Day: August 13, 2019

Brick & Mortar Ventures, a young, San Francisco-based venture firm that’s focused on startups innovating in or around architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management, has closed with $97.2 million in capital commitments. The fund is one in a sea or debut funds that have swung open their doors in recent years, though it’s also interesting […]

Not one to let Face App and Snapchat steal its spotlight, Facebook announced today that it’s opening its closed beta of Spark AR on Instagram, letting any developer build and share an augmented reality filter on the platform. The company announced this change was coming at its F8 keynote earlier this year. Phone-based AR isn’t […]

Ahead of the upcoming school year, Apple this morning announced it’s bringing contactless student IDs in Apple Wallet to several more U.S. universities. The expansion will allow more than 100,000 college students to carry their student ID on their iPhone or Apple Watch, where it can be used for a variety of tasks, including paying […]

Walmart is dominating the U.S. online grocery market, according to new research out this week from the analysts at Second Measure. The nationwide retailer today offers grocery pickup and delivery in nearly every U.S. state, and had 62% more customers in June than its next nearest rival. And no, in this case, that rival is […]

Electronics manufacturers are no doubt breathing a collective sigh of relief this morning at the news that the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has delayed tariffs on a number of categories. A long list of exports, including livestock, foodstuff and clothing will have the additional 10% tariff imposed on September 1. Others, including “cell phones, […]

The Roku Channel continues to expand beyond ad-supported movies and premium subscriptions with today’s announcement of the addition of several more live TV channels available to anyone with a Roku streaming device or Roku TV. The company says today it’s adding five free live TV channels to this offering, including, most notably, fubo’s Sports Network. […]

Creating backups for massive enterprise deployments may feel like a solved problem, but for the most part, we’re still talking about complex hardware and software setups. Clumio, which is coming out of stealth today, wants to modernize enterprise data protection by eliminating the on-premise hardware in favor of a flexible, SaaS-style cloud-based backup solution. For […]

Aaron Rasmussen, co-founder and former creative director of MasterClass, has a new startup called Outlier.org. Like MasterClass, Outlier is bringing education online, but with a key difference — these are college classes offering real college credit. The startup is launching a pilot version of its first two courses, Calculus I and Introduction to Psychology, for the […]

PlayGalaxy Link got fleetingly little stage time at last week’s Unpacked event. It’s true that Samsung had a lot of information to jam into the hour-long press conference, but the offering was glazed over during a brief segment on mobile gaming — a surprising choice given how big of an industry the category has become. […]