Remember Google Glass? How could you not? Born with great fanfare just four short years ago, the device quickly became the object of derision. People who wore them were “Glassholes.” There were hyper-privacy concerns related to wearing a head-mounted camera, and even the Glass Explorer program, which limited availability, seemed to contribute to the disdain people felt. Read More
OMG Digital, a West Africa-based startup founded by Prince Boakye Boampong and Jesse Arhin Ghansah, is on a mission to bring relatable content to African millennials. The two are currently participating in Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, with the hopes of becoming the BuzzFeed for Africa, or, a media site known for highly shareable content.
OMG Digital launched its entertainment… Read More
Insurance may be widely perceived as a sleepy backwater when it comes to innovation in technology, but that’s about to change. Whether the transformations to come — which we expect to impact the industry on a number of different fronts — end up bolstering a particular insurer’s future or undermining it depends on whether they seize the opportunity to reinvent their… Read More
VR will be big, AR will be bigger (and take longer). But as in most early-stage tech markets, growth will be curved, not straight. There will be a few billion dollars of revenue this year, a progressive ramp in 2017 and a hoped-for inflection point in 2018 (when AR could deliver that magic combination of hero device, long battery life, cellular capability, strong app ecosystem and telco… Read More
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — more commonly referred to as drones — are on the cusp of a major commercial trial that has the power to save thousands of lives. This pilot [program isn’t taking place in the Bay Area or Boise or Boston. Instead, it will take place 7,200 miles away — in Rwanda. Read More
What if you could control a computer screen with just your eyes? Well that’s the vision of Eyefluence, a Silicon Valley-based startup that is working on technology for hands-free navigation. The team has been working on prototypes, testing it out with augmented reality glasses equipped with cameras that can assess where you’re looking at any given time. Users can click on icons with… Read More
It’s Halvening!!! Bitcoin just experienced a major milestone in its short little lifespan. The reward for mining a block (a block = a ledger of transaction data) was just cut in half from 25 bitcoins to 12.5 bitcoins. This means that assuming a price of $650 per coin, going forward miners will make ~$8,125 per block they mine, compared to $16,250 before the halving. But… Read More
But before we go sagely nodding about the coming Augmented Reality revolution the Poképoaclypse foretells, maybe it’s best to take a step back and examine the components of Pokémon Go’s success, and its potential pitfalls. 1. Pokémon The franchise upon which Pokémon Go is based is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. It has sold upwards of 279 million… Read More
If you think Google has a controversial reputation at this point in its business evolution, buckle up because things are really stepping up a gear — as its machine learning DeepMind division pushes for access to publicly funded healthcare data. Read More
Many things have sought to capture your undivided attention, but that might be the ghost of a goal in today’s reality. We’re less attentive than goldfish; even our best and brightest can’t focus; and we’re more likely than ever to be paying less than full attention in even circumstances where distraction can be deadly. Read More
PostGhost was a nascent website that archived the tweets of the famous, rich, and important. The site got popular for finding and storing the deleted Tweets of politicians and even Lindsay Lohan who plead with the English PM to #remain. “We created the website postghost.com to provide the public with a more accurate history of public statements made by the most influential public figures… Read More
If you’re in a startup or even plan to sue one, Chaos Monkeys is the book to read. Antonio Garcia Martinez is a former physics major turned Wall Street quant turned startupper and he’s an amazing writer, able to encapsulate in a few words an era of greed, avarice, and ridiculous button-down-shirt/sweater vest combos. The world in which Garcia Martinez operated wasn’t pretty.… Read More
Over the past 10 years I’ve been on the first cap tables of three startups for which I’ve been responsible for closing their capital-raising efforts. I’ve raised money from the smallest angel investor to the biggest European VC funds and some of the world’s largest corporate investors. My present role has me on the other side of the table, assessing the pitches of… Read More
As technology advances, a world partitioned into nation-states makes less and less sense. That may sound crazy, if you take it as granted that our world must be divided into nations. But the whole concept of a “country” is a 400-year-old weird hack, riddled with crippling bugs, plagued by contradictions that sharpen each year. It is unlikely to survive this century. Read More
As the UK referendum result dropped in that fateful Friday morning, the tech startup world didn’t immediately grind to a halt. Websites kept loading. Apps kept opening. But what left UK technology entrepreneurs aghast was not just that Britain had chosen to leave the European Union after 40 years, but that all those years of trying compete with the giants of Silicon Valley would now… Read More
To many, Austria can seem like a country of the past, one whose very charm lies in the fact that its best days are behind it. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed almost 100 years ago, and, with it, the aspirations this landlocked, Central European nation of 8.5 million had to control the global stage. Perhaps that’s why the Austrian startup scene has been so easy to overlook. Read More
Elizabeth Holmes banned from any blood testing for two years, Facebook Messenger adds End-to-End encryption, Sit and smiling guys films his 220th video, Siris Capital buys Polycom for 2 Billion Dollars, SmartNews App Nabs 38 Million in Funding. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
CartoDB, a data visualization company founded in Madrid in 2012, changed its name to CARTO to celebrate its new analysis tool CARTO Builder and to emphasize its attempt to enlarge its audience from developers to business people and non-coders. Historically, CartoDB has helped data specialists with knowledge of SQL perform location data analysis. In addition, the company allowed data… Read More
Facebook only removes content if it celebrates or glorifies violence, not if it’s only graphic or disturbing, according to a spokesperson. Facebook also insists that the video of Philando Castile’s death was temporarily unavailable due to a technical glitch that was Facebook’s fault. That contradicts theories that the video disappeared due to Facebook waffling on whether… Read More
This week, Apple’s iOS 10 beta was released, Tesla Autopilot went under scrutiny and the tech world responded to the devastating shootings and protests that occurred across the country. These are the top tech stories to bring you up to speed. Read More
