Category: Tech news

 The company behind Viv, a powerful form of AI built by Siri’s creators which is able to learn from the world to improve upon its capabilities, has just closed on $12.5 million in Series B funding, an SEC filing reveals. Multiple sources close to the matter also confirm the round, which was oversubscribed and values the company at north of nine figures. Read More

 This week, RapidMiner announced that it has raised a $15 million Series B round of capital. The company had previously raised a total of $5 million, bringing its total capital tally to $20 million. The round was co-led by Ascent Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners. RapidMiner, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., provides what it describes as “code-free” analytics tools.… Read More

 TechCrunch’s startup launch events go back to 2007 with TC40. That inaugural event surfaced some pretty amazing companies, including Mint, TripIt, Xobni and ZocDoc. The conference grew and in 2010, was re-named Disrupt featuring the Startup Battlefield competition. Over the years it grew into a Mecca for young teams to lay it all it on the line in front of top VCs, CEOs and technologists. Read More

 Airpost, a startup that helps IT managers monitor their employees’ cloud applications, announced this morning that it has been acquired by Box.
Airpost founder and CEO Navid Nathoo’s blog post makes this sound like a talent acquisition. The Airpost team will be joining Box (which went public just under a month ago), while the Airpost service will be shut down on March 1. Read More

 True to its reputation, the Sundance Film Festival debuted a variety of fascinating and cutting-edge independent films during its annual run in Park City recently, but this year’s biggest breakout star was not celluloid. It was technology, as Silicon Valley innovation invaded this year’s festival in a big way. Filmmakers, studio representatives and festival attendees rubbed elbows… Read More

 EasilyDo, the app that automatically helps busy people manage their calendar, contacts, and to-do lists, has a new trick up its sleeve. The app now has features it hopes will appeal to enterprise users, specifically salespeople and execs who need help keeping track of their contacts in Salesforce. Read More

 Apple intends to offer a public beta program for iOS 8.3 and iOS 9, starting in March and this summer respectively, according to a new report from 9to5Mac. The move makes sense in light of Mac OS X’s public beta program, which debuted last year and offered a select group of users (Apple said it had room for one million participants in the program) access to Yosemite ahead of its… Read More

 Techstars has had a fast 3 years in Europe. After Techstars London, led by the departing Jon Bradford, had been set up, it opened a further three programmes: in Berlin, the Techstars Metro Accelerator (around retail) and a fintec accelerator sponsored by Barclays Bank. Techstars London Demo Day today saw over 1,000 people signed up (the majority of whom actually turned up to a rented East… Read More

The Ring is a novel idea: a person rings your doorbell, your smartphone buzzes, and with a tap, you can initiate a videochat with the visitor. Better yet, it mostly works.

The post Review: Ring Video Doorbell appeared first on WIRED.

The Surge is less of a direct shot across Apple Watch’s bow and more of a souped-up fitness tracker that provides minimal notifications from your smartphone. If you’re an active type and you don’t want to wear two devices on your wrist, you’ll like it.

The post Review: Fitbit Surge appeared first on WIRED.

 Y Combinator-backed CloudMedx is building a suite of physician- and patient-facing apps that together lead to better, cheaper health care outcomes. Read More

 Seed thinks that business banking is opaque, expensive, and behind the times. The company, which is part of the Winter 2015 Y Combinator class, wants to shake up banking, bring it into the API era, and rip out unnecessary fees to make it, according to its CEO Brian Merritt, as “easy as possible to start and manage a business.” Read More

 This week, we have a rare opportunity to just plain unleash on a device: The Neptune Duo, which puts all the smartphone smarts inside an Android-powered smartwatch, then makes the screen in your pocket essentially a dumb receiver. It’s backwards and bad, and we find we’re mostly in agreement on that point. In other news, LG has another Android Wear device coming to market, making… Read More

 Government outreach efforts often talk about collaboration and working together but usually in a vague, aspirational, kumbaya kind of way. However, for cybersecurity the need for collaboration is pragmatic and pressing. Read More

 The writing is on the wall.
The music industry is dying.
Nobody buys music.
It’s the Wild West.
The last one might be true. But the rest? Not exactly.
In the Wild West the winner of the shootout was always the one who was armed the best and able to take the best shot. Nowadays, artists and executives need to have that same kill or be killed attitude. It’s time to upgrade the arsenal. Read More