Day: May 30, 2019

Google Maps want to help restaurant diners know what to order. The company today is rolling out an update to Google Maps on Android, with iOS to follow, which will highlight the restaurant’s most popular dishes. The feature itself is using machine learning to uncover these dish suggestions based on the restaurants’ reviews and photos. […]

Firefly, a startup that allows ridehail drivers to make money from advertising, has raised $30 million in Series A funding. The company is about to launch in New York City, where it’s also acquiring the digital operations of advertising company Strong Outdoor. Co-founder and CEO Kaan Gunay said this will allow Firefly to start working […]

Netflix has released a new teaser trailer for its collaboration with The Jim Henson Company on “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” and wow, is it a doozy. For a certain generation of moviegoer (including this author), “The Dark Crystal” was an eye-opening introduction to the darker, explicitly fantastic side of Jim Henson’s genius. Long-known […]

Google and its partners today announced that the 5,600-miles-long INDIGO subsea cable, which connects Sydney and Perth with Jakarta and Singapore, is now ready for service. To build the cable, which will significantly strengthen the connectivity between Australia and Southeast Asia, Google partnered with AARnet, Indosat, Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra. The cable, which features about […]

Businesses have to keep the content flowing on social media, so a startup called soona says it’s developed a new way to provide all the photos and videos they need. The company was founded by CEO Elizabeth Giorgi and Chief Creative Officer Hayley Anderson. Giorgi told me they both worked in production (Anderson as an […]

NBC’s new digital streaming news network, NBC News Now, has officially launched. The service offers viewers 8 hours of continuous daily programming from 3 PM to 11 PM on weekdays. Its goal is to capture the attention of younger news consumers — those who don’t necessarily subscribe to pay TV or watch television in a […]

For more than 25 years the founders of Thrive Earlier Detection have been researching ways to improve the accuracy of liquid biopsy tests. The fruits of that labor from Dr. Bert Vogelstein, Dr. Kenneth Kinzler and Dr. Nickolas Papadopoulos — all professors and researchers at Johns Hopkins University — is CancerSEEK, a liquid biopsy test […]

Weights & Biases, a startup building development tools for machine learning, has raised $15 million in its second round of funding. The company was started by CrowdFlower founders Lukas Biewald and Chris van Pelt, along with former Google engineer Shawn Lewis. (Under its new name Figure Eight, CrowdFlower was acquired by Appen for up to […]

A new startup aims to help you get your student loans under control. Today, an app called Pillar, backed by $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, is launching a simpler way for consumers to better understand their student loan debt — and even pay it off early. To do so, the app […]

This morning’s Moto Z4 news was good cause to go back and reassess the state of the modular phone. Three years after the line launched, the concept hasn’t exactly ignited the market — in fact there are really just a handful of scattered competitors to show for it. Essential is among the most prominent with […]