All messaging apps are the same no more. A few years ago, there were few differences between SMS and a slew of chat apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, Kik, Line, KakaoTalk and Facebook Messenger. But each have slowly defined themselves differently, whether through simplicity, connections to businesses, media, stickers, games, location, and other features. But today, Facebook…
Ok, not really, but this is pretty cool. Vegemite is a disgusting yeast paste beloved by far too many people. While I wouldn’t recommend actively eating it, Professor Marc in het Panhuis at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science figured out that you can 3D print the paste and use it to carry…
Earlier today, Y Combinator President Sam Altman posted the type of numbers about which he gets asked “a lot” — calling them (humbly and probably rightly) “very imperfect indicators of success.” Here’s the lowdown, if you missed them: Excluding companies like Quora that didn’t get their start with the incubator, Altman says that YC has now…
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is acquiring FutureAdvisor, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based online financial advisory firm that aims to help people manage their investment accounts. According to the Financial Times, FutureAdvisor was picked up for between $150 million and $200 million. The company had raised $21.5 million from investors, shows CrunchBase. A Y Combinator alum, FutureAdvisor had first raised seed…
Frustrated by how difficult it was to have spur of the moment get-togethers with friends, Stanford classmates Joseph Lau and Nikil Viswanathan spent a Friday afternoon in San Francisco’s SoMa district building what they called Down To Lunch. “I want to emphasize how simple or silly it was,” said Lau. “We didn’t know who was…
Android Pay, Google’s forthcoming payments platform and rival to Apple Pay, will soon launch, allowing consumers to pay using their Android smartphones at point-of-sale as well as make purchases within mobile applications. However, according to sources familiar with Google’s plans, Android Pay is not arriving today – or any time this week, in fact – despite a…
Not unlike those fortune-telling fish you used to get at joke shops a new form of 3D-printed microfish – fish, not fiche – can wiggle and jiggle and wriggle inside you, dropping off medicine and cleaning up toxins as they go. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have created nano-sized fish out of…
Maxwell Wessel Contributor Maxwell Wessel is a VC at Sapphire Ventures. More posts by this contributor Building A Framework For Sustainability Software For The Full-Stack Era There has been a lot of discussion about startup valuation over the past few months. Luminaries across the industry have chimed in, suggesting we’re returning to a time of…
We’d been hearing rumblings that Facebook was working on an “assistant” within Messenger (along with others), but today we’ve gotten the details that pull it all together. This puts the company squarely in competition with Apple, Google and Microsoft in the digital personal assistant space. In a Facebook post, Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus spoke…
PayPal today expanded its instant checkout service known as One Touch to 13 new markets worldwide, including a wide swath of European countries along with Australia. The system, which lets mobile and web users use PayPal to pay for purchases without having to continually re-enter their username and password across merchants’ sites or apps, has…