When Newsela was created in 2012, the edtech startup aimed to help students master reading at their own pace, specifically with news articles adapted to different reading levels. The company’s app has racked up 800,000 teachers, and 7.7 million students as users and counting, according to Newsela CEO and co-founder Matthew Gross. But when it comes to teaching English Language Arts, the… Read More
 Soon cars, drones, phones, and almost anything with a battery are about to get a boost from a new MIT spin-out, SolidEnergy Systems. The company promises to double the battery life of basic lithium ion batteries and will also offer smaller batteries with the power of bigger cells. Why is this technology important? Because it is better than current battery tech and can maintain an energy… Read More
 Many of today’s fashion applications are targeted toward women, but a new app from Looklive wants to help men look great, too, without needing to be a fashion expert. Instead, the company – which is now also available as an iOS application – lets men shop the looks from their favorite celebrities and other style influencers. They can then buy exactly what those celebs… Read More
 Apple’s new iPad app Swift Playgrounds is popularizing the idea of learning to code on mobile devices, not desktop computers. But its focus is only on teaching kids to code in Swift. A new application called Mimo goes beyond that, with mini-lessons for not only Swift, but also HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, SQL and more. The idea with Mimo is to break down computer science lessons… Read More
Nintendo had a very good month in mobile gaming, according to NPD Group’s latest data. The 3DS won in both hardware and software sales for the analyst firm’s latest tracker report, with the 3DS and its family of systems (including New 3DS, 3DS XL and 2DS devices) up 80 percent for July this year versus July 2015. Pokémon Omega Red and Alpha Sapphire, the latest console titles in… Read More
I’ve lived through a lot of live blogs in my life, mostly by the skin of my teeth, desperately watching as my battery ticks down, hoping desperately that the company is nearing the finish line.
Of course, the fact that both my personal work computers sometimes feel like they’re on their last legs doesn’t help much, but the fact remains: There are few things in this life as… Read More
Google today announced that it plans to set up a new space for developers and startups at 301 Howard Street in San Francisco, just a few blocks from its main San Francisco office on Spear Street. The idea here is to provide a 14,000 square-foot space (which accounts for about one floor in the building) for the next class of Google’s equity-free Launchpad Accelerator and to offer an… Read More
Dexter, the betaworks-backed company that helps people build integration-based apps, has today announced the close of a $2.3 million seed round. The funding round was led by Rakuten Ventures, with participation from Social Starts and betaworks. Dexter lets developers build integration-based apps without all the messy work of building the actual infrastructure. Using plug-and-play blocks,… Read More
The latest move by McDonalds to distance itself from its enduring image as a greasy, unhealthy fast food apocalypse is once sure to please fitness-conscious parents: for a limited time, every Happy Meal now comes with a working pedometer. The Step-it is a simple device that comes in six colors that, once activated, tracks a kid’s steps and their general activity level. Steps show on an… Read More
