Microsoft’s Seeing AI is an app that lets blind and limited-vision folks convert visual data into audio feedback, and it just got a useful new feature. Users can now use touch to explore the objects and people in photos. It’s powered by machine learning, of course, specifically object and scene recognition. All you need to…
Your startup will not succeed unless you, the founder, build an exceptional team. Great teams are built on top of great culture. Yet any venture-backed startup founder will tell you, myself included, that developing a positive corporate culture is more art than science, requiring constant and creative recalibration as your company grows. What then does…
Pitched as “travel insurance for people who don’t like insurance,” U.K.-based Pluto Insurance is officially launching today with an online travel insurance product targeting millennials. Citing research that says 40 percent of millennials don’t actually buy travel insurance, mistakenly believing that it isn’t required, the mobile-first offering not only attempts to demystify travel insurance, but…
Amazon will stop forbidding third-party merchants who list on its e-commerce platform in the United States from selling the same products on other sites for lower prices, reports Axios. The company’s decision to end its price parity provision comes three months after Sen. Richard Blumenthal urged the Department of Justice to open an antitrust investigation…
Rather than be sore about losing independence within Facebook, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom told me it was an inevitable sign of his app’s triumph. Today at South By South West, Systrom and fellow co-founder Mike Krieger sat down for their first on-stage talk together since leaving Facebook in September. They discussed their super hero origin…
Apple sent out invites to reporters this afternoon for a March 25 special event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino. Reports have suggested that the company will focus its keynote on the content side of its business. The invite offers some pretty heavy-handed hints that the video content service will be on full display…
Security researchers have found dozens of companies inadvertently leaking sensitive corporate and customer data because staff are sharing public links to files in their Box enterprise storage accounts that can be easily discovered. The discoveries were made by Adversis, a cybersecurity firm, which found major tech companies and corporate giants had left data inadvertently exposed.…
Appen just announced that it’s acquiring Figure Eight in an all-cash deal that sees Appen paying $175 million upfront, with an additional payment of up to $125 million based on Figure Eight’s performance this year. Both companies focus on using crowdsourced labor pools to annotate data, which in turn is used to train artificial intelligence and…
In the age of Amazon, where up to 90 percent of all consumers use it to buy goods and Amazon is accounting for a rapidly-growing percentage of a consumer’s total retail spend (along with other giants like Walmart), direct-to-consumer brands — leveraging social media alongside tech-first apps — are emerging as sometimes surprising, but often effective,…
Massachusetts Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren made waves yesterday when she outlined her plan for breaking up big tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook. Now, The Verge reports Warren also wants to break up Apple. This, of course, makes sense given that Apple falls into the bucket of a platform utility with…
