SigOpt, a company aiming to “optimize everything,” announced today that it has raised $6.6 million in Series A funding. When startups talk about optimization, they often mean trying out a few different variations and then choosing the ones that get the best results. With SigOpt, it’s more of a continual process, where the technology can look at your results and recommend what… Read More
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David Lortscher was one of a few dozen people practicing dermatology in New Mexico when he realized a huge problem in the field: There weren’t enough dermatologists, and people were skipping out on visits because they thought it was for more affluent people or took too long. So Lortscher decided to start Curology, which provides acne and anti-aging treatment and prescriptions through… Read More
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Halo 5: Forge, the level creation tool that lets players build their own worlds and create new game experiences for Halo 5: Guardians, has come to Windows 10 PCs. The free download puts gamers in the developer’s seat, and adds support for mouse and keyboard, and up to 4K resolution, likely beating out the Xbox One add-on in terms of giving you finer control over world building. Xbox… Read More
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While Pokémon Go is definitely the primary benefactor of its own success, that doesn’t mean it’s hurting its competition in the mobile gaming space. New data from mobile commerce provider DOCOMO Digital has found that in fact, the Google Play Store’s top four grossing apps have seen a 10 percent increase in overall revenue from their games in Europe since the debut of… Read More
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If customized keyboards for mobile devices are to be the next-gen interface for accessing the wider web – including information you’d normally turn to a search engine to find – then Microsoft today has stepped up its fight with Google with the rollout of a new version of its predictive keyboard app Word Flow. While the app previously offered intelligent word suggestions… Read More
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A startup called SelfScore has raised $7.1 million in new venture funding to help bring much-needed financial services to international students at U.S. colleges and universities. SelfScore co-founder and CEO Kalpesh Kapadia grew up in India, but moved to the U.S. for graduate school in 1995. That’s when he first noticed the challenges of assimilating into what he says is the… Read More
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Genius, the service that lets users add annotations and context to other docs, has today announced the launch of Questions and Answers, or Q+A. Genius originally launched as a rap lyrics data trove, where users could add interesting context and insights about various rap lyrics. Eventually, the company expanded (and not without some growing pains) to all types of documents, like public… Read More
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Chatbots offer the promise of frictionless access to goods, services and information, but creating effective bots can be deceptively tricky. The flip side of the opportunity to interact with users in a seamless, natural way is that user expectations can be prohibitively high. Bots need to be smart and provide greater convenience than apps. Read More
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In what amounts to a very detailed and very heartfelt whitepaper on building and shutting down a business, John Gruber has written about shutting down Vesper, his iOS notes app and syncing service. Vesper was one of the most elegant and usable pieces of software I’ve used. Sadly, it was too easy to abandon once syncing came to nearly everything in iOS and, although the product had a… Read More
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“Identity-as-a-service” startup Auth0 (pronounced “auth zero”) has raised $15 million in Series B funding.
CEO Jon Gelsey said that for many website and mobile app developers, integrating with different login systems can turn into a big headache — and also create security risks. So the company helps those developers manage identity and authentication, whether… Read More
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