Lyft aims to raise $1 billion in new funds

According to a Delaware state filing, Lyft, the ride-hailing company up against Uber, plans to raise as much as $1 billion in new funds.

Bloomberg reports that the company didn’t indicate how much had been raised in the recent filing, nor did it list a valuation. Even so, the group was valued at around $2.5 billion back in March.

Last month, the technology site revealed that documents prepared by Credit Suisse Group AG showed Lyft heads had been in talks to raise $500 million. Now, Lyft could potentially double its money in the bank in a big effort to fund an ongoing fight against Uber.

Various financial experts have had their say on Lyft’s standing, with Sven Weber estimating the pre-money valuation at around $4.5 billion. Elsewhere, VC Experts’ Justin Byers estimates $3.9 billion.

Right now, Lyft is selling shares at $26.79, which The Wall Street Journal points out as a 38% increase per share ‘compared with its prior round, raised over the summer’. The group has partnered with some big Uber rivals in Asia, such as China’s Didi Kuaidi and Singapore’s GrabTaxi, in order to spread its global influence.

Despite the figures we’ve seen, Uber is still the top dog from a financial standpoint, and by a significant margin. The group, which operates in over 50 countries, is labelled as the most valuable startup in the world and could be valued as high as $70 billion, CNN reports.

A Lyft spokeswoman declined to comment.

Source: Bloomberg

Come comment on this article: Lyft aims to raise $1 billion in new funds

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket sticks the landing on its return

SpaceX’s last flight in June ended with its Falcon 9 rocket breaking up shortly after launch. When the rocket is meant to be recoverable after launch, you can see why this would be an… issue. CEO Elon Musk tried to improve his odds, this time around, pushing back the launch of its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket to Monday night. Better weather this evening offered a 10 percent better chance of the rocket booster landing on solid ground in a recoverable state, and for those that watched the stream, it looked like a surprisingly stable landing: a bright flare of light followed by the appearance of a fully vertical rocket — this was the stage one landing. SpaceX is checking the rocket and satellite payloads now (update: all the 11 satellites were deployed successfully) and we’ll update when we hear more.

Just reviewed mission params w SpaceX team. Monte Carlo runs show tmrw night has a 10 higher chance of a good landing. Punting 24 hrs.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2015

SpaceX had also tried recovering its rockets with drone ships, but that unsuccessful too. If the company is able to reclaim rockets after they’ve launched once, it would help decrease the cost of launching, well, anything into space, which is probably why it’s so difficult to do. The full live broadcast is now live:

Source: SpaceX

Easily keep your contact list updated with Veecards (App Review)

It’s a pain to try and keep track of all of your friends and their contact info. It’s even more of a pain to keep track of business associates that you come across while traveling for work. Veecards is here to help with those pains, and alleviate some of the headache attached with keeping your contact list clean and updated.

Veecards aims to re-invent the wheel for your contact list through a couple of ways. First and foremost, forget the days of needing to manually enter your friends information yourself, or remembering their new phone number if they’ve switched providers. Veecards does all that for you, with a catch that we’ll touch on a bit later.

Diving right into the interface of Veecards, you are presented with a beautiful UI, and easy to navigate controls, making it as easy as possible to get started and get your friends on board. The Overflow menu button on the right hand side, opens a few different options for you to toggle through and explore.

The Home page, is where you can find all of your primary Veecard contacts. If you want to get your friends in on the fun, or if you’re meeting a contact for the first time, you can send them an invite directly from the side-menu bar. The Wallet section allows for you to create NFC cards that can easily be shared between contacts while you’re on the go. You can learn more about the NFC cards here at the Veecards website.

The Activity Log shows when you shared or received various contacts information, allowing for you to easily track when you sent that information over. Tutorials allows for you to have easy access on how to use Veecards, and to create a veecard for yourself. This will also help if you need to assist others with getting started with Veecards.

Finally, the settings panel shows your basic account information, as well as the synchronization information for your account. If you want to delete all local data, and start fresh from what’s saved on the server, there’s an easy button to use that for as well. You can also enable all of the NFC technology capabilities from the Settings panel, which would be necessary if you want to easily share contact information via Veecards.

Now all this talk about Veecards, but how do you actually create one. You could head over to the Veecards site and check out the tutorial, and that’s probably you’re best bet. However, the process is pretty straight-forward and self-explanatory, meaning that it is incredibly easy to get your Veecards created and ready to be shared with the necessary people.

You can create as many Veecards as you need to, and there are all different pieces of information that can be added to your individual Veecards. For example, I’ve taken a screenshot of what my AndroidGuys Veecard looks like, and you can see all the different pieces of information that I have added to this specific Veecard. However, there’s also another Veecard that I’ve created which is my personal Veecard, but for obvious reasons, I won’t be sharing that information.

Each Veecard is completely customizable from top to bottom, and everywhere in between. When creating a Veecard, you start out by choosing the style and label for the veecard. As stated above, you can create as many Veecards as you need to, so feel free to get a little wild and try out the various options that can be found within the set up process.

Within each Veecard, you can add the following information to be shared with your various contacts:

• Email
• Event
• Instant Messaging
• Nickname
• Note
• Organization
• Phone
• Postal
• Social
• Website

You can add multiples of each field, and there are also multiple “types” that each piece of information can be categorized. For example, when adding an Email, you can choose between “Personal”, “Work”, “Education”, or “Other”. Once you’ve filled in the fields depending upon which Type you used, that information will populate in a subcategory within your Veecard.

After you’ve gone through and tweaked your Veecard to your liking, then your information is ready to be shared with whomever is asking for it.

What we like…

• Easy to create Veecards
• Simple interface
• Beautiful UI
• Good to use if you meet a lot of contacts

And not so much…

• Getting everyone on board with Veecards can be difficult

Overall, I see where Veecards can be useful, especially when you’re going to business meeting or an event like CES. Transferring contact information via NFC is a great concept that has been made possible in the past few years, and there are a lot of benefits to taking advantage of this technology.

Google Play Store: Veecards

The post Easily keep your contact list updated with Veecards (App Review) appeared first on AndroidGuys.

Former employee claims Theranos’ FDA-approved test is faulty

Startup medical testing company Theranos came under fire in October as the accuracy of its tests were called into question. The FDA has been investigating since then, and today more fuel was thrown on the fire by some former employees. According to The Wall Street Journal, both the FDA and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) each received a complaint from a different former employee. The FDA received notice that the study Theranos submitted to win the agency’s approval for its herpes test was “tainted by breaches in research protocol.” That’s notable because so far that herpes test is the only one of Theranos’ tests that has actually been approved by the FDA. Founder Elizabeth Holmes (above) has continued to deny any accusations claiming that Theranos’ data is inaccurate.

The CMS received a more general complaint in regards to Theranos’ custom-built “Edison” testing machine — the employee said the equipment had “major stability, precision and accuracy” issues. This backs up the WSJ‘s original report from October that claimed the Edison devices were only running a handful of the tests Theranos performed, with most being done on standard lab equipment. The anonymous employee also said that Edison machines would often produce radically different test results on the same sample and also claimed that Theranos was made aware of accuracy issues in 2013 and 2014. Management however supposedly pressured lab employees to keep using the machines anyway.

A spokesperson for Theranos told the WSJ that it hadn’t yet been provided with any copies of these latest complaints, so it can’t comment on them or even know if they’ve truly been filed yet. However, the WSJ claims it has reviewed copies of both reports and that the FDA has already interviewed the former employee who sent in a complaint to the agency. While it remains unclear what exactly will happen to Theranos at this point, the fact that the company’s only FDA-approved test as well as its flagship testing device are both under scrutiny doesn’t bode well. It wouldn’t surprise us to see the FDA pull its support for the test before long.

[Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images]

Via: TechCrunch

Source: The Wall Street Journal