The Hachette Book Group has teamed up with Seattle startup Novel Effect, which specializes in technology that pairs music with text, to launch a pilot program using titles from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.The resulting app, called Novel Effect, was named one of five finalists in the SXSW Accelerator Competition.The Novel Effect pilot program will launch on March 10 with four LBYR titl...

SymGym Studio makes getting a workout fun, allowing people to compete on a leaderboard and play online games with others that mimic real-life motions.No more staring at a wall, trying to maintain the motivation to get through a workout. SymGym Studio’s new online gaming system with resistance provides a fun new way to work up a sweat. Full body controllers use independent arm bars and foot ped...

Apple is doomed. So are you. As mortals we are used to the idea of death. We do not dwell on it even though it’s inevitable. We do know that we’ll die but what we don’t know is when we’ll die. That certainty/uncertainty makes us, more or less, do everything that we do. And so we carry on. But companies die too. And when they die is also a mystery but it’s not at all clear that their inevit...

I don’t smoke, but I find Zippo’s lighters really charming. They just look so cool, the way you flip them open with one hand while looking undeniably cool (smoking isn’t cool though).Banale’s travel toothbrush has swag of similar proportions, but instead of nurturing a tobacco habit, it keeps your teeth clean and your mouth fresh! The kit is roughly the size of a lighter, and comes in an ab...

In this year’s Survey, we canvassed the views of 56 Healthcare CEOs from 27 countries about three imperatives: managing man and machine to create a workforce that’s fit for the digital age; preserving organisational trust in a world of increasingly virtual interactions; and making globalisation work for everyone. Globalisation: Underway but under siege?CEOs’ long-held scepticism has been amp...

A food technology startup in San Francisco has grown a chicken strip from self-reproducing cells in a lab, making it the first to produce this type of lab-grown meat.Memphis Meats, located in the Bay Area, is planning to reveal its creation on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reports. But ahead of the release, the company invited a few lucky people to taste-test the chicken. Duck meat was als...

The most popular social network in the world launched its IPO less than four years ago, today it is worth $325 billion.FACEBOOK has defied even optimists’ projections of how big the 12-year-old firm could one day become. Today the company’s flagship social network claims 1.6 billion users, around a billion of whom log on each day. Facebook has attracted and engaged so many users by engineerin...

Internet of things (IoT) platform provider Evrythng has raised $24.8 million in a Series B round led by Sway Ventures, with participation from Generation Ventures and Bloc Ventures.Founded out of New York in 2011 and launched in stealth a year later, Evrythng has IoT smarts to help connect consumer products to the internet, serving companies with real-time data on usage. The company had raised...

Avatars, long used in video games, are coming to VR. This startup thinks you should be able to use the same one in different places.In the real world, your body is always yours—you might dress differently for a business meeting or a cocktail party, but you’re still the same person underneath the outfit. Now an avatar-making startup thinks the same should be true in virtual reality, too.Virtua...