Wia, an Irish startup that offers a cloud platform to enable developers to turn various sensor-based hardware into fully-fledged Internet of Things (IoT) devices, has raised €750,000 in seed funding, at what I understand to be a €2.5m pre-money valuation. The rather modest round is led by Suir Valley Ventures, with participation from Enterprise Ireland.
When you first look at Redkix, it looks like any other Slack clone, but while you could definitely use it just like Slack, the team offers an important twist on the standard company chat theme: it plays nice with email. After a year of private testing with about 7,000 users, the team is opening up
Ikea is getting into the domestic solar power generation and storage market in the UK, with new solar panel and home storage battery system products. The products include panels that integrated with existing roofing solutions provided by Solarcentury, a UK solar power company, which includes a 25 year guarantee on the panels themselves, as well
Instagram Stories has blossomed from a Snapchat clone into an integral part of the world’s largest dedicated visual communication app in the first year since its launch. Half of the businesses on Instagram produced a story in the last month, and its boosted the app’s average usage to 32 minutes per day for those under
HP has a new entrant in that most curious PC niche – the backpack computer. A product of the virtual reality computing wave, the backpack PC provides all the power needed to drive high-quality VR headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, but with a form factor that allows the user to roam about untethered.
Oracle might not be the first company you think of when it comes to cloud computing, but the company has made significant strides in recent years. Today, it announced the bi-annual update to its Oracle Cloud Applications Suite. This is update number 13 for those keeping score at home. The suite includes a range of
ProoV, a startup founded by a couple of industry veterans, solves a problem the founders encountered many times over the years: how do you get the CIO or CTO to agree to do a proof of concept for your startup to show that your idea will actually work as you’ve described. Today the company announced
In what looks like a pretty decent exit for German company builder Makers, two of its incubated startups have been acquired by performance marketing platform OLAmobile. The deal, for a combined price of $10 million, sees IconPeak and its subsidiary BidderPlace join OLAmobile to help the latter increase its presence within the mobile performance marketing
Filling up your car can be a hassle, especially when there are lines at the gas station. It also costs too much because part of it is covering real estate costs. A startup called Booster thinks it has a solution for this and is partnering with major employers to send its gas trucks to office
Snap shares fell 4% and closed at a record low on Tuesday at $13.10, but it wasn’t just because of the dreaded lockup expiration, which allowed some insiders to finally sell shares. Snap faced another devastating blow when it was revealed that the company won’t make it into the S&P 500, a popular stock market index. The way
Another season, another group of startups presenting as part of 500 Startups’ 21st demo day. This time around, 29 companies pitched on stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. We noticed strong trends in healthcare focused businesses as well as startups tackling international markets out of the gate. Perhaps the most interesting trait
Stan is going all in on comedy, Netflix is playing superheroes and Foxtel is in peak “Game of Thrones” mode. Subscribe to CNET: http://cnet.co/2heRhep Check …
Ritual Vitamins has raised $10.5 million in Series A venture funding to attract talent, scale the business and build in-house technology for customer experience and support. Ritual first launched as a Disrupt NY Battlefield 2016 contestant with interest and angel funding from Upfront Ventures, FF Angel, Rivet Ventures and Troy Carter. Ritual has since raised a total of $15.3 million. Vitamins
Apple Watch sales are up more than 50 percent since last year, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. He mentioned this when discussing Apple’s strong third-quarter results on the investor call Tuesday. Overall, Apple beat analyst expectations with $1.67 per share, versus the anticipated $1.57 per share. Revenue was $45.4 billion, when Wall Street forecast
The $2500 Frigidaire FPEH3077RF electric range looks good, bakes evenly and boils water quickly, but it has too many minor annoyances for its price.
Impossible Foods, the six-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company known for its “juicy” meatless burgers, quietly announced $75 million in funding late last week, led by Temasek, with participation from Open Philanthropy, as well as earlier investors Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures and Horizon Ventures. The company says it isn’t providing further financial details but the round
Apple had a semi-blowout quarter — though, really, the story is about what’s happening in the next quarter — sending the stock to an all-time high. The big jump means Apple is now a company worth more than $800 billion. It seemed not too long ago that Google might have a fair shot at being a
Apple set its expectations for the fourth quarter above what Wall Street was looking for today in its earnings report — just in time for a huge iPhone launch coming up soon. Apple said it expected to generate between $49 billion and $52 billion in the fourth quarter. The midpoint of that falls above what Wall
Uber SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey vividly remembers the day Susan Fowler published her blog post alleging workplace harassment and management issues came out. It was Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017 — her dad’s birthday. And the company was also “literally thrown into shock,” she told me at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco last
What’s worse than going to the doctor? Taking your pet to the doctor. Not only is it a major hassle to actually transport your dog or cat to the vet, but you usually end up paying way too much for way too little time spent with the actual veterinarian. But Vetted wants to change this.
The UK’s Home Secretary has yet again cranked up the pressure on messaging giants over use of end-to-end encryption to secure communications sent via popular services like WhatsApp — implying she would prefer tech companies voluntarily re-engineer their security systems so that decrypted data can be handed over to terror-fighting intelligence agencies on demand. Writing
Remember the third party controller your sibling/cousin/friend made you use when you visited his or her house in the NES days? Remember the pain you felt when the joystick wasn’t quite right and they were hosing you on Mortal Kombat while you were busy trying to figure out why your character kept kicking? Well the
Facebook is reportedly working on dedicated video chat hardware, per a new report by Bloomberg. The device is said to be the inaugural major product from Facebook’s hardware-focused Building 8 product development lab, and will include a notebook-sized display. It’s intended to make video chat participants separated geographically feel like they’re together in the same
We’ve written several times about Kuri, a self-driving robot that responds to voice commands. But there’s a big question that still hasn’t been answered. As Chris Matthews, vice president of marketing at Mayfield Robotics put it: “What does Kuri do?” In other words, we know that Kuri is cute and fun, but why would someone
VSCO is a brand well-known among photographers who take advantage of its presets for desktop and its mobile app featuring film-inspired filters and pro image tools. Now the company is moving into video editing, with the launch of its first video editing tool on iOS. The tool will allow users to apply presets and tools to any size
Helpling, the Rocket Internet-founded company that lets you book a range of home services online, has raised further funding. This time around, the undisclosed backing — which I understand to be “several million” Euros — comes from Unilever Ventures, the venture arm of Unilever, in what can undoubtedly be described as a strategic investment. In
San Francisco-based startup Juvo wants to help mobile users in emerging markets improve their financial standing by combining data and identity to provide micro-loans. It’s an ambitious goal, and to help achieve it, the company has raised $40 million in funding led by NEA and Wing Venture Capital. Juvo joins companies like Branch and Tala in bringing financial
Sawyer, a two-year-old, Brooklyn-based startup that aims to become the OpenTable of children’s activities, has raised $6 million in new funding led by Advance Venture Partners. Others that contributed to the round include Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 3311 Ventures, Female Founders Fund, and earlier backer Collaborative Fund, as well as unnamed investors from the company’s $1.5
Last week Arduino AG, the holding company for the open source Arduino project, announced that CEO Federico Musto stepped down, to be replaced with Massimo Banzi as new Chairman and CTO of Arduino and Dr. Fabio Violante as CEO. The move comes after the maker community found troubling discrepancies in Musto’s educational claims. “This is
Plume Labs has been working on air pollution for a while. In addition to its mobile app and air quality device, the startup is launching a paid API called Plume.io so that anybody can add air quality to their own service. Think about it as Dark Sky’s API, but for air quality. Plume Labs has