A startup called Primo Toys today began online and retail sales of its latest educational product, the Cubetto, a programmable wooden robot for kids as young as 3. The London startup, which is a graduate of the PCH Highway 1 accelerator and backed by Randi Zuckerberg, promises families and educators a screen-free way to teach coding basics to kids who can’t yet read or write. Retailing… Read More
Paktor, a Tinder-like app for dating from Singapore, has raised $32.5 million in new funding as it aims to diversify into new kinds of mobile entertainment. Read More
Imagine a world where you buy mobile phone, data, voice and television services from a single provider. A world where you don’t worry about running out of wireless minutes, exceeding text message limits or running up roaming charges. A world where you talk, text and stream video on an iPad, TV, laptop or mobile phone, seamlessly using the same user interface and applications across… Read More
If you live in a building with a doorman, you don’t need Doorman. If you don’t, you do. The company is making it easy to accept deliveries when you’re out and about, but realized it was getting so successful in changing the patterns of how its customers do online shopping, that it was effectively losing money on each customer. Read More
On October 28, Tesla unveiled its new solar roof tiles. Few of us in attendance, if any, realized the solar roofing tiles were actual functional solar panels until Elon Musk said so. Sure, it’s a neat trick, but what’s the big deal? Read More
Nitrous.io, an online development environment and IDE, today announced that it is shutting down its service on November 14. The service is now closed for new signups and the team says it will refund any payments made after October 16. Nitrous’ existing users will be able to download their existing data soon. The team says that it will also soon release an open-source version of its… Read More
Apple dropped the first beta for iOS 10.2 today. And it comes with the latest update in emoji innovation. You may have noticed that Apple already redesigned most of the core emojis and added new gender and race options with iOS 10. But the company didn’t stop there. With iOS 10.2, Apple is adding full Unicode 9.0 support. Given that hundreds of millions of people use Apple-flavored… Read More
When President Obama turns over the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he’ll also be handing over a number of high-profile social media accounts. Eight days ahead of the election, the White House is outlining how the transfer of social power will go when the commander-in-chief steps aside early next year. The president’s Twitter account, for one, will be getting a fresh start of… Read More
Intellectual property protection is an important consideration for most startups. Obtaining intellectual property protection, such as patents, can minimize competition and act as a defensive mechanism against infringement claims from others. Intellectual property also can attract or solidify funding and partnerships. Read More
This was certainly unexpected. For any number of reasons. A day before the planned shutdown of cloud-based storage service, lifelogging startup Narrative — or, rather, a group of former employees — has snatched itself from the jaws of death. In an email sent to Narrative users, the company announced the launch of “New Narrative,” rising like the proverbial phoenix or one… Read More
A massive social media protest is exploding on Facebook, not Twitter for a change, yet Facebook’s dehumanized Trending system wasn’t picking it up. People around the country are checking in on Facebook at the Standing Rock Native American Reservation in an effort to supposedly hinder local Morton County police from targeting protesters attending in person to fight an oil… Read More
Just like Airbnb, ride-hailing startups Uber and Lyft are not immune to racial discrimination on its respective sharing economy platforms. It turns out that black people have to wait longer for rides in Seattle, according to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study, which researchers conducted in Seattle and Boston, looked at the results of nearly 1,500 rides… Read More
Big robots like Spot may be great for carrying things or trotting out onto stages, but just as much sophisticated engineering goes into creating tiny ones as well — and this little flyer from the University of Pennsylvania is one the tiniest yet. Read More
As we first reported last month, on-demand delivery app Postmates raised additional funding in a round led by Founders Fund, with participation from existing investors. The company is now confirming the total came out to $140 million, giving the Postmates above a $600 million post-money valuation. Brian Singerman from Founders Fund will be joining the board.
Despite Postmates’… Read More
Last night, after several months of relative quiet, a hacking group calling itself the Shadow Brokers posted new data purportedly stolen from the NSA. The group’s last leak in August included malware believed to be used by the NSA as recently as 2013. At the time, the Shadow Brokers claimed they would auction a second set of data including the “best files” it had stolen,… Read More
Like wildfire, the latest viral protest spreading across the internet involves Facebook users checking in at Standing Rock, ND en masse to “confuse” and “overwhelm” law enforcement authorities seeking to disrupt ongoing protests against the proposed path of an oil pipeline. The viral Facebook post claims that the local sheriff’s department in Morton County is… Read More
It’s a strange sort of legacy, but it’s the kind that’s ever present – the dreaded spinning pinwheel or beach ball or wheel of death. That bright, rainbow colored circle that pops up when an application in busy in macOS. It’s one of the most instantly recognizable of Keith Ohlfs’ many contributions to the modern operating system interface. The UX designer,… Read More
Google is currently making a concerted effort to make its Chrome browser faster and leaner. The company announced a project to bring down memory usage earlier this month, for example. But it also quietly started work on some other optimizations recently, too, that add up to making Chrome on Windows run about 15 percent faster than before. Starting with the Chrome 53 release of 64-bit… Read More
Los Angeles-based Replicated has raised $5 million to build out its service that takes software-as-a-service companies down from the “cloud”, TechCrunch has learned. The company, which operates under the somewhat contrarian belief that not all services are going to be delivered in the cloud, provides a toolkit that lets software companies offer their products on premise behind… Read More
Google today announced it’s rolling out a new detection and filtering system on the Play Store to crack down on those developers who use illegitimate means to boost their apps’ rankings in the store’s top charts. This will affect apps that use methods like fraudulent installs, fake reviews, and incentivized ratings, the company noted. While Google already had technology it… Read More
