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Snapchat has quietly acquired an Israeli startup for a reported $30 million to $40 million

by Connie Loizos
Snapchat sewed up its first acquisition in Israel this week, according to the outlet Calcalist News. It acquired four-year-old Cimagine, whose augmented reality platform lets consumers instantly visualize products they want to buy in their intended location, paying what Calcalist says was between $30 million and $40 million. According to its LinkedIn page, Cimagine currently works with brands like Jerome’s, a furniture store franchise in Southern California; the U.K.-based digital retailer Shop Direct; and the global giant Coca Cola — its cloud-based mobile platform aiming to help these companies augment their sites and mobile apps and boost online conversion rates and in-store sales in the process.

Presumably, Snapchat will use the tech to further enhance campaigns like we’ve seen in the past with, say, Starbucks, which launched a Snapchat chilled summer drinks campaign last summer, giving Starbucks drinkers the ability to superimpose a lens over a picture of their icy Frappuccino beverage and send it to their friends. [ Tech Crunch ]
Related : Snap reportedly acquired augmented reality startup Cimagine Media for up to $40 million

33 startups to watch in 2017, according to VC investors

2017 is almost here and it's once again time to predict which startups will take the tech industry by storm. Who better to ask than the startup experts, the VCs that watch the industry, guide the startups, hear their pitches, and invest in them? So we reached out to a handful of top VCs and asked them which young or growth-stage startups will boom in 2017. [ Business Insider ]

2016 VC Half-Thoughts: Seed Companies Aren’t Being Overfunded, They’re Being Prematurely Funded

Hunter Walk of Homebrew
In the spirit of clearing out some half-formed thoughts, I wanted to share my response to venture LPs who ask about the effect of “so much money” flowing into the seed space and how we think about its competitive impact upon our fund Homebrew.
[ Context regarding our fund’s strategy is important here: we make 8-10 seed stage investments per year, where we’re leading or co-leading the round and stepping up to serve as a committed, proactive investor for the company in the years to come, typically serving on a Board or otherwise spending time ongoing with the founders until, say, Series B. Most of our investments are listed on our website. ]

Italian incubator H-Farm prepares for a new crop with a campus slated to open in 2018

There’s a farm outside of Venice, Italy, that cultivates tech talent the way that other farms grow crops. Called the H-Farm, the compound nestled in the Venetian countryside will open Italy’s most advanced technology education campus, providing all levels of education — from primary school to master’s degrees — to students coming from all over the world. “Forming the next class of innovators is the biggest challenge our country needs to face in the next years,” says Riccardo Donadon, CEO & founder of H-Farm. Carlo Carraro, the former president of Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice (one of Italy’s most prestigious public Universities) , has been chosen as the Head of Education. The school will offer robotics, AI, and data science and coding classes.

The campus will be built over 300,000 square meters of Venetian countryside, and it will be home to 2000 students and over 240 staff members. It will also boast 270,000 square meters of green space. [ Tech Crunch ]

Why 2016 Was The Year Of The Women-Led Period Startup

If you happen to be a New Yorker, you might remember a clever, minimalist subway advertising campaign from last fall by Thinx, maker of women's panties that double as menstrual pads. In one poster, a raw egg dripped artfully (and euphemistically) off a plinth. In another, half a ruby-red grapefruit winkingly stood in for a vagina. It wasn't the innuendo that reportedly troubled the city's transit authority, but the inclusion of the word 'period' in the ad copy. In progressive Manhattan in 2015, a bodily function still had the power to scandalize.

Thankfully, Thinx didn't budge. Its ads appeared on New York's trains and platforms with ‘period’ front and center. In the year since, the startup -- which raised a Series A funding round in 2014 -- has doubled down on evocative advertising. Its spring campaign featured a transgender model in a pair of its boy shorts. [ Forbes ]

Selected Works of David Carr

15 memorable articles, columns and video clips from Mr. Carr, a prolific media columnist for The New York Times, including his last piece that was published the day before he died. [ NY Times ]

5 Fintech Startups To Watch In 2017

For fintech, 2016 was a year of reckoning. Scandals and layoffs killed industry buzz, and deal activity took a mid-year nosedive. Regulatory uncertainty in the U.S. loomed large, as did Brexit. For some companies, the environment led to a greater reliance on partnerships with big banks, with potential implications for the types of exits that investors could realize. For others, 2016 became a time to retrench and refocus. [ Fast Company ]