MONET Technologies, a joint venture launched by Softbank and Toyota to provide on-demand mobility services eventually with an autonomous module bus, has five new partners. Five Japanese automakers including Isuzu Motors, Suzuki Motor Corp., Subaru, Daihatsu and Mazda will each invest 2% in the venture. Softbank and Toyota each own 35% of the company. Honda…
In its most recent report, Synergy Research, a company that monitors cloud marketshare, found that enterprise SaaS revenue passed the $100 billion run rate this quarter. The market was led by Microsoft and Salesforce. It shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that these two enterprise powerhouses come in at the top. Microsoft reported $10.1…
It looks like choose-your-own-adventure Twitter games won’t be a one-hit wonder, now that Apple’s social team has adopted the format. A new tweet from the @AppleTV Twitter account today helps users find a movie to watch by having them click through a series of Twitter threads. However, their effort (so far at least) pales compared…
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, which is coming up on July 20, NASA has restored and re-opened the original Apollo Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The restoration is a painstakingly detailed recreation, which involved years of research of archival footage and photography, and seven months of restoration…
A $30-per-month email service capturing the adoration of investors and founders in Silicon Valley is perhaps an unsurprising story in a subscription-obsessed landscape, yet we’re only now hearing how stealth-y startup Superhuman has captured investor $$$. The New York Times reports that the SF startup closed a $33 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz…
A look at nearly 200 crypto startups shows which companies have become crypto academies Ash Egan leads crypto investing at Accomplice. He formerly was a VC at ConsenSys Ventures and Converge. In the early 2000s, journalists popularized the term “PayPal mafia” to describe the PayPal founders and employees who left to start their own wildly…
PepsiCo is planning to replace its plastic bottles of Aquafina with aluminum cans at locations around the U.S. The move is part of a broader initiative from the company to reduce its plastic use as a consumer backlash against plastic use grows across the country. Microplastics, found in both air and water, block up the…
Soon, you might not need anything more specialized than a readily accessible touchscreen device and any existing data sets you have access to in order to build powerful prediction tools. A new experiment from MIT and Brown University researchers have added a capability to their ‘Northstar’ interactive data system that can “instantly generate machine-learning models”…
Southeast Asia’s highest-capitalized startup is sitting on even more money from investors today after ride-hailing Grab announced it has raised $300 million from Invesco. The deal takes Singapore-based Grab $7.5 billion raised to date. The money is part of its ongoing — feels-like-everlasting — Series H round which was started last June via a $1…
Google has always argued that the data it collects does more than provide power for its targeted ad empire — it also makes its services more useful. But not everyone thinks that Google should be able to suck up a never-ending stockpile of personal data on its users. Today, Google is taking a step towards…
