A startup called Iotera wants to let you track your pets, your kids, or your belongings without relying on commercial wireless networks.
The iPhone wouldn’t stop chirping. On a recent morning I was riding in a car through Silicon Valley with three people from a startup called Iotera. A small tracking tag was attached to the passenger-side sun visor. Our mission was to see how far we could drive from Iotera’s office building before the tag would stop transmitting its location to a small base station on the building’s roof—which meant the location-logging app on the phone would go silent.
Lovely, the site that aggregates home rental listings, is today moving up from studio to duplex status. The startup is announcing its first acquisition, Rentmatic, so that those finding apartments on its site will soon be able to set up their monthly rent payments on Lovely after they move in. And it is gearing up for more growth: it has also closed a Series A round of funding.
Hailo, the taxi-booking app with a whopping $50 million+ in funding from the likes of Atomico, Accel, Union Square Ventures, and Richard Branson, has been grabbing most of the headlines in London. The service lets you book a fully licensed taxi in various major cities in the U.S. and Europe.
Seventy percent of American car owners overpay for insurance because they don’t drive much. Luckily, today MetroMile comes out of stealth to launch its per mile car insurance. The $14 million-funded MetroMile gives away a plug-in device for your car that connects to a free app that teaches you how to spend less on gas and shorten commutes. If you drive under 10,000 miles a year, you can buy its insurance to save an average of $400 a year.
Durante este fin de semana se ha celebrado en LaSalle Technova la 3ª edición de 3DayStartup Barcelona, en el que 35 estudiantes de diferentes universidades españolas han tenido que asumir el reto de crear su empresa en sólo 3 días.
Con tan solo ocho meses desde su lanzamiento, el proyecto innovador creado para promocionar artistas musicales Pypna.com ha superado ya los objetivos que sus creadores se habían marcado para los próximos tres años. En este periodo, más de 500 artistas se han unido a la comunidad de PYPNA.COM, que actualmente recibe una media de 12.000 visitas diarias desde países de todo el mundo.
The Internet of Things — like true mobile wallets or Internet-connected coffee makers — is on the horizon. It awaits us, a world where all of our devices are connected and communicate with each other in some sort of futuristic circle of life.
But as with any major shift in technology, we’re certainly not there yet. For those of us who are growing impatient, might I introduce you to the Gecko, a new Indiegogo project that’s meant to “make your smartphone smarter.”
The idea here is that the accelerometer-equipped Gecko connects to your smartphone via low energy Bluetooth to help you monitor the various things in your life, as well as bring gesture controls and triggers to your smartphone.
eliotrope Technologies, an early-stage startup currently incubating at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, may have found the key to delivering the first cost-effective “smart window.” The company has developed a relatively inexpensive glass composite with the unprecedented capacity to selectively block the sun’s heat-producing infrared radiation as well as visible light. Buildings equipped with such glass could be more energy-efficient.
