Category: Tech news

 The Columbus Dispatch is reporting this afternoon that Columbus OH is the winner of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge beating out San Francisco, Austin, Portland, Kansas City, Denver and Pittsburgh and will receive $140 million in grants and matches. I reached out to local and state offices for confirmation but have not received comment at this point. Read More

 DFJ Growth, the 10-year-old growth-stage arm of the 30-year-old Sand Hill Road firm, is raising a new $500 million fund, suggests an SEC filing first flagged by Fortune. The timing fits the narrative of many Silicon Valley venture firms, many of which have been returning to their LPs in two years’ time, rather than a more traditional three or four years. Indeed, the firm raised its… Read More

 The great Elon Musk empire is uniting. Today his electric car and battery company Tesla announced its offer to acquire his solar panel installation company SolarCity. Together the companies could allow you to outfit your home with solar panels that power a giant battery for everything inside, as well as your electric car. The deal still has to be approved by SolarCity and its board. If it… Read More

 If you follow your dreams, and film it, and put it on YouTube, there’s a chance Richard D. James will see it and commission you to direct the first Aphex Twin video in 17 years. That’s the lesson learned by young Ryan Wyer, of outer Dublin, who was not even close to being born when the seminal “Windowlicker” came out in 1999. Read More

 Earlier this spring, Safeher (the ride-hailing service formerly known as Chariot for Women) established itself in the Boston area as a safer service for women drivers and passengers. Now See Jane Go is starting a similar service for women in the greater Los Angeles area this summer. Its public launch is today, with a commercial launch coming at the end of July. William Jordan founded the… Read More

 Gradifi founder Tim DeMello doesn’t have an outbound sales team. That’s how big the student loan problem is.
When Boston based Gradifi first launched its student loan paydown plan, 456 companies reached out wanting to sign up for the benefit.
Employers want to attract and retain employees and unfortunately one of the best ways to do that right now is by offering student loan… Read More

 With a lot of tech companies and automakers staking their claims in the connected car space, now there are signs that others are looking to move in, too. Today, telecoms giant Verizon announced that it is acquiring Telogis, a California-based company that develops cloud-based solutions for mobile workforces, and specifically telematics, compliance and navigation software used by Ford, Volvo,… Read More

 People just don’t seem to have the same excitement lately about Apple’s App Store or the Google Play platform. The air of hopelessness that surrounds the mobile app ecosystem is obvious and demoralizing. Read More

 Dr. David Charbonneau, a Harvard astronomer known for multiple “firsts” in the field of exoplanet research, has been selected as one of three recipients of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.
The annual award, which comes with $250,000, is the largest unrestricted cash award given to early-career scientists.
The two other recipients include Dr. Phil Baran from the Scripps… Read More

 Imagine having a perfect recall and a way to auto-edit your life into exciting, fun snippets (even if your life isn’t exciting or fun.) That’s what the Perfect Memory wireless camera aims to do. The camera, created by the team at General Streaming Systems, LLC, is an evolution on the traditional body cam. This device connects to a chain you can wear around your neck or can clip to… Read More

 A couple weeks back, Reddit announced that it would be providing its own image hosting solution to a handful of subreddits. The experiment appears to have been a success, because the site announced today that the feature is rolling out to any SFW subreddit that wants to take advantage of it. Read More

 Yahoo this morning launched a new travel guide for iOS it’s calling Yahoo Radar. While the app will offer traditional travel companion type features like restaurant recommendations and details on popular attractions, landmarks, and other sights in a given city, the app will be more useful to those who use Yahoo Mail as their primary email client. It also heavily relies on a… Read More

 Brigade, the political advocacy platform backed by Sean Parker and made from the early team of Causes, has come a longer way in the last six months. Originally unveiled as a really simple way to agree or disagree with political positions, Brigade has evolved into a more robust site for debating policy and political topics. Instead of a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ interface… Read More

 VLC, the venerable and widely used multi-platform video player, received a major update on Android today, adding a number of highly requested features while managing to actually reduce the number of permissions it needs. That seems like an infallible sign of a trustworthy developer right there. Read More

 At its developer conference in Seattle, Docker today announced the private beta of the Docker Store, a new marketplace for trusted and validated dockerized software.
The idea behind the store is to create a self-service portal for Docker’s ecosystem partners to publish and distribute their software through Docker images — and for users to make it easier to deploy these… Read More