I’ve been going to CES for almost ten years now, and it amazes me that really, nothing has changed. The same people are saying the same things on the same stages, selling the same people the same junk with… well, slightly different numbers attached. But this year I had a great time and found some amazing companies — because I avoided at all costs actually stepping foot on… Read More

 Irish startup SoapBox Labs is on a mission to create what it calls “the world’s most accurate and accessible speech technology for children”, tech it plans to offer to third-party hardware and app developers. These span educational apps that support reading and language development, children’s voice-control for IoT devices in the home, smart toys, and AR/VR experiences. Read More

 Hulu on Friday released the first images of the next season of The Handmaid’s Tale, announcing that the next season will be released in April. Unfortunately, they weren’t any more specific than that. Another lingering question is whether or not Hulu will continue on with its weekly release of episodes for Season 2. In the first season, Hulu released the first three episodes at… Read More

 Just a few weeks ago I was in Utah for the holidays, spending time with the many family members my husband and I both have there. At one family gathering, a cousin began talking about how he bought a brand new home and sold his own home all without a real estate agent on a site called Homie. Read More

 Nuheara’s new IQBuds Boost headphones exist in a a strange sort of in-between spot. Like the rest of the company’s line, they’re clearly one of countless devices looking to compete in the crowded world of bluetooth earbuds. Like the standard IQBuds before them, however, they’re also designed to boost hearing. But the Boosts are an attempt to be even more, offering… Read More

 As we noted earlier this week, the mere fact that Blocks was able to bring its modular smartwatch system to market feels like a minor miracle. The company appears to have not taken the easy route in any respect. It could have launched an Android Wear device, but instead opted to skin a scaled down version of stock Android. And then there’s the modules — the company compares… Read More

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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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest William Hsu, Co-founder, Partner at Mucker Capital, a Los Angeles based fund that invests largely outside Silicon Valley and follows a more...

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 Byton’s electric concept car wowed at CES, and for good reason. The SUV has a lot of strong features, including a max range of 323 miles for the upgraded version, and a starting price of just $45,000. But the real jaw-dropping feature is a 49-inch display that covers the entire dash, providing a multifunctional information and entertainment interface unlike anything else in the… Read More

 Y Combinator is pulling the curtains off of a new experiment, YC Bio. The idea is to fund early-stage life-sciences companies that are still in the lab phase, YC President Sam Altman wrote on the YC blog today. YC Bio’s first area of focus will be on healthspan and age-related disease. Read More

 Meet Kuzzle, an all-in-one backend solution for connected devices and beyond. The French startup is giving you a scalable solution so you don’t have to develop everything from scratch yourself. Think about it as Firebase but for different use cases. Read More

 Startup Closetbox recently raised a $7.3 million Series A round, bringing its total amount of funding to $19.8 million. Closetbox, of course, has competitors like fellow startups MakeSpace and Omni, as well as larger companies like Pods and Public Storage. Closetbox offers “full-service storage,” which means it has professional movers come to your house to do any heavy lifting and… Read More

 There are a number of services that let you sell your used watches or simply purchase new watches but few have the funding war chest of Chronext. This online services lets you buy and sell fancy watches for a fraction of the price and, as evidenced by their performance and the performance of competitor Crown and Caliber, it looks like that market is heating up. Created by Philipp Man and… Read More

Sramana Mitra: It’s great to hear your enthusiasm. I’m married to a European. I love Europe. We spent a lot of time in Europe and London. I do see the energy change in London as well, which is...

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 Codeless development platforms are at once a blessing and a curse. If they’re complete enough to be powerful they are too difficult for beginners and if they’re simple enough for beginners they’re useless for serious work. Zeroqode, a one-stop-shop for codeless creation, aims to make the difficult easy and the easy more powerful. Created by Levon Terteryan and Vlad Larin,… Read More

Prashant Srivastava: That business would get better over time because it would learn from what works for each person and adapt whereas as we got bigger in a human capital business, the labor pool...

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Sramana Mitra: Can you give me an example of the projects? Steve Gross: An example would be developing a contraption that leverages materials that normally wouldn’t be available inside the classroom....

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Today’s 381st FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, January 11, at 8:00 a.m. PST/11:00 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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