A wellspring of interest in quadcopters for commercial applications is advancing globally. From Airware’s recent $10.7 million round from Andreessen Horowitz to the launch of AngelPad’s DroneDeploy, quadcopters are one of the hot, hardware trends that founders and VCs are latching onto. This experimentation is also happening on the other side of the world. Russia’s UVS Avia is… → Read More
Carnet de Mode (CDM), the Paris-based online fashion marketplace, has announced that its closed a $1.5 million Series A round — yes, in Europe we call that a Series A — led by Elaia Partners with participation from a number of angels. This brings the total raised by the company to approximately $1.8 million, having previously raised €100k in seed funding in July 2012. → Read More
Here’s an opportunity for European app developers to work on a project aimed first and foremost at helping others, rather than on the off-chance it will catch Yahoo!’s eye and lead to insane riches. Carrier Vodafone’s philanthropic arm has kicked off an app competition seeking iOS and Android apps that are “designed to improve people’s lives and deliver substantial public benefit”. → Read More
Alibaba Group officially launched (link via Google Translate) the China Smart Logistics Network (CSN) today, which former Alibaba CEO Jack Ma says will become the backbone of the country’s $190 billion e-commerce market. The network, which will be able to deliver shipments to any city in China within 24 hours, is slated for completion in 8 to 10 years. → Read More
Social news site and meme aggregator Buzzfeed is partnering with CNN and YouTube to create a new online-video channel called “CNN BuzzFeed” that will be unveiled later today. Chief operating officer Jon Steinberg told the Wall Street Journal that BuzzFeed plans to invest a low “eight-digit sum” over two years in the video platform. → Read More
Microsoft’s SharePoint always featured a core set of social tools, but with the acquisition of Yammer, as well as the ongoing integration of Lync and Skype, the folks over in Redmond are clearly ready to push social as the next major cornerstone of their enterprise offerings. Today, Microsoft is launching a new campaign to help companies understand how social can help them become more productive. → Read More
New Relic CEO Lew Cirne asked himself a question upon embarking on developing a new startup inside the company he co-founded. He wondered: “How would Jack Dorsey do it?” Dorsey started Twitter and then Square. He is now Twitter’s chairman and runs Square, too. He innovates arguably more than any CEO in the startup world. And he had a system Cirne could use. Today, Dorsey’s system… → Read More
There’s no shortage of novel Kickstarter projects that aim to change how we think about the environment, but here’s one that could literally change how we look at it. Infragram, created by the civic science-minded folks at Public Lab, puts low-cost infrared cameras into people’s hands so they can better understand the health of the plants around them. → Read More
Over the last few days, the website for video-discovery website Matcha.tv has gone dark, and those who have downloaded the company’s mobile app report that it’s no longer working. Co-founder and CEO Guy Piekarz says that the company is going in a new direction and that it will have “something better” in the future. → Read More
Ten years ago today, WordPress, the open source blogging software, was born. It’s amazing to think that it’s been that long, but considering it had all of the elements that other startups and projects have tried to emulate over the past 10 years, then it makes sense.
When speaking with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, you’d think that he was only a small part of the movement that attempted to… → Read More
Because why do anything other than try out hot technologies on Memorial Day, I just bought some Bitcoin. I might finally play Dots and maybe 3D-print an ear later this afternoon.
I would not have bought my .1 ($13.17) in Bitcoin if it weren’t for a startup called Coinbase, which is “one of the places that looked less sketchy” according to TechCrunch editor and Bitcoin bug John Biggs. “It’s one of… → Read More
The campus of Washington State University in Southeast Washington’s agricultural region looks like a typical land-grant university. The connected mix of art-deco, modern and post-modern buildings that collectively house the College of Engineering and Architecture hide a strange and incredible secret: that the researchers inside are close to making human-compatible ceramic bone grafts and… → Read More
One of the biggest challenges many entreprenuers face is finding the right technical partner when building a company. Some startups can have a single leader, but more often than not, there is a balanced team behind every successful business.
Ooga Labs founders Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier began their partnership when Currier moved Emode, the business he started with BranchOut founder … → Read More
So iOS 7, it seems, is going to do away with much of the skeuomorphic design that has crept into the operating system and its utilities. Jony Ive, rumor has it, has done away with all the textures and real-world analogs in iOS 7 and has switched to a flat design instead. Good for him, but if that’s all that is new in iOS 7, Apple has a real problem. It’s not the design of iOS, but rather the fact… → Read More
A lot of the gadgets that help people monitor and track their physical health focus on providing feedback related to physical activity for use with tracking workout data and energy expenditure during the day. Now, a new Kickstarter projected called the W/Me band wants to leverage similar data sources, but with the goal of providing a more holistic picture of wellness. → Read More
Spanish startup Ticketea, the leading DIY ticketing platform in Spain, has raised $4 million in a Series B round of funding. The investment is being led by newly-established Spanish VC Seaya Ventures, and will be used by the company to consolidate its position in Spain through new m-commerce products, as well as for international expansion with a specific focus on emerging markets. Latin America… → Read More
Nextpeer, the mobile gaming network that adds multi-player mode to indie titles, is entering private beta on the Android platform. Although the platform launched about two years ago, it only started picking up momentum in the last few months, growing to 1,000 live games from 100 back in January. They’ve also 10X-ed the number of monthly active users in the network, reaching 8 million from… → Read More
Mojang, the creative force behind Minecraft, is releasing its next title to the public a week from today on June 3rd. The new game is a digital collectible card game, similar in concept to Magic: The Gathering, and therefore a very different beast from the free-form world-building and exploration sim Minecraft. Like Minecraft, it’ll allow users to access the software very early, inviting them to… → Read More
Facebook used to have a blogging feature called Notes. It still does, but it got buried by the Timeline redesign and widely forgotten. Facebook needs to overhaul Notes, and signs say a refresh may already be in the works. It could help people express themselves, make Notes a legitimate competitor to Tumblr, and soften the blow of Facebook reportedly failing to buy Yahoo’s new baby. Back in… → Read More
I have some really big news, you guys! It turns out that if you ask people whether they want to leave their wallets at home, 83 percent of them will say yes! And sometimes, people won’t have cash with them, so they can’t make a purchase — in fact, that’s what happened to a whopping 75 percent of Canadians! What a crazy, backwards world we live in!
Even more astounding: If you buy a meal for a… → Read More
A new app created by Toronto-based developer and entrepreneur Alex Kennberg uses the Pebble to take users through a standard 7-minute workout (made popular through media coverage at outlets including the New York Times Magazine), and does so using only the tech on your wrist. It’s a great example of where standalone smart watch app development could take that gadget category beyond the boundaries… → Read More
Even though Sal Khan is now running a platform that serves 6 million students and people a month, he’s still churning out a couple videos a week. What’s been most recently on deck? World War I. To make a video, Khan says he’ll front-load several books worth of reading on everything from the Armistice Day to the sinking of the Lusitania. Then he’ll start to make videos once… → Read More
The $35/$25 Raspberry Pi microcomputer is being used by hardware hackers to power all sorts of creative projects. Including this Raspberry Pi powered laptop, which ties in the Motorola Atrix laptop dock to turn the microcomputer into a portable computer. Which surely must be the coolest use of that piece of kit to date. → Read More
Nobody’s quite sure when (and if) Bitcoin will go mainstream, but plenty of investors and entrepreneurs have begun to place their bets. The snowball is off and rolling.
If this post doesn’t make it clear why venture capitalists are loving this emerging market, just in the last two months, we’ve seen the Winklevosses admit they have a crush on Bitcoin, Liberty City Ventures launch its own… → Read More
Collabspot, an email CRM startup, has just received $79,000 (S$100,000) from a former mentor, Laurent Gasser, who also joins the company as director of business development. Collabspot provides a service that layers CRM (customer relationship management) software into Gmail. It’s targeted at the SME crowd, and promises to simplify data entry by letting workers save emails into the company… → Read More
When I speak to technical founders, they often look back with fondness to days of tinkering with a Commodore 64 or Hypercard. But perhaps tomorrow’s founders will experiment with a very different kind of code — the genetic code that underlies how everything from one-celled organisms to humans develop and behave. A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel… → Read More
Samsung has yet to officially confirm the Galaxy S4 mini, but the smartphone’s brief appearance on the company’s app store earlier today backs up rumors of a summer launch. The listing was spotted and screencapped by TGspot (link via Google Translate) before it was removed. → Read More
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just tweeted an interesting data point about the valuations of YC startups. As of now, Graham says that 37 Y Combinator companies, out of 511 startups, have valuations of or sold for at least $40 million. Currently the total valuation for the 511 startups is $11.5 billion, as Graham writes on Hacker News. → Read More
It’s no surprise that fitness gamification network Fitocracy is thriving — the company recently announced that it had surpassed 1 million users and has signed deals with personalities like the Governator, Arnold Schwarzzeneger.
But the company recently received its latest honor as one of Time Inc’s 10 NYC Startups to Watch. → Read More
Everyone has an opinion about Google Glass. Some fears are justified, since, as a culture, we don’t have a pristine history of social etiquette always catching up to technology (see: loud-mouth cellphone users). But, as XKCD points out, this doesn’t absolve us of the right to say something intelligent, and offer a reasonable path forward as we inevitably march towards heads-up display technology… → Read More
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