Day: February 15, 2018

 French startup Lydia is raising a $16.1 million round (€13 million) led by CNP Assurances with existing investors XAnge, New Alpha AM, Oddo BHF and Groupe Duval also participating. Lydia isn’t the first startup that wants to replace PayPal, and also probably not the last one. But it’s clear that the company is slowly becoming […]

 TechCrunch has learned of a potentially serious new bug affecting a wide range of Apple devices. During their development work on an international news feed, software engineers at Aloha Browser discovered two unicode symbols in a non-English language that can crash any Apple device that uses Apple’s default San Francisco font. The bug instigates crashes […]

 Amazon today is rolling out the biggest makeover for its Alexa Skills Kit Developer Console – the console where voice app developers create their skills – since its debut back in 2015. The new console has been redesigned with a focus on improving developer workflows, says Amazon. It now offers separate sections for “build,” “test,” “launch,”… […]

 I’ve been holding a series of micro meetups in New York over the past few years and I thought we should have one on February 28 to talk about token sales/ICOs. I’ll bring in an outside speaker and I’d love to have one or two companies pitch who are working on their own token. If […]

 LiveLike, a startup that powers VR streaming experiences for broadcasters like FOX Sports and Sky, has raised a $9.6M Series B round led by Greycroft Partners and Lepe Partners. This brings total funding raised to just over $23M. As a refresher, LiveLike’s VR experience let you select different camera angles, sit in and look around […]

 Unsplash is rethinking the way photography gets distributed and monetized, and today it’s announcing a $7.25 million Series A to fund those efforts. The site actually started as a side project for freelance marketplace Crew, but eventually the founders decided to focus on Unsplash and sold Crew to Dribbble. While the Unsplash photo library contains […]

 Facebook is amping up its Community Help efforts, now enabling companies like Lyft, Chase, International Medical Corps and Save the Children to easily provide information and services, like food, transportation and shelter, to people in crisis. “Our priority is to build tools that help keep people safe and provide them with ways to get the […]

 Nokia’s been facing an uphill battle for relevance in the consumer space ever since the company threw in the towel on smartphones. Wearables seemed like a reasonable road, so the company snapped up French electronics company Withings back in 2016, phasing out the name a year later and rebranding itself Nokia Health. Of course, the […]

 Pandora is plugging a hole in its paid subscription service with today’s launch of Pandora Premium on the web. While free users of the radio service could listen to their stations via the browser, oddly, those who pay for an upgraded experience couldn’t play their music on-demand, build playlists, or take advantage of any of […]

 Twenty minutes into my interview with CEO Rob Nail, and I still couldn’t cut through the buzzwords about his online and in-person education startup. So I asked him straight up, “with as little BS as possible, what does Singularity University do?” He told me “You learn to read the news differently and how to identify […]