Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm known for early bets in Twitter, Etsy and Tumblr, has $450 million in capital commitments to plow into the next generation of technology startups. The capital, which comes in just above the $429 million USV filed to raise earlier this year, is divided across two new funds: $200…
Matt Miesnieks Contributor More posts by this contributor Why the YouTube of AR won’t be YouTube The product design challenges of AR on smartphones The martial arts actor Jet Li turned down a role in the Matrix and has been invisible on our screens because he does not want his fighting moves 3D-captured and owned by…
YouTube wants to have half of the featured videos in its trending tab come from streams originating on the company’s own site going forward, according to the latest quarterly letter from chief executive Susan Wojcicki. The letter, directed to YouTube’s users, is meant to help ease concerns the site’s biggest stars have over copyright challenges,…
Rappi represents a new era for Latin American technology startups. Based in Bogotá, Colombia, the on-demand delivery startup has taken the region by storm, attracting a record amount of venture capital funding in mere months. Today marks the beginning of a new round of explosive growth as SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant and prolific Silicon…
SoftBank Vision Fund has its pedal to the metal in more ways than one. On stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference yesterday, the CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisors, Rajeev Misra, reportedly disclosed plans to double the size of the investment arm from 400 employees to 800 employees over the next 18 months. That’s a…
Facebook announced at its F8 conference today a new feature to its Dating repertoire, this one apparently designed to help single minglers poach potential paramours from their Friends by adding them to an ostensibly private list of people you’re crushing on. Here’s how this is supposed to go down: You add up to nine people…
A team of security researchers has claims to have found a publicly-accessible database that exposes information on more than 80 million U.S. households—nearly 65 percent of the total number of American households. Discovered by VPNMentor’s research team lead by hacktivists Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, the unsecured database includes 24GB of extremely detailed information about…
Aperture was a great application for editing photos back in the day, but it hasn’t been supported by Apple for years. You can, however, still run it on the latest Macs, should you need to. But that won’t be the case for long, the company has announced. In a support page pointed out by MacRumors,…
At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today announced that it is launching its Portal video chat hardware internationally by bringing it to Canada and a select number of European countries, too. This roll-out will begin in June. In the U.S., Portal sells for $199 and $349, depending on the screen size. The company did not…
Valve is throwing a little bit of a “screw you” to Oculus this morning, announcing the specs of their high-end VR headset the Valve Index, just before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some minor updates to the Rift. The Valve Index is a high-end headset with few compromises. It’s $999 for the whole system but…
