tech:

taffy

Plug Memory Adapter Blazes Through Kickstarter

Plug, a crowdfunding campaign launched on Kickstarter on Wednesday, has met its funding goal after being live on the website for only 12 hours. The campaign collected $118,000 in its first 24 hours, and snagged 1,638 pre-orders. At the time of writing (later during the day), Plug had 1,926 backers and raised $158,119.

Plug is a small $69 adapter that acts like the brain of your devices, according to Cloud Guys, the US/French startup behind the device. Plug works a lot like popular cloud services like Dropbox or Evernote, but with one significant difference – your files are stored within your premises. 

Plug enables you to transform your old USB drives into a memory, common to your smartphone, tablet and computers. Install Plug, and your devices will start storing all of their content in this common memory.

What Plug does is create a VPN (a ‘virtual private network’ or VPN extends a private network across the Internet) between your devices. If you want to, say, use a smartphone to access files stored in your home machine, Plug hooks you to the network. Now, whenever you’re connected to Internet, it’s just like all your devices had exactly the same size: the size of your Plug. The initial size of your devices doesn’t matter anymore.

Once Plug is installed, it unifies the memory of all the users’ devices (smartphones, tablets, computers, TVs), removes their limits of size, introduces a technology for instant file sending. 

Users can make files available offline with Plug (like with Spotify). Plug is also compatible with backup services such as BackBlaze or CrashPlan.

[Image courtesy: Cloud Guys]

Just in

Tembo raises $14M

Cincinnati, Ohio-based Tembo, a Postgres managed service provider, has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round.

Raspberry Pi is now a public company — TC

Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate, writes Romain Dillet. 

AlphaSense raises $650M

AlphaSense, a market intelligence and search platform, has raised $650 million in funding, co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners.

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B to take on OpenAI — VentureBeat

Confirming reports from April, the series B investment comes from the participation of multiple known venture capital firms and investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, writes Shubham Sharma. 

Capgemini partners with DARPA to explore quantum computing for carbon capture

Capgemini Government Solutions has launched a new initiative with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate quantum computing's potential in carbon capture.