Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic wil find out what the public markets think of its ambitious plan to make commercial space tourism a reality on Monday. The company’s shareholders have approved a merger announced earlier this year with Chamath Palihapitiya’s special Social Capital Hedosophia holding company, and that will take effect Friday with adequate on the NYSE for the newly merged ...

HelloOffice, a new real estate brokerage business out of San Francisco, has nabbed $6.5 million in new financing and is absconding down to Los Angeles to open its first regional office. The company provides software to expedite the often painful (especially in San Francisco) task of finding office space (not the Mike Judge movie, which is available to stream on ...

Microsoft  posted quarterly results today that were well ahead of analysts’ expectations, but Azure’s growth rate continues to decline as it competes with AWS. The company’s revenue for the first quarter of the fiscal year rose 14% year-over-year to $33.1 billion. Net income increased 21% to $10.7 billion, or $1.38 per share. Revenue from Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, which ...

Amazon  has acquired Health Navigator, a startup that develops APIs for online health services. According to CNBC, which first reported the deal, Health Navigator will become part of Amazon Care, its pilot healthcare service program for employees. This is the second health startup acquired by Amazon. The first was online pharmacy PillPack, purchased by the company in 2018 for slightly less than $1 billion. ...

Scoot,  owned by Bird,  has just unveiled what it’s calling the Scoot Moped. At first glance, it appears to be Bird’s two-seater vehicle. In June, Bird unveiled the Cruiser, which can seat up to two people and be pedal-assist or just have a peg, depending on the market. While the Scoot Moped is meant for one person, the design and engineering of the Scoot ...

EV Connect, the Los Angeles-based company that sells software to manage electric vehicle charging, has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by investors Mitsui & Co. and Ecosystem Integrity Fund. The company has raised $25 million to date. EV Connect’s cloud-based platform has an open standard architecture that is designed to be hardware agnostic. In other words, EV ...

On November 12 Verizon will begin offering 12 months of Disney+ to all of its new and existing 4gLTE and 5G unlimited wireless customers, the companies said today in a joint statement. It’s a great way for Disney to juice its early subscriber numbers and for Verizon to add a tantalizing perk as competition heats up for both streaming media ...

Law enforcement tech outfitter Axon  has announced that it will include automated license plate recognition in its next generation of dash cams. But its independent ethics board has simultaneously released a report warning of the dire consequences should this technology be deployed irresponsibly. Axon makes body and dash cams for law enforcement, the platform on which that footage is stored (Evidence.com), and ...

Pizza Hut  this morning announced plans to pilot Zume’s signature round pizza boxes. Testing for now will be extremely limited — in fact, it’s only happening at a single location in Phoenix, Ariz. The boxes are one of a number of different technologies being pushed by the SF Bay startup. In fact, my recent conversation with Zume CEO Alex Garden quickly turned to ...

Aurora Insight, a startup that provides a “dynamic” global map of wireless connectivity that it built and monitors in real time using AI combined with data from sensors on satellites, vehicles, buildings, aircraft and other objects, is emerging from stealth today with the launch of its first publicly-available product, a platform providing insights on wireless signal and quality covering a ...