Monthly Archives: August 2022

Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water

Artistic rendition of the exoplanet TOI-1452 b, a small planet that may be entirely covered in a deep ocean. Credit: Benoit Gougeon, Université de Montréal. An extrasolar planet named TOI-1452 b was recently discovered by an international team of researchers led by Charles Cadieux, a graduate student at the Université de Montréal and member of…

Kleiner Perkins leads $30M raise for Zumper to meet flexible, short-term rental demand

One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is more people had flexibility to work remotely, and that meant they also had more flexibility to live where they wanted. As a result, more people chose to relocate — either temporarily or permanently — to other cities. For online rental marketplace Zumper, this meant a shift in user…

This freshly funded startup spun out of a student-run Stanford investment club

In late 2020, a group of Stanford students banded together to create Stanford 0220, a venture fund solely to invest in their fellow classmates’ ventures. Given the school’s past in spinning out successful startup founders, it unsurprisingly had no trouble raising $1.5 million for the debut investment vehicle – waitlist not included. Now, two years…

Metafy’s Josh Fabian and 776’s Katelin Holloway get their game on at Disrupt

Video gaming might well qualify as the world’s favorite pastime. Experts project that global gaming revenues will surpass $235 billion in 2022 and $321 billion by 2026. So it’s not at all surprising that avid gamers, like any devoted hobbyist, are willing to spend money to improve their skills. Enter Metafy, a marketplace where aficionados…

Instagram now defaults new users under 16 to most restrictive content setting, adds prompts for existing teens

In December, just ahead of Instagram head Adam Mosseri’s testimony before the U.S. Senate over the impacts of its app on teen users, the company announced plans to roll out a series of safety features and parental controls. This morning, Instagram is updating a critical set of these features which will now default teen users…

Why you must build a moat around early customers, according to Benchling’s CEO and co-founder

Benchling’s unicorn status didn’t come overnight. Some ten years after its founding, the company is worth more than $6 billion, and the founder sees the company going public in the future. The company’s future looks like its past: talking to customers and building for power users. To that end, Benchling announced today that it recently…

‘White Noise’ trailer teases a postmodern, apocalyptic satire with Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig

Don DeLillo’s postmodern 1985 novel White Noise has been described, like many of the author’s works, as “unfilmable”, rendering screen adaptations difficult. But director Noah Baumbach has tackled the material, resulting in his own White Noise, made for Netflix. Starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, the movie is a contemporary satire, a blend of both…