Startups
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Uber’s design director on what it took to redesign a global product
Didier Hilhorst is a director of design at Uber. In this episode, he shares how his graduate degree in economics helped mold him as a designer and, in turn, shape how he and his team redesigned Uber from the ground up. It’s not every day economics and design overlap with one another. But for Didier, they do. He explains how elements usually not thought of as a design tool, such as price,… Read More
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Poncho weather service picks up $2.4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners
Poncho, the betaworks-backed weather service, has raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Ventures. Poncho launched out of betaworks the same year as Giphy and Dots, and uses SMS and email to bring the news to you in an entertaining way. The premise is simple. Instead of having users seek out their own information via weather apps and being bombarded with numbers like… Read More
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TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 will feature some of tech’s wildest success stories
TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 is less than a month away at Pier 48 in San Francisco. This year’s lineup includes a stellar group of speakers, including Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, Golden State Warriors superstar forward (and also investor) Kevin Durant, Forerunner Venture’s Kirsten Green and Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun. Read More
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OpenAI bot remains undefeated against world’s greatest Dota 2 players
Last night, OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat the world’s most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles, showing just how advanced these machine learning systems are getting. The bot beat Danil “Dendi” Ishutin rather easily at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world’s top Dota 2 players.… Read More
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Moneytis is like a travel fare aggregator, but for sending money abroad
If you don’t care too much about loyalty programs, chances are that you’ve been relying on platforms like Booking.com and Expedia to find the cheapest flights and hotel rooms. Moneytis wants to do the exact same thing, but for foreign exchange services. TransferWise is arguably the biggest consumer brand in international transfers. Instead of telling your bank to send money to… Read More
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Machine learning can tell if you’re wearing swap-meet Louie
A wise man once said “The hat mighta had a L V on the back but at the swap meet that ain’t jack,” and now researchers can ensure that the Louis Vuitton or Prada or Coach you bought is the real deal. The system, which essentially learns the difference between real and fake products over time, uses a small microscope connected to a phone. “The underlying principle of… Read More
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The US Government must work with tech companies if it wants to remain competitive in AI
U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is concluding his tech tour of the West Coast today with a visit to Google’s Mountain View campus. Mattis spent time at Amazon and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, earlier in the week. His key takeaway from all the socializing with tech leaders is that the Department of Defense needs to embrace technology coming out of the private sector… Read More
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LaterPay brings its media payment technology to the US
LaterPay is offering media companies a business model that goes beyond subscriptions and ads. LaterPay is trying to help monetize “the vast space” between subscriptions and ads, allowing publishers to charge for their content on an à la carte basis. That can meaning charging per article or video, or asking users to buy a pass to their site for a limited period of time. Read More
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Tetra raises a $1.5M seed round to bring deep learning to voice transcription
There are a million and one services for voice transcription on the market. But even with just one job to do, I’ve never seen a service that can handle the long tail of vocabulary used in the real world. This is particularly challenging if you’re a startup trying to sell your service to enterprises that rely on accurate transcription for their operations. Read More
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SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors
SoundCloud will soon collapse if investors don’t vote for a rescue funding round tomorrow. The stumbling music streaming community site had to suddenly lay off 40% of its staff last month. Now it’s asking investors for $169.5 million at a pre-money enterprise valuation of just $150 million. That’s a steep drop from the $700 million valuation of its previous rounds. Read More
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