Author: pekandesigns

The founders of Seattle-based Modus cold-emailed Pete Flint, the founder of Trulia and a current managing partner at the venture capital firm NFX, for months, to no avail. In a last-ditch effort, Alex Day, Jai Sim and Abbas Guvenilir sent one more message to the investor whose real estate listings tool sold to Zillow in […]

The internet and search engines like Google have made the world our oyster when it comes to sourcing information, but in the world of business, there remains a persistent need for more targeted market intelligence, a way to get reliable data quickly to get on with your work. Today, one of the startups hoping to […]

Chances are you mostly think of Samsung as a consumer-focused electronics company, but it actually has a very sizable B2B business as well, which serves over 50,000 large enterprises and hundreds of thousands of SMB entrepreneurs via its partners. At its developer conference this week, it’s putting the spotlight squarely on this side of its […]

Google open-sourced its TensorFlow machine learning framework back in 2015 and it quickly became one of the most popular platforms of its kind. Enterprises that wanted to use it, however, had to either work with third parties or do it themselves. To help these companies — and capture some of this lucrative market itself — […]

The cloud kitchen craze has reached Latin America. Food tech startup called Muy landed a fresh $15 million Series B to expand into Mexico and soon Brazil. The service is currently operative in Colombia.  Muy is a “cloud kitchen meets Chipotle,” says one investor. The company describes itself as a virtual kitchen and smart chef […]

Contract, self-employed and temporary jobs are on the rise in developed markets, with some 85% of the global workforce, 2.7 billion people, estimated to be on some form of hourly wage rather than flat salary. Today, a startup that helps companies source these kinds of candidates is announcing a round of funding to help meet […]

A group of Lyft, Uber and DoorDash drivers are announcing a statewide ballot measure for the November 2020 ballot this morning in Sacramento. Called the Protect App-Based Drivers & Services Act — funded by Uber, Lyft and DoorDash — the measure aims to ensure drivers and couriers can continue to be independent contractors with flexible […]

A year ago, Google rolled out “.new” links that worked like shortcuts to instantly create new Google documents. For example, you could type “doc.new” (without the quotes) to create a new Google Doc or “sheet.new” to create a new spreadsheet. Today, Google announced it’s bringing the .new shortcuts to the rest of the web. Now, […]

The Los Angeles-based mobile game development studio Scopely has become America’s newest unicorn thanks to a $200 million financing which values the company at a whopping $1.7 billion. Scopely said it would use the capital to continue its strategy of developing and acquiring new games as it looks to continue its run of six consecutive […]