For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our weekly informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just in town...

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 A group of students from the Warsaw University of Technology and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow built an indoor location system for disabled students. They’re rolling out the app, created during a local Campus App Challenge/hackathon. The creators, Łukasz Ławniczak, Jakub Kmiotek, Tomasz Urbaszek, Miron Marczuk, and Szymon Stankiewicz, used a tool called IndoorWay to map and… Read More

 While Elon Musk is preparing for this week’s launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, his other company is also preparing for a launch. Tesla has made a deal with Home Depot to sell both the PowerWall and Tesla’s solar panels at 800 Home Depot locations. The retail spaces will be Tesla branded and Tesla employees will be on hand to assist with service and sales. Bloomberg first reported… Read More

 If you’ve ever tried to collaborate on a document (or any kind of note, really) with coworkers or anyone else, you’re probably using something along the lines of Dropbox Paper or Google Docs — but they don’t quite have the same team-focused simplicity as, say, Slack, if you ask Christophe Pasquier. That’s where Slite, a new notes tool that’s specifically… Read More

 China has already been one of the fastest-growing luxury retail markets in the world for years. As their spending power increases, consumers are becoming more picky, demanding premium goods at better prices, with better service. Now Le Tote, the fashion rental service backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV and other investors, is preparing to enter the fray. Read More

 Factual announced this morning that it’s expanding its Geopulse ad-targeting suite, with new products designed to help advertisers measure whether their campaigns drive in-store visits, and to give them more guidance on overall strategy. Read More

 Would you wear a virtual reality headset while riding a bike? The answer is no, hopefully, but what about a stationary bike? One Cambridge-based fitness startup, VirZOOM, is hoping virtual reality can be the next key to a new fitness craze. Read More

 Tamatem, a startup backed by 500 Startups that creates localised versions of popular games so that they resonate better with users in Arabic speaking countries, has picked up $2.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Wamda Capital, with participation from Discovery Nusantara Capital, Raed Ventures, Vision Venture Capital, and Seed Equity Venture Partners. Read More

 Meet Wildmoka, a French startup that wants to streamline video editing during live events. Wildmoka is particularly useful for broadcasting companies that want to share highlights of live TV programs on social networks.The company just raised an $8 million Series A round led by Alven Capital, with existing investor Apicap also participating.Clients tend to use Wildmoka for all sorts of… Read More

 If you’ve ever tried to buy a car, there’s a good chance that a lot of your research has shifted online as it’s become easier and easier to figure out exactly the kind of car you want — and less of it is about going to a dealership. At least, that’s what Michia Rohrssen is baking on. He and his co-founders started Prodigy, a company based on extending that same… Read More

 Just about every startup has aspirations to be a platform play. One of the main issues companies typically face on that journey is that just because they build an API doesn’t mean developers are going to adopt it. German API startup CloudRail wants to help. It not only provides a set of tools to simplify implementing your API, but also offers a marketplace and a community of developers… Read More

 Uberall, the Berlin-headquartered startup that has developed a cloud-based platform to let small and large businesses get listed and market themselves across multiple location-based services, has picked up $25 million in Series B funding. Read More

Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures, was first a highly successful serial entrepreneur, and brings to the VC game an entrepreneur’s view of the world. Rajeev highlighted...

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 After a slow and steady expansion across the U.S., social platform Nextdoor is now launching its fourth country outside of its home country. Nextdoor is a sort of tiny Facebook for neighborhoods. It’s a good way to connect with your neighbors, exchange tips, buy and sell things and more.“The launch of Nextdoor in France represents a critical step in our continued European expansion. Read More

John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer\Managing Director at TBWA\Chiat\Day discusses the Corporate Innovation strategy of his advertising agency.

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Sramana Mitra: I have a question that I want to double-click on. One of the big differences in the Indian market that doesn’t exist in the US market is this abundant supply of cheap labor. Are you...

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 If you’re more of a Gmail power user (or even semi-power user) and other email services geared toward work, you’ve probably installed plenty of plugins like Rapportive to make your job a little bit easier. And while it’s all fine to try to pull together a suite of plugins to make that a little bit easier, a startup called Polymail is hoping to rope that all into a single hub… Read More

 Actress Maisie Williams, best known for her role as Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, is the latest celeb to venture into tech entrepreneurship, with the launch of a new company aimed at connecting creatives, called Daisie. Available later this summer as a mobile app, Daisie will offer a platform where creators can network, like, share and collaborate on projects within a social networking… Read More

If you have great domain knowledge and a domain-specific network, both of those can be leveraged to build excellent companies with reasonable amounts of capital and minimum friction. Beeswax is an...

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