Digit, the developer of a wildly popular automatic savings mobile app, is moving beyond its core business with a new feature enabling users to pay down credit card debt from their Digit account. Announced earlier today the new Digit Pay service, which uses savings in a Digit account to pay off credit card debt for […]

Fundraising is never easy, but it’s even harder when the goal posts are being moved around. Such is the challenge facing today’s youngest startups, which are looking at very different fundraising metrics than new startups did just six or seven years ago. We explored the issue yesterday with Peter Wagner, who spent more than 14 […]

A new privacy-centric cryptocurrency project with some big names on board just raised a round worth noting. On Tuesday, the team at MobileCoin announced that Binance Labs, the major blockchain incubator associated with the Binance exchange, led a $30 million round denominated in bitcoin and ether for the new cryptocurrency. MobileCoin will enjoy “priority consideration” […]

New European financial regulations requiring fund managers at investment firms to pay banks for research and trading services separately could open the door for new entrants in the professional advisory services marketplace. The rules, which were approved in 2014, but only took effect in January, are proving to be a boon for four MIT students who launched a company last year to try and grab some of the market.

A Cambridge University academic at the center of a data misuse scandal involving Facebook user data and political ad targeting faced questions from the UK parliament this morning. Although the two-hour evidence session in front of the DCMS committee’s fake news enquiry raised rather more questions than it answered — with professor Aleksandr Kogan citing […]

Voyage, the self-driving car spin-out from Udacity, is open-sourcing its approach to autonomous driving safety. This comes at a time when autonomous driving programs are under intense scrutiny following two fatal crashes — one involving Tesla’s Autopilot and the other involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in Tempe, Arizona. Meanwhile, Voyage has successfully deployed five Level […]

Facebook is making good on Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to prioritize user safety and data privacy over its developer platform. Today Facebook and Instagram announced a slew of API shutdowns and changes designed to stop developers from being able to pull your data or your friends’ data without express permission, drag in public content or trick […]

There is concern, tears and lost money in the world of crypto once again after MyEtherWallet (MEW), one of the most popular wallets on the internet, was hit by a DNS hack that saw some users lose their cryptocurrency. MEW said in a statement that “a couple of Domain Name System registration servers were hijacked […]

Groupon founder Andrew Mason’s audio tour startup Detour has been sold to Bose. The acquisition, which involves only the software and tour content — not the team — was quietly announced on Detour’s blog a few days ago, followed by an email to customers. Bose, initially, seems like an unlikely acquirer for an app designed […]

Instacart has revamped its checkout process to make it easier for customers to leave better tips. Now, Instacart suggests a 5 percent default tip. If someone wants to leave more, or less, there are still options to tip nothing at all, 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent and other amounts. Instacart has had a rocky […]

The developer-centric communications platform Twilio today announced that it has added support for LINE to Twilio Channels. With this, Twilio developers now have the ability to reach users on this service, which has 168 million monthly active users, most of whom live in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia. LINE support in Twilio Channels is currently […]

Two weeks ago TechCrunch called on Instagram to build an equivalent to Facebook’s “Download Your Information feature so if you wanted to leave for another photo sharing network, you could. The next day it announced this tool would be coming and now TechCrunch has spotted it rolling out to users. Instagram’s “Data Download” feature can […]

In February, Amazon announced it would begin to deliver from Whole Foods markets via its Prime Now service, which offers free, two-hour deliveries for purchases over $35 and even faster, one-hour delivery for an upcharge of $7.99. The service was initially available in only four markets — Austin, Cincinnati, Dallas and Virginia Beach. Today, Amazon is […]

The founding partners of the new Seattle-based venture firm Flying Fish met as angel investors deploying capital in the talent-heavy, cash-light region around Amazon and Microsoft’s corporate headquarters. “We’ve underperformed relative to the talent pool,” is how Heather Redman, one of the firm’s three founding partners, describes the region. Well, now Flying Fish has held a […]