the platform for you to experiment and try out strategies, and the money to back your bets, too. Qua … | Continue reading
More than 100 million Americans have a criminal history, according to a Department of Justice survey. Catherine Hoke of Defy Ventures believes that through training, these individuals can become successful entrepreneurs, high performing employees, engaged parents, and committed r … | Continue reading
UberEATS, the newer, standalone app for Uber’s restaurant food-delivery business, is today launching in its first U.S. markets: Chicago, Houston, L.A., and San Francisco. The U.S. expansion was announced earlier this year, when the app made its initial debut in Toronto. Uber says … | Continue reading
Well, that was short-lived. It was only in October that I outed the then stealthy Valk Fleet, a new food delivery and logistics startup from European online take-out behemoth Delivery Hero. However, the short-lived company has announced that it is closing down as part of a reorga … | Continue reading
For gamers worried about exclusive Oculus titles and the diverging future of content support on virtual reality, OSVR is making a bid to take over the platform and ensure that content is available across all hardware. The ecosystem just received a major vote of confidence today f … | Continue reading
Late last year, Microsoft announced that it would start hosting its Azure cloud computing platform and some of its other cloud-based services out of local data centers in both Germany and Canada. Both of these new regions, Azure Canada and Azure Germany are now officially in prev … | Continue reading
Payoneer helps businesses and B2B marketplaces move money across borders. It’s one of the biggest companies in this space and its customers include the likes of Amazon, Fiverr, Airbnb, Upwork, and Taboola. Today, the company announced that it has acquired Armor Payments, a digita … | Continue reading
Accel Partners, the 33-year-old venture firm, has pulled off a bit of a hat trick. In an increasingly uncertain economy, it has raised $2 billion across two new U.S. funds. The Sand Hill Road outfit has closed a $500 million U.S.-focused early-stage fund to back mostly seed and S … | Continue reading