Each massive exit in the tech ecosystem usually follows the same cycle: an upstart becomes a huge business, it goes public or sells for a huge sum of money, many of the best people that built it take off and then they use their newfound wealth to start companies. But in addition to tech, the venture community has its own pet project: coffee. Read More
While cryptocurrencies stole the spotlight in 2017, a clutch of companies were quietly working behind the scenes to slowly bring the financial services establishment to its knees. It may turn out that these startup entrants of the last several years will prove to be the more relevant disruptors. Read More
The founders of PayPal and its employees have produced many highly successful companies over the years. Often referred to as the “PayPal Mafia” because they’ve had such an impact on the startup ecosystem, this serial entrepreneur success story is reminiscent of a similar phenomenon taking place in Latin America. The story starts with another U.S. company, Groupon. Read More
Holy hell, it’s been a year for Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ former-online-bookstore dumped $13.7 billion to buy a bunch of grocery stores, that speaker you talk to in your living room that Amazon makes is really popular and a bunch of server farms Amazon runs generate more than $10 billion in revenue annually. Read More
TrendKite is closing out 2017 with the announcement that it’s raised an additional $11 million in funding. The Austin-based startup says it’s currently analyzing 4.2 million articles every day, and using that analysis to help both brands and agencies to measure the impact of their PR efforts. So it can identify the total audience reached by articles mentioning the company, or… Read More
Mitch Goldstone loves photo scanning. His business, ScanMyPhotos, does what it says on the tin: you send photos to the company and, using high speed scanners and special software, his team digitizes your photos, sticks them onto a USB key or online, and sends them back. He is proud of his business. Thanks to his scanners he’s helped users save their photos from tornadoes, floods, and theft. Read More
In this week’s episode of Technotopia I spoke to author and historian Leslie Berlin, writer of Troublemakers: Silicon Valleys’ Coming Of Age. Berlin is the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University and one of the few people who can see the entire rise of SV tech culture from a researcher’s perspective. Berlin’s book is quirky, fun, and… Read More
Today was a momentous day in Uber history. After much debate, rumors, and strife over the past few weeks, it looks like the company and its shareholders have come to an agreement over a tender offer that will see SoftBank own nearly 15% of the company, while also injecting around $1 billion in fresh capital. That deal is expected to close in the new year. The SoftBank tender offer was… Read More
HQ Trivia is letting Android users pre-register for the live-streamed trivia game built by the makers of Vine, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. Pre-registering means you’ll get notified the moment HQ Trivia is available for download. HQ, which opened up pre-registration on December 24, had previously marketed its Android app as being available “this Christmas.” To me, that means… Read More
he trip began just before the end of school. From the wood-shaving smell of third grade out into the clean fall air, sprung free by my mother who appeared at the little window in the classroom door like a treat. You were the one who got out early. You were the one walking down an empty hall toward the big triple doors of the school. We were leaving school to drive to my grandmother’s house. Read More
All eyes may have been on Nvidia this year as its stock exploded higher thanks to an enormous amount of demand across all fronts: gaming, an increased interest in data centers, and its major potential applications in AI. But while Nvidia’s stock price and that chart may have been one of the more eye-popping parts of 2017, a year when AI continued its march toward being omnipresent in… Read More
Scaleworks, a private equity firm based in San Antonio, Texas, apparently couldn’t wait until after the holidays to share the news of its latest purchase. The firm announced it was acquiring Keen IO in a Medium blog post yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company was available for comment beyond the blog post, but Keen has raised close to $30 million since it… Read More
“I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter. For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email, or speak a request and a real person… Read More
Molekule, a San Francisco-based startup with a sleekly designed molecular air purifier started as an immigrant dream twenty years ago and ended up being named one of Time’s top 25 inventions of 2017. The inventor Yogi Goswami came up with the idea when his baby son Dilip started having a hard time breathing the air around him. Dilip suffered from severe asthma but no air purifier at… Read More
Mattermark, the site for startup and company data, is shutting down its own business after selling in a disappointing outcome to FullContact. In a document obtained by TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Danielle Morrill wrote that “common stockholders will not be receiving anything in this deal.” In other words, Mattermark employee shares are worthless. It was just last year that… Read More
More than a year and a half ago, I wrote about Coach, a startup offering tools for tutors and other freelancers to make money and operate their business online. Since then, the company has shifted focus in a big way, and it recently announced that it’s raised $3 million in seed funding. It’s got a new name, too — Podia. CEO Spencer Fry explained that after launching, Coach… Read More
Despite repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate this week, health insurance startup Oscar Health expects to gain to pull in nearly $1 billion in revenue and enroll a quarter of a million members in 2018. That’s quite a feat for the insurance company meant for the digital age. The company is only in its fifth year of operation and owes much of its success to the… Read More
Taplytics is announcing what it calls its “Intelligent Experience Cloud,” bringing together products for A/B testing, messaging, analytics and more To certain extent, this is just new branding for existing Taplytics tools, highlighting the fact that the Y Combinator-backed startup has expanded beyond mobile A/B testing by launching a full suite of products to help businesses… Read More
Chip, the chatbot app that plugs into your bank account and lets you automatically save for a rainy day, has raised nearly £1.1 million on equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. The fund raise, which is part of a larger £2.4 million funding round, forms part of plans for the London-based startup to apply for a banking license. Read More
Revoice.me is a new service that makes it easy to give readers, listeners and viewers the option to subscribe to your content — newsletter, blog, podcast or YouTube channel — via Facebook Messenger. Because, as we end 2017, messaging apps is where a significant proportion of your audience is at. Or so the thinking goes. Read More
WeWork had a big year in 2017. The seven-year-old company opened 90 new locations, doubling its global membership, and expanded into new cities in Latin America, Asia and Australia, and Europe and Israel. It is reportedly valued at $20 billion. While 2018 holds more of the same — WeWork plans to launch 1 million square feet of new space each month next year — the company also plans… Read More
I’ve been holding a few micro meet ups over the past few years and thought I’d start it up again in honor of token/ICO mania. I’d love to hear what you all are working on in the New York area so we’ll all meet at Union Hall in Brooklyn tonight at 7pm. The event is very informal and we’ll plan the next few months of micro-meetups during the event. My goal is to do… Read More
Ooma, the company that’s probably still best known for its VoIP platform, today announced that it has acquired Butterfleye, an AI-powered video camera and security platform that produces a smart security camera for home and business use. Ooma plans to integrate Butterfleye’s camera into its Ooma Home security solution, but the company will also continue to sell the camera under… Read More
Let’s Enhance is an Estonia-based startup that’s using a so called ‘hallucinating AI’ deep neural network to power a freemium photo upscaling service. Find out what happened when we fed it some photos for printing… 