Tech Drop Every Minute

When you’re laser-focused on reaching beyond the stars, it’s hard to remember more earthly, mundane tasks. That’s why we’re giving you an extra week to score early-bird savings to TC Sessions: Space 2020 (December 16-17). So, to all you harried, procrastinating visionaries: take a breath, relax a bit and buy your pass before November 20 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) . Join the two-day online conference to hear from and connect with the leading forces within the space industry. Learn how to secure grants for your space company, how and where the Air Force plans to spend $60 billion on R&D, what savvy space investors think and where they might place their bets. And that’s just the tip of the rocket. Presentations range from asteroid mining, extra-planetary robotic research and the future of space exploration to human spaceflight, manufacturing in space and supply-chain issues. Here are just two stellar examples, and you’ll find many more in the event agenda . Start planning your time n...

NextView Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital fund, has raised an $89.6 million fund, according to SEC filings. The firm’s fourth fund, its largest to date, is oversubscribed, with early documents indicating a $70 million goal. The NextView Ventures team did not immediately respond to request for comment. NextView Ventures was launched in 2010 by Rob Go , a former partner at Spark Capital; Dave Beisel , who clocked time at Venrock and Masthead Venture Partners; and Lee Hower, a former investor at Point Judith Capital. Melody Koh joined as a partner three years ago, and most recently, the fund brought on former journalist Leah Fessler as an investor. The fund, which has offices in New York as well as Boston, invests in consumer and software-as-a-service enterprise startups at the pre-seed and seed stage. Its portfolio includes Ellevest , an investing platform for women; Grove Collaborative , a sustainable goods subscription platform; and ThredUp, which has confidentially filed...

Reports that Dominion Software, which provides voting tabulation tools to about half the states in the U.S., “deleted” millions of votes have been soundly rebuffed after outgoing President Trump parroted numbers from a random internet forum. Tweeting Thursday morning about baseless claims of election fraud, Trump cited OANN, a right wing news outlet, which itself seemed to have found its numbers in a thread on pro-Trump Reddit knockoff thedonald.win. (The tweet was quickly wrapped in a warning that the contents are disputed.) The anonymous person posting there claimed to have compared numbers from Edison Research, a company that does exit polls and other election-related measures, to those from Dominion, and come up with very different sums. The methods are not very well explained, nor are the results. It’s not really clear what is being compared to what and why, or for what reason this alleged fraud was published publicly by the company supposedly perpetrating it. No one has verifi...

New research has found that San Francisco and London have become two of the world’s leading hubs for VC investment into tech solutions which address one or more of the 17 UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), more commonly referred to as ‘Impact Tech’. They are followed by Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Shanghai and Beijing. Tech solutions for such pressing issues as the climate crisis and social inequality has seen a 280% increase in global VC investment from 2015 to 2020, while investment in this space more than doubled in both cities over the past five years. The report was put together by London & Partners and Dealroom as part of this week’s  Silicon Valley Comes to the UK  virtual event. Over 5,000 startups were surveyed to create the data. According to the research, VC investment into London-based impact tech start-ups has grown by almost 800% (7.8 times) since 2015, compared to 3.1 times in Europe as a whole. 2020 is set t...

Electric automaker Rivian will makes its hands-free driver assistance system standard in every vehicle it builds, including its first two vehicles — the RT1 pickup truck and R1S SUV — that are coming to market in 2021. Details about the system, which is branded as Driver+, was just one of numerous new bits of information released Wednesday on its website, including prices and specs on its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV. Rivian said the driver assistance system will automatically steer, adjust speed and change lanes on command. The capabilities of the system that Rivian describes suggests it is a Level 2 system as designated by SAE International. Level 2 means the system can perform two or more parts of the driving task under supervision of the driver. To support this level of driving, the system will be powered by two redundant compute platforms, 12 ultrasonic sensors, 10 exterior cameras, five radars and high-precision GPS. This essentially gives the vehicle 360-camera and radar...

Google changes its storage policy, Facebook extends its political ad ban and Ring doorbells are recalled. This is your Daily Crunch for November 11, 2020. The big story: Google Photos will end free, unlimited storage Google is changing its storage policies for free accounts in a way that could have a big impact on anyone regularly using Google Photos. Currently, Google Photos allows users to store unlimited images (and HD video) as long as they’re under 16 megapixels. Starting on June 1, 2021, new photos and videos will all count toward the 15 gigabytes of free storage that the company offers to anyone with a free Google account. Google says it will take the average user three years to reach 15 gigabytes — at which point they’ll either need to delete some photos or pay for a Google One account. Also on June 1: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files will start counting toward your storage total as well. The tech giants Facebook extends its temporary ban on pol...

In the past several weeks we’ve seen refreshes and product expansions from about every facet of the smart home virtual assistant world. Apple launched the HomePod Mini, Google offered a long-overdue refresh of the Google Home, and Amazon found even more speaker shapes to shove Alexa into. Today, we’re getting an addition from a startup competitor. Josh.ai has aimed to build out a niche in the space by building a smart assistant product that’s designed to be professionally installed alongside other smart home wares and they announced a new product this afternoon. The device, Josh Nano, fully buys into a more luxury home-focused niche with a low-profile device that appears to be a little bit bigger than a half-dollar, though the bulk of the device is embedded into the wall itself and wired back to a central unit via power-over-ethernet. The device bundles a set of four microphones eschewing any onboard speaker, instead opting to integrate directly with a user’s at-home sound system....