Category: Tech news

 When the San Francisco 49ers take the field for their first preseason home game on August 17, fans will have a lot to cheer about. Not just because the team, which finished last year with a 12-4 record and made it into the NFC Championship game, is back — but also because they will be playing in a brand new stadium. Read More

 As you may expect, the summer can be a slow period for tech journalists. But since we’re obsessed with startups, there’s still plenty of new stuff to discuss this week on the TC Gadgets Podcast. Read More

 Yo, the simple app that just sends a “yo” to your friends, has closed $1.5 million in seed funding with a $10 million valuation and is finally ready to talk about its investors. They include Betaworks, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, and the founders of China’s Tencent, among others. Read More

Wally is a sensor network you install yourself. It can detect water leaks, small changes in moisture, and temperature fluctuations anywhere in the immediate vicinity of one of its sensors.

Little Windows Tablets like these are proving themselves to be quite the capable on-the-go productivity devices. They’re rapidly becoming the netbooks of the ’10s, only considerably more worthwhile.

 Funding Circle, an online marketplace that connects small businesses looking for loans with individuals and institutions willing to lend money, has picked up a significant round of funding of its own. The startup, founded in 2009 in London and more recently active in the U.S., has raised $65 million — money that co-founder and CEO Samir Desai tells me it will use to continue to… Read More

 Balderton Capital is leading an investment into investment crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. Yes, things really have got that meta in the startup investment world. Read More

 Online retailer ModCloth laid off around 70 employees yesterday, a little under 15 percent of its 500-person-plus workforce.
We first heard about the cuts through a couple of emailed tips and a comment on Twitter. A ModCloth spokesperson confirmed the news. Read More

 We’re apparently in the pre-Post PC market. The PC market has almost stabilized, and its re-found salubrity is helping players in the space. Intel and Microsoft both notched big gains today in the wake of Intel’s positive earnings report that came after the bell yesterday. Intel rose 9.27 percent during regular trading, pushing its market capitalization to $172.28 billion.… Read More

 Visa wants to make the process of paying for goods on your phone or iPad as easy as swiping your credit or debit card at an offline retailer.
To do so, it’s adapting to Internet retail with the launch of Visa Checkout, a new payment option that will allow users to speed through the online checkout process in just a few steps. Read More

 With sales of its premium smartphones failing to live up to expectations, Samsung is moving into another potentially high-margin business: premium headphones. Tomorrow the South Korean electronics giant will launch its Samsung Level line of headphones (and a wireless speaker) on premium goods retailer Gilt, whose members will have exclusive early access to buy a pair before they become more… Read More

 Ginkgo Bioworks sounds kind of like a mad science lab of the future. The Boston-based biotech company is currently working on a project with DARPA to treat antibiotic-resistant germs, using designer microbes to convert CO2 emissions into fuel and is somehow making yeast smell like roses. Bioworks co-founder Jason Kelly considers these projects, and many others, the future of the… Read More

 In a real life scene that could be in HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley,’ Airbnb unveiled a very sexually connotative logo today: Bélo. Apparently no one in on the design process asked themselves, in this guy’s parlance, “Does this logo look like a boobs and a butt and a hooha?” Per Armin Vit’s post, “The answer has to be a resounding “No”. If… Read More

 Even as a clutch of new payment technology companies including Zooz Mobile and Plastiq announce new financing rounds today, it seems like investors are no longer paying out for payment companies.
Over the past three quarters, the number of venture-backed payments companies has declined, tumbling from 59 startups in the third quarter of 2013 to just 41 companies in the second quarter of 2014. Read More

 On-demand shipping startup Shyp only officially launched in San Francisco just a few months ago, but it’s already looking to expand to new markets. First, though, the company raised $10 million in new capital, led by Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford’s SherpaVentures. The funding follows $2.3 million in seed funding that Shyp had raised from Homebrew Ventures and a large number… Read More