Startups
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EquipmentShare, the Airbnb of construction, raises $26 million
It hasn’t even been a year since EquipmentShare raised a Series A round of funding, but the “Airbnb of construction rentals,” has closed a $26 million Series B round. The Columbia, Missouri-based startup helps contractors rent out their under-utilized equipment, or rent safety tested equipment that they need from a fellow contractor. Last year, EquipmentShare also launched… Read More
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Breathometer ordered to refund purchases of its breathalyzers as part of FTC settlement
Breathometer, a startup that quickly rose to prominence due to an appearance on Shark Tank, has agreed to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in which it will offer refunds for mobile-connected breathalyzer devices the company sold from 2013 to 2015.
The two products — the Original ($49) and Breeze ($99) — were marketed as devices that could detect a user’s… Read More
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Time Inc-owned Viant acquires mobile ad company Adelphic
Viant, the ad tech company acquired by Time Inc. last year, just announced an acquisition of its own. The company has reached an agreement to buy Adelphic, an ad startup focused on mobile and cross-device targeting. “Adelphic will bring superior media execution capabilities to Viant’s advertising cloud platform as one of the only DSPs built mobile-first,” said Viant… Read More
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UpKeep gives companies an app to speed up the maintenance work order process
As a process development engineer, Ryan Chan was used to trying to make incremental improvements to the development process in manufacturing. Those changes would improve efficiency by around one to three percent, which would net hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Chan wanted to figure out how to get things moving even more efficiently. So he left, and he became an iOS engineer. That led him… Read More
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Maker Bre Pettis talks about the way forward for tech in this new century
On this week’s episode of Technotopia I talked to Bre Pettis, former CEO of Makerbot and the founder of Bre&Co. Pettis has been thinking about new manufacturing chains, the rise of the local maker, what what happens when a country falls into disrepair. Pettis is an optimistic realist. He’s been watching Venezuela with great interest and has a few pieces of advice for tech folks… Read More
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FLYR raised $8 million to change the way we buy plane tickets
Travel tech startup FLYR raised $8 million in Series A funding for technology that predicts the price of airfare by applying artificial intelligence to a database of both open industry data and a proprietary collection of years of past prices and fluctuations. The funding round was led by a Peter Thiel fund, and, according to an SEC filing, Thiel Capital principal Phin Upham was involved in… Read More
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How to fail at Kickstarter — even if you get funded
Originally positioned as a medium for projects to garner modest seed funding from a diverse group of supporters, crowdfunding platforms have evolved. Yes, crowdfunding has produced some inspiring success stories. However, it also has facilitated the transfer of significant sums of money to teams that ultimately proved themselves to be incompetent, leaving backers with nothing. Read More
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FishTaco can analyze your microbiome before or after you eat a fish taco
Our microbiomes: who understands them? Scientists? The bacteria colonizing our guts? The guy who made the Mexican food we just ate? Wrong. It’s our computers. Researchers have tasked them to create a new way to analyze and understand our microbiomes electronically. The service is called “Functional Shifts’ Taxonomic Contributors” or, obviously, FishTaco. The system,… Read More
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Quixey alums launch Sigma, a platform to bring merits and certifications online
A new company named Sigma, founded by alumni of mobile app search engine Quixey, aims to take records and certifications currently trapped in the analog world and bring them online. To do so, the company has raised $4.35 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors. The idea originated in late 2014, during a scuba trip in Belize that Sigma cofounder and… Read More
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In a tech-saturated world, customer feedback is everything
I’ve found that the most valuable design tool in the 21st century is rather old-fashioned: customer feedback. Technology has produced huge breakthroughs in design. A product can be ideated, prototyped and finalized with little more than a keyboard and code. But the ingenuity of modern design often leads to product teams neglecting the basics. Read More
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