I don’t want VR to be boring. It’s strange to think that something so futuristic and promising, something we’ve looked forward to for decades, could be boring, but I can’t deny it, since experienced it myself. The fact is that with hundreds of companies joining the VR gold rush, we’re going to be panning a lot of silt for every grain of gold. Read More
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Performance Horizon, a company aiming to help advertisers manage their relationships with marketing partners, is announcing that it has raised $15.4 million in Series C funding.
The company’ says that with its software, brands and agencies can bypass the affiliate networks that online publishers usually rely on to get paid by marketers for driving purchases or other consumer actions. Read More
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In these earliest days of commercial viability, virtual reality is running up against the same wall as so many technologies before it: how does a company translate it for the majority of consumers who won’t be able to demo it in the wild?
HTC’s mixed reality is an interesting sort of work around, adding augmented reality to the equation, in order to offer a sort of voyeuristic… Read More
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The very mention of e-sports tends to conjure up titles like Bethesda’s Quake, the arena shooter, or Valve’s Dota 2 and Riot’s League of Legends, both arena battle games, which are played by professionals for piles of cash with prize pools in the millions of dollars. But a San Francisco startup called Skillz paid out 21% of last year’s e-sports prizes worldwide, and is… Read More
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Microsoft has been searching for ways to strengthen its flagging Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and it made a couple of moves this week (one quite significant) with an eye toward making life easier for sales people and enhancing its marketshare in the process. For starters, you might have heard that Microsoft bought LinkedIn on Monday for a cool $26 billion.… Read More
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Step 1: Build software for pot labs. Step 2: Find out who has the strongest herb. Step 3: Create a marijuana marketplace connecting dispensaries with the best growers. That’s the plan that scored $3 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures for Confident Cannabis. Right now it’s on Step 2, having established the largest real-time database of cannabis in the world just nine… Read More
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We haven’t heard much from Fleksy — one of a number of custom keyboards for Android and iOS — lately, and it seems we may have an answer why: It’s been acquired by Pinterest. But it isn’t a total product acquisition. While the app will continue running (with minimal updates) for the forseeable future, half of the team will be integrated into Pinterest’s… Read More
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Most smartphone users download zero apps per month, and only tend to use around a half-dozen of their installed apps on a regular basis. Meanwhile, there are millions of native applications available today that offer a better experience than using the mobile web. The problem is finding these apps and easily accessing them at the right time. Read More
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The Pew Research Center’s latest annual State of the News Media report underlines how successful technology giants continue to be at creaming off digital ad profits, even as traditional news media faces ever intensifying pressure to find a way to sustainably fund journalism. Read More
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YouTube is launching a new suite of products for advertisers under the umbrella name of YouTube Director. Collectively, these products are supposed to make it easier for businesses (particularly the smaller ones that don’t have their own production capabilities and aren’t going to hire an ad agency) to shoot and edit video ads that can run on YouTube. One of the new products is… Read More
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