Day: July 25, 2019

EQT Ventures, Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator have fueled Standard Cognition with another $35 million to help retailers battle Amazon. The deal values the San Francisco-based autonomous checkout startup, founded in 2017, at $535 million. Standard Cognition implants its AI-powered computer vision platform, which enables the autonomous checkout process, in brick-and-mortar stores. To date, […]

Over the past several years, many have suggested that broadband internet should be regarded as a public utility, like water or gas. Staying connected has become an essential part of nearly every facet of life, but according to a new report, high-speed connections may not be as prevalent here in the States as you may […]

Serverless developers have always faced a steep challenge when it comes to writing code on their laptops, and debugging said code on cloud services. It’s sort of a chicken and egg thing. You can’t deploy until you’re ready, but you can’t know if you’re ready without testing. That requires access to your cloud services on […]

Netflix has canceled the animated series “Tuca and Bertie” after a single season. The show, which starred Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong as the titular friends (a toucan named Tuca and a songbird named Bertie), debuted in May. It shared some creative DNA with Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman — creator Lisa Hanawalt designed the characters on […]

Alphabet’s autonomous driving and robotaxi company Waymo does a lot of training in order to refine and improve the artificial intelligence that powers its self-driving software. Recently, it teamed up with fellow Alphabet company and AI specialist DeepMind to develop new training methods that would help make its training better and more efficient. The two […]

The Void, a developer of immersive virtual reality entertainment centers, is partnering with the multi-national, multi-hyphenate mall developer Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield to build twenty five new locations around the world. Location-based virtual reality has become the default gateway into the consumer market for virtual reality headsets given that adoption of the consumer wearable device hasn’t been all […]

Hardware developers toying with the idea of building physical stuff that can plug into the decentralized world of blockchain should point their eyes at Elk: A dev board in the making that’s been designed to support all sorts of IoT projects with a blockchain flavor. Such as, for example, a connected door-lock that doesn’t demand […]

Amazon’s Alexa ushered in a new dawn of user interfaces, bringing voice into the mix as a viable option. Dozens of companies have sprouted because of this, not least of which being Airbud.io. Airbud allows any company to add a voice interface to its website. The company just closed a $4 million round led by […]

eBay had a front row seat for Amazon’s historic growth. The auction site does just fine, thank you very much, but in terms of revenue is only a fraction of the e-commerce giant. That ship has almost certainly sailed, but eBay’s finally readying a service to take on Amazon’s offering more directly. Launching in the […]