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‘Solar Voyager’ autonomous boat looks to make history in sun-powered journey across the Atlantic
About 200 miles due east of Boston, a robotic boat is putting along at a walking pace on what could be an historic journey across the entire Atlantic. “Solar Voyager,” built by two friends in their spare time, would be the first autonomous vessel to cross that ocean — and the first one to cross any ocean using solar power alone. Read More
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Meet the newest AngelPad startups, and the tech they built to cure business headaches
Yesterday in San Francisco, AngelPad held its 10th Demo Day, a graduation of sorts for the enterprise startups admitted into and backed by the accelerator. The accelerator, run by husband and wife team Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas, has realized at least one solid exit already in the adtech startup MoPub, which sold to Twitter for $350 million in stock in the fall of 2013. Companies that… Read More
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Olly has built a breakout brand in a crowded space: Here’s how
Vitamins and venture capital might not seem like the most natural fit, but a number of related companies has attracted capital from tech investors in recent years, including SmartyPants, which makes a gummy vitamin, and Elysium Health, a supplements company that counts a former venture capitalist as a co-founder. Still, competitors may have trouble catching up to two-year-old Olly, a… Read More
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Crunch Network
Making contrarian bets in adtech
It has become fashionable of late to see adtech as a dirty word in the world of technology investment. Many investors struggle to see the upside of backing businesses involved with the seemingly murky world of advertisement technology. Combined with the lower exit multiples seen over recent months, it is understandable that adtech businesses are feeling the squeeze when trying to raise… Read More
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Tinder discontinues service for users under 18
Tinder is discontinuing use of the app for everyone under the age of 18 starting next week, according to a statement from Tinder VP of Communications Rosette Pambakian. The dating app has allowed everyone 13 years of age or older to use the app since it launched back in 2012. Anyone between 13 and 17 years old was only allowed to match with others in that pool. However, that is all changing… Read More
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NHS memo details Google/DeepMind’s five year plan to bring AI to healthcare
More details have emerged about the sweeping scope of Google/DeepMind’s ambitions for pushing its algorithmic fingers deep into the healthcare sector — including wanting to apply machine learning processing to UK NHS data within five years. Read More
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Apple to introduce search ads on App Store along with changes to app review, discovery and splits
Just ahead of its annual WWDC conference, Apple has announced a series of changes to its App Store, aimed at improving the experience for both developers and consumers alike. According to Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, who took over the App Store in December, the company is working to speed up the time it takes apps to go live, revamp how it splits revenue… Read More
Newsletters
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Google adds U.S. Cellular’s network to extend Project Fi’s coverage
Google today announced that it has added U.S. Cellular, one of the larger regional carriers in the U.S., to its Project Fi network. U.S. Cellular joins Google’s existing network partners T-Mobile and Sprint. What makes Project Fi different from mobile virtual network operators like Boost Mobile or MetroPCS is that it doesn’t just rely on a single network. Instead, it can… Read More
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Monster snaps up ‘Tinder for jobs’ app, Jobr
Monster.com announced this morning it has acquired the San Francisco-based startup Jobr, which had been developing a job-finding app the company described as a Tinder for jobs, thanks to its use of swipe-based gestures. Deal terms were not disclosed, but Jobr had raised $2 million in seed funding in 2014. The app is not being shut down, but will rather be integrated with Monster’s… Read More
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Ex-Mozilla team behind smart home hub Sense refunds Kickstarter backers, focuses on software
Earlier this year, a company called Silk Labs, co-founded by former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal, unveiled its plans to address the smart home market with a hub called “Sense,” which interoperates with a home’s connected devices, while also automatically adapting to its owners’ patterns and behavior over time. The device was crowdfunded via a Kickstarter campaign, as a… Read More
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Crunch Network
Is HTML5 the new Windows?
If you are as old as me, you remember the transition from MS DOS to Windows in the early 1990s. Might the arrival of new cloud-based apps that run in a web browser and store their data in the cloud create enough of an advantage over the common desktop environment to cause a similar shift? There are many parallels between the arrival of cloud-based apps and the arrival of Windows 30 years ago. Read More
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Comfy raises $12 million for app to end office thermostat wars
Building Robotics Inc., better known as Comfy, raised $12 million in Series B funding for building automation software that helps companies save energy on office air conditioning while gathering employee-contributed data about the use and occupancy of a workspace. Emergence Capital led the investment, joined by real estate services company CBRE and Microsoft Ventures. According to company… Read More
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Analytics startup Amplitude raises $15M
Amplitude announced this morning that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. In the past, the web and mobile analytics company has pitched itself as a more affordable alternative to Mixpanel. More recently, CEO Spenser Skates said the bigger vision is to make user data available to everyone in a company, not just data scientists. “It’s so easy to look up any piece of… Read More
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Silicon Valley shows its primary colors
Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter, Uber and Instagram, also bet early on Clinton, contributing to her campaign in July 2006. Bill Gates and Sheryl Sandberg both contributed to Clinton in 2007 before becoming major donors to President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. And Carl Icahn, the investor who has endorsed presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, was previously… Read More
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T-Mobile thanks customers with a new freebies app that hasn’t worked all day
Hey T-Mobile, this is not how you go about thanking your customers! Yesterday, the mobile operator announced its latest “un-carrier” move – this time, its latest gimmick involves giving away stock to T-Mobile customers and the launch of an app called “T-Mobile Tuesdays” that’s full of freebies. Unfortunately, that app has been down all day as… Read More
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The unsexiest trillion-dollar startup
Steve Jobs went ballistic when public shipping manifests leaked the existence of the iPhone 3G. That’s about the only time something exciting happened in the freight forwarding business. The circulatory system of the global economy is a trillion-dollar industry, yet no one really talks about it, or builds tech for it. That’s what makes freight such a massive disruption opportunity… Read More
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How a 30K-member Facebook group filled the void left by Uber and Lyft in Austin
Exactly a month ago, Uber and Lyft paused operations in Austin after voters defeated Proposition 1, an attempt to overturn mandatory fingerprint-based background checks for Uber and Lyft drivers in the city. With almost a million residents of the 11th largest city in the United States now void of the reliable transportation option that is Uber and Lyft, no one really knew what would… Read More
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Mary Meeker’s essential 2016 Internet Trends Report
The fastest way to learn everything going on in tech is to read this report. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker has become a legend for publishing these compilations of the most critical stats and trends about how technology is evolving. From the funding climate to smartphone adoption to the tech giants to cutting-edge inventions, the Mary Meeker Internet Trends report has it all. Below… Read More
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