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Crunch Network
Financial technology startups emerged as serious challengers to financial services in 2017
While cryptocurrencies stole the spotlight in 2017, a clutch of companies were quietly working behind the scenes to slowly bring the financial services establishment to its knees. It may turn out that these startup entrants of the last several years will prove to be the more relevant disruptors. Read More
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Crunch Network
Latin America’s Groupon Mafia
The founders of PayPal and its employees have produced many highly successful companies over the years. Often referred to as the “PayPal Mafia” because they’ve had such an impact on the startup ecosystem, this serial entrepreneur success story is reminiscent of a similar phenomenon taking place in Latin America. The story starts with another U.S. company, Groupon. Read More
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Amazon did a lot of funky stuff this year and it’s paying off
Holy hell, it’s been a year for Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ former-online-bookstore dumped $13.7 billion to buy a bunch of grocery stores, that speaker you talk to in your living room that Amazon makes is really popular and a bunch of server farms Amazon runs generate more than $10 billion in revenue annually. Read More
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TrendKite raises another $11M for its PR analytics platform
TrendKite is closing out 2017 with the announcement that it’s raised an additional $11 million in funding. The Austin-based startup says it’s currently analyzing 4.2 million articles every day, and using that analysis to help both brands and agencies to measure the impact of their PR efforts. Read More
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A digitizing David takes on photo-scanning Goliath
Mitch Goldstone loves photo scanning. His business, ScanMyPhotos, does what it says on the tin: you send photos to the company and, using high speed scanners and special software, his team digitizes your photos, sticks them onto a USB key or online, and sends them back. He is proud of his business. Thanks to his scanners he’s helped users save their photos from tornadoes, floods, and theft. Read More
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Historian Leslie Berlin talks about the rise of Silicon Valley
In this week’s episode of Technotopia I spoke to author and historian Leslie Berlin, writer of Troublemakers: Silicon Valleys’ Coming Of Age. Berlin is the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University and one of the few people who can see the entire rise of SV tech culture from a researcher’s perspective. Berlin’s book is quirky, fun… Read More
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Uber’s Frankenboard arrives
Today was a momentous day in Uber history. After much debate, rumors and strife over the past few weeks, it looks like the company and its shareholders have come to an agreement over a tender offer that will see SoftBank own nearly 15 percent of the company, while also injecting around $1 billion in fresh capital. That deal is expected to close in the new year. Read More
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HQ Trivia is coming soon to Android
HQ Trivia is letting Android users pre-register for the live-streamed trivia game built by the makers of Vine, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. Pre-registering means you’ll get notified the moment HQ Trivia is available for download. HQ, which opened up pre-registration on December 24, had previously marketed its Android app as being available “this Christmas.” Read More
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Quiet
he trip began just before the end of school. From the wood-shaving smell of third grade out into the clean winter air, sprung free by my mother who appeared at the little window in the classroom door like a treat. You were the one who got out early. You were the one walking down an empty hall toward the big triple doors of the school. We were leaving school to drive to my… Read More
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The AI chip startup explosion is already here
All eyes may have been on Nvidia this year as its stock exploded higher thanks to an enormous amount of demand across all fronts: gaming, an increased interest in data centers, and its major potential applications in AI. But while Nvidia’s stock price and that chart may have been one of the more eye-popping parts of 2017, a year when AI continued its march toward being omnipresent in… Read More
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Scaleworks announces pre-holiday surprise with Keen IO acquisition
Scaleworks, a private equity firm based in San Antonio, Texas, apparently couldn’t wait until after the holidays to share the news of its latest purchase. The firm announced it was acquiring Keen IO in a Medium blog post yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company was available for comment beyond the blog post, but Keen has raised close to $30 million since it… Read More
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Meet Molekule, the sleekest air purifier on the market
Molekule, a San Francisco-based startup with a sleekly designed molecular air purifier started as an immigrant dream twenty years ago and ended up being named one of Time’s top 25 inventions of 2017. The inventor Yogi Goswami came up with the idea when his baby son Dilip started having a hard time breathing the air around him. Dilip suffered from severe asthma but no air purifier at… Read More
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Inside ‘Fin,’ the elite human/AI assistant
“I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter. For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email, or speak a request and a real person… Read More
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A look at 42 women in tech who crushed it in 2017
What a challenging, exhilarating year it has been for women everywhere, starting from the women’s March on Washington to former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s eye-opening and now famous blog post to the #metoo movement that has swept the country, washing dozens of sexual predators out of their powerful roles in the process. All the while, women in tech have been driving their… Read More
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Mattermark to shut down after selling to FullContact
Mattermark, the site for startup and company data, is shutting down its own business after selling in a disappointing outcome to FullContact. In a document obtained by TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Danielle Morrill wrote that “common stockholders will not be receiving anything in this deal.” In other words, Mattermark employee shares are worthless. It was just last year that… Read More
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Podia helps content creators build their online business
More than a year and a half ago, I wrote about Coach, a startup offering tools for tutors and other freelancers to make money and operate their business online. Since then, the company has shifted focus in a big way, and it recently announced that it’s raised $3 million in seed funding. It’s got a new name, too — Podia. Read More
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Oscar Health expects to generate $1 billion in revenue and sign up 250,000 members in 2018
Despite repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate this week, health insurance startup Oscar Health expects to pull in nearly $1 billion in revenue and enroll a quarter of a million members in 2018. The revenue prediction first reported in Axios and signups are quite a feat for the insurance company meant for the digital age. Read More
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Startup incubator Nailab invests $25K in East African startups
When Nailab (Nairobi Incubation Lab) opened its doors seven years ago in Kenya, it wanted to be the Y Combinator for Kenya, Nailab CEO Sam Gichuru told me. In order to accomplish that goal, Gichuru realized Nailab would need a lot of money, which it did not have at the time. That’s why it initially began as a co-working space. Read More
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Optimization startup Taplytics expands beyond mobile apps with its new Experience Cloud
Taplytics is announcing what it calls its “Intelligent Experience Cloud,” bringing together products for A/B testing, messaging, analytics and more To a certain extent, this is just new branding for existing Taplytics tools, highlighting the fact that the Y Combinator-backed startup has expanded beyond mobile A/B testing by launching a full suite of products to help businesses… Read More
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Can a dreaming AI fix low res digital photos in the edit?
Let’s Enhance is an Estonia-based startup that’s using a so called ‘hallucinating AI’ deep neural network to power a freemium photo upscaling service. Find out what happened when we fed it some photos for printing… Read More
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