simplify

“Streamlining Sound Creation for Children: Playtime Engineering’s Innovative Musical Toy Startup”

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That’s why Sheets decided to develop the $199 Blipbox, an affordable kid-friendly synthesizer designed for ages three and up. With its chunky control knobs, levers and an easy-to-use randomize feature, MyTracks aims to encourage music exploration and simplify beatmaking for kids. According to the company, all Blipbox devices underwent “rigorous” testing to ensure they are BPA-free and comply with toy safety standards. Blipbox has even been used by music teachers, including helping special-needs kids express their creativity in a non-verbal way. “We got a lot of weird looks from parents,” Kate Sheets says, describing how people reacted to the first Blipbox synthesizer in 2018.

Make Your Retirement Planning Easier with NewRetirement

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So Chen founded NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans. Today, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer products power financial planning for 70,000 users managing close to $100 billion in their own financial plans, according to Chen. And while 37% of respondents say that they work with a financial adviser, two-thirds of Americans believe that their financial planning needs improvement, according to Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Study 2023. Now, you might wonder, what makes NewRetirement different from startups like Retirable, which similarly provides an array of retirement planning tools and access to asset managers? Chen asserts that NewRetirement is one of the few — and perhaps only — financial planning platform that serves consumers as well as advisers and workplaces.

New York Times Unveils Enhanced App for Improved Discovery and Streamlined Navigation

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The NYT Games app is debuting a new redesign to help users discover games and track their progress more easily. The redesign comes nearly a year after the New York Times renamed its games-focused app from “NYT Crosswords” to “NYT Games” to better represent its growing family of games. NYT Games principal product designer Lian Chang told TechCrunch that the redesign caters to both old and new players. Chang says the redesigned game cards incentivize players to come back to a game and finish it. The idea behind the redesigned game cards was to not only be inviting for discovery purposes, but also be functional.

“Simplifying Blockchain Development: Initia Secures $7.5M in Seed Funding”

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It’s hard to keep track of crypto’s technical development, but one thing hasn’t changed much: blockchain applications are notoriously hard to build. This stems in part from their decentralized nature, resulting in a lack of uniform standards across different infrastructure pieces. Initia, founded by a group of developers in their late 20s, is trying to bring more interoperability to multi-chain networks and simplify the process of creating app-specific blockchains, or app chains. In layman’s speak, Initia is abstracting away app chains’ technical complexity, aiming to make them more friendly to both end users and app developers. They paused the project after the FTX implosion and eventually changed tack to work on blockchain infrastructure.

Discover the Advantages of WebAssembly for Your Startup

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Don’t miss your chance to learn how Wasm can simplify and increase real-time application performance (and more) in your business. Watch and learn at your leisure! Tristan Stevens, director of customer success at Redpanda, will lead the discussion and cover these topics and more. After the event, we’ll send you a promo code for a TC+ membership – good for one month. Learn how Wasm can simplify and improve your business.

Maka: Simplifying Fashion and Beauty Shopping in Africa – Social Commerce Platform Secures $2.65M Funding

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Maka, an African fashion and beauty e-commerce platform, has raised a $2.65 million pre-seed round led by Pan-African venture capital firms 4DX Ventures and Janngo Capital. She said launching Maka began during the pandemic when she was in Ghana and struggled to find inclusive fashion inspiration. To address the trust element, Maka leverages videos as a means to connect users with trusted creators. Notably, the platform offers a review option, allowing customers who make purchases to share their feedback through video reviews, usually between 30 and 60 seconds long. Furthermore, creators can download their reviews from Maka and share them on other social media platforms, earning additional points for each share.