Month: June 2017

Google.org, BlackRock and others commit .2 million to Fast Forward’s nonprofit tech accelerator As impact investing gains traction in the market, a new accelerator for tech nonprofits called Fast Forward has raised $2.2 million in philanthropic funding from the nonprofit arms of some of the world’s largest companies and financial services firms. BlackRock, Google.org, Comcast NBCUniversal, and AT&T joined Zendesk, Twilio.org, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the Nasiri and Rita Allen Foundations and the Omidyar Network in the financing. The not-for-profit accelerator said that the funds would be used to continue to build products…

Binary Capital’s investors just accepted Jonathan Teo’s resignation Earlier this week, following the resignations of Binary Capital cofounder Justin Caldbeck and a more recent addition to the team, Matt Mazzeo, Binary cofounder Jonathan Teo offered to resign his position as well. Late yesterday, the firm’s limited partners —  include WeatherGage, Legacy Venture, UNC, and UCLA — accepted Teo’s resignation. According to sources, the firm’s portfolio companies will now report directly to these limited partners with any questions or concerns. In the meantime, these institutional investors have committed to renaming the…

Your favorite songs are remixed into flavored drinks Your favorite music can now be remixed into a tasty drink. Japanese company Nomura has a new gadget that lets music lovers taste songs. Squeeze Music is a juice maker. It blends a glass of juice according to the mood of a song. Happy songs produce a sweet drink. Jazz lovers will taste a bitter drink. This is how it works. The song’s waveforms are analyzed by a computer and five feelings from the music are assigned a flavor. Happy, exciting, romantic,…

Manufacturing civility Facebook’s task is unenviable. Two billion people, all yammering on about literally everything in the world. And hidden in that unending torrent are an unknown number of abhorrent, hateful utterances that would be better off unuttered. But the method Facebook has applied to this problem, a tangled system of ethical arithmetic revealed in a report from ProPublica, seems unsuited to the task — even absurd. I wrote back in 2013 that Facebook’s “categorial imperative,” by which the company assembles personas from political and social breadcrumbs in haphazard jigsaw…

Harver raises .1M to replace the tedious trawl though résumés with an AI The problem of dealing with CVs during the hiring process is a perennial one. There are a number of approaches and there are various assessment companies and recruitment companies providing human services to do so. But it’s tought to get around the fact that having to read a lot of CVs is often just pure grunt work. Imagine instead if you could apply machine-learning and a platform which self-trained and optimized, as opposed to using human recruiters….

Tintri up slightly after lowering IPO price Enterprise cloud company Tintri was supposed to debut on the public markets yesterday with an IPO price between $10.50 to $12.50, but then pushed things back a day and lowered its price to $7. Shares were up about 3.5% midday Friday, trading at roughly $7.25 per share. In what seems to be a tough week for tech IPOs, cooking kit delivery service Blue Apron also significantly lowered its price range after weak investor demand. It could be a sign that the appetite for…