As great as the web is, I still haven’t been able to kick my habit for buying fashion and lifestyle magazines off the newsstand. One of the things I love the most about monthly glossies are features like Vanity Fair’s My Stuff and Us Weekly’s What’s In My Bag, in which notable people reveal the exact products that they actually buy and use (celebrity chef David Chang uses Sensodyne toothpaste and… → Read More
Bloomberg today reports that Google could face a new U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust probe into its display advertising business. As Bloomberg’s Brian Womack and Sara Forden note, the FCC is looking into whether Google used its strong position in this market to “illegally curb competition.” The investigators, the report also notes, want to see if Google used its display ads business… → Read More
Toshiba isn’t exactly known for churning out attractive, high-end notebooks, which is why the company’s new Kirabook is such an oddity. It’s a handsome little thing if you’re into very (and I mean very) understated designs, though I imagine at least a few people will think the Kirabook looks downright dull.
The Kirabook is wedge-shaped like many of its other ultrabook brethren but it’s… → Read More
Convertibles were all the rage back in the 1950s (thanks to tailfins and the Corvette) and in the early 2000s (thanks to Microsoft and Sony). In the 2000s, however, we saw convertibles in the form of laptops that could twist and turn themselves into tablets. The result, usually, was a not-very-good-laptop folded into a not-very-good tablet. → Read More
Salesforce.com met analyst expectations for its first quarter with non-GAAP earnings per share of 10 cents. Total first quarter revenues were $893 million, an increase of 28 percent on a year-over-year basis. Subscription and support revenues were $842 million, an increase of 29% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $50 million, an increase of 25%. It had… → Read More
Pandora has had a busy quarter. In March, the social radio company saw its long-time CEO Joe Kennedy abruptly step down, leaving the board to scramble to find a replacement. On the bright side, Kennedy’s exit, while likely a result of stress, followed relatively good times for Pandora. And it’s continued to push forward since. → Read More
Postmates is looking to expand its business and make mobile, on-demand deliveries a widespread thing throughout cities around the country — that we already know. The company has been operating in San Francisco for a while, and launched in Seattle about three months ago. But where will it land next?
All signs point to New York City. → Read More
A new bulletin from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns that lethal, undetectable 3D-printed firearms may be “impossible” to contain. After a Texas law student designed and released digital blueprints for the world’s first fully printable gun, the files have allegedly been downloaded more than 100,000 times, despite a domestic ban on distributing the files from the U.S. State… → Read More
Google almost completely revamped the Google+ photo experience last week, but somehow the company didn’t get around to announcing one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire: Google now uses computer vision and machine learning to let you search your photos for things like sunsets, food and flowers. I also tried terms like “cars,” “beach” and “bikes” and Google consistently… → Read More
After being acquired by Facebook, the mobile back-end service Parse has been busy integrating itself into the company, as well as launching new services like web hosting for developers.
The service has built tools to help developers focus on the front-end of their product, while handling all of the messy back-end things like cross-platform compatibility and testing. Naturally, Facebook… → Read More
Lambda Labs, an early-stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release a facial recognition API for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says. The move comes on the heels of a Congressional inquiry into Google’s new wearable technology, which is still very much in the prototype… → Read More
It was just two weeks ago that fast-growing enterprise cloud storage company, Box, went out and acquired document embedding service and Y Combinator grad, Crocodoc. Apparently Aaron Levie sees what Yahoo is doing and he wants to show that Box is ready to do a little acquiring of its own. → Read More
After just a year, Badoo COO Ben Ling is leaving the social networking site to join Khosla Ventures. Ling, who has formerly held senior executive roles at companies like Google, YouTube and Facebook, will join a growing team at Vinod Khosla’s venture firm, as it has been adding operations executives as partners. → Read More
This isn’t exactly the launch of Google Now for the desktop, which many of us have been patiently waiting for, but Google today announced that it is bringing a richer notifications experience to Chrome, starting with the latest beta. This definitely feels like it brings Google Now yet another step closer to the desktop. → Read More
Score one for technology: Doctors 3D-printed an emergency airway tube that saved a 20-month old baby boy’s life. After imaging the boy’s faulty windpipe, doctors at the C.S. Mot Children’s Hospital printed 100 tiny tubes and laser-stitched them together over the trachea (video below). → Read More
Imonomy, an Israeli startup which makes software that analyses webpages and automatically inserts relevant, copyright-free images to accompany the content, has closed a $400,000 seed round from a group of angel investors. Investors include Inon Axel, former CEO of Kasamba, Liron Rose, cofounder of AfterDownload, and Itai Levitan and Tal Shaked, partners at AfterDownload. → Read More
Toronto-based startup MyShoebox is facing a time in which photo sharing announcements are thick and deep; Google unveiled its updated Google+ photos experience last week at I/O, and this week we seen pretty big announcements from Yahoo! around Flickr. Does that intimate MyShoebox, a photo-focused startup launching its version 2.0 product on the tail of those bits of news? Not really, says… → Read More
Today a TechStars-backed company is launching out of private beta and into the App Store in an attempt to bring the Utopian notion of a barterer’s lifestyle to fruition. Bondsy, founded by a long-haired, bearded, and Brazilian Diego Zambrano, lets users trade anything they own for anything their network has to offer.
Yet, unlike Zaarly, TaskRabbit, or other peer-to-peer marketplaces, Bondsy… → Read More
Google today announced that it has been taking its Street View Trekker – the compact backpack version of its Street View cars – and its underwater Street View cameras to the Galapagos Islands and that it plans to make these images available on Google Maps later this year. The company worked together with the Charles Darwin Foundation, the Galapagos National Parks Directorate and, for the… → Read More
Barely a month or two after launching the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing service Popset, the team realized they were solving the wrong problem. Users weren’t struggling to share their photos with groups; they needed tools to help them organize and manage their photo libraries across a variety of platforms and services. So the company decided to change its course, and today it’s… → Read More
LoyalBlocks, a startup that makes a mobile-focused technology platform for brick-and-mortar businesses looking to encourage customer loyalty, has raised $9 million in new funding.
The round, which serves as LoyalBlocks’ Series A, was led by General Catalyst Partners with participation from Founder Collective and existing investor Gemini Israel Ventures. This brings the total investment into… → Read More
The U.S. House of Representatives just released its own version of a high-skilled immigration reform bill and is actively seeking input through the collective IQ of the Internet. House Oversight Chairman and one of our Most Innovative People in Democracy, Darrell Issa, has placed the Supplying Knowledge-Based Immigrants And Lifting Levels of STEM (SKILLS) Visas Act on his very own public markup… → Read More
At Google I/O last week, Google announced that its Google App Engine High Replication Datastore (HRD) – its schemaless object data storage service – currently processes over 4.5 trillion transactions per month, has an uptime of 99.95% and stores over a petabyte of data. Today, the company announced that it is dramatically reducing the pricing for some Datastore features. Storing a gigabyte of data… → Read More
It was almost one year ago (to the day!) that we first wrote about Lyft and how the company was going to offer some lower-priced competition to on-demand ride leader Uber in San Francisco. Now, 366 days later, Lyft is celebrating the anniversary of that launch with some huge news: It’s raised a $60 million round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. → Read More
For those who use Evernote as a to-do list application, the service just became more useful today with the launch of a much-requested feature: reminders. Available to both Evernote and Evernote Business users on Mac, iOS and web (to start), the option now appears as an alarm clock icon at the top-right of the note on Mac and web, and the bottom of the note on mobile (iPhone and iPad). Though a… → Read More
TaskRabbit, the San Francisco startup that has made a name for itself by helping people connect with odd jobs, is now a place where you can find a real job too.
Today TaskRabbit is launching a new set of tools in its three-month-old TaskRabbit for Business portal that are designed to help companies hire ongoing temporary workers for jobs that will span over multiple days, weeks, or months. → Read More
Remember how over a year ago, everyone was all excited about the forthcoming Pinterest API? CEO Ben Silbermann even teased its release in a March 2012 email to Pinterest users detailing a Terms of Service change. And API documentation even once popped up on the site, only later to lead to a 404? Well, don’t get all excited again, but the API documentation has returned…um, sorta.* This… → Read More
JustFab, the subscription-based fashion commerce site, is putting the $109 million that it has raised so far to use: today it is announcing the acquisition of The Fab Shoes, a European e-commerce shoe club in France and Spain, to build out its global operations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Twitter today made the latest push in its bid to cozy up to Madison Avenue and the world of big-budget advertising, by tapping more into the kind of mainstream mediums where advertisers like to spend their money. Today the big focus is TV and your living room. In New York, the company announced Twitter Amplify, a way of bringing real-time video into the site, with initial partners including the… → Read More
Another day, another acquisition by Yahoo.
Yahoo said this morning it’s acquired PlayerScale, a California-based startup that makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming. Financial details haven’t been disclosed.
PlayerScale, which was self-funded and cash-flow positive as of this past January, was founded in 2009. According to a VentureBeat article also from January, the company… → Read More
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