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Jan 23, 2020
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we're digging into One Medical's updated IPO filing released this week. The document contains directional pricing information that will help us understand where the tech-enabled medical care startup expects the market to value itself […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Atlassian today announced an update to Jira Software, its popular project and issue tracking tool, that brings a number of major updates to the roadmapping feature it first introduced back in 2018. Back in 2018, Atlassian also launched its rebuilt version of Jira Software, which took some of its cues from Trello, and today's release […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Outside of in-app purchases in mobile games, subscription revenue from non-game apps helped to boost 2019's mobile consumer spend — a figure that reached $120 billion globally last year, according to a recent report by App Annie. Now, new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicates U.S. subscription app revenue grew by 21% last […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Time is supposed to make technology better. The idea is simple: With more time, humans make newer, better technology and our lives improve. Except for when the opposite happens. Google is a good example of this. I've been harping on the matter for a while now. Google mobile search, in case you haven't used it […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Early Stage SF is sneaking up on us and there is plenty to be excited about. The one-day event, which brings together a wide variety of startup experts to host breakout sessions, is going down on April 28 and we have a handful of speakers to announce. So without any further ado: We're thrilled to […]
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Jan 23, 2020
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is getting ready to begin its human spaceflight program, which aims to carry its first astronauts starting in 2022. In advance of that milestone, however, the agency will be launching its ‘Gaganyaan' crewed orbital spacecraft later this year if all goes to plan - and while it won't carry […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Brooke Hammerling, the strategic communications veteran that brought us BrewPR, announced her new project today. Dubbed The New New Thing, Hammerling's new communications advisory wants to help startups bring more authenticity to brand messaging and comms through high-level partnerships with CEOs, founders, and executive leadership teams. There are a few critical pieces to The New […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Match Group, the dating app giant and parent company to Match, Tinder, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and several other dating apps, announced this morning it has invested in and partnered with connected safety platform Noonlight to roll out a series of new safety features to its suite of dating apps. The tools include those for […]
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Jan 23, 2020
This next year will be one of the most important since Boston Dynamics was founded back in 1992. After changing hands from Google to Softbank, the robot maker is getting more aggressive about commercializing products, bringing Spot to market, while Handle waits in the wings. The news includes a new CEO, its first since founding. […]
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Jan 23, 2020
After more than a quarter-century spent developing some of the industry's most iconic and advanced machines, Boston Dynamics is a company in the midst of a profound transformation. This week, the Waltham, Mass.-based organization issued a number of key announcements, all focused on the same fundamental shift, as it readies the release of two commercial […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Fintech startup Revolut lets you earn interests on your savings thanks to a new feature called savings vaults. That feature is currently only available to users living in the U.K. and paying taxes in the U.K. The company has partnered with Flagstone for that feature. For now, the feature is limited to Revolut customers with […]
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Jan 23, 2020
The food industry may be the biggest industry in the world, but it's also one of the least efficient. BCG says 1.6 billions tons of food, worth $1.2 trillion, is wasted in food every year and those numbers are only expected to go up. A number of players have stepped up to try and solve […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Lighter Capital announced today that it has secured access to $100 million to lend to growing startups. The firm is best-known for its work with revenue-based financing, in which expanding companies repay borrowed funds out of future receipts. Lighter has also expanded into other, equity-free capital options for startups in the last year. Lighter is […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Twitter is pouring a little more fuel on the messaging fire. It's added a heart button to its direct messaging interface which lets users shortcut to a pop-up menu of seven emoji reactions so they can quickly express how they're feeling about a missive. Emoji reactions can be added to text or media messages — […]
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Jan 23, 2020
NASA has finalized the payloads for its first cargo deliveries scheduled to be carried by commercial lunar landers, vehicles created by companies the agency selected to take part in its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. In total, there are 16 different payloads, which consist of a number of difference science experiments and technology experiments, […]
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Jan 23, 2020
When the Department of Defense finally made a decision in October on the decade long, $10 billion JEDI cloud contract, it seemed that Microsoft had won. But nothing has been simple about this deal from the earliest days, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that last night Amazon filed a motion to stop work […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Wrist-worn fitness trackers tend to do a fine job when exercising outdoors. For those glued to gym equipment, however, things get trickier. GPS can't really do its job detecting distances, and machines like the elliptic tend to be even trickier. Recent generations of the Apple Watch and WatchOS have worked to bridge the gap, with […]
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Jan 23, 2020
TikTok, the fast-growing user-generated video app from China's Bytedance, has been building a new music streaming service to compete against the likes of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. And today it's announcing a deal that helps pave the way for a global launch of it. It has inked a licensing deal with Merlin, the […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Did you notice a recent change to how Google search results are displayed on the desktop? I noticed something last week — thinking there must be some kind of weird bug messing up the browser's page rendering because suddenly everything looked similar: A homogenous sea of blue text links and favicons that, on such a […]
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Jan 23, 2020
When Dfinity raised $102 million in funding in 2018 at a $2 billion valuation in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, it was thought of as a step change in the world of blockchain technology. In an area that was synonymous generating a lot of headlines around cryptocurrency speculation, this was […]
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Jan 23, 2020
When Dfinity raised $102 million in funding in 2018 at a $2 billion valuation in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, it was thought of as a step change in the world of blockchain technology. In an area that was synonymous with generating a lot of headlines around cryptocurrency speculation, this […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Language-learning platform Busuu, which has fast expanded to take on traditional giants like Duolingo, says it has acquired the live video tutoring company Verbling for an undisclosed amount, other than calling it a "double-digit million dollar acquisition." As a result, Busuu will now use the Verbling platform to expand into the live video tutoring space […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Internet services company Opera has come under a short-sell assault based on allegations of predatory lending practices by its fintech products in Africa. Hindenburg Research issued a report claiming (among other things) that Opera's finance products in Nigeria and Kenya have run afoul of prudent consumer practices and Google Play Store rules for lending apps. […]
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Jan 23, 2020
Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates over 15,000 electric and gasoline docked bikes and scooters in nearly three dozen cities in India, said today it has raised $105 million in a new funding round as it explores sustainable ways to expand within the nation and build its own electric vehicles. The new financing round, Series […]
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Jan 23, 2020
If you've ever entered a company's office as a visitor or contractor, you probably know the routine: check in with a receptionist, figure out who invited you, print out a badge and get on your merry way. Brussels, Belgium- and New York-based Proxyclick aims to streamline this process, while also helping businesses keep their people […]
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Jan 22, 2020
If I watch a Story cross-posted from Instagram to Facebook on either of the apps, it should appear as "watched" at the back of the Stories row on the other app. Why waste my time showing me Stories I already saw? It's been over two years since Instagram Stories launched cross-posting to Stories. Countless hours […]
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Jan 22, 2020
After announcing a $550 million fundraise last August, U.K. AI-based health services startup Babylon Health is putting some of that money to use with its widest-ranging project to date. The company has inked a 10-year deal with the city of Wolverhampton in England to provide an integrated health app covering 300,000 people, the entire population of […]
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Jan 22, 2020
If robots are to help out in places like hospitals and phone repair shops, they're going to need a light touch. And what's lighter than not touching at all? Researchers have created a gripper that uses ultrasonics to suspend an object in midair, potentially making it suitable for the most delicate tasks.
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Jan 22, 2020
Memphis Meats, a developer of technologies to manufacture meat, seafood and poultry from animal cells, has raised $161 million in financing from investors including Softbank Group, Norwest and Temasek, the investment fund backed by the government of Singapore. The investment brings the company's total financing to $180 million. Previous investors include individual and institutional investors […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Back in September, Betaworks put out a call for startups to participate in its latest "camp," this one focused on audio. Danika Laszuk, the head of Betaworks Camp, told me at the time that the startup studio was looking for companies that are trying to build "audio-first" experiences for smart speakers and wireless headphones, or […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Google is giving an A.I. upgrade to its Collections feature — basically Google's own take on Pinterest, but built into Google Search. Originally a name given to organizing images, the Collections feature that launched in 2018 let you save any type of search result — images, bookmarks, or maps locations — into groups called "Collections" […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Google is giving an AI upgrade to its Collections feature — basically, Google's own take on Pinterest, but built into Google Search. Originally a name given to organizing images, the Collections feature that launched in 2018 let you save for later perusal any type of search result — images, bookmarks or map locations — into […]
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Jan 22, 2020
As we learned back in October, Microsoft has been cracking away at not one, but two dual-screen devices: Surface Duo and Surface Neo. Surface Duo will run Android, while Surface Neo will run on a special fork of Windows 10 dubbed "Windows 10 X." This morning the company is pulling back the curtain a bit, […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Google Cloud today announced Secret Manager, a new tool that helps its users securely store their API keys, passwords, certificates and other data. With this, Google Cloud is giving its users a single tool to manage this kind of data and a centralized source of truth, something that even sophisticated enterprise organizations often lack. "Many […]
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Jan 22, 2020
International Business Machines is living a case study of a large, established company vying to transform. Over the last decade, the technology elder has struggled to move into areas like cloud and AI. IBM has leaned on a combination of its own R&D abilities and deep pockets to push into modern markets, but has struggled […]
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Jan 22, 2020
International Business Machines is living a case study of a large, established company vying to transform. Over the last decade, the technology elder has struggled to move into areas like cloud and AI. IBM has leaned on a combination of its own R&D abilities and deep pockets to push into modern markets, but has struggled […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Startup productivity tools have never been better, but that's led to employees being more passionate than ever about the tools that they want to use themselves. PMs don't want to use Jira, engineers don't want to mess with Trello and keeping everyone happy can mean replicating processes again and again. Montreal-based Unito is building software […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Disney announced today it has sold the game studio FoxNet Games Los Angeles, the makers of "MARVEL Strike Force" and other titles, as well as Cold Iron Studios in San Jose, to the interactive entertainment and mobile game company, Scopely. The studios were acquired by Disney in 2019 as a part of its $71.3 billion […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Disney announced today it has sold the game studio FoxNext Games Los Angeles, the makers of "MARVEL Strike Force" and other titles, as well as Cold Iron Studios in San Jose, to the interactive entertainment and mobile game company Scopely. The studios were acquired by Disney in 2019 as a part of its $71.3 billion […]
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Jan 22, 2020
"Dear Sophie" is a collaborative forum hosted by Extra Crunch and curated by Sophie Alcorn, who is certified as a specialist attorney in immigration and nationality law.
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Jan 22, 2020
Eight years ago, Two Sigma Investments began an experiment in early stage investing. The hedge fund, focused on data-driven quantitative investing, was well on its way to amassing the $60 billion in assets under management that it currently holds, but wanted more exposure to early stage technology companies, so it created a venture capital arm, […]
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Jan 22, 2020
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch's roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you'd like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. UN calls for investigation after Saudis linked to Bezos phone hack United Nations experts are calling for an investigation after a […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we're adding a few names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club. The new entrants come after we kicked off 2020 with a previous four new members. So far in January, we've […]
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Jan 22, 2020
We are continuing our discussion of Ted Chiang's Exhalations. Today (and one day late thanks to the MLK holiday), I give some thoughts on the first short story of the collection, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" and kick off the discussion for the second short story of the collection, the eponymous "Exhalation." Previous editions […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Back in August, we flagged a filing for you that we'd found interesting, one for a now 2.5-year-old, 40-person Redwood City, Calif.,-based startup called Bear Robotics that's been developing robots to deliver food to restaurant customers. The filing listed a $35.8 million target; Bear Robotics founder and CEO John Ha now tells us the final […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Reuters reported yesterday, citing six sources familiar with the matter, that the FBI pressured Apple into dropping a feature that would allow users to encrypt iPhone backups stored in Apple's cloud. The decision to abandon plans to end-to-end encrypt iCloud-stored backups was reportedly made about two years ago. The feature, if rolled out, would have […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Despite ongoing speculation and investor pressure, Netflix is still declining to adopt an advertising-based business model as a means to boost its revenue, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings confirmed on Tuesday. The company on its Q4 earnings call again shot down the idea of an ad-supported option, with Hastings explaining there's no "easy money" in an […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Farming is one of the oldest professions, but today those amber waves of grain (and soy) are a test bed for sophisticated robotic solutions to problems farmers have had for millennia. Learn about the cutting edge (sometimes literally) of agricultural robots at TC Sessions: Robotics AI on March 3 with the founders of Traptic, Pyka, and […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Amazon Music, the streaming music service from the e-commerce and cloud giant that competes against the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, announced a milestone in its growth today: it has passed 55 million customers across the six different pricing tiers that it offers for the service, ranging from $15 per month through to a […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Amazon Music, the streaming music service from the e-commerce and cloud giant that competes against the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, announced a milestone in its growth today: it has passed 55 million customers across the six different pricing tiers that it offers for the service, ranging from $15 per month through to a […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Substack announced today that it has built support for multiple authors into its service. The company provides a publishing tool that blends blogs and email newsletters into a single entity, with a focus on subscription monetization. The day's updates also include a number of publisher-friendly tools, like shared access and homepage features closer to those […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Front is raising a $59 million Series C funding round. Interestingly, the startup hasn't raised with a traditional VC firm leading the round. A handful of super business angels are investing directly in the productivity startup and leading the round. Business angels include Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian President Jay Simons, Okta co-founder […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Electric scooter operator Skip is gearing up to appeal San Francisco's decision to deny the company a permit to operate in the city. When the Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced the permit grantees in September, it came as a surprise to Skip, which had previously received a permit to operate as part of the city's […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Advances in biology, biochemistry, sensors and automation have the potential to reshape the ways manufacturing in America is done and a relatively new firm called Anzu Partners has just raised $190 million to invest in companies turning these scientific achievements into new products and services. Far from Silicon Valley, Anzu is investing in technology companies […]
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Jan 22, 2020
In October, Google debuted experimental apps focused on digital wellbeing, including one that offered a notification mailbox, another that tracked how long you went between phone unlocks, and even one that let you print out the information you needed from your phone for the day so you wouldn't have to use it, to name a […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Small Door, a veterinary services membership startup, today announced the grand opening of its NYC location at 15 Seventh Ave. Small Door soft-launched the space in November of 2019. The vet startup first came onto the scene in April of 2019 with a $3.5 million seed round led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from […]
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Jan 22, 2020
United Nations experts are calling for an investigation after a forensic report said Saudi officials "most likely" used a mobile hacking tool built by the NSO Group to hack into the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' phone. Remarks made by U.N. human rights experts on Wednesday said said the Israeli spyware maker's flagship Pegasus mobile spyware […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Fortnite, one of the world's most popular games, will now be an official high school sport and college sport thanks to an LA-based startup called PlayVS . The company has partnered with Epic Games to bring competitive league play to the collegiate and high school level. This also marks PlayVS's entry into colleges and universities. PlayVS […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Tesla reportedly reached a settlement with the State of Michigan regarding the sales and service of its vehicles. According to the AP, this settlement would end the automakers lawsuit against the state, which barred Tesla and others from selling vehicles directly to consumers. This would lead to consumers being able to purchase, take delivery, and […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Lately, the venture community's relationship with advertising tech has been a rocky one. Advertising is no longer the venture oasis it was in the past, with the flow of VC dollars in the space dropping dramatically in recent years. According to data from Crunchbase, adtech deal flow has fallen at a roughly 10% compounded annual […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Boeing has signed a new agreement with Israel-based Tactical Robotics, an exploratory deal that will see the two companies work together jointly on "developing, producing and marketing" aircraft with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities based on Tactical Robotics' ‘Fancraft' enclosed rotor technology. Already, the Urban Areonautics-owned Tactical Robotics has developed ‘Cormorant,' an autonomous flying […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Octi has created a new social network that uses augmented reality to connect the act of seeing your friends in real life with viewing digital content like their favorite YouTube videos and Spotify songs. When I wrote about the startup in 2018, it was building AR technology that could do a better job of recognizing […]
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Jan 22, 2020
TriggerMesh, a startup building on top of the open source Kubernetes software to help enterprises go "serverless" across apps running in the cloud and traditional data centers, has raised $3 million in seed funding. The round is led Index Ventures and Crane Venture Partners. TriggerMesh says the investment will be used to scale the company […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Descartes Labs, a well-funded startup based in New Mexico, provides businesses with geospatial data and the tools to analyze it in order to make business decisions. Today, the company announced the launch of its Descartes Labs Platform, which promises to bring its data together with all of the tools data scientists — including those with […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Octarine, a startup that helps automate security of Kubernetes workloads, released an open source scanning tool today. The tool, which is called Kube -scan, is designed to help developers understand the level of security risk in their Kubernetes clusters. The company is also open sourcing a second tool called The Kubernetes Common Configuration Scoring System […]
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Jan 22, 2020
ServiceNow announced today that it has acquired Loom Systems, an Israeli startup that specializes in AIOps. The companies did not reveal the purchase price. IT operations collects tons of data across a number of monitoring and logging tools, way too much for any team of humans to keep up with. That's why there are startups […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Thundra, an early stage serverless tooling startup, announced a $4 million Series A today led by Battery Ventures. The company spun out from OpsGenie after it was sold to Atlassian for $295 million in 2018. York IE, Scale X Ventures and Opsgenie founder Berkay Mollamustafaoglu also participated in the round. Battery's Neeraj Agarwal is joining […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Placer.ai, a startup that analyzes location and foot traffic analytics for retailers and other businesses, announced today that it has closed a $12 million Series A. The round was led by JBV Capital, with participation from investors including Aleph, Reciprocal Ventures and OCA Ventures. The funding will be used on research and development of new […]
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Jan 22, 2020
The UK's data protection watchdog has today published a set of design standards for Internet services which are intended to help protect the privacy of children online. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has been working on the Age Appropriate Design Code since the 2018 update of domestic data protection law — as part of a […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Tencent, one of the world's biggest video and online gaming companies by revenue, today made another move to help cement that position. The Chinese firm has made an offer to fully acquire Funcom, the games developer behind Conan Exiles (and others in the Conan franchise), Dune and some 28 other titles. The deal, when approved, […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Smart speaker manufacturer Sonos has announced that the company is going to drop support for some of its products. Sonos stopped selling these devices a few years ago. While nothing lasts forever, dropping support is going to have a lot of implications and shows once again that the connected home isn't as future-proof as expected. […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Blossom Capital, the early-stage VC firm co-founded by ex-Index Ventures and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown, is announcing a second fund, less than 12 months since fund one was closed. The new fund, which is described as "heavily oversubscribed," sits at $185 million. That's up from $85 million first time around. Blossom's remit remains broadly the […]
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Jan 22, 2020
Nigerian digital payments startup Paga has acquired Apposit, a software development company based in Ethiopia, for an undisclosed amount. That's just part of Paga's news. The Lagos based startup will also launch its payment products in Mexico this year and in Ethiopia imminently, CEO Tayo Oviosu told TechCrunch The moves come a little over a year […]
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Jan 22, 2020
LumApps, the cloud-based social intranet for the enterprise, has closed $70 million in Series C funding. Leading the round is Goldman Sachs Growth, with participation from Bpifrance via its Growth Fund Large Venture. Others participating include Idinvest Partners, Iris Capital, and Famille C (the family office of Courtin-Clarins). The round brings the total raised by […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Cruise unveiled Tuesday evening a "production ready" driverless vehicle called Origin, the product of a multi-year collaboration with parent company GM and investor Honda that is designed for a ride-sharing service. The shuttle-like vehicle — branded with Cruise's trademark orange and black colors — has no steering wheel or pedals and is designed to travel […]
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Jan 21, 2020
It's hard to put a positive spin on terrible situation, but that didn't stop Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon earlier today. Asked during a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos about WeWork's yanked IPO in September, Solomon suggested it was proof that the listing process works, despite that the CFO of Goldman — […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Seattle's Female Founders Alliance, which runs the Ready Set Raise accelerator for women and non-binary founders, has acquired New York's Monarq, an incubator with similar goals and origins. The latter will be integrated into the former, but it seems to be a happy collaboration rather than a consolidation of necessity.
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Jan 21, 2020
Publishers hate ad blockers, but millions of internet users embrace them — and many browsers even bake it in as a feature, including Google's own Chrome. At the same time, growing numbers of publishers are walling off free content for visitors who hard-block ads, even asking users directly to be whitelisted. It's a fight for […]
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Jan 21, 2020
New Delhi is inching closer to recommending regulations that would require social media companies and instant messaging app providers operating in the nation to help law enforcement agencies identify users who have posted content — or sent messages — it deems questionable, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. India will submit the suggested […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Netflix grew by 8.8 million net subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to its latest earning report, putting its growth well ahead of its forecast of 7.6 million. The company says it has 167 million paid memberships worldwide, with more than 100 million outside the United States. It also reported stronger-than-expected financials, with […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Ten months ago, Cruise declared it would hire at least 1,000 engineers by the end of the year, an aggressive target — even for a company with a $7.25 billion war chest — in the cutthroat autonomous vehicle industry, where startups, automakers and tech giants are battling over talent. What Cruise didn't talk about then […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Shyft is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding to make the moving process less painful — specifically in the situations where your employer is paying for the move. There other startups are looking to offer concierge-type services for regular moving — I used a service called Moved last year and […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Spotify is testing a new Stories feature that will allow select influencers to incorporate video elements into their public playlists, TechCrunch has learned and Spotify confirmed. The first influencer to test the feature is makeup and fashion YouTube star Summer Mckeen, who currently has a social media fan base that includes 2.33 million YouTube subscribers, […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Phones were not the centerpiece at the recently wrapped Consumer Electronics Show; I'll probably repeat this point a few more times over the course of this piece, just so we're clear. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that Mobile World Congress has mostly usurped that role. There are always a smattering […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Apple has scored more big names for its newly launched streaming service, Apple TV , including "Veep" and "Seinfeld" star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as well as Meryl Streep, the latter who's attached to an animated short film about Earth Day, set to premiere on April 17. In addition, Apple has now announced several new series for Apple […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Google's strategy for bringing new customers to its cloud is to focus on the enterprise and specific verticals like healthcare, energy, financial service and retail, among others. It's healthcare efforts recently experienced a bit of a setback, with Epic now telling its customers that it is not moving forward with its plans to support Google […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we're taking a moment to discuss the amount of money going into startups building OKR software. After covering WorkBoard's recent round, I've noticed OKR software and services everywhere, even in Twitter ads that I […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Losing access to Google software and services understandably threw Huawei for a loop. The Chinese hardware giant has clearly been working on a contingency plan to deal with the loss of access to things like Android and the Play Store, but Google's offering formed so much of the devices' software core — as they do […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, today announced the launch of Anbox Cloud, a new platform that allows enterprises to run Android in the cloud. On Anbox Cloud, Android becomes the guest operating system that runs containerized applications. This opens up a range of use cases, ranging from bespoke enterprise app to […]
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Jan 21, 2020
I'm still going through some of the comments I received on last week's articles about the heightened competition among VCs for the best (typically SaaS) venture deals. Some more notes on whether large funds investing in small rounds causes VC signaling risk in a moment, but first, a fun anecdote about how lame LPs (still) […]
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Jan 21, 2020
I'm still going through some of the comments I received on last week's articles about the heightened competition among VCs for the best (typically SaaS) venture deals. Some more notes on whether large funds investing in small rounds causes VC signaling risk in a moment, but first, a fun anecdote about how lame LPs (still) […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Last year, Tim Cook-backed shower startup Nebia announced it had raised a Series A led by the faucet-maker Moen, this year, we're seeing the fruits of the exclusive partnership, the startup's third-generation shower head. The product, called Nebia by Moen, is launching on Kickstarter for $199 and will retail for $269 for the shower head […]
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Jan 21, 2020
One of the big questions I got around the time the Apple Card launched was whether you'd be able to download a file of your transactions to either work with manually or import into a piece of expenses management software. The answer, at the time, was no. Now Apple is announcing that Apple Card users […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Training an artificial intelligence agent to do something like navigate a complex 3D world is computationally expensive and time-consuming. In order to better create these potentially useful systems, Facebook engineers derived huge efficiency benefits from, essentially, leaving the slowest of the pack behind. It's part of the company's new focus on "embodied AI," meaning machine […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Finding the right product/market fit is challenging for any company, but it's just a little harder for hardware startups. I recently visited the San Francisco offices of Nebia to chat with co-founder and CEO Philip Winter, whose eco-friendly hardware startup has received funding from Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Fitbit […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Party on, startuppers. We've just printed up a fresh batch of tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7. If you haven't snagged yours yet, don't wait, because tickets to this event fly off the proverbial shelf. Buy your ticket right now. Our annual winter soiree features 1,000 of Silicon […]
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Jan 21, 2020
In recent years, the retail category has become one of the biggest and best-funded robotics categories — particularly when coupled with connected verticals like warehouse fulfillment and logistics. Berkshire Grey has flown mostly under the under the radar, but is kicking 2020 off with some pretty sizable funding news. The Massachusetts-based company just announced a […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Supersonic aviation startup Boom is making progress on its XB-1 demonstrator aircraft, the airplane that will prove out its tech and pave the way for construction of its future production commercial supersonic passenger jets. The Denver-based startup has partnered with Flight Research, Inc., a company that specializes in flight testing and certification, as well as […]
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Jan 21, 2020
This week, on my way to check out a little ride debuting at Disneyland in California, I stopped by Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank to check out "Myth: A Frozen Tale." Myth is a new VR experience created by a team working at the studio that debuted with the movie but has not yet […]
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Jan 21, 2020
Roku announced this morning it's expanding into Brazil, a sizable market that could have a notable impact on the streaming device maker's advertising business. The company last summer was said to be considering a Brazil expansion, at a time when more than 90% of its advertising business's revenue came from the U.S. Since then, Roku […]
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