Snapchat announced this week that it’s introducing a new ASL Alphabet lens to encourage users to start learning American Sign Language. The new AR lens will teach users to fingerspell their name and practice the ASL alphabet. The lens also includes games that users can play to test their ASL knowledge. The social media company
Month: April 2022
Twitter will finally let you be excluded from this narrative. The company announced Thursday that it was testing a new way for users to remove themselves from conversations they don’t want to be a part of. The company calls this “unmentioning” and while it’s only a test for now, it’s one many Twitter users weary
Lisa Kaplan Contributor Lisa Kaplan is the founder and CEO of Alethea Group, a technology company that detects and mitigates instances of disinformation, misinformation and social media manipulation on behalf of private and public sector entities. Kaplan was recently recognized as Forbes 30 Under 30 and as one of Washington, D.C.’s most powerful women Lee
There’s coming hard out of the gates with a new company, and then there’s Sweep. The company was founded in 2020, then raised a $22 million Series A round a few months ago, following by a $73 million Series B round announced today. The company swept in with a platform for carbon emissions management. It
Rick Schostek, EVP of American Honda, said it best in a released statement: “Announcing a new battery electric vehicle isn’t exactly headline making news these days.” He’s right. There’s seemingly a new EV everyday (including an electric DeLorean, announced yesterday). But this announcement is different. General Motors and Honda today announced a partnership to co-develop
Gogoro, the company behind Taiwan’s thriving two-wheeler battery swapping ecosystem, is poised to succeed where others have tried and could not — and now it has the cash to do so. On Monday, the company closed its merger with special purpose acquisition company Poema Global and is now listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker
The U.S. government owns about 1,100 charging stations. It may need more than 100,000 charging stations to support widespread EV use in the next decade, according to testimony from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday. The testimony, which was first reported by Reuters, mainly delved into the U.S. Postal Service’s efforts to transition its
Well, the early-bird has left the building and taken substantial savings right along with it. Did you miss out? Don’t despair — we’re still committed to making TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 available and accessible to as many mobility fanatics as possible. How? Listen up. We’ve added two new pass types: Expo Only and Online Only.
We often think of NASA as an agency that looks outward into space, but it’s the agency’s position in space that makes it such a powerful tool for observing the Earth itself. Today NASA announced the results of two space-based studies observing climate change across the planet. The first is a data set from the
Take a shipping container, add a helping of AI and a boat-load of black soldier flies, fold in a small mountain of food waste, sprinkle in $16 million of investment led by Balderton Capital, and call in the Michelin reviewers, because om nom, you’ve got yourself a delicious dish called Better Origin. The company is
Dave Mullen Contributor Dave Mullen is an investor at SVB Capital, where he focuses largely on fintech, proptech and insurtech. Dave was previously an investor with Wells Fargo’s principal investment arm and is currently the proptech vertical lead for the EVCA. More posts by this contributor Fintech founders can learn a lesson about frugality from
It’s 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, and you’re running late for a flight to a corporate conference. While stuck in rush-hour traffic, it occurs to you that you’ve forgotten to book a babysitter for the kids — and find a restaurant for the team outing scheduled toward the end of your trip. Instead of completing
Fashion e-commerce startup, The Folklore Group, has today announced a shift from direct-to-consumer to B2B wholesale against the backdrop of a $1.7 million pre-seed funding, which the startup plans to use to fuel the growth of its new business. The startup’s new wholesale business dubbed The Folklore Connect, will link luxury fashion brands in emerging
If “The Great Resignation” taught us anything, it is that people want to be appreciated, respected and well paid for their work. Staff turnover in restaurants and hospitality has always been an issue, with people leaving at an average rate of 30%. That’s where Landed comes in. The company touts itself as the “first end-to-end
Pam answering the phone at Dunder Mifflin become one of the most iconic refrains of life at The Office, and it’s really no wonder that it did: businesses big and small have long run on communications as played out over PBXs, voice mail, cold and warm calls, customer help lines, and more recently the never-escapable,
Amadeus’ migration to the public cloud will take 3 years Ron Miller 7 hours Public travel systems provider Amadeus opened for business way back in 1987 when four airlines wanted to offer a centralized booking system. Today, the company facilitates booking and inventory management for 216 airlines, as well as hotels, trains, airports, online travel
As we start to see AI advance in business, the ways in which we interact with machines are beginning to change. Companies like Salesforce are looking for new opportunities for AI to have a more direct impact on customers. While using AI to surface the customer most likely to churn or most likely to buy
Lilt, a provider of AI-powered business translation software, today announced that it raised $55 million in a Series C round led by Four Rivers, joined by new investors Sorenson Capital, CLEAR Ventures and Wipro Ventures. The company says that it plans to use the capital to expand its R&D efforts as well as its customer
Airbyte, the well-funded open source data integration platform, today announced that it has acquired Grouparoo, an open source startup that focuses on helping businesses sync data between their data warehouses and cloud-based tools. In many ways, this complements Airbyte’s offering, which focuses on loading data into data warehouses, while Grouparoo then specializes in operationalizing that
Shifting consumer buying behaviors means brands can’t only rely on selling via one channel anymore. For e-commerce and traditional retailers looking at new ways to connect and engage with consumers, Lucky believes its approach enables them to work together to not only achieve that goal, but give consumers a better shopping experience. The 1-year-old company
You may not have heard of Amadeus, but if you’ve taken a trip, you’ve probably interacted with its tech stack. Launched in 1987, the company provides hundreds of transportation and hospitality providers with inventory management and booking services. “In short, it covers just about every aspect of travel IT imaginable,” writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.
The credit-oriented fintech platform Liquidity Group, which funds later-stage technology companies, has announced a new raise of $775 million from private equity house in Apollo and MUFG Bank. In a statement Ron Daniel, Co-Founder and CEO of Liquidity Group said: “The new capital partnership with Apollo and the continued and successful partnership with MUFG is
Two-dimensional virtual event platforms such as Hopin, Cvent and Zoom have become staples of virtual events but these are about consuming content rather than “user activation” for brands. So in the metaverse, brands have turned to platforms like Meta, Sandbox or Decentraland for this kind of interaction. But, again, these are platforms built for consumers,
To many people, e-commerce is synonymous with shopping on Amazon, but the reality is that a retailer has the option to use a bundle of different channels to sell and market products, and many do. Today, a startup called Productsup, which has built a platform that helps retailers navigate that landscape, is announcing $70 million
Financial infrastructure startup Fidel API has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The London-based company provides identity, data and payments products that it says gives developers a way to capture consent permissions and “securely” connect payment cards to a service or application. “With this infrastructure, developers are
VPN usage has surged in the last several years, with growing concerns over data privacy and security — and sometimes completely different motivations like people wanting to access content otherwise blocked in their regions — driving an estimated 30% of all internet consumers globally to use a VPN at some point this year. Now Nord
In the latest spark from its fast evolving tech ecosystem, Spain’s scale-ups are banding together to lobby lawmakers and press the economic case for their high-tech, high-growth business model more broadly. The new lobby group, called EsTech (aka ‘Es’ for España), had its official launch last week — when it unveiled nine founding company members
TikTok has once again delayed the timeline for opening its first data center in the European Union, in Dublin, Ireland — saying the facility is now not expected to be fully operational until next year. The video-sharing social network has been trailing plans to store the data of EU, EEA and U.K. users in the
The political agreement reached late last month between the European Union and the US administration on a new transatlantic data transfers pact which aims to end years of legal uncertainty for businesses exporting data from the bloc is not yet a done deal. The deal in principle faces scrutiny in the coming months once the
Proton, the Geneva, Switzerland-based startup behind the eponymous E2E encrypted webmail service ProtonMail, has acquired French startup SimpleLogin, which offers a freemium, open source service for creating email aliases to let people shield their actual email address when they sign up for digital services. Paris-based SimpleLogin was founded back in 2019 and works as a