Wealthfront has a new man in charge at the top of the company, with Andy Rachleff — the company’s co-founder and executive chairman — taking the chief executive spot, according to an announcement on the company’s own blog.
Rachleff, who is perhaps most famous for co-founder Benchmark Capital (one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture firms), launched the… Read More
Google’s new Pixel-branded smartphones have proven to be a little too popular. Already, Google stated that pre-order demands had exceeded the company’s expectations, and now the company is trying to make up for shipping delays by offering affected customers $50 Play Store credits as an apology. In emails being sent to those whose phones won’t arrive by the promised ship… Read More
Amid all its turmoil – layoffs, failed attempts at finding an acquirer, the closure of Vine – the company is still futzing around with its product in an attempt to make it easier to use. The latest odd test involves Twitter’s iOS app launching web links in Safari with the Reader mode automatically turned on.
This mode is a Safari feature which allows you to load up a… Read More
Around the world, drones have been delivering life-saving drugs and blood to clinics, and contrarily tasty treats like burritos, pizza, and Slurpees to homes or campuses. Civilian drones have also conducted countless surveys of farms, construction sites, and surveillance around venues with a high security risk. Now, in a stunt that begs to be spoofed by Mike Judge for his HBO… Read More
Fisker Inc., the new electric car company founded by Henrik Fisker (not to be confused with his previous venture, now Karma) has revealed the design and specifications of its first vehicle, the luxury sport sedan all-electric EMotion (see what they did there?). The car will boast a top speed of 161 MPH, and will have a 400 mile range from its electric battery. The body of the vehicle (which… Read More
Nike’s been getting all the glory for its self-lacing sneakers – and understandably so. You can’t really beat the built-in promotion of Back to the Future pre-product placement and world class shoe model that is Michael J. Fox. But while the MAG only just launched and the HyperAdapt system is still in the works, Puma’s been doing its thing relatively under the… Read More
Edtech giant Coursera has launched a monthly subscription payment option in the hope that learners on its platform can be enticed into ongoing educational activity, rather than a more piecemeal pay-per-course-bundle option. Read More
Microsoft today open sourced its next-gen hyperscale cloud hardware design and contributed it to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Microsoft joined the OCP, which also includes Facebook, Google, Intel, IBM, Rackspace and many other cloud vendors, back in 2014. Over the last two years, it already contributed a number of server, networking and data center designs. With this new contribution,… Read More
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel may have been trying to drum up more support for Republican candidate Donald Trump this morning at the National Press Club in Washington. But a 15-minute long speech he delivered sounded more like a plea to Americans to understand what’s so wrong with this country, rather than a case for Trump. His pitch: American is broken, and there’s nothing… Read More
Justin Kan, YC Partner, serial entrepreneur and one of the internet’s most-loved reality stars, has started another venture in the form of Whale, a video Q&A app. Whale lets users post questions and enter into a one-to-one video conversation with an influencer or expert who can offer up the perfect answer. Those videos answers are then recorded and added to a library of existing… Read More
Honda has a new AI research center, which will begin operation early next year and centralize its R&D efforts in the field. The new center will bring together Honda’s AI teams distributed across Silicon Valley, Europe and Japan in a single location in downtown Tokyo, according to Bloomberg. The consolidation is part of Honda’s plan to begin bridging AI products to market,… Read More
Giphy, the NY-based search engine and platform for GIFs, has raised $72 million in funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Institutional Venture Partners and China Media Capital. This brings Giphy’s total funding to just short of $151 million, according to Crunchbase, with a valuation reported at $600 million by the WSJ. Giphy started as part of a Hacker-in-Residence program at… Read More
Brave, the new web browser company co-founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, has launched a do-over on Android. The earlier version of the ad-blocking browser utilized an odd user interface involving floating link bubbles, which didn’t sit well with all users. The design made the experience more cumbersome and confusing, when what people really wanted was an alternative browser… Read More
Lost among all the talk streamlined ports, missing function keys and MagSafeless power, was mention of the fact that the company has also quietly ditched one of the more iconic pieces of the Apple ecosystem for the new MacBook Pro. The F-sharp chime that has greeted users on startup since 1998 is a casualty of the new laptop’s instant boot up. The change was spotted on an Apple FAQ… Read More
Volvo has little confidence that human drivers will be reliably kind and courteous to the first robot cars to hit the road: The carmaker plans to leave its first road-faring self-driving cars, a pilot group of 100 SUVs leased to users in London sometime in 2018, completely unmarked. Details of the plan come from Volvo senior technical lead Erik Coelingh, who shared the info with The… Read More
Microsoft Outlook users on mobile will now have an easier way to schedule meetings from their smartphone, with the launch of a new scheduling assistant that helps you find a time that works for everyone. The feature, which is rolling out today to the iOS version of Outlook’s mobile app, will show your coworkers’ availability so you can quickly pick a date and time when everyone… Read More
Some scientists devote themselves to curing diseases. Others are researching an end to famine or global climate change. And some spend their time making nightmare machines, deep learning algorithms that utilize Artificial Intelligence to tap into humans’ deepest and darkest fears. Like Google’s Deep Dream, only with way more dangling, bloodied flesh.
MIT teamed up with… Read More
Carmakers continue to look at the future of transportation and invest in alternatives to individual ownership: Toyota is the latest to make a bet on a mobility model espoused by a startup, with a strategic investment in SF-based car sharing provider Getaround. Toyota’s investment also comes with integration with Getaround’s platform on the technology and finance side,… Read More
Microsoft revealed that partners including Asus, Dell, Lenovo and others are going to be building VR headsets for use with the Windows 10 Creators Update, and that these would start at $299, but we don’t know much beyond that about this third party-supported push into Windows VR. Microsoft told Polygon we’ll find out more in December, however, including possibly what a ranged lineup… Read More
Samsung continues its in-house startup incubator program, called “C-Lab,” which encourages employees to build their own business and spin them out as startups on occasion. Previous C-Lab standouts include the Welt, a smart belt with health tracking features, and a new crop of six C-Lab projects includes similarly out-there concepts. This batch includes Hum On!, a music app for… Read More
