Microsoft this morning announced an expansion to its Office 365 suite with the debut of a new service called Bookings, which will allow customers to schedule appointments with a business using online software. In addition to connecting businesses and customers without the need for a phone call, Bookings will also manage other aspects to appointment management, including sending out… Read More
Back in 2006, Google opened its first owned and operated data center in The Dalles, Oregon, and starting today, you’ll be able to host your Google Cloud Platform applications in Oregon, too. The company today announced the launch of its first West Coast region (formally known under the poetic name of ‘us-west1’). The company first detailed its plans for opening this new region… Read More
Early demos of VR headsets talked a lot about the potential for designers working in virtual space with live 3D models, but DesignSpace, a prototype originally created at the 2015 AEC Hackathon in London, is one of the first real pieces of software that looks like it can deliver. The prototype by Thomas Van Bouwel uses the HTC Vive to let designers, architects and urban planners immerse… Read More
HomeTouch, the UK home care marketplace, has picked up £700,000 in new funding in a round led by Rocket Internet’s venture arm Global Founders Capital (GFC). Previous backer Passion Capital also participated, along with various angels, while I’m told the new capital will be used to invest in performance marketing and further product development. Read More
Dreamit Ventures’ accelerator has ditched the demo day, according to Chief Innovation Officer Steve Barsh. That’s not the only change the early-stage venture firm and accelerator has made of late.
Today, Dreamit unveiled a list of 25 new health and edtech startups launching from its revamped programs. A full list of those companies provided by Dreamit follows at the end of this… Read More
Bioz, a new search engine for life science experiments, wants to reduce the time it takes researchers to thumb through thousands of science articles published online and get them right to the findings relevant to their search. The Palo Alto startup does this by offering up article extracts from published science papers using natural language processing. The Bioz platform helps researchers… Read More
Keyboard app maker Swiftkey, which was acquired by Microsoft for $250 million in February, has officially launched its first product since that acquisition — and it’s an emoji-predicting keyboard app, called Swiftmoji. Read More
Facebook’s gamble of forcing users to download Messenger has paid off. Despite the backlash, Messenger has doubled its user count in 20 months to reach the one billion user mark five years after its debut. Messenger joins Facebook, its acquisition WhatsApp and Google’s YouTube in the billion user mobile user club. The app has racked up some other impressive stats. Each month,… Read More
If you’re tech-savvy and a serious writer, chances are you already know about Scrivener. The popular writing app has been available on OS X and Windows for years now. And it is now available on iOS for $19.99 as well. Scrivener is a flexible and powerful writing app that makes it easier to write long-form stuff — think about it as a sort of writing studio. Read More
The UK is sometimes called a nation of shopkeepers, and soon mobile payments company Square may be putting that to the test in the search for new business. Square Register — the company’s point of sale app used by merchants to manage their inventory, make invoices and take payments from customers — has quietly started to allow users to make payments in the UK, in UK pounds.… Read More
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo talked up some ambitious plans for the future of the New York City Subway during an address to a crowd at Brooklyn’s Transit Museum this week. At the top of the list is the addition of 1,025 new/refurbished subway cars, featuring some relatively high-tech amenities.
“New York deserves a world-class transportation network, worthy of its role as the… Read More
Online design platform Canva, which makes it easy for anyone to create professional graphics quickly – even if they don’t have a design background – is expanding its reach today with the launch of its first-ever iPhone application. Up until now, the company had offered a web application for around three years, and had been available on iPad for a year. With its iPhone… Read More
CargoX, a Brazilian startup that has been described as “Uber for trucks,” is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding. The analogy is kind of irresistible, since Uber co-founder Oscar Salazary is one of CargoX’s investors — he’s certainly seen his share of “Uber for X” pitches, but he told me he sees a big opportunity here due to… Read More
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
