Collaborative Consumption

$35 million-funded Omni is packing up and shutting down after struggling to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. It’s another victim of a venture capital-subsidized business offering a convenient service at an unsustainable price. The startup fought for a second wind after selling off its physical storage operations to […]

Omni storage & rentals fails, shutters, sells engineers to Coinbase

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A Dutch court has ruled that Facebook can be required to use filter technologies to identify and pre-emptively take down fake ads linked to crypto currency scams that carry the image of a media personality, John de Mol, and other well known celebrities. The Dutch celerity filed a lawsuit against Facebook in April over the […]

Dutch court orders Facebook to ban celebrity crypto scam ads ...

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Uber’s best hope to beat all its ride sharing and food delivery competitors is that it does both. Through cross-promotion, it can combine activities people might only do a few times per week or month into a product they open daily. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said cryptically on the company’s first earnings call last month […]

Uber eats Uber Eats, embedding it in the main app

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Uber’s best hope to beat all its ride sharing and food delivery competitors is that it does both. Through cross-promotion, it can combine activities people might only do a few times per week or month into a product they open daily. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said cryptically on the company’s first earnings call last month […]

Uber eats Uber Eats, embedding it in the main app

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Omni simply couldn’t scale storing stuff in giant warehouses while dropping it and off picking it up from people on demand. Storage was designed to bootstrap Omni into peer-to-peer rentals of the goods in its care. But now it’s found a better way by partnering with retailers which will host and rent out goods for […]

$44M-funded Omni pivots from storage to rentals via retailers

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In just a few years, Niantic has evolved from internal side project into an independent industry trailblazer. Having reached tremendous scale in such a short period of time, Niantic acts as a poignant crash course for founders and company builders. As our EC-1 deep-dive into the company shows, lessons from the team’s experience building the […]

The definitive Niantic reading guide

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In just a few years, Niantic has evolved from internal side project into an independent industry trailblazer. Having reached tremendous scale in such a short period of time, Niantic acts as a poignant crash course for founders and company builders. As our EC-1 deep-dive into the company shows, lessons from the team’s experience building the […]

The definitive Niantic reading guide

This entry was posted in Apps augmented reality Cloud Collaborative Consumption Developer Gaming ingress niantic Niantic Labs Social Startups TC Venture Capital Virtual reality and tagged google on by
One of the hottest Y Combinator startups just raised a big seed round to clean up the mess created by Uber, Postmates, and the gig economy. Catch sells health insurance, retirement savings plans, and tax withholding directly to freelancers, contractors, or anyone uncovered. By building and curating simplified benefits services, Catch can offer a safety […]

Gig workers need health & benefits. Catch is their safety ...

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Homosexuality is illegal in a third of the planet, and in eight countries, it is punishable by death. In the febrile atmosphere of today’s politics, hate crime incidents in the US increased by 17% between 2016 to 2017, according to the FBI. Over 20 of those incidents were crimes against an individual’s sexual-orientation — the […]

misterb&b hits the equity crowdfunding trail to expand into hotels

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French company Chauffeur-Privé is going to expand aggressively over the next couple of years. That’s why the company is changing its name to Kapten — a name that sounds less French. “We wanted to share with you a very important piece of news,” Kapten co-founder and CEO Yan Hascoet said in a press conference. “We […]

Uber competitor Chauffeur-Privé rebrands to Kapten

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