Led by Amazon’s Alexa, smart speakers’ install base is expected to reach 200 million units worldwide by 2020. A quarter of Americans over the age of 12 own a smart speaker, and the majority of those users have more than one device in their home. Moreover, Apple could sell 50 million of its Airpods this…
Babbel, the popular Berlin-based language learning service, today announced that its founder and current co-CEO Markus Witte is stepping down from his CEO role but that he will remain the executive chairman of the company’s board. The company’s current co-CEO Arne Schepker will become Babbel’s sole CEO. In addition to these leadership changes, the company…
Heads up, startuppers. We’ve entered the final week of early bird pricing on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019. Place your procrastination on hold, because the deadline to save as much as €500 comes to an abrupt halt on 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Do yourself a saver-favor and buy your early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin today.…
Welcome back to Max Q, our weekly look at what’s happening in space and space startup news. This week was a bit more quiet than usual coming off of the amazingly over-packed International Astronautical Congress, but there were still some big moves that promise a lot more action to come before they year’s over –…
At last, it is here! The truly self-driving car, no human behind the wheel! For the public! …A few hundred of them, in a closed beta, in a small corner of sun-drenched (never snow-drenched, almost never water-drenched) suburban Phoenix, five years later than some people were predicting six years ago. Few new technologies have ever…
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said Saturday the company will ban “party houses” and take other steps to safeguard hosts and guests after five people died at a Halloween party hosted at California home that was rented on the service. Chesky made the announcement via a series of tweets Saturday. “What happened on Thursday night in…
Welcome back to This Week in Apps — the easiest way to keep up with everything that happened in the world of apps over the past week — from the breaking news to the trends and all the other information an industry watcher needs to know. The app industry is as hot as ever, with…
Perhaps best known for a career-making seed investment in Snapchat, Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew is a leading investor across media and entertainment, making bets on startups like Cheddar, Giphy, HQ, SpecialGuest, Mic, Beme, Playdom, Duta and Flixster. I spoke to him earlier this week about how he assesses the market for media startups, which led…
Software development companies tackling services for niche industries, like commercial real estate subcontracting, continue to find Los Angeles to be fertile ground for development. The latest company to raise funding from a clutch of investors is BuildOps, which raised $5.8 million in seed financing from some big names in the Los Angeles tech ecosystem. Led…
Imagine a hypersonic passenger aircraft that would cut the journey time between London and New York to around two hours. At Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, the aircraft would complete a trip across the Atlantic in around 120 minutes. Mach 5 is more than twice as fast as the cruising speed of Concorde…
