Soundboks is scaling high-volume, high-energy speakers across borders and cultures

Back in 2016, Hammad Syed and Mahmoud Felfel, an ex-WhatsApp engineer, thought it’d be neat to build a text-to-speech Chrome extension for Medium articles. The extension, which could read any Medium story aloud, was featured on Product Hunt. A year later, it spawned an entire business. “We saw a bigger opportunity in helping individuals and organizations create realistic audio content for their applications,” Syed told TechCrunch. “Without the need to build their own model, they could deploy hu

Nov 25, 2024

Autio, a location-based audio entertainment app co-founded by actor Kevin Costner and formerly known as HearHere, has raised a $5.9 million seed extension led by iHeartMedia. The app uses GPS to tell stories based on a user’s geographic location. Autio narrates stories of landmarks, cities and towns nearby with the aim of fostering deep connections […]

Mar 29, 2023

Every so often, a new startup crosses your radar and reminds you how exciting hardware can be. It’s a relative rarity in consumer electronics, a category dominated by corporations like Samsung, Apple and Sony, which are (perhaps understandably) somewhat risk averse. Melbourne-based Nura was one such company. I distinctly remember the startup paying a visit […]

Apr 20, 2023

Back Market held a press conference on Thursday morning in Paris to talk about upcoming product launches and give an update on the company’s current situation. If you’re not familiar with the French startup it operates a marketplace of refurbished electronics devices — mostly smartphones. It’s attracted a lot of investor cash in recent years but has also been through tougher times. In 2021, just like many large tech companies, Back Market rode the wave of zero-interest rate policies around the

Sep 19, 2024