Month: October 2017

How can internet giants know that innocent-seeming U.S. companies aren’t actually shell vehicles for malicious foreign actors to buy ads to interfere with elections? The short answer is they can’t, and that drew questioning from a Congressional probe today into Facebook, Twitter and Google being used to manipulate the 2016 presidential election. The hearing saw
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If it’s tough to find even five minutes of quiet in your busy day, Oak could be the meditation app for you. Launched today by Digg founder and True Ventures partner Kevin Rose, the free Oak app offers quick and simple breathing exercises as well as longer guided and DIY meditations. While apps like Headspace,
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“When I was 17, I experienced erectile dysfunction.” My interviews with startup founders rarely start so candid. But to destigmatize the business of his new company Roman and empathize with customers, Zachariah Reitano is getting vulnerable. “I think in a good way I’ve become numb to the embarrassment” says 26-year-old Reitano. “I remember the embarrassment
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In July b2b smart access startup Latch announced a partnership with ecommerce platform Jet.com to install 1,000 of its smart locks on residential apartment buildings in New York. It’s now announced the first “secure, unattended deliveries” enabled by the installations. Writing in the customary Medium post, co-founder Luke Schoenfelder says Latch-enabled unattended deliveries kicked off on Monday
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International remittances continues to be one of the biggest financial services in developing countries, with $450 billion getting sent from countries like the U.S. to emerging markets in 2017 alone, according to the World Bank. Now, one of the bigger startups using tech to take on Western Union, MoneyGram and other offline incumbents in the space
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Alan Dye, who was responsible for leading the software design teams that had to decide how to handle the sensor package, says that it felt the most honest. “We’ve got this amazing True Depth camera system packed into this space at the upper center of the display. And we thought a lot about how to
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Ada Health, the AI-driven app which works a little like an ‘Alexa for health’, has raised a $47M (€40M) funding round led by Access Industries, Len Blavatnik’s global investment group. Joining the round in the Berlin-HQ’d startup was June Fund and Berlin-based Cumberland VC. Fascinatingly, William Tunstall-Pedoe, the AI entrepreneur who came up with the Siri-like
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Silicon Valley is a land of ideation and thinkfluence and Qi drinks with tapioca mushroom protein. In this fourth episode of Bubbleproof, an original mockumentary series on the influence and ignorance of Silicon Valley, we get a closer look at the evolving/devolving relationship between startup founder guru Michael Fertik and venture capitalist David Cowan (who co-wrote
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Square is expanding its hardware lineup with a new point-of-sale device called the Square Register. Square’s Head of Software Jesse Dorogusker explained that while the company’s existing products incorporate existing hardware (the Square Stand, for example, turns an iPad into a POS stand), the Square Register is “totally integrated — our hardware, our software, all
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Instagram Stories is doing so well, the app wants to ensure you don’t just scroll by its Snapchat clone. Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it’s redesigned its mid-feed re-engagement box for Stories to show preview tiles of people’s slideshows that are twice as big as the Stories bar atop the feed. The box appears slotted
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Earlier this year, Skype introduced a revamped version of its application offering a heavier focus on media sharing and social expression tools, in an effort to better compete with more modern social communication services, like Slack and even Snapchat. Today, the company is publicly launching the new version of Skype to the desktop, including on
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