At its I/O developer conference, Google today launched Google Wallet, a new Android and Wear OS app that will allow users to store things like credit cards, loyalty cards, digital IDs, transit passes, concert tickets, vaccination cards and more. That’s pretty straightforward, but from here on out, it gets a bit confusing. Google, after all,
Month: May 2022
The ongoing market correction and the cratering of several leading crypto tokens are erasing wealth so quickly, you can almost hear it. Companies in other industries are on a hiring spree, but startups like Robinhood, Better.com and Peloton are laying off thousands as FAANG companies slow down their recruiting and look for places to save
Inflection AI, the machine learning startup headed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and founding DeepMind member Mustafa Suleyman, has secured $225 million in equity financing, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The source of the capital isn’t yet clear — Inflection didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information
Twitter staff must really be wishing for a quiet life… Elon Musk, the gadfly billionaire who recently decided he wants to add the social media platform to his collection of tech firms, has just tweeted that his $43BN bid to buy the company is “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed
It appears battery startup SES’ investors are quite happy with its first earnings report. The company went public in February via a SPAC merger, and to no one’s surprise, reported a loss. And its investors don’t seem to mind. Its shares, while still trading below its SPAC merger price, were up 16.7% at $6.15 at the
Zoom swung for the fences last summer when its stock value was soaring, offering almost $15 billion to buy Five9 to get into customer service. Eventually the deal fell apart when the stock price plunged, but Zoom’s desire to get into customer service, one way or the other didn’t diminish. Earlier this year, the company
With Elon Musk’s recent interest in Twitter, Facebook’s growth flattening, and TikTok’s meteoric rise, it feels like the world of social media is back into some kind of inflection point period. Consumers seem hungry to try out new platforms again, and entrepreneurs are delivering. Last year the Supernova app launched as a ‘ethical alternative to
It’s neither surprising, nor necessarily new scuttlebutt, but one of the most reliable Apple news scoopers of all time has chimed in to say that Apple is indeed at least serious enough about a potential switch from Lightning to USB-C on future iPhones that it’s doing testing with models equipped with the latter connector. Bloomberg’s
As wind energy gains ground in the U.S., SkySpecs is using drones and AI to detect future equipment failures before they grind those giant turbine blades to a halt. The company, which works with wind farms to monitor the health of turbine blades from above, has locked down a fresh $80 million Series D round
If there’s one area that has thus far felt insulated from the global venture downturn, it’s infrastructure. Companies that offer banking as a service and help other businesses offer their own financial services and products in particular continue to rake in the dollars. The latest such company in Latin America is São Paulo-based Dock, which
The customer experience is one of the most important focus areas for businesses. According to PwC, among all customers, 73% point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, behind price and product quality. But the pandemic increased the workload of support teams, making it more difficult to hire customer service agents and
Cryptocurrency startup BVNK (pronounced ‘bee-vee-en-kay’) has closed a $40 million Series A funding round at a $340 million post-money valuation. Interestingly, Tiger Global is leading the round despite being in the news because they’ve experienced a $17 billion loss during this year’s tech stock sell-off. Other investors in today’s funding round include The Raba Partnership,
A long, long time ago, before the iPod, MP3 players were badly designed devices with insufficient storage. The market was ripe for a change, and Steve Jobs, who had returned to Apple four years prior, was ready to give it to us. On October 23, 2001 the company released its first music player with a
Bubbles, a startup that pitches its platform as the “anti-Zoom” for video messaging, today announced that it closed a $8.5 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, 468 Ventures, and Bain Capital. Co-founder and CEO Tom Medema said that the money will be used to further develop Bubbles’ platform while ramping
Coinbase Global Inc. shares tumbled after first-quarter revenue missed estimates and the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange warned that total trading volume in the current quarter will be lower than in the first. Julie Chariell of Bloomberg Intelligence speaks on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
Rachel B. Goodman Contributor Nathaniel M. Lacktman Contributor Nathaniel M. Lacktman is a partner at Foley & Lardner and chair of the law firm’s national Telemedicine & Digital Health Industry Team. More posts by this contributor Telemedicine startups can survive and thrive under renewed regulation It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the reasons some
The first quarter was a hot time for crypto-focused startups. According to a recent dataset from CB Insights, crypto startups raised more capital than ever before in Q1 2022 and set records across a host of other metrics. If you closely watched the first-quarter venture capital cycle, this should not come as a surprise. As
Facebook Pay will soon be renamed Meta Pay, according to a blog post written by Meta’s head of fintech, Stephane Kasriel. With the rebrand, the company is focusing on enhancing the payments experiences it already provides with Facebook Pay in regions where it’s seeing good adoption, as opposed to focusing on expanding to new countries.
In the U.S., more than 6,000 new medical devices are approved by the FDA and released every year. As a surgeon, you may not want to stay on top of this, but fear ye not, your helpful neighborhood medical equipment sales team is there to help explain why you need (on average) 16 new toys
The problem with waiting for quantum computing to bring in the next wave of AI is that it’s likely to arrive a lot slower than people would like. The next best options include increasing the speed of existing computers somehow – but there’s now an important added ijmperative: power-efficient systems that mean we don’t burn
Offering a sneak preview of the Pixel 7 wasn’t enough, so Google’s really leaning in. Today at I/O, the company announced that it’s returning to the tablet business with a new device set for, get this, a 2023 launch. “Normally we wouldn’t tease a new product before it’s ready,” said Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh,
As Snapchat’s app continues to grow, the company is turning to the open source community to help further improve its technology infrastructure. This morning, Snap announced it’s acquiring the Toronto-based KeyDB, the developer of an open-source, high-performance database, for an undisclosed sum. The startup’s six-person team, including its co-founders John Sully and Ben Schermel, will
Michael Broughton was the first in his family to go to college. But he almost didn’t, when he had trouble securing the necessary financing to pay his tuition. The experience stuck with him, and when he met Ayush Jain at the University of Southern California, the pair bonded over their belief that credit access should
Grocery delivery unicorn Instacart filed privately to go public yesterday, a long-awaited event for the well-known private company. During its startup days, Instacart raised huge amounts of capital and grew rapidly. When the pandemic arrived, Instacart’s business turbo-charged as demand for its service reached a fever pitch. The last year has been less kind. Growth slowed as
Twitter GM of Consumer, Keyvon Beykpour, announced today he will be leaving the company after seven years. Beykpour first joined the social media platform by way of its acquisition of Periscope, which he founded, said in a tweet he was asked to leave by current CEO Parag Agrawal, who wants to take the team in
During the pandemic especially, it’s become overwhelming for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to answer all of their customer service requests. A Freshworks survey found that companies experienced a 71% increase in overall contact volume between February 2020 and January 2021, and expect it to increase further. At the same time, customers — while empathetic
The rise of digital payments has changed the nature of how people do business with each other; and open banking — a movement in banking where incumbents are finally adopting newer technology such as APIs to open their systems to modern integrations — is leading to a wave of new payment methods, all of which
Most of the time no one has to think about how the mobile networks we all rely on work. But it won’t surprise many to hear that, as is often the case with infrastructure, some pieces are the latest tech and others haven’t changed in decades. Eridan is a well-funded startup aiming to replace one
It’s been said that no one uses Alexa for voice-based shopping. But retail giant still sees the potential for Alexa as a shopping companion — just in a different way. That’s why this month the company quietly rolled out a new feature designed to boost consumers’ use of Alexa’s Shopping Lists: cashback offers. The company
A few months after raising $1 billion, payments startup Checkout.com has announced that it plans to acquire French startup Ubble, which operates a remote identity verification service. The deal should close later this year and Checkout.com isn’t disclosing the terms of the deal. With this acquisition, Checkout.com is adding a new product to its suite
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