Walmart is giving augmented reality a shot. The retailer today announced the launch of a new AR scanning tool in its iPhone application which will help customers with product comparisons. However, unlike a typical barcode scanner meant only to compare prices on one item at a time, Walmart’s AR scanner can be panned about across
Month: November 2018
An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores. Its vanishing was flagged to us earlier today, by Twitter user Sarah Parks, who noticed that, when loaded, the Campaigner app now displays a message informing users
Foursquare, the former location-based social network turned enterprise location data platform, has today announced a new partnership with TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor will be using Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK, launched in March 2017, to help the platform better serve users with contextually relevant, real-time information based on their location. Alongside the 13 billion check-ins accumulated on Foursquare’s apps
The past decade in retail has been the golden age of direct-to-consumer (D2C) and digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs) that use the internet to communicate with customers, execute transactions, handle distribution and offer better economics. But as small independent startups have scaled into unicorn territory and as countless brands have saturated digital channels, customer acquisition has
Dearest Martha, I write to you from the cold wastes of Earth on the first day of the New Year, 2023, the third year of war, and so close to your own child’s decanting date that it pains me to think on thee. The machines have been unkind to this planet and I hope you
Asana, the platform where people can create and track the progress of work projects, made its name originally as a place where individuals and smaller teams can create and track the progress of a specific project. Now, as the startup courts bigger organizations among its 50,000 paying organizations and millions of (paying and free) users
With a planned cartoon series coming up, partnerships in place with Major League Baseball, NBCUniversal and other media companies of heroic proportions, the founders creating the kids clothing phenomenon, Cubcoats, are on a roll. Peak Theory, launched by longtime friends Zac Park (who’s 29) and 35-year-old Spencer Markel, is the company behind Cubcoats, a hoodie
With the US midterms fast approaching purveyors of online disinformation are very busy indeed spreading their hyper-partisan junk on Facebook . Their goal: Skewing democratic outcomes by putting out misleading, deceptive or incorrect information that’s packaged as real news about politics, economics or culture — yet presented in a way that panders to prejudices and is
HashiCorp, the company that has made hay developing open source tools for managing cloud infrastructure, obviously has a pretty hefty commercial business going too. Today the company announced an enormous $100 million round on a Unicorn valuation of $1.9 billion. The round was led by IVP, whose investments include AppDynamics, Slack and Snap. New comer
Rockset, a startup that came out of stealth today, announced $21.5M in previous funding and the launch of its new data platform that is designed to simplify much of the processing to get to querying and application building faster. As for the funding, it includes $3 million in seed money they got when they started
As car and tech companies continue to make inroads on vehicles and services to build autonomous driving systems, a startup that is creating high-definition maps to help these vehicles move around has quietly picked up a significant round of funding. DeepMap — a Palo Alto startup co-founded by James Wu and Mark Wheeler, who previously
Sonos today announced that Google Assistant will not be available on its products until at least 2019. The service was supposed to launch in 2018 but the company said in a blog posting it needs a bit more time. Additional information about timing will be released in early 2019, Sonos says. Eager customers can sign-up
Last year, Defakto released the limited edition Stille Nacht (Silent Night) in collaboration with artist Friederike Bellman. The watch featured a hand-painted star field throughout the dial. Now, the independent German watchmaker is back with the successor to the original: the Mitternacht (or in English, the Midnight). It’s even better than the original. Like the
Spoke, a startup that wants to simplify the way companies add and process help desk tickets using artificial intelligence underpinnings, announced it has enhanced its AI engine to allow for more complex queries. The company founders were working at Google after a previous startup had been sold to the search giant when they encountered a
Well, you have to admire a staggered PR plan. Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that just announced £85 million in Series E funding and its entrance into the fintech unicorn club, is rolling out a new feature today. The banking upstart is adding interest-earning savings accounts as an upgrade to its existing “Pots” functionality that
Last year, HPE successfully built and installed a supercomputer on the International Space Station that could withstand the rigors of being in space. Today, the company announced that it is making that computer available for earth-based developers and scientists to conduct experiments. Mark Fernandez, who has the lofty title of America’s HPC Technology Officer at
Neo4j has helped popularize the graph database. Today it was rewarded with an $80 million Series E to bring their products to a wider market in what could be the company’s last private fundraise. The round was led by One Peak Partners and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital with participation from existing investors Creandum, Eight Roads
ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski is obsessed with SAR satellites. He’s so obsessed that his company plans to launch dozens of satellites into space. According to him, ICEYE satellites should be much better than existing SAR satellites — call it the Tesla or satellites if you want. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Modrzewski is