(Reuters) — Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk made a brief public appearance late on Tuesday to unveil the first tunnel completed by the underground transit venture he launched two years ago as an ambitious remedy to Los Angeles’ infamously heavy traffic. But contrary to some of his own hype from several months ago, free rides were […]
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Last year, cloud storage provider Box launched Box Skills, a suite of third-party apps that add features and functionality to uploaded files, and the Box Skills Kit, a set of APIs, developer tools, and documentation for designing custom Box Skills on platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM’s Watson, and Microsoft Azure. Today, the […]
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Ada, a Canada-based startup that is setting out to help companies develop their own automated customer service tools, has raised CAD$19 million (USD$14 million) in a series A round of funding led by New York-based VC firm FirstMark Capital, with participation from Leaders Fund, Burst Capital, Bessemer, Version One, and computer scientist Barney Pell. Founded […]
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Palo Alto startup Luminar today announced a collaboration with Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID), Audi’s driverless technology spinoff and a supplier for Volkswagen Group brands such as VW and Porsche, to accelerate the latter’s goal of bringing to market fully self-driving cars by 2021. It marks the second such partnership between the two companies, which teamed up […]
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For agencies dealing in sensitive data, cybersecurity has arguably never been more important. Enterprises that discover a data breach within the first 100 days spend about $1 million less on average than those that uncover it later on, according to the Ponemon Institute. And in a recent study, 60 percent of 200 security leaders surveyed […]
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In the first part of the year, major tech companies — including Apple and Google — indicated that they were getting too big for Silicon Valley and wanted to add jobs in other parts of the country. This generated considerable excitement in the Heartland — could the trend lead to more jobs and businesses in […]
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RightHand Robotics today announced the close of a $23 million funding round to bring its services to customers in Europe and Japan and expand sales, engineering, and customer service divisions of the company. The RightPick platform combines proprietary machine learning-driven tech with commercially available cameras and robotic arms to complete orders by picking and sorting items […]
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Indian education startup Byju’s has raised $540 million in a funding round led by South Africa’s Naspers Ventures and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The funding round announced today roughly doubles the 10-year-old startup’s valuation to $3.6 billion, making it one of the biggest education startups in the world. The new valuation also helps Byju’s […]
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After years of uncertain experimentation, free-to-play game developers are starting to view in-game ads as a genuine alternative to in-app purchases (IAPs) rather than just an additional revenue bonus, according to DeltaDNA‘s survey of 336 game developers and publishers. DeltaDNA said that in the last 12 months, the number of games owing at least 40 […]
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TransferGo, an international money transfer service based in London, has raised $17.5 million in a series B round of funding led by San Francisco VC firm Hard Yaka and Vostok Emerging Finance, with participation from Revo Capital, U-Start Club, and Practica Capital. Founded in 2012, TransferGo is one of a number of London-based fintech startups to […]
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Next time you order something from Postmates, a robot might greet you at the doorstep. The San Francisco on-demand delivery firm today unveiled Serve, a four-wheeled delivery rover that’s capable of autonomously navigating sidewalks and city streets. It’s the first commercial product from Postmates’ new research and development lab, Postmates X, and comes as Postmates […]
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Wonolo, an app that helps companies find temporary workers and contractors, announced today that it is partnering with Waze Carpool to help workers find rides with other Wonolo workers heading to jobs located close to theirs. The partnership will first roll out in the Bay Area and Chicago, where about 50,000 workers are using Wonolo. […]
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Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage. Case in point? In a recent survey, 15 percent of U.S. adults said they’d used a chatbot to interact with a company this year. Be that as it may, such systems can be difficult to design and maintain if you don’t have the data science chops. And […]
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Automation is permeating just about every industry, from logistics and transport routing to translation — even the creative spheres aren’t impervious to algorithmic interference. One of the big fears around automation is the impact it will have on jobs, with Forrester recently predicting that 10 percent of U.S. jobs will be lost to automation in 2019. […]
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Salespeople, on the whole, are enthusiastic about artificial intelligence (AI). In a survey of 2,900 teams conducted by Salesforce earlier this year, 66 percent characterized AI’s ability to glean customer sentiment and engagement as “transformative,” and 65 percent said that AI-powered insights into business developments, emails, and calendar data would “make them more effective in their job.” That […]
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Apple announced it will spend $1 billion on a new campus in North Austin while also opening new offices in Seattle and Southern California. In a press release, the company also sought to emphasize its economic impact across the U.S., noting that it has employees in all 50 states and is on track to meet […]
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Despite being a $10 trillion industry, construction is not famed for its efficiency — a 2016 McKinsey report suggested that the industry ranks among the lowest in terms of productivity, in part due to a lack of digitization. Against that backdrop, a number of technology startups have emerged to help construction firms optimize their operations. One of those […]
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The narrative goes that in order to really build a successful rocketship company, Heartland tech companies have to recruit some upper-level talent from other places — namely Silicon Valley — that have worked for fast-growing startups before. But are companies overemphasizing the need to find talent with prior startup experience? That’s the thesis of Robert […]
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How do you harness the power of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and virtualization? There are a wide variety of tools on the market, but choosing the wrong HCI platform could limit your options or impede cloud and virtualization goals. Join NASDAQ’s AVP of DevOps and others for this VB Live event to learn more about how […]
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Almost half of businesses have adopted some form of artificial intelligence (AI) and 43 percent of corporate “decision makers” see it as having a significant impact on their bottom lines. That’s according to market research firm Tata Communications, which today published The Cycle of Progress, a bi-annual survey of 1,600 employees from organizations with over 250 […]
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