MarketingMuses

 Lyft has hired a new C-level executive: Jon McNeill, who joins as Chief Operating Officer. McNeill previously held a top role at Tesla, where he was president of Global Sales & Service, overseeing all of the company’s showroom and customer-facing interactions. Read More

 Elon Musk’s vision of autonomous driving differs from a lot of Tesla’s competitors in that he’s been adamant that LiDAR isn’t a core component of his approach. It’s a stance that provokes a lot of debate among experts in the field. Read More

 Tesla had aimed to do a cross-country U.S. drive in one of its vehicles using fully autonomous driving capabilities by the end of last year, but obviously it didn’t make that goal, or you’d have heard about it. Instead, Tesla CEO Elon Musk now says that he anticipates being able to make the trip within three months, or six months at the long end. Specifically, Musk said on an… Read More

 Bug bounty programs are designed to sic security researchers on software and pay them to find vulnerabilities and report back to the sponsor. In return, the researchers are richly rewarded for their findings. In fact, Google’s bug bounty paid out a hefty $2.9 million in bug bounties in 2017. Rewards can range from $500 to $100,000 or more depending on the type of bug and the amount of… Read More

 Starman and his space Tesla have sent their last selfie from Earth orbit, Elon Musk announced. The car and its mannequin driver (in working SpaceX spacesuit) launched yesterday atop the Falcon Heavy rocket will eventually escape Earth orbit and travel outwards through the solar system — but not in a hurry. Read More

 Yelp saw its stock take a steep dive this afternoon after it reported its fourth-quarter earnings, which on an adjusted basis fell below Wall Street’s expectations on the bottom line. Yelp has had a very up-and-down year, all while still continuing to be a go-to site for reviews and content around restaurants. Read More

 ClearBrain has a big goal: “Our mission is to democratize AI for marketers.” That’s how co-founder and CEO Bilal Mahmood put it, though he and his co-founder Eric Pollman aren’t trying to do all that at once. Instead, they’re tackling a more specific challenge — helping companies target ads toward the users most likely to sign up for a subscription, buy… Read More

 Want to let friends know you’re trying to party, hit the gym, focus on work, or grab a drink? That’s the idea behind a powerful new feature Facebook Messenger is testing called Your Emoji. Akin to offline meetup app Down To Lunch, it lets you overlay a chosen emoji on your Messenger profile pic for 24 hours as a way to spur conversation and hang outs, or just let people know… Read More

 The Uber vs. Waymo trial took a turn for the the weird today when testimony revealed that Otto, the company whose acquisition is at the center of this lawsuit, was entertaining bids from other suitors. For a bit of background, Otto is the self-driving truck company that Anthony Levandowski co-founded with Lior Ron. Both men previously worked at Google/Alphabet/Waymo — Levandowski on… Read More

 Tesla CEO Elon Musk managed to send his Tesla Roadster into space — because why not? — earlier this week, and it looks like his week (and Tesla’s) is still looking up for now following the company’s fourth-quarter results. The company slightly beat Wall Street’s expectations on the financial front, and said it’s still targeting producing 2,500 Model 3… Read More

 Turing Robotic’s CEO says the company isn’t done. But it’s definitely hit another significant roadblock in its quest to bring some fun alternative handsets to the market. The Finnish phone maker’s story so far is one of delay after delay, and now it’s announced, via Facebook post, that it’s suspending manufacturing. CEO Syl Chao’s didn’t offer… Read More

 Studio, a startup that delivers coaching, music and competition to treadmill runners’ smartphones and smartwatches, is getting a boost from treadmill maker Life Fitness. Studio founder and CEO Jason Baptiste explained that through this partnership, Studio’s classes will be available on Life Fitness treadmills in gyms, starting with the ones that are equipped with the… Read More

 Notation Capital, the NY-based pre-seed fund that launched in 2015, has just picked up a fresh $27 million in capital to invest in to super early stage startup sin the NYC area. The fund is called Notation II, and it’s still run by Nick Chirls, who led seed investment at betaworks and helped build Alphaworks, and Alex Lines, an architect at betaworks who contributed to products like… Read More

 Kids don’t try their hardest unless they think someone’s watching. Overcrowded classrooms and distracted parents can make pouring effort into school work feel pointless. But Seesaw’s app turns their assignments into social media they share with teachers, peers and mom and dad. Now it’s invading schools across the country and just raised a Series A round from LinkedIn… Read More

 Back in 2014, Google bought Nest — the hardware company behind things like the Nest Cam and the Nest thermostat — for around $3.2 billion. At the time, Google opted to keep Nest running as its own independent operation. Seems that’s about to change. Google’s head of hardware Rick Osterloh announced this afternoon that Nest will “join forces” with… Read More

 For the longest time now, Google Photos has used its machine learning magic to automatically create movies for you based on your recent trips or around special occasions. What you couldn’t do, though, was to tell Google Photos to create these movies on demand. That’s changing today, as Google has now launched the ability to create themed movies via the app or web on demand. Google… Read More

 Tinder will launch a series of new features based on location in 2018, its parent company Match Group revealed during this week’s Q4 2017 earnings. The dating app maker has been fairly vague on what these new features will entail, having only described them previously as something that will blur the “distinction between digital and real-life dating, and dating and simply engaging… Read More

 Agrilyst, a platform that makes it easier for indoor farmers to manage their crops based on sensor data, today announced that it has raised a $1.5 million funding round from iSelect Fund, Argonautic Ventures, Horizons Lab and Onland Capital Fund. The new investors were joined by existing investors Compound and the New York State Innovation Capital Fund. Read More

 Flux, the London fintech startup founded by former early employees at Revolut, has deepened its partnership with U.K. challenger bank Starling to add Flux-powered loyalty points to Starling’s mobile banking app. It builds on earlier Flux integration that sees Starling support item-level digital receipts powered by Flux and supported merchants (to date, this includes all 111 EAT stores in… Read More

 Instagram purposefully lacks a “Regram” button to promote original sharing, but it’s easing up on that philosophy when it comes to Stories. Instagram now confirms to TechCrunch that it’s testing an option that lets you share public feed posts from other users to your Story. This could let you add commentary and overlaid stickers to a meme, celebrity post or even a… Read More

 Google announced today it’s adding a series of features to Google Search and other products to help users looking for the latest information about the Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. As the company often does for major events, extra information will begin to appear at the top of Google Search results after being triggered by various keywords and search terms. In addition, Google… Read More

 Yesterday, we noted and reported on how Apple was sending developers emails with install and ad spend details for other developers’ apps. Today, Apple has sent out a note to developers to say that a processing error caused the problem, and that in the future it will only send alerts by email, but that developers will have to log in to their accounts to see any actual numbers or other… Read More

 Michael Pollan, the best-selling author of food books including the The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Rules, summarized his philosophy of eating quite simply. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The idea was to spend more on quality, and avoid the sorts of junk food that are deeply unhealthy for our physical bodies. I think it’s well past time to borrow that… Read More

 In the online gaming world, virtual reality has already been used by some of the top streamers to engage with their audiences, but there’s not much return for what the personalities have to give up. They have a bulky headset obscuring their faces and viewers aren’t getting anything more than the 2D representation of what the streamer is seeing. Vreal is aiming to get more out of… Read More

 Highfive, a startup that’s building an integrated software and hardware video conferencing solution, today announced that it has raised a $32 million Series C round, which brings the Redwood City-based company’s total funding to $77.4 million. The lead investor for this round was Dimension Data, a major global technology integrator and managed services subsidiary of Japan’s… Read More

 Google is launching an update to Google Drive today that will make it easier for teams and agencies to use a mix of G Suite and Microsoft Office while working with their colleagues and customers. With this update, Google Drive users can now easily comment on Office files, PDFs and images in the Drive preview pane without having to use (and potentially pay for) tools like Microsoft Office or… Read More

 French startup Cityscoot announced a $50 million round of financing yesterday (€40 million). RATP Capital Innovation and Inventure Partners are leading the round, with existing investors Caisse des Dépôts and LeasePlan also participating. Cityscoot operates an electric scooter-sharing service in Paris and plans to expand to other cities in France and Europe. You can now find around… Read More

 Viacom has acquired VidCon, a move that seems designed to help the media giant connect with younger audiences. Viacom’s blog post describes VidCon as “the premier event for the worldwide online video community,” drawing more than 30,000 attendees to its flagship conference in Anaheim, Calif. (It’s also held smaller events in Amsterdam and Melbourne.) The company was… Read More

 It’s been more than a year since the well-funded startup Cyanogen announced that it would shut down its mobile OS development, and since pivoted to self-driving technology. Yet we’re still seeing some fallout among the companies that had pinned their hopes on the original plans of that shooting star. Wileyfox, a smartphone maker that was one of the earliest companies to build a… Read More

 Snapchat is finally getting Live video, but you won’t be able to broadcast. Today Snapchat announced it will pipe snippits of NBC’s Live Olympics coverage directly into its app. But when TechCrunch asked if users would be able to go Live, a Snap spokesperson told us on background that there’s no intention to open up broadcasting to Snapchatters. They said users have not… Read More

 After what seems like an endless wait, Apple’s HomePod finally lands this week. You can read our freshly posted review — it’s the next best thing to actually buying the thing (and a lot less experience). We’re also trying something a bit new, with a liveblog reaction, discussing Apple’s first foray into the smart speaker category and answering some questions… Read More

 Amazon’s Alexa ad was the biggest winner of this year’s Super Bowl outside the greater Philadelphia area. The company spilled the beans early, but the spot still managed to drum up the biggest response of the night (outside of some very unfortunate choices from automakers). The silly 90 second commercial centered around some high profile celebrities filling in after… Read More

 Never did I ever think I’d be writing about a technology and science-driven pantyhose company, but here I am. Intrigued by a pitch that described them as made with the same type of fiber found in bulletproof vests and climbing equipment, I quickly jumped on the opportunity to speak with Sheerly Genius founder and CEO Katherine Homuth. Turns out they’re not bulletproof, but they… Read More

 When it comes to the art and science of retro gaming, Analogue has no equal. The small company that first brought us the Analogue Nt, then the Nt mini, is back again with the Super Nt – a lovingly engineered and built modern SNES/Super Famicom console. Wait but what? A ‘modern SNES’? What does that entail? If you know Analogue’s past work, you know it essentially… Read More

 The 2018 Winter Olympics officially kick off with Friday’s Opening Ceremony in Pyeongchang, South Korea.  The temptation to fly a shiny new drone over the action will no doubt be great for amateur filmmakers and photographers in the immediately area, but DJI’s working to put the kibosh on things by implementing a temporary no-fly zone around sports arenas in the country. The… Read More

 Amazon’s Echo Look may not be the best-selling device from the Echo lineup of Alexa-powered smart speakers, but those who purchased the camera/smart speaker combo likely have a high interest in fashion, accessorizing, and shopping. That’s why Condé Nast’s Vogue and GQ are now working with Amazon to insert fashion recommendations into the companion app for Echo Look users,… Read More

 Folks worried that their kids are spending a little too much time gaming should be pleased to hear about Sony’s latest PS4 update. System software update 5.50 includes a new feature called Play Time Management, as well as changes to the Library interface, the ability to add custom wallpapers, and a supersampling mode that makes 4K games look better on 1080p TVs. Play Time Management… Read More

 According to Cardiogram founder Brandon Ballinger’s latest clinical study, the Apple Watch can detect diabetes in those previously diagnosed with the disease with an 85 percent accuracy. The study is part of the larger DeepHeart study with Cardiogram and UCSF. This particular study used data from 14,000 Apple Watch users and was able to detect that 462 of them had diabetes by using… Read More

 Akamai, the Cambridge Massachusetts content delivery network and network services provider, announced they had laid off 400 people in their earnings call with analysts yesterday. On the call, Akamai CEO Tom Leighton indicated that the 400 people represented 5 percent of the the company’s 8000 worldwide workforce. “As part of our effort to improve operational efficiency, we… Read More

 In the fall we wrote that ESPN’s new streaming service named ESPN Plus would launch in Spring 2018. However details were vague, with pricing unknown and no specific list of what programming would be available. But yesterday on Disney’s earnings call CEO Bob Iger unveiled some more details, including pricing. ESPN Plus will cost $4.99 per month, and be available “this… Read More

 Pushing through a funding round is never an easy process — and for Captain401 co-founder Roger Lee, it was even more tricky this time around. That’s because Lee and his team raised $11 million right around the birth of his first baby. That gave Lee an even deeper appreciation and understanding for the need of robust employee benefits, which was part of the original goal of… Read More

 As we develop increasingly sophisticated technologies like self-driving cars and industrial internet of things sensors, it’s going to require that we move computing to the edge. Essentially this means that instead of sending data to the cloud for processing, it needs to be done right on the device itself because even a little bit of latency is too much. Intel announced a new chip… Read More

 We know that messaging app Telegram has big plans — beyond a planned $1.2 billion ICO it is also developing its own platform for blockchain-based services — and today it took a notable step towards making its messaging platform more useful as it rolled out a web login widget. The new feature will allow website owners (business owners) to connect with Telegram users right from… Read More

The Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit: Crypto will examine the growing market and investor interest in crypto and the technology behind it. Specifically, where are these digital assets heading, and how can everyday investors buy in safely? From bitcoin and blockchain to ethereum and ICOs, we’ll discuss crypto investing with CEOs, engineers, policy makers and legal experts. Watch the… Read More

 On the heels of its rebrand in November, mobility service STRATIM has sold itself to KAR Auction Services, a car remarketing company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. STRATIM, formerly known as on-demand valet and car services startup ZIRX, powers fleet management for more than 50 companies, including BMW (DriveNow), General Motors (Maven), Ford (Chariot) and Toyota, to power their… Read More

 The UK government has announced a package of labor market reforms to respond to changes in working patterns including those driven by the rise of gig economy platforms and apps like Uber and Deliveroo. Read More

 Protecting critical infrastructure like power plants and other industrial plants is just as important as it’s challenging. It’s one thing to take over a remote machine to mine some Bitcoin, but you’ve got a totally different problem when those hackers try to manipulate the physical infrastructure of your power plant with the goal of causing an explosion. With their thousands… Read More

 What goes up, must go down… what does down, must go up…? After a big and bloody plunge this week — which saw the price of bitcoin touch a two-month low of sub-$6,000 — the crypto market has mounted a comeback with double-digit gains across the board. Coinmarketcap.com — the current go-to for crypto pricing — shows that bitcoin is up 26 percent in the last… Read More

 SoftBank made waves when its gigantic Vision Fund hit a massive $93 billion first close of a targeted $100 billion total last year, but already it is clear why the firm is reportedly planning a sequel. According to the Japanese firm’s latest financials, it has already deployed one-third of the capital. A large chunk of the investments went on ride-hailing. SoftBank completed a $7.7… Read More

 There is a clutch of new VC funds launched in the US every year, and but when you look at the stats around new funds started by women they are pretty dismal. A cursory glance at the figures from last year reveals that out of 153 funds founded in the US last year, only four were founded by women, and only two have gone on to raise money. Furthermore, women account for only seven percent of… Read More

 SpaceX put a “Starman” into space today, on a path to a potential wide looping orbit of Mars and Earth — it was actually a mannequin wearing an official SpaceX crew flight suit, but it was more than just a fun payload for a rocket that stood every chance of exploding mid-flight, it turns out. Read More

 SEC chairman Jay Clayton made clear today that his agency, along with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, remains acutely concerned about initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency trades. In fact, toward that end, they’re now looking for more expansive powers when it comes to protecting customers on cryptocurrency exchanges from fraud. Read More

 SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said at a press event for the just-launched Falcon Heavy that SpaceX will now begin focusing in earnest on ‘BFR,’ the code name for its next big space launch vehicle. BFR (aka ‘big f*cking rocket’ in case you lack imagination) will be designed to be a vehicle capable of using a single stage to make it all the way to orbit, with fully loaded tanks.… Read More

 Snapchat doubled its Rest Of World revenue this quarter. That’s a surprise, considering CEO Evan Spiegel never seemed to care about anyone but U.S. teens. Snapchat’s Android app was buggy. Its videos loaded too slow on weak connections. And Spiegel even admitted “Historically we’ve really focused our efforts on markets where [high-end phones and broadband mobile… Read More

 SpaceX has managed an incredible feat alongside its historic Falcon Heavy first test launch today – landing two of its boosters at once, nearly simultaneously, intact. The first-stage rockets used during today’s launch included two flight proven Falcon 9 boosters previously used during missions for SpaceX in 2016 and then refurbished, which landed at their intended destinations… Read More

 In a hearing today before the Senate Banking Committee, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo opened up about what the near-term U.S. regulatory fate of cryptocurrency might look like. In a week of plunging prices and bad news, the hearing struck a tone that coin watchers could reasonably interpret as… Read More

 Placements.io says it’s helping online publishers get paid on-time for ads. Founder Edwin Fu said that when he was at Salesforce, he worked with “some of the largest media companies in the world” and “noticed a huge problem — they were having difficulty managing revenue fulfillment and billing for ads.” The problem, he said, is that online ad process has… Read More

 SpaceX now has a live feed of its Mars bound simulated astronaut, a dummy wearing the private space company’s new crew uniform. There are cameras mounted on the Tesla Roadster the dummy is “driving,” which was the primary payload for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch, which went off almost perfectly as planned by SpaceX earlier today. The livestream switches between… Read More

 David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the writers who turned George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels into a television phenomenon, will be writing and producing a new series of Star Wars films. Read More

 Netgear announced this afternoon that it plans to spin off its Arlo wing into a standalone business. The networking hardware giant’s board of directors has unanimously approved the decision and plans to have the separation to be completed by the second half of this year. Netgear is planning an IPO as part of the process, issuing less than 20-percent of common stock in the process and… Read More

 Snapchat is starting to turn things around, boosting its sluggish user growth rate and beating Wall Street’s expectations for the first time with today’s Q4 2017 earnings report. It added 8.9 million daily active users to reach 187 million with a quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 5.05% percent in Q4, compared to 2.9 percent in Q3. Revenue was $285.7 million, up 72 percent… Read More

 Evan Frank was five years old when he first knew he was going to be an entrepreneur. While attending kindergarten, Frank crafted books and sold them to his teacher at a nickel to a dime a piece. “There was always this desire to build stuff,” he explained to me, and also clearly a desire to make some money on those projects, to boot. Read More

 The actual negotiation of venture rounds remains unnecessarily murky. First-time entrepreneurs are often at a loss for mapping the business values they hold to specific terms during a negotiation. Moreover, many wonder what terms even come up for discussion and why VCs and entrepreneurs may care about a particular term, but barely mention another. Read More

 SpaceX has had a very good first test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heavy-lift orbital vehicle that can carry twice the weight of its closest competition in active operation. The massive, three-booster rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as planned on Tuesday at 1:30 PM EST, lifting off from Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A. This is a historic moment for SpaceX, since it has… Read More

 Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung have all been working hard to create their own standard to control all the connected devices around your home. Mozilla just announced that anybody can now create an open gateway to control the internet of things. The organization also confirmed that it is still working on a set of frameworks and open standards so that we don’t end up with an internet… Read More

 Google’s Motion Stills video/gif editing app is getting an augmented reality upgrade, with the app bringing some of the fun from AR Stickers on the Pixel 2 to a bevy of Android devices. Read More

 Roc Nation, the full service entertainment management company created by the music impresario Shawn Carter (better known as Jay Z), is making an investment in financial trading platform Robinhood. The investment, through Roc Nation’s Arrive subsidiary, is the latest instance of a celebrity rapper plowing cash into Robinhood’s free-to-trade investment platform. The company also… Read More

 If you want to read a lot of words about the Apple HomePod, you can do so here and here. Obviously, I’d recommend you do so before plunking down $350 of your hard earned cash on a first generation product, but the long and short of it is actually pretty straight forward. Apple made a very nice speaker — arguably the best on the market in its class. But there are caveats. As is… Read More

 Twitch today announced new metrics related to the growth of its game streaming service, including, most notably, that the number video creator Partners who profit from their Twitch content has climbed to 27,000 over the course of 2017, and the number of Affiliate streamers reached 150,000. Until mid-2017, Twitch had only allowed a smaller subset of its creator community to make money from… Read More

 Meet ProcessOut, a French startup that automatically routes transactions to the best payment provider. This way, big online services can start using multiple payment providers, pay fewer fees and reduce the number of declined transactions. The startup has just raised $1 million from various business angels, such as BlaBlaCar CTO Francis Nappez, former PayPal Director of Global Business… Read More

 Technology reporting has become a function of every single major news beat these days. From politics to crime, business and finance to entertainment, it’s increasingly important that reporters get a good grounding in the technology that’s transforming their beats to avoid basic errors. For John Biggs, an editor-at-large here at TechCrunch, the problem became so acute in the… Read More

 Exclusive content is how creators get patrons to pay them a monthly subscription fee on Patreon, so the startup is equipping them with a Snapchat-like tool to turn their private lives into “behind-the-scenes” footage. Patreon Lens launches today within Patreon’s iOS and Android apps so that creators can share photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours just with those who… Read More

 As a fan of both waffles and robots I present to you the FANUC food and beverage manipulation robot, waffle edition. The robot, as you see below, sorts the waffles by color, stacks them, and then another robot grabs them and puts them into a box. And these bad boys can do some heavy lifting. From the site: We have the largest o­ffering of standard and collaborative robot models with… Read More

 The European Commission has announced a review of Apple’s acquisition of music discovery service Shazam — agreeing to a request made by several countries to weigh competition concerns.  Read More

 In a blog post this morning Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced the company is naming long-time employee Allen Shim as the company’s first CFO. “Today, I’m excited to announce another milestone: Allen Shim has been appointed Chief Financial Officer for Slack,” Butterfield wrote in the blog post. He went onto to describe Shim as his right hand man, who has been with… Read More

 Apple’s investment in AR technologies has been ushering in a new wave of apps, from those that let you perform more practical tasks – like visualizing furniture placement in rooms – to those with mass consumer appeal – like AR gaming, including Niantic’s upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. But AR can also be used to create unique experiences within more… Read More

 Microsoft is targeting its cloud storage rivals including Dropbox, Box, and Google today by offering to essentially buy out customers’ existing contracts if they make the switch to OneDrive for Business. The company says that customers currently paying for one of these competitive solutions, can instead opt to use OneDrive for free for the remainder of their contract’s term. The… Read More

 Houzz, the platform now valued at $4 billion where people plan and help find people to complete home design projects, has made an acquisition to expand how it works with one of its most important groups of customers, interior designers. The company is acquiring IvyMark, which offers a set of business management tools and a community platform for interior designers and home design firms. The… Read More

 Portrait mode-style bokeh camera features have largely been the realm of high-end flagships to this point. That’s due, in part to the fact that many device makers rely on a dual-camera system to create the effect, driving up prices in the process. Samsung is getting ready to change that soon, however, with a plan to bring its version of the tech to mid-range and entry-level handsets.… Read More

 Last week Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba announced its Q3 earnings. Cloud revenue was $553 million, an impressive 104 percent year-over-year increase. That comes out to a run rate in the range of $2.2 billion, well behind Google which announced it is pulling in a billion dollars a quarter and still buried behind the market leaders all of whom reported around $4 billion+ a quarter. While… Read More

 SimpliSafe, a Boston-based home security company, launched their first security products in 2009 and the devices were a hit. Thanks to their home-security-in-a-box solution the average homeowner could install door sensors, glass-break microphones, and motion detectors without having to run wires or even have a salesperson visit their home. The Lego-like system of removable components was… Read More

 Red Dead Redemption 2 has been delayed more than once, with a current slated release for October 2018. That said, RDR2 fans are likely desperate for even the slightest whiff of the game, which is why an allegedly leaked document from Trusted Reviews couldn’t have come at a better time. The leak, which TechCrunch has not been able to verify, includes information on potential game modes… Read More

 The team at SocialRank has spent the last few years building ways for brands and marketers to get a better sense of who’s following and engaging with them on social media. Until now, they’ve been doing that on an account level — plug in an account and you get a SocialRank report covering things like your most valuable followers. With a new product called SocialRank for… Read More

 Embark’s autonomous trucking solution just demonstrated what it could be capable of in a big way: It make a coast-to-coast trip from L.A. to Jacksonville, Florida, driving 2,400 miles and delivering refrigerators for Electrolux from one end of the U.S. to the other. This follows Embark‘s prior test route, which ran from L.A. to El Paso, and covers more than four times the distance… Read More

 More consolidation is afoot in the busy world of backend developer tools. Today, CloudBees — the company closely associated with support and services for the open source Jenkins continuous integration and delivery engine — has announced that it will acquire CodeShip, another startup in the dev-ops space focusing on continuous integration and delivery. Terms of the deal are not… Read More

 The Apple Watch continues to be a bright spot in amongst the middling world of wearables, according to new numbers from Canalys. The analyst group’s figures put the smartwatch at 18 million shipments for 2017, representing a 54-percent jump over the device’s 2016. Apple’s wearable popped for a couple of reasons, LTE functionality being chief among them. For one thing,… Read More

 In October, InVision made the first dramatic change to its product portfolio since the company’s inception. The team launched InVision Studio, a design tool meant to take on the likes of Adobe PhotoShop and Sketch. Now, however, InVision is taking yet another huge step forward with the announcement of the Studio Platform, letting third-party developers build products and programs for… Read More

 Hundred of startups have tried to kill it, but email is still alive and well. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon, though. Mixmax, a startup that aims to make email more useful for businesses, today announced that it has raised a $10.35 million from Creandum’s Carl Fritjofsson and SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin. Previous investors Michael Dearing, Harrison Metal… Read More

 If you’re in high school in the United States, there’s at least a 50% chance you’re using Quizlet. And there’s an even better chance you’re at least familiar with it. But for the rest of the adult population, times have changed since we were students. Educational apps like Quizlet help you do your homework and prepare for tests. Quizlet builds modern day flash… Read More

 If you’ve ever wanted to share a voice conversation you had with Alexa, you probably pointed your smartphone at your Echo speaker and recorded a shaky mobile video. That solution may work for the occasional tweet, but businesses and developers may want an easier, more professional way to show off their Alexa skills. That’s where Voicegram comes in. Created by the makers of… Read More

 Loris.ai, a spin-out product from the maker of suicide prevention organization Crisis Text Line, has raised $2 million to help companies navigate conversations around harassment and other charged topics. Loris.ai’s seed round was led by Floodgate with participation from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Kapor Capital and others. “We started getting calls from companies and even one… Read More

 Last year two venture capital firms, General Catalyst and CRV, launched a program called the Velocity Network to get their startups in front of Fortune 500 executives in New York City. Today they announced that Mayfield has joined as the third VC firm in the network. New York is home to financial, insurance, security, retail, media, and other Fortune 500 companies — the very types of… Read More

 It may seem like there are already enough on-demand fitness classes, but one startup has an idea for something a little different. Mirror is debuting an at-home device that looks like a mirror, but also lets you see the instructor and classmates for fitness routines like barre, yoga, boxing and pilates. I’m told that this is no ordinary mirror or video conferencing system, but that… Read More

 Rubrik, the enterprise startup that provides data backup and recovery services across cloud and on-premise environments, is putting some of the funding that it raised last year at a $1.3 billion valuation to use. Rubrik has acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, the company announced today, in what appears to be Rubrik’s first acquisition. The financial terms of the deal are… Read More

 Apple’s HomePod delivers superior sound quality and solid Siri performance but still lags behind competition on breadth of voice commands. Read More

 This speaker is huge. It’s the size of a cooler a person would take camping for a week. It weighs 48 lbs. And for a good reason, too. The Kube speaker from Thomas and Darden is solid and packed with power. The company says it can put out 122 dB of sound. But it’s not a good sound. That’s the rub. This is a massive speaker that gets really loud but doesn’t sound great at… Read More

 Mobile AR had a lot of hype heading into the rollout of ARKit and ARCore this past year, but for the most part mobile AR apps have delivered a pretty heavy thud, failing to deliver on their futuristic promises. 8th Wall believes that this is the result of developers looking to port existing experiences into AR rather than designing for mobile AR’s strengths in the first place. The… Read More

 When Jason Chen first ended up at Salesforce through the acquisition of his last company Stypi, he had the tough task of integrating within Salesforce’s complex infrastructure — and not a lot of documentation to go on. Fortunately, Chen’s company had just been acquired and he was able to get the attention of the higher-ups and find that information, which was actually… Read More