Amazon has just announced a new content deal with NBCUniversal, bringing a host of new television series to the video streaming platform.
Some of those titles include Covert Affairs, Defiance, Grimm, Hannibal, and Suits. And what’s more, the company is pulling content from NBCUniversal’s children series such as Curious George and Land Before Time, which will be available with Kindle FreeTime… → Read More
BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in what is a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPal Mafia. → Read More
BonitaSoft, a provider of an open source business process management (BPM) solution, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by the FSN PME Fund, a French government initiative to invest in technology companies to help them scale globally. Also joining the round are previous investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital. The new funding round brings the total raised by the company to… → Read More
Social analytics startup Awe.sm has been growing quickly and getting a lot of interest from brands that want to use its platform for measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. With that in mind, the company has hired a new CEO, industry veteran Fred McIntyre. → Read More
IDC today was the latest to publish its numbers on smartphone market shares after the major handset makers released Q1 earnings, and like Gartner, Strategy Analytics and the rest, it underscores the power of Google’s Android platform at the moment: Android OEMs shipped 162.1 million handsets in the quarter, giving the platform a 75% share of total worldwide shipments, while Apple’s 37.4 million… → Read More
AirWatch, the startup that helps businesses manage security and more on employees’ mobile devices, is today announcing that it has raised another $25 million, led by Accel with participation also from Insight Venture Partners. The funds come as part of an expanded Series A round, originally for $200 million, which the company announced with a splash in February during Mobile World Congress. This… → Read More
While the world goes gaga for Google Glass, a small startup has come up with an intriguing new take on a device which can display information before your eyes. Instabeat is head-up display unit which attaches to swimming goggles and monitors your heart rate, calories, laps and turns during your swim. It’s been live on crowd funding platform Indiegogo for a few days and is already poised to reach… → Read More
On the heels of Google wading into the music streaming waters with its Google Play Music All Access service, with a $10 fee for all-you-can-eat streamed tracks, the indie music agency Merlin has today published results of a recent survey of its 20,000-label member group, plus an analysis of 6.5 billion music streams over the last year, which spell out where the money is coming from today. → Read More
Marqeta, the startup that helps businesses nationwide attain the Starbucks loyalty Card “pay-in-advance for your coffee” model, is announcing $14 million in new funding from Greylock IL (an affiliate fund of Greylock Partners), Granite Ventures, new investor Commerce Ventures, and a number of leading new angel and unnamed strategic investors. → Read More
EdgeSpring, an enterprise business intelligence and analytics startup, is emerging from stealth and announcing $11 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. → Read More
It’s clear that Google had other things it could have talked about on the first day of the I/O conference. Like Google Glass. Instead, the attendees heard more about how Google has developed new ways to turn data into services. The highlights were not some fancy hardware but the magic of Google’s APIs and algorithms, the bread and butter of what Google does. I spent part of the… → Read More
Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a… → Read More
By now, you have probably heard about the Liberator, a 3D printed plastic gun designed, assembled, and test-fired by Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. Is it legal? → Read More
Sebastian Rodriguez waited in line 90 minutes to be the first person at Google I/O to get the Google Chromebook Pixel, the premium laptop given to all conference attendees today. Rodriguez is a a software engineer with Thales, a data security company. He humored us and did an “unboxing” of his new Pixel. He was hoping to get Google Glass as were most of the people we talked to at the… → Read More
Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers.
We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company… → Read More
Google isn’t about search, apps, or devices. Those are just vehicles, and there’s no destination. That’s because Larry Page’s Google is on an unending pursuit of the future, not just next quarter’s earnings. The scattershot of projects Google revealed today at I/O had just one unifying factor: They further that pursuit, or empower the curiosity of others. → Read More
Google’s stock price came close to its 52-week high on the first day of Google I/O today, hitting $915 per share at close. In comparison, Apple today dropped 15 points to close at $428 per share, 277 points off its 52-week high. This morning, Google stock jumped to $909 per share from its opening price of $895 when Co-Founder Larry Page hit the stage at around 11:45. It is now trading at… → Read More
Google took the lid off of its new version of Maps at I/O 2013 today, which is a dramatic redesign of the long-standing navigation and place-finding software across all platforms. We got a chance to go hands-on with the new Maps, which is still a beta product, with access only given out to a few select users so far. In the video above, you check it out in action as a Google rep gives us a… → Read More
Meet the PR2 personal robot from Willow Garage. The human-sized bot can learn to fold clothes and do other activities via voice commands, and it can even get into sword fights. Watch as I challenge the PR2 to a lightsaber duel today at Google I/O, and learn how Willow Garage could help anyone run their own experiments with robots. → Read More
Google+ is getting a big update for its photos experience, which is rolling out to users now. Initial impressions show a work flow that makes it easier to tweak pictures quickly and even automatically, without requiring that you learn a huge amount about Photoshop or other editing software. → Read More
It’s becoming increasingly commonplace for startups in the so-called “sharing economy” to take heat from regulators who seek to hold them to the same business standards as incumbent businesses. The latest company to come under fire from regulators is peer-to-peer car-sharing startup RelayRides, which received a cease-and-desist notice from New York State’s Department of Financial Services (DFS). → Read More
It’s rare to see a company that is so established yet so cutting edge as Shapeways. The company, founded in 2007 as a spin-off of Royal Philips Electronics, began as a one-off 3D printing service that offered basic plastic items for sale online. Over the years, however, the company has branched off into some amazing materials – steel, ceramic, and even sandstone – and they’ve already been able to… → Read More
Apple had a bit of a head start when it came to mobile software sales, since it launched its App Store earlier than the Android Market (which would later become what we call Google Play today). But the gap was more pronounced in terms of downloads when they kicked off, but lately the gap has been closing, and today both Play and the App Store announced very close milestones. → Read More
Google today announced a small but cool update to Gmail. For emails where the developer has enabled this feature, Google will now show action buttons next to emails in your inbox that let you take actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the schema.org markup language to add their own actions to Gmail messages. → Read More
Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the Cambridge, MA cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down TweetBackup, a company originally founded in Sweden that Backupify acquired in 2010 for an undisclosed amount. Tweetbackup has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting… → Read More
Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements from today’s Google I/O developer conference is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants, such as PayPal. It plans to do so with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more.
It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand… → Read More
Indoor mapping software startup Meridian, continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering.
Called Zones, the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. → Read More
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a new Maps API for mobile developers, updates to Maps for Android and iOS and a completely refreshed Google Maps experience on the desktop. After the main keynote, however, Google also announced a major visual refresh for sites that use its Google Maps API. → Read More
Phew. Google just spent the last three hours or so showing off new developer tools, APIs, service overhauls, and the occasional gadget, but not everything the search giant rolled out today got a turn under the spotlights at the Moscone Center. Case in point: according to a post on the official Google Commerce blog, Google Wallet support has been baked into Gmail, so users will soon be able to send… → Read More
Larry Page thinks we are, as a population, too negative. Especially the tech community.
The solution? Amongst other things, Larry wishes the world had some sort of Burning Man-esque place for crazy builders to just be crazy. A place with less societal pressure, and without antiquated laws makin’ things sticky. → Read More
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