Kiran Upadhyay

Jewelbots, a programmable friendship bracelet that debuted on Kickstarter last week, is on a mission to make coding popular among pre-teen girls. Jewelbots surpassed its $30,000 crowdfunding goal in the first 19 hours. In the past five days, the campaign has pulled in over $70,000 from nearly 800 backers, and it still has 25 days to go. “When MySpace was a big thing, knowing HTML and CSS was cool, and now that Minecraft is big, kids want to make awesome models so they’re coding in Java,” says Jewelbots co-founder Sarah Chipps. “We’re trying to reverse engineer that with Jewelbots.” The relatively simple friendship bracelets are equipped with four LED lights and a button. They pair with the Jewelbots iOS or Android app and are designed to hold a charge for three days. Girls can add their friends to different friend groups designated by color, and the bracelet will light up with that color when their friends are nearby. They can also send “secret messages” in the form of vibrati...

India’s e-commerce boom continues unbounded. Beyond the top players such as Flipkart and Snapdeal raising billions to support their capital intensive businesses, startups in other parts of the online retail space are raising significant numbers too. One such company is MySmartPrice, a Hyderabad-based price comparison and search site, which has landed $10 million. The round was led by Accel with participation from Helion Venture Partners. MySmartPrice, which was founded in 2010, plans to use the fresh influx of capital to grow its focus on the offline shopping experience. The startup raised $1.3 million across two prior funding rounds. The company began life as a tech and gadget-focused price comparison service, but over the years it has added verticals and new components to the experience. Today, it is designed to navigate the maze of Indian e-commerce sites to find specific products, and at the best prices possible. MySmartPrice co-founder and CEO Sulakshan Kumar told TechCrunc...

Unless you’re Jaqueline Voorheese from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, chances are you’re not letting Uber drivers shuttle around your kids to and from school, practice, classes, etc. But that doesn’t mean there’s no need for a little transportation-based help with the little ones. HopSkipDrive, a startup that just received $3.9 million in seed funding, is looking to hook up cautious yet busy parents. The startup lets parents set up pre-scheduled pick-up times for their kids with trusted, thoroughly vetted drivers to help get kids around town when time simply doesn’t allow parents to do it themselves. Here’s how it works: Parents schedule a ride with a ‘CareDriver’ and are sent a short bio for that driver, a picture, and are required to enter in a code word for the ride. The parent then relays that information to the child, and then to the school or daycare organization from which the kid is getting picked up. That way, little Tommy or Patty knows how to identify their ‘CareD...

Tesla’s Model S P85D is well known for its wonderfully named “Insane” mode, which tunes the car to go from 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds. Not insane enough for you? Now the Model S is getting a “Ludicrous” mode. Seriously. The aptly named Ludicrous mode will do 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, that acceleration pins you to the seat at a 1.1 Gs. “It’s faster than falling,” he adds. “It’s like having your own private roller coaster.” One catch: unlike most Tesla Model S tuning enhancements, this one isn’t a software update — and it’s not free. Why? Because Tesla had to make new, physical hardware to make this possible. Specifically, they had to make a fuse that didn’t melt when you pulled ridiculously high amperages over it. The fuse upgrade will be a $10k option for new buyers, and cost $5k (before installation) for existing P85D owners. Musk also announced two other bits of news surrounding the Model S: They’re introducing the Model S 70, a new single mot...

A spot of consolidation in the online dating space today, with Match Group, the subsidiary of Tinder and OkCupid owner IAC, announcing it has agreed to acquire PlentyOfFish (POF) for $575 million in cash. Match Group said it expects the transaction to close early in the fourth quarter, pending Canadian regulatory approvals. The acquisition looks squarely focused on snagging a fresh pool of digitally active singles to feed into its portfolio of digital services. With dating apps’ free-at-the-point-of-use model superseding desktop era subscription-for-access online dating there’s greater need for businesses in the space to ramp up their volume of users to boost conversions to paid services. Tinder, for instance, flicked the monetization switch this spring, launching Tinder Plus: a monthly subscription that gives access to features such as a Rewind option for those who swipe too quickly and regret consigning a potential match to the virtual dustbin. Such business models flourish w...

The first car Tesla ever built, the Roadster, hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love lately. They stopped building them back in 2012, after all. It looks like the Roadster is set for a revival, though. Buried deep in today’s other Tesla news was word of a brand new Roadster model. After announcing a holy-crap-that’s-fast, 0-to-60-in-2.8-seconds mode for the Model S P85D that the company rightly calls “Ludicrous mode”, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped this little detail: There is of course one speed faster than ludicrous, but that is reserved for the next generation Roadster in 4 years: maximum plaid. (Both “Ludicrous mode” and “maximum plaid”, of course, being Spaceball references) So it’ll be a few years, but Tesla isn’t done with the Roadster just yet. And that’s good news — particularly for those who want the breakneck speeds of the Model S P85D in a body that’s a bit more exciting. Musk confirmed on a press call that, Spaceball references aside, this would be a new model.

After a year of previews and one release candidate, Microsoft today officially launched the latest version of its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) together with an update to its .NET framework. Visual Studio 2015 (VS 2015) is now available for download (and purchase), but Team Foundation Server 2015 — part of Microsoft’s online services for development teams — will remain in its release candidate phase until next month. As part of today’s announcement, Microsoft also released a couple of new download numbers for various tools in the Visual Studio ecosystem. Visual Studio Community, for example, the much-improved free version of the software for non-enterprise users, has now been downloaded 5 million times since its launch seven months ago. More than 3.2 million developers have now registered for the Visual Studio Online services. Visual Studio Code, the standalone code editor for Windows, Mac and Linux, has seen half a million downloads since its launch thr...