Hans Zimmer, the film score composer behind dozens of Hollywood movies including The Lion King and Inception, is shaping what the next generation of BMW electric vehicles sound like. Zimmer and Renzo Vitale, an acoustic engineer and sound designer at the BMW Group, recently composed the sound for the BMW Vision M NEXT, the concept…
Google Maps just got a lot more useful for commuters. The company today announced a pair of updates for its mapping application — one that will offer live traffic delays for buses in the cities where it didn’t already provide real-time updates, and another that will tell you how crowded your bus, train, or subway…
Two of Europe’s biggest on-demand laundry startups are merging today. Laundrapp from London and Zipjet from Berlin are confirming the completion of a previously-rumored merger through which the combined business will become the largest on-demand laundry business in the UK. Alongside this, the combined business has completed a funding round from existing investors including Toscafund,…
NTWRK, is a fascinating experiment in live video shopping for the iPhone set. It’s been described as a blend of QVC and Twitter and Twitch and they just got a new slice of money from investors like Drake and Live Nation to expand into physical events. There’s been a bunch of attempts at this kind…
The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market networks B2B service marketplaces (think translation as a service) are an extraordinarily lucrative startup category. But despite the incredible potential of these platforms to generate outsized returns, many fail. Why? Ivan Smolnikov, the CEO and founder of translation service startup Smartcat, investigates why certain marketplaces seem to grow…
International money transfer service TransferWise, has made a significant incursion into the US market today, launching a MasterCard debit card alongside a multicurrency account. Mirroring the card it has already launched in the UK and Europe last year, the card will work in over 40 currencies without balance limits, and conversion fees will be competitive…
Well, it’s official: The Office is leaving Netflix . Michael Scott and the rest of Dunder Mifflin will be heading for another streaming service come January 2021. By far the most popular show on Netflix in 2018, The Office was bound to leave the service eventually — or, at the very least, see some HUGE…
San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures is best known for its long string of bets on successful and fast-growing consumer companies. Now, its newest partner, Brian O’Malley, who has a knack for finding startups that straddle both the consumer and enterprise worlds, has written his first check on behalf of the firm, and it’s largely in that…
Facebook has announced it’s rolled out a basic layer of political ads transparency globally, more than a year after launching the publicly searchable ads archive in the US. It is also expanding what it dubs “proactive enforcement” on political ads to countries where elections or regulations are approaching — starting with Ukraine, Singapore, Canada and…
The groups behind a push to get the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate YouTube’s alleged violation of children’s privacy law, COPPA, have today submitted a new letter to the FTC that lays out the appropriate sanctions the groups want the FTC to now take. The letter comes shortly after news broke that the FTC…
