The spa industry is in need of a technology makeover and Zenoti thinks it can help. The Seattle-based startup is raising $15 million in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners to help salons run their businesses. A cloud-based management platform, Zenoti helps spa chains with everything from billing to inventory management. They aim to create a tailored enterprise software experience for what… Read More
from TechCrunch
Microsoft has acquired Beam, a Seattle-based interactive game streaming service that lets viewers play along with streamers as they watch. Beam’s model takes the mostly passive interaction that streaming fans may be used to from services like Twitch and YouTube, and adds the ability for viewers to interact with the streamer via crowdsourced controls. Players interacting through Beam… Read More
from TechCrunch
Marijuana use is a bit of a tricky subject in the United States. While public opinion on the matter may be shifting toward being more open to legalization — a YouGov poll released earlier this month showed that 55 percent of those surveyed supported legalizing marijuana, with more Republicans supporting legalization than not — only 25 states and Washington, D.C. have legalized… Read More
from TechCrunch
Yahoo has been beaten up in the press for so long that it’s hard to remember how untouchable it once appeared. We’d like to think that Yahoo’s failure has made us wiser, less likely to repeat the same mistakes. We’d like to think that having witnessed Yahoo’s demise, we would be better able to spot a company that was at peak valuation and about to begin a… Read More
from TechCrunch
Another traditional media company has invested in an online property to help expand its digital footprint and capture the next generation of consumers. Refinery29 — the online publisher that, in its own words, is aimed at “a modern woman’s destination for how to live a stylish, well-rounded life” — has raised $45 million in funding led by Turner, the Time… Read More
from TechCrunch
The latest on-demand delivery startup to pick up backing is Barcelona-headquartered Glovo. The company operates a local on-demand delivery service similar to Postmates in the U.S. or the U.K.’s Jinn, and is disclosing €5 million in Series A funding. Read More
from TechCrunch
Among other things, CareSkore wants to use machine learning to anticipate mortality. However, the newly endowed platform is more than just a Facebook poll that tells you how you’ll meet your end this Christmas by being squashed by a falling piano. Storm ventures, Cota Capital, Rising Tide Fund and Liquid 2 Ventures are rallying behind the Y Combinator graduate with today’s… Read More
from TechCrunch
Twilio recently exceeded expectations with an IPO that priced them at over $1 billion. For some, this proves that developers are the future of business. While they are certainly an indispensable asset, as more and more businesses turn to the cloud, what about the rest of us? What about the admins and the marketers and those who are equally important to a business but don’t code? Read More
from TechCrunch
Abhinav Shashank was working on an academic project at Harvard — figuring out how to pool together large data sets from hundreds of different sources and APIs and manage them — when his business colleagues started asking him to help apply those tools. The result was Innovaccer, a set of software that mashes together data from different enterprise sources and online data sets… Read More
from TechCrunch
Silk‘s co-founder and CEO, Salar al Khafaji, announced today that private data analytics unicorn Palantir would be acquiring the company. The transaction appears to be an acqui-hire, with members of the Silk team directly joining Palantir in new roles. Founded in 2010, Silk helps data journalists, activists, NGOs and businesses produce data visualizations in the cloud without the need… Read More
from TechCrunch