Instacart, in partnership with ALDI, will support SNAP EBT for online groceries

Instacart is making its grocery delivery and pickup services more accessible to lower-income customers by offering customers the ability to pay for groceries using their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits. This is the first time Instacart shoppers have been able to use govern

Woven adds to its calendar app’s $20/mo premium plan

Productivity software has had a huge couple of years, yet for all of the great note-taking apps that have launched, consumers haven’t gotten a lot of quality options for Google Calendar replacements. This week, Woven, a calendar startup founded by former Facebook CIO Tim Campos, is shaking up

Here.fm raises $2.9 million to reimagine video chat

Here.fm, a new web-based communication platform founded by Jesse Boyes and Seth Harris, has today announced the close of a $2.9 million seed round from FirstMark with participation by Y Combinator and a group of angel investors. Here is all about giving people the chance to create personal, shareab

Chinese live tutoring app Yuanfudao is now worth $15.5 billion

Yuanfudao, a homework tutoring app founded in 2012, has raised $2.2 billion from investors, surpassing Byju’s as the most valuable edtech company in the world. The Beijing-based company is now worth $15.5 billion dollars, almost double its valuation set in March. The company views the new cap

Lyft will soon let riders pay for rides with Venmo

Lyft riders will soon have the option for paying and splitting fares using Venmo, the company said in a blog posting this morning. Venmo joins Lyft’s other payment methods of PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, Lyft Cash and more. To enable the payment method, users need to authorize Venmo in

Freelancer banking startup Lili raises $15M

It’s only been a few months since Lili announced its $10 million seed round, and it’s already raised more funding — namely, a $15 million Series A. The startup, founded by CEO Lilac Bar David and CTO Liran Zelkha, is creating a bank account and associated products designed for freelan

Amazon Echo review: Well-rounded sound

Six years ago, Amazon essentially created a new consumer electronics category. Expectations weren't particularly high when the first Echo device debuted in November of 2014. Amazon, after all, has never shied away from throwing a new device against the wall to see what sticks — if anything, t

Facebook adds hosting, shopping features and pricing tiers to WhatsApp Business

Facebook has been making a big play to be a go-to partner for small and medium businesses that use the internet to interface with the wider world, and its messaging platform WhatsApp, with some 50 mlion businesses and 175 mlion people messaging them (and more than 2 blion users overall) has been a

WoHo wants to make constructing buildings fast, flexible and green with reusable ‘components’

Buildings are the bedrock of civilization — places to live, places to work (well, normally, in a non-COVID-19 world) and places to play. Yet how we conceive buildings, architect them for their uses and ultimately construct them on a site has changed remarkably little over the past few decades. Ho

E-bike subscription service Dance closes $17.7M Series A, led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures

Three months on since the former founders of SoundCloud launched their e-bike subscription service, Dance today is announcing the close of a $17.7 million (€15 million) Series A funding round led by one of the larger European VCs, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Founded by Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss (ex-So

Smartphone shipments rebound to an all-time high in India

Smartphone shipments reached an all-time high in India in the quarter that ended in September this year, as the world's second largest handset market remained fully open during the period after initial lockdowns due to the coronavirus. According to a new report, about 50 million smartphones shi

Here integrates what3words’ super simple address system into its in-car API

Geocoding startup what3words — which chunks the world into 3mx3m squares, giving each a unique three-word label to simplify location sharing — has nabbed another in-vehicle integration, via a partnership with Here Technologies. The pair said today that OEMs using Here’s navigation

Hearings begin in Samsung vice chairman Jay Y. Lee’s accounting fraud trial

The trial of Samsung leader Jay Y. Lee, who is accused of accounting fraud and stock-price manipulating, held its first hearing today at the Seoul Central District Court. The Seoul Central District Court denied prosecutors’ arrest warrant request for Lee in June, stating that even though they

Facebook Dating launches in Europe after 9-month+ delay over privacy concerns

Facebook’s dating bolt-on to its eponymous social networking service has finally launched in Europe, more than nine months after an earlier launch plan was deraed at the last minute over privacy concerns. From today, European Facebook users in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republi