Year: 2018

 If you’re in high school in the United States, there’s at least a 50% chance you’re using Quizlet. And there’s an even better chance you’re at least familiar with it. But for the rest of the adult population, times have changed since we were students. Educational apps like Quizlet help you do your homework and prepare for tests. Quizlet builds modern day flash… Read More

 If you’ve ever wanted to share a voice conversation you had with Alexa, you probably pointed your smartphone at your Echo speaker and recorded a shaky mobile video. That solution may work for the occasional tweet, but businesses and developers may want an easier, more professional way to show off their Alexa skills. That’s where Voicegram comes in. Created by the makers of… Read More

 Last year two venture capital firms, General Catalyst and CRV, launched a program called the Velocity Network to get their startups in front of Fortune 500 executives in New York City. Today they announced that Mayfield has joined as the third VC firm in the network. New York is home to financial, insurance, security, retail, media, and other Fortune 500 companies — the very types of… Read More

 Loris.ai, a spin-out product from the maker of suicide prevention organization Crisis Text Line, has raised $2 million to help companies navigate conversations around harassment and other charged topics. Loris.ai’s seed round was led by Floodgate with participation from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Kapor Capital and others. “We started getting calls from companies and even one… Read More

 It may seem like there are already enough on-demand fitness classes, but one startup has an idea for something a little different. Mirror is debuting an at-home device that looks like a mirror, but also lets you see the instructor and classmates for fitness routines like barre, yoga, boxing and pilates. I’m told that this is no ordinary mirror or video conferencing system, but that… Read More

 Rubrik, the enterprise startup that provides data backup and recovery services across cloud and on-premise environments, is putting some of the funding that it raised last year at a $1.3 billion valuation to use. Rubrik has acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, the company announced today, in what appears to be Rubrik’s first acquisition. The financial terms of the deal are… Read More

 Apple’s HomePod delivers superior sound quality and solid Siri performance but still lags behind competition on breadth of voice commands. Read More

 Mobile AR had a lot of hype heading into the rollout of ARKit and ARCore this past year, but for the most part mobile AR apps have delivered a pretty heavy thud, failing to deliver on their futuristic promises. 8th Wall believes that this is the result of developers looking to port existing experiences into AR rather than designing for mobile AR’s strengths in the first place. The… Read More

 This speaker is huge. It’s the size of a cooler a person would take camping for a week. It weighs 48 lbs. And for a good reason, too. The Kube speaker from Thomas and Darden is solid and packed with power. The company says it can put out 122 dB of sound. But it’s not a good sound. That’s the rub. This is a massive speaker that gets really loud but doesn’t sound great at… Read More

 When Jason Chen first ended up at Salesforce through the acquisition of his last company Stypi, he had the tough task of integrating within Salesforce’s complex infrastructure — and not a lot of documentation to go on. Fortunately, Chen’s company had just been acquired and he was able to get the attention of the higher-ups and find that information, which was actually… Read More