According to numerous reports, U.S. authorities today alerted a number of Middle Eastern and African airlines that starting soon, their passengers will have to check any electronic items larger than a cell phone. That means passengers on these flights will have to put their laptops, tablets, Kindles and portable game consoles into their checked baggage. Read More
While Foursquare started as a social check-in app, the company has always said there is a bigger picture — mainly related to unique ways of leveraging its database of check-ins at nearly 100 million public places. Today the company is announcing Foursquare Analytics, a foot-traffic dashboard for brands and retailers. Read More
A Congressional committee is grilling FBI director James Comey and NSA chief Admiral Mike Rogers on a Russian-led cyber campaign to influence the 2016 election, but representatives’ questions have veered from political hacking into debates about prosecuting journalists for publishing leaked documents and, of course, questions about President Trump’s Twitter habits. Read More
Google Maps has just added a handy feature that will help users remember where they parked. This appears as a new menu option when you tap the blue dot, and will place a “P” icon on the map so you can find your way back to your spot. While remembering your parking location is something Apple Maps has done since the launch of iOS 10, Google’s implementation is a bit more… Read More
One of the unique things about Instagram Live is that the videos have always disappeared. After your live stream is over the content is deleted forever — unlike Facebook Live or Periscope, which save your video so audiences can view it after the fact. Until now. Read More
Marty Pichinson and the firm he co-founded specialize in selling off the assets of startups when they fail. He’s been given every kind of death-related moniker as a result, from the Terminator to the Undertaker. Pichinson doesn’t mind any of them, as long as they help keep Sherwood at the top of its game. We chatted with Pichinson to ask what he’s seeing in the current market. Read More
Like all good games, Kendama is easy-ish to learn and frustrating as all ever-loving £%&*@£^% to master. What’s a poor entrepreneur to do when a game hasn’t changed for 400 years? Rename it Dendama, add a boat-load of electronics, invent a slew of multiplayer games and launch a Kickstarter campaign, of course. Read More
There are still a lot of unknowns in the medical world when it comes to pregnancy — including which factors lead to carrying a healthy fetus to term. WebMD and Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) have launched a new investigative study and are teaming up with Apple’s ResearchKit to recruit participants to look at what contributes to a healthy pregnancy. Read More
Entrepreneurs, investors, press and other tech enthusiasts are flocking to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View later today to take part in yet another Y Combinator Demo Day. Diversity hasn’t always been a priority at YC, but its president Sam Altman has been relatively vocal about diversity and the accelerator’s push to increase it in recent years. In YC’s Winter… Read More
The iMessage App Store may have its struggles, but one app aimed at bringing group video chat into the iMessage experience is reportedly taking off. Smack, the company behind the video chat app called Fam, has raised $1.8 million in funding for its Top 25 Social Networking app on the App Store that allows groups to chat with one another via iMessage with just a few taps. Read More
SirionLabs, a startup providing vendor management software to enterprises, is adding a U.S. headquarters to its footprint. The company was initially founded in India and has raised $16.95 million from Sequoia Capital India, Canopy Ventures and Qualgro VC to extract data from contracts to ensure transparency and accountability. The establishment of a U.S. presence represents a strategic… Read More
Mass Effect is a video game series that attracts ardent fans and invokes emotional reactions from those fans via its storytelling decisions. The franchise builds on the legacy BioWare built with its stewardship of the Star Wars universe with the Knights of the Old Republic, but offers truly unique science-fiction storytelling in expansive action RPG games. Read More
French startup Akeneo just raised a $13 million Series B round led by Partech Ventures, with existing investor Alven Capital also participating. Akeneo is a product information management (PIM) service to manage all information about your products in your stores, online and in your good-old paper catalogs. Read More
Today in a hearing with the House Select Intelligence Committee, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that his agency is in fact investigating ties between Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Trump campaign. Read More
MakerBot’s MinFill arrived quietly last night as a firmware upgrade for existing customers, and the company is already calling it a “big benchmark in speed and widespread adoption of 3D printing.” Many are understandably a bit cautious around such grandiose proclamations, particularly when it comes to something as unabashedly unsexy as infill. Read More
Phil Gilbert is the GM and head of design at IBM, leading an organization of over 1,300 designers. In this episode, he discusses creating IBM’s proprietary design thinking methodology, their own design school for new graduates, and what he’s going to do with the $100 million that IBM has entrusted to him to bring design back to its roots. Read More
In response to the growing threat of Amazon and its annual Prime membership program, eBay announced a new program that will offer online shoppers guaranteed three-day delivery on 20 million eligible products — “millions” of which that will also include free shipping. “Guaranteed Delivery” will roll out in the U.S. starting this summer. Read More
I’ll be in Boulder for a few weeks and would love to hear some pitches and maybe give out some tables for Disrupt. I’ll be holding a micro-meetup at Boomtown on Broadway in Boulder, Colorado on Wednesday, March 29th at 7pm. Read More
SpaceX is already thinking about when its spacecraft will first touch down on the surface of Mars — either good planning or wishful thinking, depending on your perspective — working with NASA to ID and examine potential landing spots on the red planet. Read More
