This afternoon, Norwest Venture Partners announced that it led a massive $210 million Series D investment round in OpenDoor. With the new capital, the startup is looking to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project… Read More
Millions of people suffer from strokes every year worldwide, and severe ones can require long-term care — but as with other rehabilitation regimens, it can be hard for doctors to track the everyday activities of their patients. A high-tech suit created by a Dutch grad student may be a powerful new way to help keep better tabs on those in recovery. Read More
Tesla has won the right to open and operate its own dealership in Virginia, after the state Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner reversed a ruling from September denying it a license. In his decision, the commissioner cited overwhelming public support, as well as unique sales and service requirements as reasons for his finding that “no dealer independent of Tesla” in… Read More
Slowly but surely the Moto Z is getting an ecosystem. The promising handset launched with some solid specs and a handful of add-ons that made it the most fully formed modular handset to date — which, granted, isn’t saying a whole heck of a lot. And Motorola’s been working to add to those offerings by opening up its Mods to developers and even launching a handful of… Read More
Game tech startup Skillz today launched a service that allows brands to easily sponsor and host mobile e-sports tournaments for any game titles that they like, as long as they are already part of the Skillz platform. As we’ve previously reported, Skillz enables developers to turn mobile games into tournament-playable titles without writing a ton of new code. Its technology operates as a… Read More
A fabulous piece of photographic history just sold at auction for $406,000, more than twice the estimated haul. This Nikon One was the third production camera — as in the third actual camera it built — from the now-famous company, and it’s the oldest one known to still be around today. Read More
Are you upset your team isn’t playing in a championship game this weekend and need a reason to watch? Well here’s a reason to watch at least one game on Saturday: Referees will wear hats with built-in GoPros during this weekend’s NCAA Football Big Ten Championship Game between Penn State and Wisconsin. The project is part of a deal between FOX Sports Lab and GoPro to offer… Read More
If you use iCal and have noticed a weird, sudden influx of calendar invites suggesting you buy bootleg purse knockoffs… you’re not alone.
Just before Black Friday, spammers started tapping a relatively new technique: sending spam as event invites to iCloud email addresses, rather than sending standard emails. By default, iCloud processes these and tries to add them to your… Read More
Online anonymity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can give people a voice when they’d otherwise be afraid to speak up — whether that’s because of fear of government surveillance, discussing a topic that’s known to provoke cyberbullying or because the topic itself is sensitive — like a personal confession or health issue. But anonymity also… Read More
Founder Collective, the seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based seed-stage venture fund, has closed its third fund with $75 million in capital from a small group of limited partners whose anchor investors are the the firm’s three partners: David Frankel, Micah Rosenbloom and Eric Paley. “Unlike most funds, the partners are, in fact, the single-largest investor in [our new fund]. So… Read More
We’ve got machine learning systems captioning images, synthesizing speech and translating between languages, but it seems we’ve been neglecting their cultural development. Would you believe the future rulers of this planet are largely ignorant of classical music? A new project looks to change that with a data set of pieces from great composers, annotated so the computers can… Read More
Big tech companies have been creating accelerators left and right to evangelize their brands and get developers engaged with APIs and other open-source efforts. Today, Amazon joined the crowd by announcing a new program for startups developing conversational AI. This is Amazon’s first foray into the world of accelerator programs, though its $100 million Alexa Fund has already invested… Read More
At $720, Version 1.0 of Nike’s HyperAdapt self-tying shoes are for sneakerheads. They’re flashy and pricey, and while Nike isn’t revealing exact numbers, it’s clear that they’re an extremely limited edition. But one thing they’re not, according to Tiffany Beers, is a gimmick.
The Nike senior innovator has been working on the project for more than a decade now. Read More
Cloud storage company Box reported third-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations with a record $102.8 million in revenue, a 31 percent increase year-over-year and above predictions of $100.64 million. Adjusted earnings per share showed a loss of 14 cents, better than the negative 19 cents that analysts were forecasting and a 17-cent improvement from… Read More
Amazon’s popular Snowball storage container got a major update today at the company’s re:invent conference. Though largely overshadowed by the new batshit crazy AWS Snowmobile, the aforementioned Snowball will be getting a storage increase to 100 terabytes in addition to computing functionality. Users of the new Snowball Edge will be able to perform basic analysis on their data… Read More
Reddit will start issuing warnings, timeouts and permanent bans to its most abusive trolls, but will also limit the content manipulation capabilities of its own CEO after he apologized today for ethical violations that shook the trust of the online community.
Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by the handle Spez, secretly edited users’ comments in the pro-Trump subreddit… Read More
Amazon today announced the launch of AWS Greengrass, a new service that will be built into IoT devices to bring them better and smarter compute capabilities.
As AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted in today’s keynote at Amazon’s re:Invent developer conference, Amazon expects that the majority of on-premises hardware will soon be IoT devices as enterprises move their servers into the cloud. Read More
Robotic arms seem like they belong in Sci-Fi movies, car factories and the dreams of DIY nerds. Dobot wants to change that, with a shiny new Kickstarter campaign bringing entry-level robotics to the desktop. The robot is extendable and can be equipped to deal with any number of tasks, including cutting, moving, printing, picking-upping, soldering and a ton of other -ings. Dobot M1 costs $1,399. Read More
Rick Schwartz has produced some great, successful movies, including The Departed, Black Swan and Gangs of New York. But with Jerrick Media Holdings (founded with former Wall Street executive Jeremy Frommer), he’s shifting his focus to the online world. Schwartz explained the move by saying he’d “noticed that it was harder and harder to get people to go into theaters… Read More
The White House announced today new and expanded plans to improve diversity and inclusion within the startup economy, focused on higher education, investment and entrepreneurship. The diversity commitments made by schools, venture capital firms and tech companies represent a passing of the torch from the Obama administration to the private sector, which has been asked to take on the challenge… Read More
