Virtual reality as it exists currently is generally an isolating experience. Plenty of VR worlds are sparsely populated, inhabited by robots, or empty. There are social platforms for VR already, but MetaWorld, an upcoming collaboration between UK-based Improbable and Berkeley-based HelloVR, will expand the horizons of social VR – expand them nearly 10,000 square miles, to be exact.… Read More
Pantheon, a WordPress and Drupal hosting service with a strong lineup of features for developers, today announced that it has raised a $29 million Series C round. Investors in this round include previous investors Foundry Group, OpenView Investment Partners, and Scale Venture Partners, as well as new investor Industry Ventures, which put $8.5 million into this round.
This new round follows… Read More
German IT services and enterprise giant SAP reported encouraging numbers for Q2 2016, beating analysts’ expectations and spiking its share price by nearly five percent in pre-market trading Wednesday as its non-IFRS EPS increased 2 percent to €0.82 ($0.90). Analysts had predicted a quarterly EPS of $0.78. The leap is owed in part to the strength of the company’s… Read More
It’s fair to say that Google-owned AI company DeepMind’s big push into the health space via data-access collaborations with the UK’s National Health Service — announced with much fanfare in February this year — has not been running entirely smoothly so far.
But there are more regulatory bumps in the road ahead for DeepMind Health. Read More
A Sesame Street partnership is a big coup for any company – let alone one that’s only existed for four years and produced two Indiegogo-backed products. But Kinsa’s line of smart thermometers clearly struck a chord with the team behind everyone’s favorite educational monsters. The hardware startup’s third official product is also the first connected device to get… Read More
Ever wonder how much you spend each month on Uber? The newly released Trim chatbot will tell you in a text. Trim also helps you manage subscriptions, set up spending alerts and check your bank balance. But there is no app, only a bot that can be linked to SMS or Facebook. “Anything that you can do on your mobile banking app, you can do with trim with the exception of moving… Read More
Versus, the Berlin-based product comparison site and engine backed by Earlybird Venture Capital, and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups (amongst others), has been acquired by Germany’s MenschDanke Group, which owns several shopping and online discount properties. Read More
As Pokemon Go moves into the real-world partner marketing business with McDonald’s, one might wonder what businesses potentially stand to gain the most from association with Niantic’s world dominating location-based collect’em game. Well, Red Robin should plan a Squirtleburger™, if data gathered by location analytics firm Placed is any indication. The company used info… Read More
Twitter has permanently suspended Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at the conservative news outlet Breitbart and one of its most notorious trolls. The expulsion of Yiannopoulos, who counted more than 300,000 followers on the service, comes just one day after he urged on a hateful mob that harassed ‘Ghostbusters’ actress Leslie Jones to the point that she quit Twitter. Jones received… Read More
You can now use Bitmoji in Snapchat, apply to be verified on Twitter, Twitter will stream two NBA shows, Pokemon Go is launching in Japan tomorrow and Google gets a record number of data requests. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Unilever creates and captures a unicorn with its plans to acquire Dollar Shave Club.
Announced this evening, the $130 billion dollar multinational consumer goods company is speculated to be paying $1 billion, all cash, for the startup, according to reports from Fortune.
If the pricing is true, the transaction will be the third largest ever in e-commerce, only beaten by zulily… Read More
Leading venture capitalists, scientists and CEOs all have the same prediction for AI: machines will take jobs away, “eat the world” and, ultimately, overthrow humanity. These histrionics have driven a widely accepted negative narrative about this technology’s potential impact on humanity. That needs to change. Bringing AI into the mainstream world should be met with hope… Read More
Etsy users had another bad week as payment processor Worldpay continues to cause problems. Late last week, some Etsy users began reporting that they had experienced duplicate charges. The forum on Etsy for duplicate charges is approaching one thousand posts. In a statement, Worldpay admitted to causing the duplicate charges for Etsy users in its attempts to rectify the problem.… Read More
If you were wondering what a mottled sculpin looks like, there are plenty of pictures available online. But while they may satisfy a curious tidepooler, the discerning ichthyologist demands more. That’s why a professor at the University of Washington is getting full 3D scans of every fish in the sea — every species, anyway. Read More
Cars are one of the top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions globally, and cars in cities can be especially heavy with their contributions, owing to traffic and population density. And while encouraging everyone to bike or use public transit probably isn’t going to convince everyone to ditch car ownership, car sharing services seem to be winning more city denizens over, and a new… Read More
Leslie Jones, the star of the new “Ghostbusters” reboot and a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” announced she was leaving Twitter after trolls bombarded her with racist comments.
“I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart,” Jones tweeted before going silent on her account, where she’d spent the last several days battling trolls. Read More
A team of physicists and electrical engineers at Facebook published a new idea for using luminescence to improve signal detection in free-space optical communication today. Facebook, in a partnership with Internet.org, has been developing drones to deliver basic internet access to remote locations around the globe. Last year, the company came out with a plan, codenamed Project Aquila, to… Read More
“They’re going to hit some challenges and marketers are gonna start to ask questions when they get out of the experimental budget phase,” Facebook’s head of adtech said about Snapchat today. While Facebook tries to collect as much data about users as possible to prove its ads work, Snapchat has tried to avoid being creepy, despite that hindering its potential… Read More
I still love books, and I still have a fair amount of trouble finding new ones to read that I’ll actually enjoy. Helping with discovery is the idea behind Reco, a new mobile app from Canadian bookseller and retailer Indigo, which provides users with a social network based around books, and people’s love thereof. “We have a kind of obsessive focus on who our customers are,… Read More
