As brick-and-mortar commerce continues to shift online — whether that’s to competitors like Amazon, through online ordering systems or into instant delivery apps — traditional retailers are looking for new ways to accommodate a customer base that now wants the increased convenience that comes with not having to park their cars, then wander around the store, cart in hand. Case… Read More
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Sin City is about to get a bit more sinful, as VR content platform VR Bangers and headset maker AuraVisor are teaming up to offer in-room adult experiences (via virtual reality) at hotels on the strip in Las Vegas. What makes this partnership particularly interesting is that users who purchase the in-room AuraVisor will be viewing content that was filmed in a hotel room that looks similar to… Read More
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LinkedIn — the social platform used by 400 million professionals looking to network or find work — has taken a major tumble in the markets in the last few months over weak financial guidance amid slowing growth. So this week, ahead of its next quarterly earnings on April 28, LinkedIn is shoring up in areas where it’s either already strong or banking on growing… Read More
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Rinse Inc. has raised a $6 million Series A round of venture funding to pick up and clean anything in its customers’ closets. According to Chief Executive Ajay Prakash, who cofounded Rinse in 2013 with Chief Operating Officer James Joun, “We never wanted to b Uber for laundry, and don’t consider ourselves an on-demand business.” The startup provides garment care services… Read More
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Diamanti, a startup aimed at solving the problems around balancing networking and storage requirements in the age of containers, emerged from stealth today with a new appliance and $12.5 million in Series A funding from a prestigious list of investors. Perhaps those investors — Charles River Ventures, DFJ Venture, GSR Ventures, and Goldman Sachs — liked the pedigree of the… Read More
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Since launching in 2012, theSkimm has built up a big audience for its email newsletter — founders Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin told me they have more than 3.5 million active subscriptions, with a daily open rate of 40 percent. Today the New York City startup is launching its first iPhone app, accompanied by its first major service beyond the newsletter, Skimm Ahead. For a… Read More
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Azure Container Service, Microsoft’s container scheduling and orchestration service for its Azure cloud computing service, is now generally available. The service, which allows its users to choose either Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System (DC/OS) or Docker’s Swarm and Compose to deploy and orchestrate their containers, was first announced in September 2015 and hit… Read More
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Facebook 86’ed The Shade Room from its platform today for unknown reasons. The celebrity gossip and news publisher attracted about 4.2 million followers on Facebook. We reached out to The Shade Room and to Facebook to learn why its page disappeared. Facebook did not yet reply to our inquiry, but we’ll update this story as it develops. Angie Nwandu, The Shade Room founder, and… Read More
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Many of the world’s legendary tech companies got started just as the public markets were cooling off; Microsoft, Apple, HP, IBM, Oracle, FedEx, etc. The most recent case in point is the startup class of 2008-2009: Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber and Tiny Speck (Slack) all got their early funding in those dismal years. And, while not everyone agrees that there is a massive downturn in… Read More
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In terms of venture capital dollars, it’s still hard to beat Silicon Valley. The latest figures have Bay Area companies gobbling up about 15 percent of the world’s venture capital. Factor in San Jose and Los Angeles and that share climbs to nearly one-third of the all the money raised by private companies in 2015. By contrast, New York City companies raised just 5 percent,… Read More
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