Y Combinator-backed startup Whyd is pivoting from hardware to software. The startup had been working on a connected speaker with a voice-control interface specifically designed for music. But a couple of years later, it’s clear that subsidized voice assistant devices from Google and Amazon have taken over the market.
A number of Twitter users have been complaining that tweets that were retweeted by people they don’t follow are now showing in their timeline. The issue, thankfully, is not related to a new Twitter algorithm or recommendation system, as some had feared. Instead, the company confirmed that a bug affecting Android users was mislabeling the […]
Jason Rowley Chicago accounts for 97 percent of the dollar volume and 90.7 percent of total deal volume in the state. We included the rest of Illinois to avoid adjudicating which towns should be included in the greater Chicago area. In addition to all the investment in 2018, a number of venture-backed companies from Chicago […]
While it appears that overall economic activity could be slowing down, one area that continues to soar is the cloud business. Just this week, Amazon and Microsoft reported their cloud numbers as part of their overall earnings reports. While Microsoft’s cloud growth was flat from the previous quarter, it still grew a healthy 76 percent […]
The man who has headed up Siri at Apple since 2012 is no longer at the helm, according to The Information. Bill Stasior remains at the company in a different role, the report states. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment. Stasior joined Apple to take over Siri in 2012 after being poached from Amazon’s A9 […]
Sunny Dhillon More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela So why haven’t animated characters taken off on social media platforms? It’s largely an issue of scale — it’s expensive and time-consuming to create animated characters and to depict their adventures. One 2017 estimate stated that a 60 to 90-second animation took about […]
Notification spam ruins social networks, diluting the real human interaction. Desperate to gain an audience, users pay services to rapidly follow and unfollow tons of people in hopes that some will follow them back. The services can either automate this process or provide tools for users to generate this spam themselves, Earlier this month, a […]
As Slack reportedly readies itself for an entry to the public markets, the high-flying startup is ready to brag a little bit about what it has accomplished in the past year. In a blog post, the company shared that it now has 10 million daily active users on the platform, up from 8 million DAUs […]
Sibjeet Mahapatra Source: Getty Images/MIKIEKWOODS A path to equal opportunity: Turning fixed costs into variable costs What do AWS, WeWork, Stord, Gusto and RocketLawyer have in common? They provide cloud computing services, office space, warehouse storage, payroll management and access to legal templates, respectively — at first glance, not a particularly congruent set of services. But they are alike in the economic […]
