tech:

taffy

Firespotter Labs Raises $15M Series B Financing

[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Firespotter Labs  has raised $15 million in Series B financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Existing investor, Google Ventures, also joined the round. Blake Krikorian, co-founder and former CEO of Sling Media, joins Wesley Chan, Partner at Google Ventures, and Craig Walker, Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Firespotter Labs, on the board. The company says it will use the financing to expand its engineering team and develop its telephony-based product line.

Firespotter Labs was founded in April 2011 by Craig Walker, John Rector, Brian Peterson, and Alex Cornell. With an initial investment of $3 million from Google Ventures, Firespotter released their first product, Nosh, in July 2011. Like Yelp for menu-items, Nosh allows users to rate and review individual dishes. Firespotter released their second product, Jotly, in December 2011.  Firespotter’s third offering was NoshList, the free wait list application for the iPad.  In May 2012, Firespotter launched their fourth product, ÜberConference.

Based in California, Firespotter Labs is a product-focused team of developers and designers focused on everyday technology.

Just in

AI is ‘a new kind of digital species,’ Microsoft AI chief says — Quartz

Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, said during a talk at TED 2024 that AI is the newest wave of creation since the start of life on Earth, and that “we are in the fastest and most consequential wave ever,” writes Britney Nguyen in Quartz.

It’s baaack! Microsoft and IBM open source MS-DOS 4.0 — ZDNet

Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols. 

Generative AI arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR — NYT

New AI technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today, writes Cade Metz.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will offer its virtual reality OS to hardware companies, creating iPhone versus Android dynamic — CNBC

Meta will partner with external hardware companies, including Lenovo, Microsoft and Asus, to build virtual reality headsets using the company’s Meta Horizon operating system, writes Kif Leswing.