Monthly Archives: September 2022

Chrome “Feed” is tantalizing, but it’s not the return of Google Reader

Enlarge / Digging into bleeding-edge Chrome code has made some bloggers hopeful, but Google has been focused on its own feeds for a while now. (credit: Getty Images) Does Google enjoy teasing and sometimes outright torturing some of its products’ most devoted fans? It can seem that way. Tucked away inside a recent bleeding-edge Chrome…

NASA will pay Boeing more than twice as much as SpaceX for crew seats

Enlarge / The Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is seen after it landed in White Sands, New Mexico, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2019. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls) NASA confirmed Wednesday that it has awarded five additional crew transportation missions to SpaceX, and its Crew Dragon vehicle, to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. This brings to 14…

Reddit acquires contextualization company Spiketrap to boost its ads business

Reddit’s acquisition spree is continuing this morning with news that the company is bringing the audience contextualization company Spiketrap’s technology in-house. Deal terms were not disclosed, but Reddit says Spiketrap’s AI-powered contextual analysis and tools will help Reddit to improve in areas like ad quality scoring and will boost prediction models for powering auto-bidding. The…

To reach fintech’s next level, infrastructure providers must address these pain points

Laura Spiekerman Contributor Share on Twitter Laura Spiekerman is the co-founder and chief revenue officer of Alloy, an identity-decisioning platform for banks and fintech companies. We’ve all seen the headlines: Fintech is struggling. Since last year, valuations are down 70%-80%, deal activity is down 67% and layoffs have plagued many former industry favorites. But fintech is…

Puna Bio’s extremophile microbe menagerie survives and revives depleted soil

The farming industry spends tons of money on artificial means of reinvigorating soil, but an all-natural solution may already exist: beneficial microbes that have evolved to thrive in extreme environments. Puna Bio, which raised a $3.7 million seed round, captures and cultivates these extremophiles, putting them to work in milder climates where their plant-aiding processes…

With schools increasingly focused on mental health, PsycApps raises Seed round for US expansion

I’ve been tracking PsycApps, a startup that came up with a gamified mental health game ‘eQuoo’, since 2016, and this company – and its founder – is nothing if not persistent in ‘pivoting into the wind’. The last we heard it had been approved by the UK’s National Heath Service and was even distributed by…