Latin America just might be the most overlooked emerging market on the planet. The venture dollars in Latin America can’t hold a candle to India or China (compare China’s $11.8 billion in new VC funds for the first half of 2016, down 14 percent according the WSJ, to Latin America’s $218 million), and the region’s 600 million inhabitants get overlooked by investors who… Read More
Probably not the kind of thing Samsung was hoping it would be dealing with in the wake of a massive Galaxy Note 7 recall, but here we are. And here’s the statement from the company’s media relations wing: It is important to note that Samsung customers have completed hundreds of millions of loads without incident since 2011. That message comes after the U.S. Consumer Product… Read More
The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook,… Read More
Papa John’s has a catchy motto: “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” This analogy works in technology, as well. As better ingredient technologies arrive on the scene, they open the door for new, iconic companies to be formed that meet our needs in fundamentally better ways. Read More
Facebook couldn’t fit all the developers for its F8 conference into San Francisco’s Fort Mason any more, so F8 will take place at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center on April 18th and 19th, 2017.
Registration hasn’t started yet but will follow the same rules as last year, which you’ll want to follow if you’re trying to get a seat as it always sells out quickly. Read More
Google today announced an expansion of its home delivery shopping service Google Express, which is now available across a large part of the East Coast. The service lets online shoppers order consumer products like electronics, clothing, health and beauty items, home décor and even dry good groceries, from either the web or a dedicated mobile app. With the expansion, Google Express will… Read More
Aetna just threw in with Apple in a big way. The healthcare provider announced a number of different iOS-only apps aimed at quantifying wellness and streamlining the healthcare management process that are set to arrive early next year. It’s also investing a ton in the Apple Watch, providing the wearable for all of its 50,000 or so employees (who are, naturally, enrolled in its own… Read More
Skymind, a company developing an open-source deep-learning library for Java, along with tools for implementation, today closed $3 million in financing from Tencent, SV Angel, GreatPoint Ventures, Mandra Capital and Y Combinator. Skymind was previously part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and has taken money from Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and a number of other… Read More
Humans are pretty good at ballparking distances, even with one eye closed — but it turns out computer vision systems have a hard time with it. Researchers hope to fix that, or at least make robots a little more robust, by teaching them to navigate a space without the benefit of stereo vision — in zero gravity, to boot. Read More
For those of you unawares, the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator, like other accelerators, is a program that provides participating start-ups exposure to potential investors. Read More
My first home-way-from-home was a room in a house with an unrepeatable nickname on West College St. in Oberlin, OH. I lived with 8 other people in a two-story, rambling warren filled with rooms and roomlets that had been created over the years to shelter increasing numbers of people in the same finite amount of space. While increasing numbers of college students are choosing the manicured… Read More
Meetup is giving users a new way to find the meetups that give the company its name. The New York City-based company is launching new smartphone apps and a (partially) redesigned website with new branding, as well as a new way to browse meetup listings. “We killed the calendar,” CEO and co-founder Scott Heiferman said. Instead, Meetup will recommend listings for you based on your… Read More
It’s definitely not the sexiest platform play in tech town but b2b startup Paddle thinks it’s found an underserved niche — selling a SaaS ecommerce service to scaling SaaS startups seeking to offload the headache of administering international sales so they can focus on building core product. Read More
Last year, privately held online lenders like Prosper, SoFi and Avant looked all but certain to go public at same unicorn valuations their venture investors had assigned them, if not higher. It seemed their apt reward for reshaping the student, consumer and small business lending business. Fast forward today and the picture is much changed. While the market that online lending companies… Read More
Why pay for air conditioning when you can just build a data center near the Arctic Circle and pump in the frosty winds? That’s why Facebook created these massive fans for its Luleå, Sweden data center. In hopes of proving that Facebook’s 10-year plan goes way beyond the News Feed, Mark Zuckerberg has begun sharing rare photos of the company’s technology. Here’s his… Read More
Nvidia’s work in reinventing itself as a leader in automated-car technology continues with the launch of a new system-on-a-chip, called Xavier and launched today at the GPU Technology Conference Europe. The Xavier SoC manages 20 trillion operations per second, while only using 20 watts of power. Xavier is designed to be used as an AI brain for use in self-driving cars specifically,… Read More
It’s a foregone conclusion that in the near future everything will be captured on camera. Unveiled at SXSW four years back, the Narrative Clip was part of a small contingent of hardware solutions that really leaned into the notion. The square device was designed to sit on the wearer’s lapel, taking photos at 30 second intervals, regardless of subject matter or focus. I tried the… Read More
There are multiple approaches to tackling self-driving; one is to program algorithms or rules that will tell a car how to behave in specific situations. Nvidia is using a deep learning approach, however, by providing its autonomous system with real-world data from humans drivers and letting it learn how to drive on its own – like a supercharged, AI-powered teenager getting behind the… Read More
We’ve long extolled the virtues of Moore’s Law in terms of delivering faster, better processors to power our individual computers, but Kuffner says that the rapid, continuous evolution of wireless broadband internet speeds is just as crucial to a future in which robotics help solve everyday problems. Kuffner is delivering the opening keynote for San Jose’s RoboBusiness… Read More
Finally, finally, Twitter has rolled out a version of its storytelling feature called Moments that it should have released at launch. Today, the company says that it’s opening up the Moments platform so anyone can create their own stories using tweets and photos uploaded to the service. We already knew this day was coming: in August, Twitter expanded access to Moments to also include… Read More
