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Vegans who miss the creamy taste of real cheese, rejoice! A group of biohackers from Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, Calif., and BioCurious in Sunnyvale, Calif., are using baker’s yeast to produce the world’s first cheese that did not originate from milk in the udder of a cow. Most vegan cheese is nut-based and doesn’t taste much like cheese at all. If you’ve been… Read More
Toonimo, a startup that says it can make websites more engaging and lucrative by adding custom animations, is announcing that it has raised $2.5 million in funding. The idea is that online visitors might appreciate having a cartoon character who can point out the important parts of a website and walk them through some of the trickier bits — and that, in turn, can lead to increased sales.… Read More 
Once bitter rivals, ScribbleLive and CoveritLive are now family. Scribble Technologies is today announcing the acquisition of CoveritLive from Demand Media, effectively bringing two of the largest live content creation companies under one roof. The two companies have slightly different product sets, but the same aim: To empower brands and companies with tools to bring live content to their… Read More 
There’s surely no shortage of dating apps out there, but for those of us who wish to arm ourselves with every weapon in the potential arsenal, might I introduce Floret. Floret is a new dating app that focuses on a common problem known as the Stable Marriage Problem, which essentially means that elements in a group are matched based on preferences, without any two elements in the… Read More 
As the initial comment period regarding the FCC’s currently proposed net neutrality rules comes to a close, the Internet Association, a technology industry consortium, today released a strongly worded treatise calling for strict net neutrality rules that would not include paid prioritization, or what many refer to as Internet “fast lanes.” The letter also supports applying… Read More 
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Nordstrom has invested in several digital-based startups, but it hasn't acquired many to date. That could change soon.
The Seattle-based, high-end retailer has recently held acquisition talks with Trunk Club, an e-commerce company that offers a personal styling service for men, according to people familiar with the talks.
It's not clear if the talks will result in an acquisition or a strategic investment. It is also possible that neither of those transactions will occur.
Trunk Club customers consult with a stylist and then receive a mailing that contains an array of clothing options, such as jeans, shoes and blazers. Customers keep and pay for the items they want and mail the rest back for free. The deal could make sense for Nordstrom as a digital extension of its existing in-store styling service. Like Nordstrom, Trunk Club sells items from a variety of different clothing and accessory brands.
Nordstrom spokesman Dan Evans and Trunk Club CEO Brian Spaly declined to comment.
Spaly did say, however, that Trunk Club “has been actively fundraising for the past three months” and talking to a variety of companies during that time.
Through its Series A round, Trunk Club raised $12 million from U.S. Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners, Apex Venture Partners and Anthos Capital. Spaly said the company raised an unannounced Series B round last summer from existing investors. He declined to reveal the amount of that investment.
Before Trunk Club, Spaly was a founder of Bonobos, a men's apparel company that recently landed a new investment round of $55 million and counts Nordstrom as an investor.
In addition to Bonobos, Nordstrom has invested in gift-giving service Wantful, which has since shut down, and acquired flash sale site HauteLook. Nordstrom is also a limited partner in the e-commerce focused venture fund Forerunner Ventures.
When Sophia Amoruso — the founder of sexed-up online vintage clothing shop Nasty Gal — came to San Francisco this summer, more than a hundred young women crowded into the back of Books Inc. in Opera Plaza to see her.
Wearing Nasty Gal-favored items like sheer pants, capes, bustiers and statement necklaces (wild for San Francisco’s usual fleece-uniformed crowd), the audience had a lot of questions for Amoruso — from taxes to work-appropriate vintage attire to choosing credit cards.
Amoruso’s advice onstage — and in her new book #GirlBoss — was simple: entry-level jobs teach valuable lessons, save a little bit of money each month, don’t chew gum during interviews. One chapter of the book is called “Money Looks Better in the Bank Than on Your Feet.” In the middle of the audience, her mother, aunt, and uncle (she comes from a large Greek family) sat in a row nodding — it was quite sensible advice.
“Two years ago we did a focus group: how do you feel when you wear Nasty Gal?” she said in an interview later. “The most common answer? I feel like I can take over the world. The brand was already about empowerment.”
Formerly a wild-child art school student who hitchhiked and regularly shoplifted, Amoruso has created a $100 million company with 350 employees around provocatively styled vintage clothing. “Nasty Gals do it better” is one of their slogans. But somewhere along the way she became more than a designer. With #GirlBoss and the subsequent tour of brass tacks personal finance advice, she’s become something of a Suze Orman for young women.
“The advice is actually easy for anyone to give, and for some reason it’s just not done for these girls,” she said. “I’m telling girls, ‘You don’t get what you don’t ask for,’ or, ‘Hey, pay your parking tickets,’ and a lot of them haven’t heard it before. When you have a platform, you start to see that, and you start to see how much of an impact you can have.”
#GirlBoss Sophia Amoruso
Amoruso plans on opening brick-and-mortar stores soon and wants them to host #GirlBoss meetings and personal finance classes, much like Lululemon has yoga classes.
“At the end of the day, I don’t want it to be about clothes. It never was about clothes,” she said.
“For these girls, it’s that time in your life when you’re like: ‘Is my life starting now? Am I preparing for my life? Is this the job? Is this a stepping stone?’ And I’m like, you never know until you know, which is pretty normal advice,” she said. “But no one else is talking to them about it.”
Sample advice from Nasty Gal:
On cover letters: “Spell check exists for a reason.”
And on the interview: “You wrote a cover letter that was so good it made my mascara run, and now you have an interview. Have you ever walked into a party and felt like everyone was staring at you in judgment? This is why you should not smoke weed at parties. But in all seriousness, at a job interview, this is exactly what happens.”
Electronic Arts said today that it had hired a new Chief Technology Officer, former eBay VP and Microsoft search team leader Ken Moss. Moss is replacing Rajat Taneja, who left EA last November to join Visa. A blog post announcing Moss’s hiring emphasized the importance of a CTO to “designing games as live services,” a core issue for EA as the videogame publisher tries to balance new releases with updates to and stability within existing titles.
General Electric, the century-old industrial giant, is acting more like a technology company all the time. With last year’s big investment in Pivotal, the software development outfit that is part of EMC, and other moves, it has been showing off its tech chops more often these days.
Today it announced a significant research and development initiative. Known as The Next List, it’s a set of guiding principles laying out the company’s R&D priorities for the next several years. Announced internally today, it was shared with Re/code, and we got a chance to talk with CTO Mark Little about some of the interesting things therein.
GE
The first one that caught my attention was the Industrial Internet. GE has talked about this concept before, but it’s doubling down on it as a significant research imperative. The idea is that machines in factories and energy infrastructure and any other industrial process you can think of will get smarter by talking to each other. Eventually maintenance and downtime can be planned for and every step of the process can be made more efficient.
It’s already fairly well along in its evolution. GE has a platform called Predix that it uses to create a common way of connecting different kinds of industrial gear. The platform is already in use across GE, and Little says he’d like to extend it to third-party equipment. “Don’t be surprised if you see us take this to things that we don’t make so that our customers and others can connect up other devices smoothly,” he said.
Talk about smart machinery segues logically into a conversation about big data. All of those machines will be constantly monitored for their performance and conditions. GE is taking it a step further with a concept it calls “brilliant factories.”
Little said GE is building a battery factory in Schenectady, N.Y., that will have sensors constantly gathering data on every step in the process. “We can track the raw materials, what the humidity conditions were like when the product was manufactured, the temperatures,” he said. “We can track these batteries throughout their entire life cycle.” The point is to learn more about what works best and eventually build better batteries.
Aside from the sensors, another component of the brilliant-factories initiative is 3-D printing. Replaceable parts for factory equipment will be readily printable so that there’s little waiting time when one is needed, and less need to keep an inventory of replacements. “This goes beyond your usual Makerbot printer,” Little said. “We want to do 3-D printing with metals and ceramics.”
GE’s new Leap jet engine, due in 2016, will contain parts that have been 3-D printed, he said. “The parts have shapes that are so complicated that it’s difficult to control the tolerances, but it will allow us to make them in a cost-effective manner,” he said.
Another initiative worth noting is one that GE calls Mind Mapping, using functional magnetic resonance imaging to build a detailed roadmap of the human brain. “We know a lot about the brain and its structure, but we don’t know a lot of the specifics about the wiring of the brain and the way the pathways work and also how certain diseases affect it,” Little said. Understanding that wiring better will lead to new techniques to diagnose problems like Alzheimer’s disease earlier and treat them at earlier stages.
There are other items on the list: Extreme machines, or industrial gear that’s specifically designed to function in a wide range of conditions — deep underwater or underground or in extreme heat; “Super Materials” that are both light and incredibly strong; “Energy Everywhere” is a concept about getting power to places that are far off the traditional electrical grid.
While you can argue whether or not significant R&D spending is worthwhile at most companies, GE clearly takes it seriously — and it gets results. The company says it has a $220 billion backlog of orders stemming directly from its R&D projects over the last decade, of which at $78 billion is for the Leap engine.
