Ori Living partners with IKEA to bring robotic furniture to customers by 2020

Welcome to the robotic bedroom of the future, coming in 2020 to tiny apartments beginning in Hong Kong and Japan, but expanding around the world. IKEA is now selling robotic furniture that can convert from a storage and seating unit into a bed and closet — and back again. The new line of furniture, based on the company’s PLATSA storage unit, is called ROGNAN and is designed to use space inside the home more efficiently, especially as housing units become smaller to accommodate the 1.5 mil…

Amazon launches physical kiosks in UK train stations, a local extension of its Treasure Trucks

After announcing a year-long pilot of pop-up shops in the UK earlier this week to sell items from smaller marketplace merchants, Amazon has added another development to its brick-and-mortar efforts in the country. Starting today, the company is setting up physical kiosks, initially in train stations, to sell passers-by a rotating range of items at discounted prices….

Sheltr Raises $3.2M in Funding

Sheltr, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a home maintenance software platform, raised $3.2m in funding. Backers included South Park Commons, MetaProp, NYCA Partners, Ben Porterfield, Co-Founder of Looker Data Sciences, Misha Esipov, Co-Founder of Nova Credit, and Marcus Ridgway, Co-Founder of Invitation Homes, among others. The company intends to use the funds to make key hires at its San Francisco-based headquarters, grow its platform of service providers, and expand into new cities…

STRATIS Named RealPage’s First Smart Buildings App Partner

STRATIS IoT has been named RealPage’s first AppPartner in their Smart Buildings category. While STRATIS has been partnered and integrated with RealPage for several months, the company is a fully certified RealPage AppPartner now.

STRATIS IoT is a complete Sidewalk-To-Sofa IoT solution for more than 300,000 apartments across the U.S. and more than 10,000 internationally.

CEO spin wash

As the housing market nationwide sputters along, many real estate firms are accelerating deal flow in one key area: their C-suites. Since the start of last year, more than a dozen newly minted chief executives have seized control of the country’s largest residential companies, and some like Keller Williams’ Gary Keller and Zillow Group’s Richard Barton are taking a second shot at the job….

Truss Launches a New Platform for Brokers with Complete Price Transparency

Truss CRE is an Industry First and Launches with More than 50 Percent of Brokerages in Boston BOSTON and CHICAGO – Truss, an award-winning marketplace for commercial real estate, is launching its new platform for brokers called Truss CRE.  More than 50 percent of brokerage firms in Boston’s downtown area, Seaport and Cambridge have signed up, demonstrating the need and demand for this platform, which officially launches on June 5, 2019. “We created Truss CRE based on strong demand and intere…

Amazon is reportedly looking into expanding into the telecom industry

Amazon, the e-commerce giant that also has cloud computing, shipping, grocery, and pharmaceutical businesses, is reportedly considering buying the prepaid phone brand Boost Mobile from its parent company Sprint, according to Reuters. But the potential deal depends on whether Sprint is able to convince antitrust regulators to approve a proposed $26 billion merger with T-Mobile. If both deals were to happen, it would mean Amazon, which is already under scrutiny for anticompetitive behavior, would…

NoBroker raises $51M to help Indians buy and rent without real estate brokers

A startup that is attempting to significantly improve the way how Indians rent or buy an apartment just raised a substantially big amount to further pursue its mission. Bangalore-based real estate property operator NoBroker said today it has raised $51 million in a new round of funding.

Watch out, StreetEasy — a new NYC house-hunting tool is here

Many New York City property owners are so bold as to buy their pads sight unseen. And even those lucky enough to tour the apartments they end up buying may lack important information that could inform their decisions. To arm prospective buyers and renters with as much information as possible about properties on the market, startup Localize.city is launching a new platform that allows users to look at each apartment along with a deluge of accompanying data points….

Big Data and the Shape of Grocery-Anchored Retail

LAS VEGAS–How is Big Data changing the face of retail? Just ask senior InvenTrust Properties executives Tom McGuinness and Ivy Greaner. That’s exactly what we did at the recent RECon 2019 Conference here, and learned that perceptions of the market as tech averse are simply wrong.