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Tiny Tower Developers Call Out Zynga For Copying Their Game (After They Refused To Be Acquired)
The guys from NimbleBit (developers of Tiny Tower, the game handpicked by Apple as iOS Game Of The Year) are on a bit of a tweeting spree tonight, blasting out two big ol' gems of knowledge in as many hours.
First: Zynga just launched a new iOS game, and it looks a lot like Tiny Tower. Second (and this one makes that first bit all the more interesting): Zynga allegedly tried to buy NimbleBit at some point in the past, but NimbleBit turned them down.
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Obama: America Should Support The Next Steve Jobs
In his State of the Union address tonight, President Obama laid out a blueprint for economic recovery, with numerous references to the technology sector. "An economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country," the President said, with Steve Jobs' wife (and Instagram's Mike Krieger) in attendance, That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrep...
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Kim Dotcom Denied Bail In New Zealand Court
The Megaupload saga continues. Kim Dotcom, Megaupload's mega founder, was just denied bail by a New Zealand court citing he's a flight risk. He will remain in New Zealand's custody until February 22, when the courts will hear the US Justice Department's application for Schmitz.
Dotcom insists he's innocent of the various charges involving racketeering and piracy. His lawyers insist that Dotcom's company was simply offering an online storage locker and diligent responded to complaints about pir...
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Google Stockpiles Data Ammo Through Privacy Merge, Guns To Win Relevancy War
Data is ammunition in the war for information relevancy. And Larry Page, the prototypical war-time CEO, has just told everyone to empty their ammo packs so Google can build one big bomb with the words “Facebook” and “Twitter” and “Apple” chalked on the side.
The privacy policy change announced today rolls more than 70 separate policies into a single one, and will let the company combine any piece of data it has about you into a single profile. The point is, in the company's own w...
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Watch And Share The State Of The Union, Thanks to SnappyTV
If you're watching President Obama's State of the Union tonight, SnappyTV has a cool way for you to share your favorite clips with your friends — and we're including it in this post.
We've already written about the clip-sharing service, which launched last year. To coincide with the State of the Union, SnappyTV is opening up its Pro Editor, which allows content owners and online news organizations to an easy way to create a timeline of clips using live footage, which they either own or is in ...
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App-maker Moonbot Gets An Oscar Nomination
There's been a lot of talk about the divide between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but at least one upstart animation studio seems to have one foot comfortably in both worlds — Moonbot Studios, which was just nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short.
The film in question, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," was also released as an iPad app, and will be published a traditional book, too. Co-founder William Joyce is an established children's author, and he first conceived ...
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You Call That Evil?
There's a nice little insider quarrel going on over Google's just-announced privacy policy changes. A number of sites and commentators have let their fingers jump up mechanically in accusatory fashion. Google, caught red-handed being evil!
Here, I think, is a time when the word "bias" is actually warranted. Everyone wants so badly for Google to do something truly evil (instead of just questionable or inconvenient) that their perceptions of Google actions are actually being affected. Casting eve...
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Apple’s Massive Numbers And Some Context
Simply looking over the numbers, it might be hard to wrap your head around what Apple just announced for their Q1 2012 results. A company this big is not supposed to be able to nearly double revenue year-to-year. Nor are they supposed to more than double profit. But Apple did both. The numbers are so big that they almost seem like they should be typos — especially coming after a quarter that was a "miss" (though we can now clearly see what a joke that "miss" was). So perhaps it's best to point...
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Apple Now Has $97.6 Billion In Cash. Let The Share Buybacks Begin!
Apple ended last quarter and the year with almost $100 billion in cash ($97.6 billion, to be exact—much of that is held overseas for tax purposes).
What should Apple do with all of that money? They could buy Facebook, which is supposed to IPO at around a $100 billion valuation. But "it is not in Apple's nature to do big acquisitions," points out BGC analyst Colin Gillis at the tail-end of this video interview. "In fact, a big acquisition would probably be disastrous for Apple." He thinks Ap...
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Babelverse To Offer Live Voice Translations For State Of The Union In Up To 7K Languages
Tonight, President Obama will give his 2012 State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. The annual address, which will take place Tuesday night at 9pm EST/6pm PST (watch it online at Whitehouse.gov here), is expected to include Obama's mission going forward and his central focus as president, which he's said is "rebuilding an economy where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded." Coming off the start of the Republican primaries, the heated battle over SOPA/PIPA, and...
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Apple Talks Retail: 110 Million People Visited Apple Stores In Q1
I'm not a huge fan of schlepping around needlessly when I can do most of my shopping from the comfort of my chair, but Apple fans don't seem to have much trouble going to their local Apple store when the urge strikes. According to their recent earnings call, 110 million people went to an Apple store in Q1, which breaks down to roughly 22,000 customers per Apple store per week.
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Rising Telecommuter Numbers Worldwide Form A Notable Trend
A new poll of over 11,000 workers worldwide by Ipsos and Reuters shows that telecommuting is an increasingly popular choice, especially in non-Western countries. This will come as no surprise to many, but the numbers are higher than some might have guessed. Over 30 percent of workers in India, Mexico, and Indonesia claimed to telecommute regularly, and one in ten overall work from home every day.
But it's not just bloggers and knowledge workers, and the business infrastructure will soon have to...
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Tim Cook: “There Will Come A Day When The Tablet Market Is Larger Than The PC Market”
One of the big questions hanging over Apple this quarter was whether or not iPad sales would continue its rapid growth. Last quarter Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire at $200 (well below the iPAd's entry-level $500 price) and there was concern that even Apple diehard fans might delay their purchase of a tablet until the iPad 3 comes out—rumored for later this year. But iPad sales came in well above expectations at 15.4 million units.
During the conference call today, Tim Cook predicted: "I t...
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Tim Cook: Apple TV IS Still A Hobby, But I Couldn’t Live Without It
Apple TV is still a hobby. The word comes from Apple's Chief, Tim Cook who nevertheless championed the company's current offering. He stated that Apple sold more than 2.8 million Apple TV units last fiscal year with 1.4 million moved within Q1 2012 (a new record for the device).
“Our Apple TV product is doing quite well… but in the scheme of things, we still classify Apple TV as a hobby. We continue to add things to it. If you’re using the latest one — I don’t know about you, but I ca...
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Apple: iCloud Now Has 85 Million Users
Apple launched its iCloud service a little over three months ago. Well, since then, over 85 million users are syncing their devices through their personal cloud. This comes from Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Office, on today's Q1 2012 financial earning calls.
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After Blow-Out Earnings, Apple Stock Up $30 In After-Hours Trading
Apple blew away expectations in its December quarter, which it just announced this afternoon after markets closed. After trading down 1.6 percent ($7) during the day, shares are up more than 7.8 percent ($30) in after-hours trading to $453.
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At Least Yahoo’s User Engagement Numbers Are Sort Of Up
Yahoo's fourth quarter results are as underwhelming as most people expected: earnings at $0.24 a shares from $1.17 billion in revenue. The brightest spot, beyond new chief executive Scott Thompson now taking the helm to try to turn things around, is the engagement numbers.
Take a look at the slide below, from the company's earnings deck. Worldwide unique visits to both Yahoo-branded sites and to Yahoo properties were up by 12%. Since this data is from comScore, I pulled the measurement firms' l...
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Google Consolidates Privacy Policy; Will Combine User Data Across Services
Google has more than 70 different privacy documents over its range of products, which overwhelming for any user to comb through (and that's after Google pared down its policies in 2010). Today, the search giant is rolling out a new, comprehensive privacy policy which the company says will consolidate more than 60 of the separate privacy notices into one simple policy. The company says the changes will take effect on March 1, and will be starting to notify users today via email and a notice on it...
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Apple’s Q1 2012: $46.3B In Revenue, 37M iPhones And 15.4M iPads Sold
We're still a few minutes out from Apple's Q1 2012 earnings call — but as is par for the course, the raw numbers have made their way out a bit early. And they.. are... insane.
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Apple Releases Q1 2012 Earnings: $46.3 Billion In Revenue, 37 Million iPhones Sold
Apple has just released their Q1 earnings, and they were even more impressive than everyone expected them to be. Right off the bat, Apple pulled in revenues of $46.3 billion while most analysts expected to see revenues of around $39 billion.
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Yahoo Earnings Meet Expectations, More-or-Less
Yahoo just released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2011, with results that were basically in line with the expectations of Wall Street analysts.
The company earned 24 cents per share, which is what analysts estimated. Its revenue, minus traffic acquisition costs, came in a little less than the expected $1.19 billion, at $1.17 billion.That's also a 3 percent decrease from the same period last year.
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The Rise of Nimble Medicine
In the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, at the turn of the 20th century, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed nearly half the workforce. Starting in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. Long story short, food now accounts for 8% of household budgets and 2% of the workforce. As a wide array of small innovations ultimately led to the transformation of farming, so too is a rapidly building wave of i...
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Paramount Begins Selling UltraViolet Movies Directly
Just over a week ago I spoke with the head of DECE and UltraViolet about the service, its origins, and where it's going. The conclusion seemed to be that there was great potential in the service as a value-add, if it's handled correctly, but that much depends on the content producers. Paramount is the first studio to start offering UV movies on their own, via a dedicated site - Paramount Movies.
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Timehop, A Time Machine For Your Social Media Updates, Gets $1.1M From Foursquare Founders And Others
Timehop, a startup that humbly began as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, has just bagged a $1.1 million round of seed funding by OATV (Bryce Roberts) and followed on by Spark Capital (Andrew Parker) and a pretty worth list of angels including Foursquare's Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and Alex Rainert, Groupme's Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin. Timehop was part of the TechStars NYC winter class.
The startup started out aggregating Foursquare user checkins from a year ago in a...
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RIM Roadmap Leaked, Points To BlackBerry 10 Launch In September
It's only been one full day since former COO Thorsten Heins has taken the top spot at RIM, and we may already be privy to the company's game plan for the next 15 months. According to reports from BGR's always-willing sources, RIM is hard at work on a series of new product launches that will culminate with the launch of their first BlackBerry 10 device in the latter half of this year.
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I Didn’t Think Samsung Could Top Its Anti-Apple Ads… Until I Saw These
Next weekend is like the Super Bowl of commercials. Well, actually, next weekend is the Pro Bowl, which is also much like a Super Bowl... for companies... with regards to their commercials.
Maybe I should try a different analogy.
Either way, next weekend and the weekend after are big for most companies and Samsung is getting started early with its latest "Apple fanbois are silly for waiting outside" campaign.
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Worvey— Err, Warby Parker Takes A Look Back At Its 2011
Warby Parker — the New York-based startup that sells prescription, designer glasses for a relatively modest $95 a pop — has just released its annual year in review, outlining some key stats and factoids from the past twelve months. My favorite section: most popular misspellings people search for when they're trying to find the site, with the leaders including "Worvey Parkers" and "Warmby Parker" (Warmby? Really?).
Oh, and there's some more serious stuff too.
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Keen On… Brad Noble: Why Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Is Creepy (TCTV)
Google's "Search Plus Your World" (SPYW) continues to jeopardize the company's world. It's a moral minus, Alexia says. Others have gone further - saying that SPYW fundamentally compromises Google as an objective search engine and raises many anti-trust issues. So what, exactly, will be the impact of SPYW on Google's artificial algorithm and how central will social search become in our Web 3.0 age?
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Online Ordering Provider OLO Hits 1M Customers, Prepares To Launch GrubHub Integration
OLO, a web and mobile online ordering service for restaurants, is celebrating a lot of things: bigger office space in New York's South St. Seaport district, hitting the 1 million customer milestone, adding new restaurant partners, and plans to launch its long-awaited GrubHub integration, nearly a year in the making.
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Between Nothing And A Blog: Check Out CheckThis, A Cool New Micro-Publishing Tool
I don't often get a chance to write about a startup from my home country (Belgium) that I'm super excited about, so consider me a happy camper. Meet CheckThis.com, a new micro-publishing service that lets you create and share a single, good-looking Web page in mere seconds.
CheckThis is designed for people who need a little more space than a tweet but don't want to go through the hassle of setting up a new blog. In literally instants, you can use CheckThis to create a stand-alone page to sell y...
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Subscription Billings Startup Recurly Raises $6 Million
Recurly, a startup that makes it easy for other companies to manage their subscription billing, has raised $6 million in a Series A financing round led by BV Capital, and including Polaris Venture Partners, Harrison Metal Capital and FreeStyle Capital. This brings Recurly's total funding to $8 million.
Recurly's service allows businesses to quickly implement a subscription billing system, handling tasks like credit card number storage (it also supports integration with financial software like Q...
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Lookout’s New App Visualizes Mobile Security Threats As They Are Detected Around The World
Lookout, a company that offers security services for a number of smartphone platforms, is debuting a new Android app that lets you see mobile threats as they are detected around the world. Launched from Lookout Labs, the new app basically visualizes what’s happening in the mobile landscape and also shares details on top weekly threats & distribution of malware vs. spyware.
For background, Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and most ...
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New Trademarkia Feature Exposes Biggest Trademark Bullies; Apple, Zynga Among Top Five
For a long time, it was easy to search for patents on the Web, but trademarks? Not so much. Thanks to startups like TechCrunch 50 grad Trademarkia, anyone can now do a simple keyword search and pick through each and every U.S. trademark filed since 1870 -- if your heart so desires, of course.
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Will This Be Apple’s First $40 Billion Quarter?
Everyone is expecting a record quarter from Apple, which reports earnings today. "We expect a big quarter from Apple," writes analyst Colin Gillis of BGC in a research note, "and we expect most investors expect a big quarter from Apple. Our pet fish expects records from Apple." Apple is expected to announce record revenues, earnings, iPhone sales, iPad sales, and Mac sales.
Here are the numbers Apple needs to beat today for an upside surprise when it announces after the markets close:
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$299 Droid RAZR MAXX To Hit Verizon Shelves On January 26
Looks like that flubbed product page turned out to be right after all -- Verizon Wireless has just announced that the ever-so-slightly-tweaked Droid RAZR MAXX will indeed be hitting store shelves on January 26.
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Producteev Drops Slew Of New Apps; Now Lets You Crowdsource Your Tasks On TaskRabbit
Today, Producteev is unveiling a slew of new apps, including a significantly upgraded web app, iPhone and Android mobile apps, and new Windows 7 and Mac desktop apps. The startup is reaching for the (asymptotic?) goal of universal, or at least cross-platform, task management, as professionals and businesses want (and need) to create and store tasks across platforms, devices, and services -- from email and IMs to voicemails and notes. And they're on their way.
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Mobile App Highlight Gives You A 6th Sense About Who’s Nearby
Checkins are not the future. They interrupt the moment and quickly become outdated. Highlight, a mobile app launching today, offers a better gateway to serendipitous meetups. All you do is download Highlight, turn it on, and let it run passively in the background. Then when you come within a few blocks of another Highlight user who's your Facebook friend or that you have friends or interests in common with, Highlight sends you a push notification and lets you message them.
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Facebook Timeline Now Pushed To Everyone, Users Get A Week To Clean Up Profiles
You can run, but you can't hide. Facebook's biggest user interface overhaul since the Wall, the Facebook Timeline, is now becoming mandatory for all users. According to the company, over the next few weeks, everyone will get the new Timeline. And here's the important part: when you do, you'll have just seven days to preview what's there now, and hide anything you don't want others to see.
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Location-Based Shopping App Shopkick Now 3 Million Users Strong; 1B Deals Viewed
Shopkick, an innovative geo-coupon system that is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, SV Angel and others, is debuting a number of momentum numbers today. The startup's service now has 3 million active users, up from 2.3 million active users in September.
Here's how Shopkicks works. Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is d...
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Onavo’s Data-Compressing Mobile App Raises $10 Million Series B From Horizons, Motorola Ventures
Onavo, makers of the money-saving, data-compressing app mobile app, just raised $10 million in Series B funding. Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm of Li Ka-shing, led the investment along with Motorola Mobility Ventures, the strategic equity investment arm of Motorola Mobility, Inc.
The company's previous investors, Sequoia Capital and Magma Venture Partners, also participated in the round.
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Was Megaupload Targeted Because Of Its Upcoming Megabox Digital Jukebox Service?
Last Thursday the US Justice Department came down hard on Megaupload and its mega founder, Kim Dotcom. In the days since, there has been a shake-up of sorts in the digital storage realm. Several smaller sites have drastically changed their business models. Others, like MediaFire, reached out to me after I published this post attempting to distance themselves from Megaupload.
However, yesterday, a new theory surfaced that indicates Megaupload's demise had less to do with piracy than previously ...
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New iOS Hack Lets You Natively Tweet By Talking To Siri
There's no shortage of novel things you can strongarm Siri into doing for you these days, but sometimes it's the little things that get me excited.
While not as innately flashy as being able to start a car, a new (and currently nameless) tweak from developer InfectionFX does something that Siri should have been able to do from the beginning: tweet for you.
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Vimeo Gets Its First Facelift Since 2007
Popular video site Vimeo is now starting to roll out a big redesign of its website.
If you're a casual user of the site like me, you might not notice some of the changes to the site, and indeed probably don't think of Vimeo as having a design that was particularly in need of updating. However, CEo Dae Mellencamp says the design actually hasn't been updated since 2007: "In Web years, that's a lifetime."
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Verizon Posts A Net Loss Of $2.02B In Q4 2011
Ever since the AT&T/T-Mobile saga came to a grinding halt, you'd think that Verizon would be enjoying its reign in peace. But it would seem that the company has posted a net loss of $2.02 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011.
At the same time a year earlier, Verizon was seeing a profit of $2.64 billion.
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Full Circle: Boxee Brings OTA HDTV And Basic Cable To The Boxee Box
Boxee just reinvented the box. The Boxee Box is no longer just a media streamer, thanks to the just-released Boxee Live TV. The little USB ATSC tuner integrates OTA HDTV and basic cable seamlessly into the Boxee Box's menu system, and I found it's as wonderful as it sounds. The little box is now the cord cutter's best friend (if it wasn't already).
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ScholarPro Intelligently Matches Students With Educational Scholarships
Chicago-based ScholarPro is launching today as an intelligent matching system for students and educational scholarships. Designed to ease the search and application process, ScholarPro's adaptive matching engine promises to deliver smarter, targeted lists of scholarships. It aims to fix the current dated process that require students to navigate complex application processes and then fail to deliver relevant results.
On the site, you answer a few simple adaptive questions, such as where you are...
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CouchSurfing Gets More Cash As Point Nine Capital Becomes Its First European Investor
Exclusive - Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm Point Nine Capital has become the first European investor in CouchSurfing, a site that helps travelers connect with locals worldwide to share accommodation, experiences and whatnot.
The investment is in fact an extension of the $7.6 million Series A round raised from Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network in August 2011.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe.
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500 Startups Grad OneSchool Raises $750K For College Student-Focused App
OneSchool, a free mobile app for college students which provides easy access to maps, course schedules, directories, bus routes, news, student groups and more, is announcing its official launch today in eight universities around the U.S. The company is also revealing it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups, Learn Capital and Magnolia Ventures.
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Xobni Brings Contact Manager Smartr To The iPhone
As we reported last September, Xobni rebranded its email contact manager Smartr and launched Android and Gmail apps out of private beta. Today, Xobni is debuting the iPhone version of Smartr.
The Smartr Cloud automatically extracts all contacts from your iPhone's email data (currently integrated with Outlook or Gmail), as well as data from social networks, and makes them easily searchable. A complete profile is created for each contact, including a photo, job title, phone numbers, company detai...
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Online Job Marketplace Elance Raises $16M From Kleiner Perkins, NEA And The Stripes Group
Online job marketplace Elance has raised $16 million in new capital led by the Stripes Group with existing investors, New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participating.
Elance is a service that allows for companies and individuals to hire and pay independent professionals and contractors online and in the cloud. Elance provides companies with the tools to hire, view work as it progresses and pay for results, replacing traditional outsourcing outlets.
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Fitness Tracker Fitbit Raises $12M To Market New Wi-Fi Enabled Smart Scale, Aria
Fitness technology startup and TechCrunch 50 finalist Fitbit has raised $12 Million in Series C funding from existing investors Foundry Group, True Ventures, SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures.
The company offers a device called the Fitbit Tracker and a companion web-based fitness data aggregation technology that tracks weight, nutrition, exercise, sleeping schedules and other health related data for users (you can read more about how Fitbit works here.)
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The Nikkei: Sony Interested In Buying A 20%-30% Stake In Olympus
More news on the Sony-Olympus alliance that's supposed to be announced soon: Japan's biggest business daily The Nikkei is reporting today that big S is interested in purchasing a stake as large as "20%-30%" in its potential, scandal-hit partner (that would be up from the 0.03% Sony currently owns).
The capital and business alliance would be mainly aimed at bringing together Sony's strength in imaging sensor technology with Olympus' expertise in endoscopes and other medical equipment.
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Daily Crunch: All Pass
Here are some of yesterday’s posts from TechCrunch Gadgets: Kickstarter: eye3, An Affordable Aerial Photography Drone Federal Judge Rules You May Be Forced To Provide Decryption Password Sony Claims New RGBW Sensors Improve Exposure, Low-Light Performance New RIM CEO: “I Don’t Think There Is A Drastic Change Needed” Hitachi And Mitsubishi Stop Domestic Production Of TVs, Optical Discs
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Sonos Urges Users To Install A Security Update To Protect Their Private Data
Sonos this morning sent out an email to users advising them to immediately update their wireless music system software with a security "enhancement" in order to plug a hole that "in rare cases" could have been exploited by malicious people to gain access to sensitive, personal customer data.
In the message, which was also posted on its forum, Sonos says it is not aware of any breaches so far:
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Chart: Android Is Catching Up To iOS In Mobile Video Views
A year ago in January, 2011, Apple dominated mobile video views, with iOS devices accounting for 87 percent of all mobile views, according to data from video encoding and short-url service Vid.ly. Android had a scant 5 percent. By December, 2011, Android's share of mobile video watching grew to 32 percent, while Apple's shrank to 52 percent.
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Mark Zuckerberg Spray Paints Graffiti On Real Facebook Wall (Video)
Mark Zuckerberg added his touch to a graffiti wall at Facebook's new headquarters. In the video above, graffiti artist David Choe, who was commissioned to paint the wall, incorporates a stick figure painted by the Facebook founder into a mohawked trollish creature wearing a wife beater with a raised fist. It's quite a transformation.
Zuckerberg needs to practice first, admitting: "I've actually never spray painted anything."
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MusicShake Brings Its Music Creation Tool For Novices To The Classroom
At some point, you may have found yourself bored out of your mind by your current music selection, and resisting the urge to try one of the eleventy million music discovery services out there, you think, "By God, I'm going to do it myself." You rush home, download a music suite, start furiously clicking and recording, only to be sooner or later confronted by the reality that you have no idea what you're doing, and reprimand yourself for turning down those music lessons in fourth grade.
The Kore...
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tumblecloud Unveils A Collaborative Take On Slideshows
An startup called tumblecloud is launching the public beta test today for its easy way to create high-quality slideshows.
Founder and CEO Brian Andreas (an artist who also runs the boutique publishing house StoryPeople) describes the company's "clouds" as a new form digital storytelling, but they're probably easier to think of as multimedia slideshows. tumblecloud breaks the process down into three steps — grab, mix, and share. You can pull photos, music, and other media from your computer or...
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PowerVoice Launches New Social Media Marketing Platform, Pays Users To Post Ads On Twitter, Facebook
PowerVoice, a new social media marketing company founded by former federal consultant at IBM Ryan Landau and ex-Googler (and brother) Andrew Landau, is launching today. The service compensates users for sharing brands' messages on social networks in a somewhat similar fashion to Adly. However, unlike Adly, it's not focused solely on enabling celebrities and other public figures to earn additional income through recommendations. Instead, on PowerVoice, anyone can sign up and get paid to promote b...
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TechCrunch |
Home Furnishings And Design Site LuxeYard Adds Concierge Buying To Flash Sales Model
LuxeYard, a luxury home furnishings and decor site, is launching its e-commerce platform today, but adding a twist to the flash sales model.
Similar to sites line One Kings Lane and Gilt, LuxeYard offers up to 70 percent discounts on furniture, home decor and other accessories in daily sales. However, LuxeYard also offers what it calls 'concierge buying,' which allows members to request items they would like to purchase at a discounted price by posting photos to LuxeYard’s Facebook page. The ...
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CEO Invests Another $500K In CrowdOptic’s “New Social Medium”
Jon Fisher, co-founder and CEO of startup CrowdOptic, just told me that he has invested another $500,000 so the company can build out what it's calling a "new social medium."
The idea is to create automatic clusters of people based on their location and line of sight. I met with the CrowdOptic team this weekend — they demonstrated the technology by whipping out their phones and taking photos of the same spot off San Francisco's Embarcadero. CrowdOptic can detect when people are all looking at...
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TechCrunch |
Federal Judge Rules You May Be Forced To Provide Decryption Password
In July, we wrote about an ongoing case wherein a woman accused of fraud was being asked by the prosecution to provide the password to access her computer's data, which otherwise would remain encrypted and unreadable, weakening their case. They got permission to compel her to reveal the password, but the defense said that it was unconstitutional to do so, as providing that information was essentially self-incriminating testimony.
The defense and the prosecution disagree, there is no single comp...
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TechCrunch |
SigFig: CES Gets Public Investors Excited About Companies, But Stock Prices Don’t Go Up
The Consumer Electronics Show, the turgid January gadget fest in Las Vegas, has been widely seen in the industry as a great place to show off your wares if you're not Apple. But is that true? SigFig, the stealth investing startup that's growing out of stock portfolio manager Wikinvest, has run some numbers on the market performance of the show's big-company attendees during the event.
The main trend is pretty clear: there's lots of buying and selling, but no significant gains. And actually, lo...
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TechCrunch |
Microsoft To Ditch “Microsoft Points”? Oh, Please Let It Be True.
Microsoft Points are dead! Or, they're dying. At least according to InsideMobileApps. Dead, dying, being taken to a farm, whatever — but man do I hope it's true.
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TechCrunch |
Early Facebook App Causes Is Being Reborn As A Polished Web Site For Good
Causes launched with the Facebook Platform back in 2007 as a way to help friends more easily campaign for the social causes of their choice. The app benefited from getting in early on the platform, being the only one in its category (other developers were building poking apps or games at the time), and from having a tight relationship with Facebook via cofounder Sean Parker.
The product, though, has lost some momentum over the years -- at least until a multi-part revamp that the company is in t...
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TechCrunch |
With Self-Serve Ads On The Way, Twitter Adds Security Startup Dasient To Its Ad Product Team
In preparation for a ramp up of its monetization efforts and its first beta phase of self serve ads, Twitter has bought security startup Dasient, which specializes in malware and fighting spam. The team will be integrated into "revenue engineering," a.k.a the ad product team under directors Kevin Weil and Alex Roetter.
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TechCrunch |
Kickstarter: eye3, An Affordable Aerial Photography Drone
A couple years back, I got to take part in the production of a music video being shot locally on a RED and filmed partially on board a custom helicopter build. It was interesting watching the operator and director work using the rig, but I was struck by how very specialized the copter was. Built from scratch by AerialPan Imaging, it was far from a personalized or affordable solution.
A new Kickstarter project called eye3 intends to make just that: an affordable aerial platform that can be autom...
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TechCrunch |
Megaupload Bust Causes Cyberlocker Panic – But It’s Only Temporary
Oh god! Megaupload has fallen and its brethren are dropping like flies! The age of the cyberlocker is passing. No longer will we be able to host a large file somewhere for free and have someone else download it.
Actually, it's not quite so dire, but it's true that a number of major file hosts have either shut down, closed part of their service, or changed the way they operate. It's not the first time that file-sharing tools have received a shock to the system, though, and this little contractio...
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TechCrunch |
A Tale Of Two Cities: Silicon Valley And Hollywood
Silicon Valley and Hollywood: so close geographically, yet so distant digitally and philosophically. You would think we’d understand each other better. In the Valley, we circulate pitch decks. In Hollywood, they shop around scripts. We strive for exits, while they sell distribution rights. They have record labels, we have venture capitalists. They have agents, we have recruiters. People on Sunset Blvd. obsess over the next “hit” that will draw viewers, ears, or butts in seats. On Sand Hill...
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TechCrunch |
5 Things RIM’s New CEO Absolutely Must Not Do
Whenever a company appoints new leadership here in the tech world, the blogosphere seems to unanimously post about what the new top dog needs to do to make his or her company better. I promise, you'll see dozens of headlines today talking about what Thorsten Heins must do in order to save BlackBerry.
In many cases, I agree with what's being said. RIM's in trouble, and without a new vision the company risks slipping even further behind the competition. You know... "the other fruit company."
S...
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TechCrunch |
Gobbler Grabs $1.75 Million To Help Musicians Keep Track Of Their Files
In the same digital asset management space as ResourceSpace and Northplains, Gobbler -- sort of like a fancy Dropbox built specifically for backing up, transferring and organizing high bandwidth media files like music, videos and photos (Mike writes a lot about why it's cool here) -- has raised another $1.75 million in financing. Investors include ff Venture Capital, Black Ocean Group, Mindjolt CTO Aber Whitcomb, Facebook VP Dan Rose, Former Googler Jermey Wenokur, Science's Mike Jones, and Lowe...
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TechCrunch |
The TechFellow Awards: Nominate Innovators To Win $100K Angel Funds
The TechFellow Awards is different. Rather than just recognizing outstanding innovators, each of its 20 winners receive $100,000 to invest in a startup of their choice. Its purpose? To fund the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurship.
Today, Founders Fund, TechCrunch, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) announce the opening of nominations for the third annual TechFellows Awards. From now until February 17th, visit the new TechFellows website and click "Nominate a TechFellow". There you ca...
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TechCrunch |
Virtual Styling And Fashion Community Polyvore Raises $14M From DAG Ventures, Goldman Sachs And Others
Polyvore, the startup lets web shoppers pull their favorite items any online store and mix and match to create personalized outfits online, has raised $14 million in Series C financing led by DAG Ventures and with participation from Goldman Sachs, Vivi Nevo (NV Investments), Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. This brings the company's total funding to over $22 million. The funding was originally reported by the New York Times.
Polyvore allows users to create fashion “sets,” which are d...
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TechCrunch |
Google+ Allows Pseudonyms, But Only If They’re “Established”
Google's Bradley Horowitz just announced that as part of a more "inclusive" naming policy, Google+ will now be allow people to employ pseudonyms as their user names.
The company's previous insistence on real names has been the subject of much discussion — and Google itself said earlier that it's trying to refine the policy to encompass different use cases.
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TechCrunch |
Facebook And Twitter Engineers Fight Google “Search Plus Your World” With “Don’t Be Evil”
Sometimes the nicest of people, when faced with the pressure of competition, make evil stupid decisions. That's pretty much what happened to Google when it realized that Facebook was about to eat its lunch with regards to social data on the web -- so it started doing dumb things, like building Google Buzz, Wave and most recently rolling out "Search Plus Your World" which to the rest of the world just looks like "Search Plus Google+."
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TechCrunch |
No “Drastic Change Needed”? Looks Like RIM’s Stockholders Disagree
Good news: You've been promoted to CEO! Bad news: Public perception of your company has tanked over the past few years, and your stockholders are looking at you to save the day. What ever you do first, just hope that you don't give the world that sound bite that suggests you think everything is okay and that nothing at the company needs to change. Whoops!
Less than 24 hours after RIM's executive shakeup, the company is already seeing its first "drastic change": its stock price.
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TechCrunch |
Sony Claims New RGBW Sensors Improve Exposure, Low-Light Performance
Sony has announced a new line of image sensors that will, in all likelihood, end up in dozens of smartphone models. The improvement is not in megapixels, which have more or less hit a ceiling, but in the actual layout of the light-sensitive wells that make up the pixels in the image.
The new sensors have, in addition to the usual red, green, and blue-filtered pixels, an unfiltered pixel element as well that will accept any wavelength of light. It can't be used to determine color, but it will ad...
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TechCrunch |
Does Your Business Need Mobile Apps? Bizness Apps (& More) Give You The Premium Tools
Let's say you want to give your small business a mobile presence. You'd like to develop some mobile apps, but you don't have the time, money, or technical skills to do it yourself, and you're not too excited about the idea of paying a developer an armload to do it for you. Of course, on the other hand, you may be willing to pay a little more of a premium to have someone else do the work for you, work with you directly, and walk you through the process, customizing your app as you go.
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TechCrunch |
Thanks To Santa, Tablets And E-Readers Are (Almost) Everywhere
Ownership of tablets and e-book readers saw a big spike over the holidays — in fact, it nearly doubled in the United States, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.
The study was based on telephone surveys conducted in mid-December and January, which found that ownership of both device types nearly doubled in just a month. Now a total of 29 percent of US adults own a tablet or an e-reader, or possibly both.
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TechCrunch |
#BlackoutSOPA: How 87,000 People Taught Us About The Future of Online Activism
At 1pm on Monday January 9th, Greg Hochmuth and I launched #BlackoutSOPA, a site that lets you alter your Twitter profile pic to display SOPA opposition. 15 minutes later the site went down due to more traffic than we expected. That demand was just the beginning. Over the next 10 days, tens of thousands of people used the tool to reach tens of millions of their followers.
Since then, #BlackoutSOPA has received coverage in the Wall St Journal, TechCrunch, the New York Times and several other pro...
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TechCrunch |
News Aggregator Wavii Wants To “Make Facebook Out Of Google,” Bring Relevant Content To You
The problem of how to find relevant content on the web has yet to be solved on a mass scale. You've got cyborg news aggregators like Techmeme and Google news and social aggregators like Reddit and Digg competing with Twitter and the Facebook Newsfeed, all of them trying to get you the news that you want to know, as fast as possible.
The Seattle-based Wavii, which has been in super stealth mode until now, takes a different approach to the problem. The startup uses natural language processing and...
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TechCrunch |
Supreme Court Rules Search Warrants Needed For GPS Tracking
The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously decided today to uphold citizens' Fourth Amendement rights in the GPS tracking case which would have allowed the U.S. government to track a suspects' cars without a warrant. The court states that the Fourth Amendement's protection of "persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," extends to vehicles.
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TechCrunch |
Evi Arrives In Town To Go Toe-to-Toe With Siri
When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S I thought to myself, who else could do this? It would need to be a search engine with natural language processing, but also behave in the manner of artificial intelligence and respond to voice recognition. One company that sprung to mind was True Knowledge. I pinged them. Are you working on a Siri type application, I asked? Interesting question, was their response. And then they went quiet.
Now they can reveal what they've been building. Evi is a new iPhone (i...
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TechCrunch |
1-Month Old BuzzDoes Scores $750K For Mobile App Marketing Platform
BuzzDoes, a newly launched word-of-mouth marketing tool for mobile app developers, has secured $750,000 in seed funding from angel investors and Proxima Ventures. The tool, which operates as a drop-in SDK (software development kit), allows developers to add a viral recommendation feature to their application using a single line of code.
Once installed, app users are "incentivized" (meaning rewarded), for recommending the app in question to their friends.
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TechCrunch |
Nimble Goes After Salesforce, Wants To Be The “Pandora Of Contacts”
Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. "We are effectively Salesforce but social," he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tus...
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TechCrunch |
Asus Transformer Prime Users Still Reporting Major GPS Issue After Official Fix
Right on cue, Asus started rolling out Ice Cream Sandwich to Transformer Prime tablets last week. The update not only brought Android 4.0 to the tablet, but also a fix for the lackluster GPS performance. But apparently the GPS is borked for some. Users are still experiencing poor performance and worse yet, some are even stating that the GPS no longer works in ICS when it did prior to the update.
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TechCrunch |
Polar Mobile Raises $6 Million For HTML5-Based Publishing Platform, MediaEverywhere
Polar Mobile, a digital media platform provider that builds apps for some of the biggest media companies, today announced it has secured an additional $6 million in funding. The new round, led by growth equity firm Georgian Partners, joins more than $3 million invested in the company previously from private investors, bringing its total funding to $9 million.
The company is also announcing its plans for a new product line called MediaEverywhere, an HTML5-based content distribution solution for ...
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TechCrunch |
Cloud Computing Software Company Joyent Raises $85 Million To Pursue Global Growth
Cloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.
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TechCrunch |
DLD 2012 – Drew Houston: “Yes, Steve Jobs Called Dropbox A Feature”
In a conversation with WIRED UK's David Rowan on stage at the DLD Conference in Germany, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that he did in fact have a "great meeting" with the late Steve Jobs in 2009.
Houston said about the get-together that Jobs had heard of them and asked to meet with him. Even though he was generally gracious, Houston said, Jobs expressed that he felt Dropbox was more of a feature than a product or business and gave him a "bit of a hard time" about that.
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TechCrunch |
LG’s Quad-Core 2012 Flagship Leaks: The Poorly Code-Named X3
Other than the LG Spectrum, LG didn't have much to show off by way of phones at this year's CES show. But that doesn't mean that something special isn't in the works.
In fact, Pocketnow reports that LG's 2012 flagship will run a Tegra 3 quad-core chipset and go by the name X3, at least for now. The phone likely won't show up on store shelves until spring or summer, but we should hear an announcement (including a retail name) come Mobile World Congress in February.
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TechCrunch |
SoundCloud Hits 10 Million Users, Releases New Sounds+Slides Feature
SoundCloud still isn't conforming our story that they recently raised a $50 million round led by Kleiner Perkins - but today at the DLD conference in Munich they have announced a pretty significant milestone - hitting 10 million users. SoundCloud is gunning to be a kind of YouTube for sound, but with a wide variety of apps that can plug into its platform, and a business model which encourages upgrades to a premium paid experience. It competes with the like of Audioboo to some extent, but that is...
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TechCrunch |
YouTube Reaches 4 Billion Views Per Day
Google's video-sharing property YouTube now sees 4 billion video views per day. That's a 25% increase over the past eight months, the company told Reuters in a report released this morning. There's now approximately 60 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, compared with roughly 48 hours uploaded in May.
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TechCrunch |
DLD 2012 – Brian Chesky: “Average Airbnb Host In NYC Pockets $21,000 A Year”
Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, took the stage this afternoon at the DLD Conference in Germany for a keynote covering his views about the 'sharing economy'.
In terms of news, there isn't much to report based on his talk, but Chesky talked about the fact that sharing used to be an integral part of human life and 'hardwired' into our DNA, that it disappeared after the second World War because of increased consumer spending and individualism, and that we're now at the beginning of the ...
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TechCrunch |
New RIM CEO: “I Don’t Think There Is A Drastic Change Needed”
RIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins has only been at the reigns for an evening, but he did a very "BlackBerry" job of presenting himself to the media this morning on his introductory media call.
It felt a lot like the media calls of yore, with Balsillie and Lazaridis at the helm. Especially when Heins referred to Apple as "the other fruit company," noting the two companies shared strategy of vertical integration. Unfortunately, vertical integration of software and hardware is about all that these two...
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TechCrunch |
Intel Acquires Fabric Technology InfiniBand From Qlogic For $125M
Intel is announcing an acquisition today—the company has acquired the InfiniBand business from networking and hosting company Qlogic. Intel says a significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join the company. The acquisition amount was $125 million in cash.
InfiniBand is a fabric technology that provides the communications links for data flow between processors and I/O devices. The scalable technology is used to connect servers in high-p...
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TechCrunch |
Baseline, Accel Put $15M In Online Privacy Certification Company TRUSTe
Online privacy certification company TRUSTe has raised $15 million in Series C funding led by Baseline Ventures with existing investors Accel Partners, DAG Ventures and Jafco Ventures participating. This brings TRUSTe's total funding to $37 million.
TRUSTe certifies that companies are meeting online privacy standards for consumers. Websites which are certified by the company bear a "trustmark," indicating that the site is secure. TRUSTe says more than 82 percent of consumers who recognize TRUST...
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TechCrunch |
Fantasy Shopper Confirms Its Hottness With $3.3m First Money From Accel And NEA
Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online and offline retailers. It's gained a lot of traction since it's launch last October, especially amongst women and we've heard on the grapevine that it was piquing the interest of investors for some months since emerging from the European Seed accelerator HackFWD.
Today that intense interest has been confirmed with a first round of funding led by top tier venture firms Accel Partn...
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TechCrunch |
Mykonos Helps Companies Battle Hackers, Raises $4 Million
Mykonos (the security software company, not the lovely Greek island) has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backer Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex.
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TechCrunch |
Clearstream Promises to Bring Transparency to Video Ads
A new startup called Clearstream says it's time to tame the "Wild West" of online video advertising.
According to co-founder Brian Mandelbaum, the idea for the company came from his time at ad agencies including Razorfish and Saatchi & Saatchi. The problem, he says, is that there's no good way to distinguish between the high- and low-quality ad placements. When you buy placement on a video ad network, that ad could be running before a video on a premium site, but it could also be running in...
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TechCrunch |
Report: Olympus In Final Stages Of Negotiations To Partner With Sony
It would be a tie-up between two giants: Diamond Weekly, a major Japanese business journal, is reporting [JP] on its website today that scandal-hit Olympus is about to ink a capital and business alliance deal with Sony. Olympus has been under fire for months, after it was revealed the company has covered up large losses for the past 20 years.
At some point, Olympus was in danger of getting de-listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but it's now on a 3-year "probation" that requires the company to i...
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Tiny Tower Developers Call Out Zynga For Copying Their ...
