It’s almost as if there’s an arms race in online education. Which MOOC platform can expand the fastest? Place your bets now. On the heels of edX’s announcement that it will be expanding internationally with the addition of six new schools (bringing its total to 12), Coursera is doing some addition of its own. Today, the massive online course platform announced that 29… → Read More
Appecute launched last year with a platform that gave customers a single view across any platform as a service (PaaS). Today the company is showing a change in focus with an activity stream style service for developer and operations (DevOps) professionals to see across the multiple services that are used for application management. → Read More
Medikly, a startup that aims to help pharmaceutical companies reach and better understand physicians, announced today that it has raised $1.2 million in series A financing from Easton Capital.
A recent graduate of the Blueprint Health accelerator in New York City, Medikly has developed an enterprise-grade platform that provides Big Pharma with a multi-channel marketing solution, combining… → Read More
When it comes to online education and massive open online courses (a.k.a. “MOOCs”), Udacity and Coursera have stolen most of the attention. But they aren’t the only two choices for voracious distance learners out there; in fact, the number of options has grown considerably. → Read More
Like a growing number of students, Ben Kosinski attended multiple universities over the course of his collegiate career. Although these schools differed wildly in culture and the makeup of their student bodies, the one thing that seems to remain true at any school, he says, is the level of influence online social identities have come to play in the daily life of college students. Yet, in spite of… → Read More
The White House released a high-level strategy paper on combating international intellectual property theft and pointed a not-so-subtle finger at China. The report promises increased criminal sanctions against thieves, diplomatic pressure on egregious state actors, and public-awareness campaigns. → Read More
Tech companies try to stay lean. They don’t want to hire too many sales people, and they can’t build the perfect advertising tool for every buyer. So following in Google and Facebook’s footsteps, today Twitter and in November LinkedIn launched ads APIs. They set up a powerful value exchange: “Help us sell more ads, and we’ll give you a cut.” → Read More
Sony’s PlayStation 4 made its grand debut today in a presentation with all the theatrical flair to be expected from an electronics company that’s also a media company that’s also a producer and publisher of blockbuster video games. But the pomp hides a hurting heart, and it didn’t show off anything that resembles medecine for the company’s ailments at today’s show. → Read More
When NVIDIA officially pulled back the curtains on its new Tegra 4 SoC at CES, it had no shortage of praise for the thing — the company referred to it as “the world’s fastest mobile processor” — but there was something missing from the announcement. Who would be using be using it?
Sure, Vizio revealed a 10.1-inch, T4-powered tablet just a day later, but there was nary a phone partnership in… → Read More
Pinterest, the content discovery website that has achieved massive mainstream popularity by letting people clip and share their favorite photos and videos online with virtual “pinboards,” is making it very clear that it is much more than just a pretty face — it’s a big business.
Pinterest confirmed today that it has secured approximately $200 million in a new funding round led by new investor… → Read More
Gaikai’s Dave Perry took the stage at the PS4 event today to describe how Gaikai would be adding cloud gaming elements to the PS4, which will make it possible to jump in and try games in the PlayStation store, make sharing with your friends a snap, and also invite spectators and get friends to help you by remotely taking over your game. → Read More
You probably associate the idea of “comics” with things of a trivial nature, like the newspaper’s funny pages, or maybe Saturday morning SpongeBob marathons. But according to Kevin Cheng, the web exec and entrepreneur who is well known for helping steer the vision and strategy for products such as Yahoo Pipes and Twitter before founding his own startup, those colorful doodles can be more powerful… → Read More
Sony had an event today and as expected, it introduced the PlayStation 4. The next-gen platform is designed to shift focus from the living room to the gamer, Sony said, and overall, PlayStation’s approach is meant to make it possible for gamers to play wherever they want, whenever they want. The console has 8GB of memory and an impressive x86 CPU, but that’s not what Sony claims to be focused on. → Read More
Barriers to international manufacturing and high fuel costs have long made overseas production painful for small businesses. Now, an economic trend towards American manufacturing has created a timely entrance to the market for Maker’s Row. The startup, a finalist in last week’s Women 2.0 Pitch Competition, says it wants to become a go-to resource to create, well, anything. Co-founders… → Read More
Join us live at the 2013 PlayStation Meeting where Sony will hopefully unveil what’s next for their iconic gaming console. The event runs from 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific and I’ll be posting images and commentary in our liveblog below. → Read More
PernixData today launched its Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) for clustering flash to get higher levels of performance. It’s similar to how VMware aggregates CPU and memory to give customers more for its server infrastructure. → Read More
Mobile commerce startup PayDragon wants to simplify the process of purchasing various grocery staples via your mobile phone. The company already has one-click purchasing and two-day shipping for products that can be ordered on its mobile apps. Now it’s redesigned its app to provide easier browsing of its inventory. PayDragon has always been focused on making mobile commerce easy. Coming out… → Read More
Average boat owners only use their vessel 14 days a year. That’s why Boatbound is brilliant. It’s a peer-to-peer boat-renting startup that lets you book everything from kayaks to catamarans to yachts for a day at a time with a $1 million Lloyd’s insurance plan. In his first interview about Boatbound, founder Aaron Hall lays out his plan to make boating more accessible to everyone. Ahoy! → Read More
WebRTC, the plugin-free real-time video, audio and text chat protocol most browser vendors now support, is now activated by default in the latest bleeding edge Firefox Nightly release. While Mozilla has long backed WebRTC, it was only available as an option in the Nightly releases so far. Now that it is enabled by default, chances are that it will slowly make its way into the stable release… → Read More
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Piazza founder Pooja Sankar and learned how her struggles in school inspired her to build an online question-and-answer platform for students to learn together. During our discussion, Pooja shared her story of feeling isolated in her studies and how that empowered her to learn Ruby on Rails and build a prototype that she pitched directly to professors. → Read More
The war for your living room is about to heat up. While Microsoft is still keeping its own next-generation console under lock and key, rival Sony is gearing up to take the stage in New York City and show off exactly what it’s been working on for the past few years. Naturally, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing starting at 6PM Eastern/3PM Pacific tonight. → Read More
Mobli is launching a new version of its photo- and video-sharing app, pushing into the next generation of this competitive space with a new feed of stories that’s integrated with Facebook and Tumblr, a new way to auto-edit uploaded photos, and filters specific to cities and other locations. Although it’s going up against competitors ranging from Instagram to Vine, the Israeli and New… → Read More
In the deep and rich world of self-generated Internet content, there are few things as stark – and as starkly polarizing – as text on a colored background. Is it meme-cheating? Is it boring? Is writing “i hate mondays” in Helvetica over a field of taupe better than posting a picture of a cat hanging off of a tree limb with the same aphorism under her? Now we can find out definitively with … → Read More
Analyst Forrester is predicting tablet ownership in Western Europe will quadruple by 2017 — with the percentage of online adults owning a slate projected to increase markedly from less than a fifth (14 per cent) last year to more than half (55 per cent) in 2017. In 2011 the tablet-owner figure stood at just 7 per cent, underlining how quickly digitally connected consumers are adopting slates. → Read More
YouTube just announced that it has partnered with Gengo and Translated.net, two popular translation services, to give its users a more streamlined process to get their video captions translated by professionals. Publishers can start the translation process from the YouTube interface, get estimates for how long the translation will take and how much it will cost, but they will still need to… → Read More
Small businesses and new brands are mere sardines in the ocean of social media. But a school of small fish is much more powerful than a lone minnow, which is why Saber Blast, a new alliance marketing tool, has launched out of beta. The service lets any brands sign up and join forces with other companies and brands, by RT-ing and re-sharing social media content. The idea is that a service like… → Read More
TrustEgg, a Y Combinator-backed startup which lets parents set up trusts for their children is actually launching. That’s a milestone in and of itself, because, as a financial services company, it had been facing a lot of regulatory hurdles. The company has also recovered from the loss of its first co-founder, Gabe Krambs, who left CEO Jeff Brice to take a job that paid the bills. It has since… → Read More
Toronto’s Upverter is a startup that’s poised to effect change that could reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship. That’s not something you can say about most of the businesses we cover on a daily basis, whether or not they have good ideas. But it’s definitely true of Upverter, the company that’s hoping to build a cloud-based hardware engineering platform that can match and overtake its… → Read More
Handy, a smartphone rental service out of Hong Kong, has launched operations in Singapore. The company offers smartphones for rent to travelers at $9 (HKD 68) a day—$12 (S$15) a day in Singapore—and the price includes unlimited 3G data and international calls. The Handy brand comes under its CEO, Terence Kwok’s startup effort called Tink Labs, and is its first and only project thus far. The… → Read More
VCs like to go around asking the same questions: “What’s cool? What startups do you like?” Recently, the consensus answer to those questions is a startup called Vurb.
Vurb is a contextual content engine, a platform that connects and compiles relevant information from services like, but not limited to, Yelp, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Amazon and so on. Nothing quite like it exists on the market. → Read More
New York City
