Author: Matthew Lynley

Alphabet is reportedly mulling a B investment in Lyft It’s about as good a timing as any for Lyft to capitalize on the tidal wave of negative publicity that Uber is facing right now, and it looks like it might end up with a significant investment from Alphabet in the middle of that train wreck, according to a report by Axios.  That’s not to say that this is directly related to Uber, which has a new CEO and is trying to move on from the disaster of the past few…

Nestlé acquires a majority stake in Blue Bottle Coffee Blue Bottle Coffee, one of Silicon Valley’s favorite coffee projects, is selling a majority stake to Nestlé in a big semi-acquisition this morning that’s no doubt going to validate a lot of interest in the potential of coffee markets. Nestlé is acquiring a 68% stake in the company, and it t looks like the leadership of the company isn’t changing as part of this deal. The company has opened up shops in San Francisco, New York, and Tokyo among other cities, and…

Pinterest crosses 200 million monthly active users Pinterest said today it now has 200 million monthly active users, up from 150 million a little under a year ago. In April, the company said it hit 175 million monthly active users, so it seems it’s been able to grow pretty methodically in the past year or so. That’s going to be a good sign for the company, which set some very ambitious targets in early 2015 but has since had to recalibrate it. Pinterest recently raised a $150 million financing round…

Yext looks to help businesses make their information more searchable by machines Yext has been known for helping businesses get all their information (like location, business hours, and such) lined up correctly on the right apps and websites — and now it’s looking to make sure the rest of the pitch is right across the Internet. Yext, which went public earlier this year, said it is launching a feature called knowledge tags to help businesses make their websites and information more accessible to crawlers and other kinds of query services. It…

MissionU raises .5M to build an alternative one-year education program Adam Braun, a consultant-turned-educational non-profit founder, will say he’s had a lot of good fortune that’s helped him position himself in a way to see the education system from a birds-eye view — and hopes he can help address the problem of student debt with a venture-backed startup. That’s why Braun, with his experience at Bain and then at Pencils for Promise, is looking to train students to basically do something similar: have the ability to parachute into a company…

Bodega raises .5M to build a smart store kiosk in your apartment building If you’re in a big city like New York City, you’re probably used to walking around the block away from where you live to the corner shop and picking up a jug of milk or some dishwashing detergent. But Paul McDonald (who says he has not lived in New York), who was at Google for more than 13 years, wants to collapse that distance between walking to that store to pick something up and ordering it online…

Apple slides through its iPhone X event without any major surprises for Wall Street We’ve noted before that Apple tends to follow a pretty consistent trend: the company has a big iPhone event, and the stock price doesn’t really do all that much because everyone knows what to expect. That was particularly true in today’s case, as we knew pretty much everything about both new iPhones — and it means that Apple was able to play out the story that it set up when it reported its last earnings report,…

The new iPhone 8 has a custom GPU designed by Apple with its new A11 Bionic chip The new iPhone 8 camera packs a new chip called the A11 bionic, which is loaded with an upgraded amount of power with a 6-core chip — but that’s probably not the most important part of the company’s announcement. Apple is including a custom-designed GPU in the iPhone 8. GPUs excel at machine learning thanks to their ability to spread out the kinds of rapid calculations across an array of cores that are…

Apple is bringing live sports to the Apple TV 4K Apple today said it is bringing live sports to the new Apple TV 4K, though the details aren’t quite clear yet as to how it’s going to play out. The new TV has a dedicated sports tab that has every live and upcoming game, and as seasons change so will the sports tab. There will be scores, and the new TV app is available on the iPhone and iPad. The announcement came as Apple said it’s bringing 4K and HDR…

With more than 6M daily users, Slack opens up cross-organization teams Slack today announced a slew of new updates, and also said that the company now has more than 6 million daily active users and has crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue. Silicon Valley’s favorite enterprise chat app, still seems to be growing quite a bit and continues to roll out the drip-drip-drip of products you’d see from a company looking to capture new enterprise users. Today, the company said it is rolling out a new feature that will…