In a small meeting with journalists at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Google’s senior vice president for hardware Rick Osterloh dropped a little bit of news: It looks like the Pixel laptop — Google’s premium Chromebook and the original product bearing the Pixel name — has hit the end of the line after just two iterations. Read More
NASA released a statement in support of SpaceX following that company’s surprise announcement that it will be sending two people around the moon sometime next year. The comment actually says a lot despite not saying very much, and could be a sign that the growing private interest in space will help propel renewed and expanded achievement from the public sector, too. Read More
Google is making a significant change to how its app store, Google Play, will work in terms of making the best games more easily discoverable by end users. At the Game Developers Conference, the company announced that it recently tuned its app store algorithms to take into account user engagement, and not just downloads, in order to better reward quality titles. Read More
Data visualization has been done — there are publicly traded, interactive, real-time and, heck, even artificially intelligent companies promising data visualization. But despite all the noise, Portland-based Reflect is making a go of it in the space, opening up its public beta today. By putting developers first and letting them integrate and customize visualizations in their own… Read More
Automated savings startup Digit has long helped users squirrel away money for a rainy day. But today the company is rolling out a new feature that will make it easier to help its users save and pay their monthly bills. Read More
Ford’s new “Autolivery” van concept has a terrible name, but is actually based on interesting core ideas. The van is yet another result of Ford’s fruitful “last mile mobility” internal employee challenge, and this one pairs an electric self-driving van with autonomous drones that nest within to help transport packages that last few feet to a… Read More
Nissan is testing its self-driving vehicles on European streets for the first time, with a rollout begun Monday in London. The tests, reported by Reuters, involved modified Nissan Leaf electric vehicles equipped with a range of sensors and onboard computing power, going as fast as 50 miles per-hour, and transitioning between small local roads and larger, multi-lane thoroughfares.
London was… Read More
In what is clearly a marketing ploy from workspace rental service Breather, the company is launching a Chrome plug-in called the “Nope Button.”
The idea here, according to the company, is to help people avoid distractions in the office, even if they can’t reserve a private Breather to get some alone time. With open work spaces becoming the standard in startup offices (and… Read More
Snapchat has a reputation for being an app that’s confusing to the “olds” – something the company tried to address with a redesign just ahead of filing for its IPO. In addition, the app has expanded beyond its original use case, which focused on communication, and now includes short, easily digestible content from a number of sources, including media and… Read More
Lux Capital’s portfolio companies sound like they ripped their product concepts from the pages of science fiction. Among these are self-driving car startup Zoox, a company gathering oceanographic data from fleets of autonomously operating boats called Saildrone, Desktop Metal whose 3-D printers that can make objects out of alloys on the spot, and 3Scan, a startup that makes detailed… Read More
Hyperloop One could bring its high-speed, tube-based transportation system to India, and will make a call by the end of this year whether it’s feasible to operate in the country, based on conversations it’s begun having with the Indian government, per Bloomberg. The company was in the country at a “Vision for India” event, discussing how its transportation innovation… Read More
Pypestream is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding. When the startup launched more than a year ago, founder and CEO Richard Smullen was pitching text messaging as the best way for customers to communicate with businesses — specifically, through the Pypestream app, where businesses can create their own accounts with a variety of different “pypes”… Read More
Ford’s putting traditional TV service into its vehicles, starting with the Expedition, which gets streaming cable capabilities thanks to a partnership with Slingbox. This will pipe that hot cable into the Expedition’s headrests, letting passengers in the back get all their entertainment without interruption while on the road. Ford’s live TV streaming is just one part of… Read More
Meet Verst, a brand new product from the company that brought you DWNLD. It’s a blogging platform like WordPress or Squarespace, but will all the optimization and analytics tools you need to optimize your traffic and revenue. “It’s really difficult to consistently monetize on the web,” CEO AJ Frank told me. “Overall it’s a web publishing product that has a… Read More
Online banking service Simple today is launching a new type of banking product aimed at a younger generation of customers who want to be able to collaborate on finances with others, but aren’t in the market for traditional joint checking accounts, like those typically used by married spouses. The company’s new Shared bank accounts let customers control their own accounts from a… Read More
Starsky Robotics has already used its autonomous trucks for paying gigs, including a 5,000-lb haul covering 140 miles, with 120 of those driven by the truck itself. It’s also moved trailers around a truck yard without anyone behind the wheel, a task that’s usually a time consuming chore for someone or a team who has to get in and out of cabs. And Starsky’s tech doesn’t… Read More
his week’s Breaking Into Startups episode features Rodney Urqhart who talks about how he acquired the skills to become a Senior Engineer at Slack after he dropped out of high school at 16 years old to work at Burger King, Sears, Best Buy, Comcast, Thoughtworks, and Microsoft (Yammer). Read More
Having free games with Xbox Live Gold was one thing, but Microsoft wants to go one step further. The company is launching a new service called the Xbox Game Pass. It’s a library of more than 100 games that you can download and play for a monthly subscription of $9.99. The feature isn’t live yet, but the company already announced some names so that the company can start beta… Read More
A few minutes of short-form video here and there can really add up – YouTube’s average video length may be quite constrained, but in aggregate, viewers are watching a billion hours of its clips per day. That’s around 8.4 minutes per day per human, according to some very napkin calculations. Put in perspective like that, it’s easy to see how we’ve come to this:… Read More
When the original $5 Raspberry Pi Zero came out – to much fanfare, I might add – users connected it to all sorts of things. They made micro gaming rigs that ran on the 1GHz single-core CPU and added Pi Hats – little breakout boards – to power robots and sensors. Now you can do all that but without worrying about a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth dongle. The $10 Pi Zero W is the… Read More
