Accompany, an app that Amy Chang bets will be able to replace the chief-of-staff or personal assistant of an executive, launched just a few months ago. The app had been in the works for a while, and now that it’s finally out the door, it’s time to step on the gas — so it’s launching in the U.K. in a beta. Chang’s bet is that there’s a slot for an app that… Read More
E-commerce company Shopify is doubling down on its mobile product ambitions with today’s acquisition of digital product studio Tiny Hearts. The studio has released a number of mobile apps, games and bots over the past several years, including popular consumer-facing apps like Quick Fit, Next Keyboard, InstaMatch, and Wake Alarm. Prior to the deal, the team had also worked with… Read More
While this year undeniably saw the entrance of quite a few major hardware initiatives from the major players (Google, Oculus, HTC, Samsung and Sony to name a few), 2016 still had quite a tough time grappling with some of the virtual reality industry’s most burning questions.
Making VR cheaper and making sure it works on a device you already own have been a couple of those issues. Read More
Drones are fairly off-the-shelf affairs for most people; there’s a wide range of companies making them for both commercial and consumer uses, but ultimately these are all remarkably similar. They tend to favor a quadcopter structure, and are often configured with photography in mind as a primary use. But MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab has come up with a… Read More
The straight-forwardly named “Just Walk Out” technology ought to give you a pretty good idea of what Amazon Go is all about. Launching in beta this year to Amazon employees at a single 1,800 square foot location in its native Seattle, Go is a “new kind of store with no checkout required.” Customers use the Go app to enter the store, and once inside, some combination… Read More
Seeds unveiled its drag-and-drop SDK for developers to integrate social good contributions directly into their apps today at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016. Seeds also announced a partnership with Amazon app store, in which Amazon markets Seeds directly to its roughly 600,000 app developers. The idea is that people are incentivized to spend money inside an app if they know it’s going to… Read More
Most startups have a pitch. The team behind Iris AI has two: right now they’ve created an AI-powered science assistant that functions like a search tool, helping researchers track down relevant journal papers without having to know the right keywords for their search. But in future their big vision is their artificially intelligent baby grows up to become a scientist in her own right… Read More
With the coming destruction of Pebble and the announcement by Motorola that it doesn’t “see enough pull in the market to put [a new smartwatch] out at this time,” you would be excused for thinking the smartwatch world is contracting. This is correct, but this is not the end of for wearables. Apple sold 1.1 million Apple Watches in 2016, 73% less than it sold in 2015. The… Read More
Let’s say you’re hosting an event. Maybe it’s a marathon or a fundraiser or a concert. You want a video recapping the event, be it for promotional reasons or just for the memories. Tradition would have you hire a film crew, but film crews — or at least, film crews alone — might not always be the best answer. They tend to be pricey — and unless you get crazy… Read More
LiftIgniter is a startup that wants to banish content recommendation engines like Outbrain and Taboola, which serve up low-grade, garbage links on websites to keep users engaged, from the internet. Read More
Ride-hailing requires a lot of machine smarts to maintain a competitive edge, so it’s not surprising to see Uber make a strategic acquisition in the artificial intelligence space. The company has acquired Geometric Intelligence, a startup co-founded by academic researchers with AI experience, and its team will provide the core for a new central AI lab being established at Uber’s… Read More
The home WiFi network extender space sure got real crowded, real fast. Startups Eero and Luma have been battling it out for some time before Google elbowed its way in, earlier this fall. All of the devices offer different somewhat different solutions to the problem of spotty home wireless networks. Like those offerings, Plume takes a similar approach of arriving solo on in a bundle, so users… Read More
While UK tech founders continue to try to second guess what ‘Brexit means Brexit’ actually means for the future of immigration and access to talent, the UK’s digital minister, Matt Hancock, has confirmed it will not mean a clone of the Australian points-based immigration system – despite politicians frequently citing this system as a possible model for the UK to… Read More
When you are watching the live video stream of a football game or any major event online, chances are that the stream usually isn’t really as “live” as you’d like it to be. Instead, it’s often a minute or more behind what’s happening in the real world because all of the tech that’s needed to transmit the signal to thousands (and sometimes millions)… Read More
Operating a service delivering food to both consumers and hotel chains and restaurants, Foodstantly is hoping to make the process of shopping for food more transparent and safer for all Nigerians (and ultimately across Africa). Read More
CES is still a full month away , but consumer security startup Blink is getting a jump on things with the announcement of a new outdoor camera designed to slot into the company’s home surveillance ecosystem. The Blink XT will be making its in-person debut at CES in January and will start shipping the following month, but company’s offering up pretty much all you need to know about… Read More
With Trusted Contacts, Google is launching a new personal safety app for Android today that allows others to ping you for your location when they think you may have been in an accident or in danger. The idea here is that you define who these trusted contacts are and by doing so, you allow them to see where you are when they ping you. The twist here is that you can always decline to share… Read More
When Leap Motion debuted in 2010, it felt like a technology in search of a platform. The startup demoed some truly impressive motion tracking technology as a means of interacting with two-dimensional computer interface. “We always thought of the PC as the first touch point on a journey that would be about five or six years,” explains cofounder, Michael Buckwald. The startup managed… Read More
Flying to London? You could spend three days in Amsterdam on the way for free or cheap. That’s the promise of AirWander, a new flight search engine for the adventurous. AirWander finds you inexpensive stopovers — essentially multi-day layovers when you can explore a connecting city between other flights. It can also help you plan multi-city excursions, stringing several flights… Read More
In what amounts to a very clever brute force attack, a group of researchers has figured out how to find credit card information – including expiration dates and CVV numbers – by querying ecommerce sites. The process, which was outlined in IEEE Security & Privacy, involves guessing and testing hundreds of permutations of expiration dates and CVV numbers on hundreds of… Read More
