Owning a dog is a major commitment. When life gets busy, people outsource some of their caretaking to friends or dog walkers.

They say that a dog is man's best friend, and every dog owner anywhere in the world can attest to that. For a lot of people, dogs are not just pets. They're also members of the family and even treated ...

When Block product designer Cynthia Chen first dreamed up the idea of an app that could catalogue dogs spotted in the wild, she shelved it. "The hurdle was so big, so I never did anything," she said.