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SoundCloud resuscitates home screen with personalized playlists
After laying off 40% of its staff and securing $169 million in emergency funding, SoundCloud’s first product push is a much needed step in the right direction. It’s filling its home page with personalized playlists and best of collections from top genres rather than other content like it’s feed. The hope is to make SoundCloud instantly accessible to new users and a more… Read More
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Wizeline expands its outsourced IT services business into southeast Asia
Wizeline, a provider of outsourced programming services, is expanding its global footprint with agreements to partner with a slew of development shops across Southeast Asia. Founded in 2014, the company’s vision is to provide programming jobs for developers in emerging markets to unlock the local talent pool and expose a new generation and geographies to the startup world. Read More
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The price is right! Pace raises £2.5M to automate hotel room pricing based on demand
Pace, a London startup that has developed tech that uses machine learning to let hotels set room prices dynamically based on demand, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding. The financing round is led by InterGlobe, with participation from Seedcamp, Speedinvest, and Amadeus Capital Partners. The company says it will use the new capital to invest in its tech and marketing teams. Read More
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Gfycat wants to fix your low-fidelity GIFs with machine learning
We all love to share GIFs — and there are plenty of ways to do that, through online portals or keyboards — but often times because there is so much content, you’ll end up surfacing up a lower-fidelity GIF. There can be plenty of copies of the same video clips as a GIF, or maybe it’s just difficult to capture and upload, but Gfycat hopes that it can be solved at a… Read More
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Security robots are being used to ward off San Francisco’s homeless population
Is it worse if a robot instead of a human is used to deter the homeless from setting up camp outside places of business? One such bot cop recently took over the outside of the San Francisco SPCA, an animal advocacy and pet adoption clinic in the city’s Mission district, to deter homeless people from hanging out there — causing some people to get very upset. Silicon Valley game… Read More
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Why content crowdfunder Patreon is halting its hated fee change
Overhauling the creative economy turns out to be tricky. Following massive backlash, Patreon is at least temporarily pausing its plan to change its payment processing fee structure from charging creators 2-10% on the first of the next month to charging patrons 2.9 percent plus $0.35 per transaction upfront and on the monthly anniversary of their first pledge beyond the 5% Patreon takes. Read More
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Fanchest raises $4M in seed funding to become the best gift for sports fans
Here’s a great present for a sports fan this holiday season: Fanchest is a Brooklyn-based startup that curates and sends team-themed gift boxes as gift. The boxes start at $59 and include about $80 worth of apparel and gear from whatever pro or college team you choose. Today the startup has announced $4M in seed funding with a diverse group of investors like New Orleans Saints… Read More
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This app will help you figure out if you can fit that Costco-sized paper towel box in your apartment
You’re probably going to get a better deal when you buy consumer products — like paper towels — wholesale, but at the same time you’re also buying a very, very large package of said consumer products. So, they might not always fit in your apartment. Wholesale goods are the primary play for a startup called Boxed, a retailer looking to play the sort of… Read More
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Indiegogo now lets you fund via token sale
Crowdfunding service and Kickstarter-competitor Indiegogo is now offering an ICO service alongside its partner, MicroVentures. The company will allow users to participate in SEC-complaint ICOs and, like its slow-burning equity crowdfunding service, will pick and choose startups that match certain exacting criteria. These tokens sales will be SEC complaint and the sales are performed within… Read More
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Events management platform Bizzabo raises $15M growth round
Just eight months after its last round of funding, events management platform Bizzabo has raised another $15 million. The new round, which brings Bizzabo’s total funding so far to $30 million, was led by Pilot Growth Equity, with participation from Maor Investments and returning investors. Read More
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Mixbook photo book service acquires WedPics
In 2012, a Raleigh, NC-based company called WedPics launched on to the scene to make wedding photos a little less of a headache. Five years and seven million users later, WedPics is being acquired by Mixbook, the platform for digitally collecting and editing physical photo books. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. WedPics is an app that lets a bride and groom aggregate all the photos… Read More
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FreightHub, a European ‘digital freight forwarder’, scores $20M Series A
FreightHub, a Berlin and Hamburg-based startup that claims to be Europe’s first fully digital freight forwarder, has raised a $20 million Series A round, just 1.5 years since launch. The round is led by VC firm Northzone, with participation from existing investors. The latter includes Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital (GFC), Cherry Ventures, Cavalry Ventures, and La Famiglia. Read More
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To fix SoundCloud, it must become the anti-Spotify
Startups die by suicide, not competition. It wasn’t that anyone was stealing SoundCloud’s underground rappers, bedroom remixers and garage bands. SoundCloud stumbled because it neglected these hardcore loyalists as it wrongly strove to usurp Spotify as the streaming home of music’s superstars. Read More
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Upstream Security reels in $9M Series A to protect connected cars
Upstream Security, a new startup founded by two cyber security industry veterans, announced a $9 million Series A today to help protect connected vehicles and eventually autonomous cars. Today, that probably means a car using a service like OnStar to connect over the internet to your manufacturer for a menu of in-car services such as automated crash detection and stolen vehicle assistance. In… Read More
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Mindspace raises $20 million to launch co-working spaces in the US
Co-working startup Mindspace recently raised $20 million as it gears up to launch its first two locations in the U.S. While Mindspace is looking to go big or go home in the U.S., it’s starting off slow with its first two locations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Mindspace started in Tel Aviv about four years ago and has since expanded to Germany, Poland and the U.K. Read More
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YouTube TV hits 34 new markets
The unbundling of the cable media empire is well underway, as players like Netflix grow and others like Hulu and YouTube offer live TV service. YouTube TV, in particular, is executing an aggressive rollout, just yesterday making the service available to another 34 markets. That brings us to a total of 83 U.S. markets in which YouTube TV is currently available. 🗣️ Cable-free live TV is… Read More
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SEC shuts down Munchee ICO
In what should be an interesting beginning to the coming avalanche of ICO failures, the SEC has come down hard on Munchee, a company that built a $15 million token sale. The SEC chairman recently noted that coin offerings are, in fact, securities and that pre-sale participants must be registered with the SEC. The Munchee ICO aimed to fund the MUN coin, a payment system for restaurant reviews. Read More
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Descript gets $5M to make sound editing like a Word document
Right before jumping on the phone Friday afternoon, Andrew Mason, who then ran a walking tour startup called Detour and ran Groupon, was hand-correcting a transcription of a speech by John F. Kennedy — which was transcribed by some new software he and his team built in-house. But Descript, Mason’s new startup that’s spun out from Detour, isn’t designed to just… Read More
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