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Twitter Acquires, Shuts Down Social News Startup Summify
Summify, a startup that uses social data to create a personalized news digest, just announced that it has been acquired by Twitter.
This sounds like a talent acquisition on Twitter's part — in other words, the main purpose of the acquisition was probably hiring the Summify team. Some of Summify's feature have been immediately disabled, it's no longer accepting new users, and in a few weeks, Summify says it will shut down the current product entirely. Meanwhile, the startup will be moving from...
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Appstores.com Launches An ‘AdSense For Mobile Apps’
If you're a developer of applications for iOS or Android — or a publisher looking to better monetize your mobile web content — you're probably going to be interested in this post.
Today Appstores.com is launching what it's calling an 'AdSense for apps' — in other words, an ad unit that publishers can embed in their mobile websites that will automatically display ads for native applications that are relevant to whatever text appears on the page. For example, if a participating publisher...
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LinkedIn Shutters Twitter Widget ‘Tweets’ Because Of ‘Extremely Low Usage’
LinkedIn is planning to shut down its Tweets application as of January 31, 2012. As you may remember, the Tweets application allowed users find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter, view Twitter feeds of connections, recommend Twitter users to follow, and more.
In an announcement, LinkedIn says that the application will be removed from all profiles and the homepage. From the announcement: At LinkedIn, we want to provide a simple and efficient experience for members like you. ...
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Keen On…Inside Apple: How Apple Is Organized Like A Terrorist Cell (TCTV)
The more we know about Apple, it seems, the less we really know. According to the journalist and writer Adam Lashinsky, America's most admired company is also America's least understandable company. And that's why he wrote Inside Apple - to reveal to the world how, as the subtitle of his book says, the Company Really Works.
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Vibrant Media Boosts In-Image Ads With Acquisition
You may not have heard of Vibrant Media, but you've almost certainly seem its product — specifically, the "in-text advertising" that pops up when you click on double-underlined words on certain websites.
Well, Vibrant is expanding beyond text, and to that end, it has announced its first acquisition, of an image-based ad network called Image Space Media. The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
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Wait A Second, There Are Only 8 Apple Textbooks Available At Launch
Apple is making a play for the textbook market with its launch today of iBooks 2 and the new textbooks within that app. It's Apple, so they are going to reinvent the textbook industry, right?
Well, maybe not today. If you fire up your iPad and update to the latest version of iBooks (Apple's app for books with its own store separate from iTunes), you can check out all of the new textbooks Apple just introduced. All 8 of them. That's right, there are only 8 textbooks available in the new format.
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JackThreads Announces Unique Mobile App For Android And iOS
Thrillist-owned JackThreads has just announced the availability of their first mobile for Android and iPhone. Built by Fueled Mobile Design and Development using designs and user experience built in-house, the app allows shoppers to browse new deals and sales as they are announced on the site and, if so inclined, make purchases.
I spoke to lead developer Chris Steib who said that JackThreads saw that much of the traffic was coming through mobile sites, something they had not initially expected.
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Some Key Subtle Details From Apple’s Textbook Event
Today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple held an event to talk about two key things: "Reinventing textbooks" and "Reinventing curriculum". But perhaps lost amid the tentpole announcements (iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the all-new iTunes U) were some subtleties of those products and Apple's plans for the education space.
Among them:
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iPads And Digital Textbooks Do Not Belong In Classrooms Yet
I do not want my children learning math proofs on iPads. I simply do not see the value in it. iPads will not help with identifying sentence clauses or writing an essay. There's a place for interactive learning and there's not. It's a clear line. Give science and history teachers iPads loaded with demos, videos and soundbites. Allow children to pinch and zoom DNA strands and the inner workings of WWI trenches. But make my kids do math drills on paper with a dull pencil. Please.
Simply put, the m...
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No More Swiping: Card.io Launches New Consumer App, Developer Tools Which “See” Your Credit Card
Card.io, the toolkit for mobile app developers which lets users pay for items by holding their credit card up to the phone's camera, is today launching a consumer-facing app. It's something like Square, but without the dongle. It's also not aimed at merchants, as Square is. Instead, the new Card.io applications, available for both iPhone and Android, are meant for person-to-person payments. Splitting lunch, borrowing money, paying for gas - that sort of thing.
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New iTunes U App Hits iTunes With Over 500,000 Free Lectures, Videos & Books
Following this morning's education event, Apple has launched a new, dedicated iOS application called "iTunes U." This educational content portal, previously available only in iTunes, has now arrived in the App Store for all iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. It has also undergone a major revamp so as to better complement Apple's newly-announced educational offerings, including iBooks 2 and its iBooks Author Tool, which allows anyone to easily create books and textbooks.
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Nike Officially Announces The Nike+ FuelBand
Exercise gadgetry seems to be all the rage this season, with products like the Jawbone UP and MotoACTV entering the marketplace. Nike of all companies will certainly not be left behind, and has today announced a new wristband called the FuelBand.
Not unlike its competitors, the FuelBand measures time, steps and calories during your fitness routine.
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AppAddictive Raises $1.2 Million For Drag-And-Drop Facebook Page Builder & Ad Platform
AppAddictive, a newly launched DreamIt-backed startup from its 2011's NYC class, has just scored $1.2 million in seed funding for its drag-and-drop Facebook page creation tools and (forthcoming) ad platform. Designed to bring the same tools the big guys use to smaller businesses and other industry verticals, AppAddictive will offer dozens of easy-to-install applications for Facebook pages, including things like custom landing pages, photo and video galleries, static HTML, quizzes and more.
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TCTV: Hundreds Rally In The Streets Of NYC To Defend The Internet
Yesterday, as some of the biggest sites on the web 'blacked out' in bold protests of the deeply flawed anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in several cities across the US to take the fight offline.
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German Clone King Faces Battle With Former Staff, And Satirical Dance Track Of His Memos
Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator most famous for slavishly cloning US companies like Zappos, AirBnB and now Pinterest in Germany, now faces a new competitor - in the form of some of its key employees. As we reported recently the core team of Rocket, lead by Oliver Samwer and his two other brothers, left to set up something new, and now we know what it is.
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Houghton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Pearson First Textbook Publishing Partners For Apple’s iBooks 2
Today at Apple's education event, the company introduced iBooks 2, a textbook platform that effectively transforms $200 textbooks into iPad apps at a much more reasonable price. But of course, a textbook platform isn't worth a thing without the educational powerhouse publishers behind it.
Luckily, the first up to the bat on the iBooks 2 platform are names we know well: Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They're responsible for 90 percent of the textbooks sold.
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Apple Isn’t The Only Disruptor: How Amazon Is Killing Publishers
While we're on the subject of publishing, Sarah Lacy found a great monologue on the current state of publishing and how, in short, Amazon is tearing old publishing houses a new one.
Publishers, like music producers, don't make money piddling around with 50 mid-list books. They make money buying (for millions) and selling (a few) books by human black holes like Snooki and the Kardashians. They make money selling Stephen King novels and Newt Gingrich screeds. They make money, to mix industries, b...
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The Shareholder Pitchforks Are Out For Netflix
Armed with pitchforks and hindsight, class action lawyers are gathering up mobs of angry shareholders who lost money and going after the company. Earlier this week a lawsuit was filed against Netflix senior management for not disclosing the short-term nature of its contracts to stream certain movies. And this morning a shareholder rights group called Robbins Umeda announced an "investigation" which could lead to another class-action suit.
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Apple Unveils New iBooks Author Tool, Not Just For Textbooks
Apple has spent the past few moments demoing all the new education-friendly featured in iBooks 2, but they have just now answered the question of how authors can create that kind of rich content. All the magic happens in a new OSX application called iBooks Author, which gives users a simple way to integrate different types of media in order to create iBooks of any stripe.
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Sea Change: Apple Guts Textbook Publishing
The days of the $500 college textbook bills are, it seems, over. With Apple's announcement of iBooks 2, the world of textbooks is changed forever.
Education is a hard nut to crack. There are bright spots and clever new ideas, but technology hasn't quite figured out how to do a better job than the "old ways." That's why Apple's decision to launch iBooks 2 and the attendant editing tools is so important: it tears down a number of entrenched technologies while maintaining the scaffolding of famil...
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The Soul Still Burns: Classic Brawler Soul Calibur Lands On iOS
Ready for a blast of late 90's fighting game nostalgia? Well, get those thumbs ready, because Namco's arcade/Dreamcast classic Soul Calibur has just been released for iOS.
I enjoyed a long-standing fling with Soul Calibur in my younger days, mostly because it was the only fighting game I was ever good at. My skills seem to have dulled considerably over the intervening years, though the touch controls probably don't help much.
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Apple: 20,000 Education iPad Apps Developed; 1.5 Million Devices In Use At Schools
At Apple's education event today, the company revealed a number of compelling stats regarding iPad use in the education and learning space. Apple's SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller announced that there are currently 20,000 education and learning applications that have been built for the iPad.
He added that 1.5 million iPads are currently in use in educational institutions and schools. Obviously, Apple is looking to increase this number, which is why the company is partnering with publishing house...
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Apple Announces iBooks 2, A New Textbook Experience For The iPad
"Education is deep in our DNA, and it has been since the very beginning," said Phil Schiller, Apple's SVP of Worldwide Marketing. On that thought Apple just announced iBooks 2.
This move is centered around reinvent the textbook. Schiller explained today that Apple sees textbooks as amazing devices, but they're heavy, not searchable or durable. According to Apple the iPad is the perfect counter. It's portable, durable, interactive, searchable, current and capable of containing even richer conte...
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Foxconn Chief Equates Employees To Animals
While I suspect there's a lot lost in translation here,Foxconn chairman Terry Gou made a wildly distasteful joke this week at the Taipei Zoo, saying (according to WantChinaTimes): "Hon Hai (Foxconn) has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache."
The comments came during a presentation at the zoo where the superintendant Chin Shih-chien gave a talk on feeding and taking care of his charges. Gou has apparentl...
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Here Come The iPad 2S/3 Cases!
It's that time again, friends. Apple rumors are swirling and case makers are trying to get a jump in their competitive field. So much so that a Chinese manufacturing company "Chineestyle Co., Limited" is actually selling cases for the next-gen iPad, which they are calling the iPad 2S. Yep, it's that time again.
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Samsung: One In Ten South Koreans Now Owns A Samsung Galaxy S II
It's not really news to say that the Galaxy S II is a hit, but it has actually become a mega hit in South Korea. According to maker Samsung, the Android handset has been sold a whopping 5 million times in its domestic market since release at the end of April 2011. In other words, a little more than 10% of the country's entire population (48 million people) are now proud owners of the phone.
It's the first cell phone that has reached this milestone in mobile-crazy South Korea, according to Japan...
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Report: 798 Daily Deal Sites Folded In The Last 6 Months Of 2011
According to a new report from Daily Deal Media, a great source of news, information and data about the hot daily deal industry, there's a whole lot of consolidation and death going on among the many Groupon wannabes on this planet - at least in some regions. Daily Deal Media is keeping most of the good stuff behind a steep paywall, but shared some key findings from its report in a press release earlier this morning. According to them, the world has lost close to 800 - 798 to be precise - daily ...
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Linux Foundation Expects More Enterprise Gains in 2012
The Linux Foundation is sharing the results of their latest invitation-only survey of enterprise Linux users. Their last such survey, in August 2010, revealed Linux was gaining popularity in enterprise computing. It should come as no real surprise that the latest survey shows more of the same.
A lot has happened since late 2010, and the Linux Foundation survey reflects that. In "Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users" we find that a substantial number of enterprise users "...
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The iRig PRE: A New Microphone Interface For iOS Devices
Jeez, CES is barely over and already NAMM is upon us. Unfortunately, this blogger is not in Anaheim for that event, but to be honest, I am still reeling from the few days I spent at CES with Team TechCrunch. Instead, I'll happily watch the music industry event from a safe distance this year.
I did however spy the iRig PRE while I was at CES but it was not yet ready for prime time. It has been officially announced.
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Wireless Sensor Posts Temperature, Humidity, And Radiation Levels To Twitter (Video)
Japan-based UC Technology Corp. [JP] has developed a wireless sensor that can automatically post data like temperature, humidity, illuminance, or radiation levels to Twitter. The so-called "Tsubuyaku Sensor" [JP, PDF] is mainly designed for use in food warehouses, plants, or wine cellars.
The data can be checked remotely on Twitter (the account can be set to private or public). UC Technology says that the sensor has a battery life of a year when it posts data once per minute.
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Peecho Lands $750,000 For Its ‘Cloud Print Button’
Peecho, a Dutch startup that enables anyone to sell professionally printed products from their website, mobile or desktop apps, has raised $750,000 in financing from Peak Capital and DHG Holding to boost development and marketing of its embeddable 'cloud print button' service.
Basically, their solution lets anyone sell digital content as physical products (think magazines, photo books, canvas prints and whatnot), by helping its customers hook into a network of professional print production faci...
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Former Google CIO Raises $73 Million To Reform Payday Loans With Data-Driven Startup ZestCash
ZestCash, a company founded by former Google CIO and VP of engineering Douglas Merrill to legitimize the payday loan industry, has raised $73 million round of funding. The company raised $23 million in an equity round led by Matrix Partners. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, GRP Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Lighthouse Capital Partners also fully participated in the round. The company also raised a separate $50 million line of debt financing from Victory Park Capital to...
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BigCommerce Establishes $2 Million Fund For Developers
Exclusive - E-commerce platform company BigCommerce has set up a $2 million fund for developers. With the launch of the fund, the Sydney, Australia-based company aims to sway third-party developers into submitting their integration and application ideas.
Caveat: investments in successful entries are capped at $20,000 per project.
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Hey Tagged, Badoo Has Been Around As Long And Has Bigger Revenues
As a social network aimed at helping you meet new people - don't mention the phrase 'hooking up' - Tagged's vice president of sales and marketing Steve Sarner claims other companies are only now catching onto 'social discovery' and the site is "by far the largest" in the social discovery space. Ex-squeeze me?
I'm afraid we'll have to balance this, and perhaps educate Mr Sarner a little, in case he hasn't heard of a little site called Badoo.
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Failure Is An Option: 7 Businesses That Tanked In 2011 (Slides)
About a year ago, my pal Nick De Mey from Board of Innovation shared a great slidedeck about the 10 business models that rocked 2010.
This year, the Board identified 7 business models that failed in 2011 (Slideshare link).
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Calling All Entrepreneurs: Twilio Expands APIs To 6 European Nations
A new wave of European entrepreneurs are about to start revolutionizing how we use our phones. Today, the Twilio voice API becomes available in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Poland. Additionally, Twilio's SMS API now supports UK phone numbers.
These APIs allow developers to build apps that can programatically send and receive calls and texts.
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Constant Contact Buys Mobile Loyalty Card Startup CardStar
Email marketing company Constant Contact has acquired CardStar, a digital and mobile loyalty card platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CardStar, which has over two million users, allows users to consolidate membership and rewards cards on smartphones, letting consumers use a single application rather than carrying around a series of physical cards. Consumers simply scan the cards and their accounts and information is then imported into the app. Merchants can then track con...
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Capsule Wants To Be Your One Stop Shop For (Private) Events
Events management startup Capsule describes itself as a little bit of Path, Color, Evite and GroupMe, but also none of those things according to co-founders Cyrus Farudi and Omri Cohen.
From what I can tell, the startup is attempting to fix the beleaguered events space, which is basically something which could be totally amazing if Facebook separated its Events vertical into a separate "Messenger" type app. Oh Lord please do this.
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Oops – Sony Ericsson Swings To A 207 Million Euro Net Loss In Q4 2011
Smartphone maker Sony Ericsson this morning posted a pre-tax loss of 247 million euros ($318 million) in the fourth quarter of 2011, after reporting a profit of 31 million euros in Q3 2011. The company, a 50:50 joint-venture between Sony and Ericsson, blames "intense competition", "price erosion" and effects from the flooding in Thailand as some of the main drivers for the drop.
Sales for the quarter were approximately 1.3 billion euros, down 16 percent year-on-year.
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Ticketmaster’s New Facebook App Recommends Concerts From Your Listening Activity
Of all the new Open Graph apps launched tonight, Ticketmaster's new Facebook experience is the most impressive. Sure it can share that you've "bought" tickets, but lots of apps have similar publishing functionality. What makes Ticketmaster's app cool is that it pulls your Facebook profile's music app activity from services such as Spotify or Rdio, and recommends nearby concerts of artists you actually listen to, not just those you say you Like.
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Google Fiber-Inspired Gigabit Challenge Unveils Winners; Senator Announces STOP SOPA Petition
Back in 2010, Google announced plans to build out a fiber-optic network for an entire city in the U.S., promising connection speeds of 1GB/sec, 100 times that of the norm. Naturally, over 1,000 cities applied. But only one could claim the prize, and that one was Kansas City.
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OrcaM “Reconstruction Sphere” Digitally Recreates Any Object Placed Within
Occasionally, in this line of work, I need to have a slight freak-out moment where I rave about the fact that things like this OrcaM "reconstruction sphere" actually exist. Not only does this thing look like a prop out of a sci-fi movie (or Transmetropolitan), but it acts like one as well.
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Google Collected 4.5 Million Anti-SOPA Signatures Today
Google generally gets in hot water when it is thought to be abusing its pole position in the search industry. But it's no use denying that while some moves skirt the edges of abusing monopoly, others are more than welcome. During natural disasters, for instance, Google has provided helpful links and resources for people who want to donate or volunteer. And their logo doodles pay homage to personages and events many people would otherwise have overlooked.
Today must rank among the best applicati...
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TCTV: Live At SF vs SOPA, The Biggest Tech Protest In Decades
When you hear the words "San Francisco," there's a good chance that the word "protest" will also come to mind. Or, if you're on a different wavelength, "Ron Conway."
But today, the city's favorite pasttime and its top angel investor came together at a special appearance in Civic Center Plaza to speak out against SOPA and PIPA, the two slimy "anti-piracy" bills currently worming their ways through through Congress.
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There Were More Than 2.4M Tweets About SOPA Today
Today was the internet's big protest day against SOPA and PIPA, and not surprisingly, there was plenty of discussion about the issue on Twitter. Specifically, the company tweeted that that there were more than 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets between midnight and 4pm Eastern time.
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Brass Monkey Grabs $750K To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Wii Controller For Browser Games
Six months ago, Brass Monkey had built and released some well-developed software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and beyond that, simply put, enabled gamers to turn their mobile devices into remote controllers, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps. The Brass Monkey team, CEO Chris Allen tells us, believed that bringing the functionality of a Wii controller to smart devices was something gamers could get excited about -- but, at the time, they were missing one imp...
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Facebook’s New Timeline Apps Introduce New Actions Like “Bought,” “Want” And “Love”
Facebook has partnered up with sixty different startups to add their "stories" to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel. Already apps like Fab.com, Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest,Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, and TripAdvisor have signed on to share these stories -- which go beyond what we're used to on Facebook.
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Pinterest and 60 Others Demo Open Graph Sites + Apps That Auto-Publish To Facebook
Facebook's Open Graph app launch event is underway here in San Francisco, where over 60 new Open Graph websites and apps are either demo-ing or launching remotely. The apps can publish user activity back to Timeline and Ticker, even from offsite. Launch partners include Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Gogobot, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Carl Sjogreen, Facebook project manager, also announced that Facebook will now begin approving apps from third-party developers who aren't partners.
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Foursquare Adds Restaurant Menus, What About Food Check Ins?
Less than a week after unveiling the Explore section of its website, Foursquare announced a nice addition — restaurant menus.
Foursquare says it has partnered with startup SinglePlatform to add menus and pricing information for almost 250,000 restaurants in Explore. This seems like a pretty natural addition, and a way to make Explore a viable alternative to a site like Yelp.
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Ness, The Restaurant Discovery App, Adds Crucial Mapping Feature
I made heavy use of Ness's restaurant-finding iOS app during a recent trip through the East Coast, because lots of places are still sadly short on Yelp reviews, and I wanted a quick way to find the best local spots to eat. While I got some good results, I would have been all over a new feature that Ness has just pushed out in an update today: maps.
Yeah, another restaurant app with a map. You're not shocked, I'm guessing, but you should take a closer look because of the data that Ness offers. I...
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From Edu To Non-Profits, YouTube Aims To Walk The Path To Good
YouTube may be best known for its viral sensations, lawn gnomes, and feline shenanigans, but the site's massive collection of content has given rise to plenty of more benevolent — and, some might say important — trends.
Like helping non-profits including charity:water harness the power of video to connect to millions of viewers. And serving up lectures from major universities, opening the doors of learning to remote villages hundreds of miles away from the nearest school. In short, YouTube ...
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Is This Activism?
Hundreds of websites (TechCrunch included) have gone dark or visibly changed their appearance as a protest against the Stop Online Privacy Act and its Senate doppelganger, the PROTECT IP Act. It's a powerful statement and many are saying that it is already producing effects: Senators are changing positions, awareness is rising, and the opposition is becoming a dinner-table topic.
But is this activism?
I'm not asking whether it's a good thing (it certainly is) or whether it is effective in guid...
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AT&T’s Data Plans To Get Pricier Overall But (Slightly) Cheaper Per Megabyte
When our friends over at The Verge got wind of a price change coming to AT&T's data plans, AT&T responded that it was "an error. There are no changes to our data plans." What they should've said was "There are no changes to our data plans... yet."
AT&T has just announced a new set of data plans for smartphones and tablets. As you'd probably guess, they're a bit pricier than those they replace. On the upside, they're (ever so slightly) cheaper per megabyte.
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Motorola Mobility’s Shaker Investment A Sign Of Mobile Virtual Clubs To Come
Shaker's certainly been keeping busy ever since they won our Disrupt competition back in September -- not only did they win our $50,000 check, the team also closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures not long afterward. Now it looks like Motorola Mobility Ventures is looking to get in on the action as well, as they have recently invested in the Israeli startup.
Neither Shaker nor Motorola would comment on the amount of the investment.
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PayPal Will Be Expanding Mobile Payments Test To 51 Bay Area Home Depot Stores
PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay's earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Basically, via the pilot customers (for now, this only applies to PayPal employees...
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@WalmartLabs Crowdsources Walmart’s Product Selection With New “Get On The Shelf” Contest
@WalmartLabs, the digital technology division of the world's largest retailer, is launching a contest today which uses crowdsourcing techniques to determine which items the company should stock in its stores and on its website. The contest, called Get on the Shelf, will be heavily promoted by all of Walmart's social media presences, including Facebook, Google+ and, most importantly, Twitter.
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Veterans Need Employment, Jobvite’s Apps For Heroes Helps Them Find It
When military veterans complete their service, they shouldn't have to struggle to find jobs. That's why Jobvite and The White House's Joining Forces initiative are teaming up to release "Apps For Heroes". The feature set allows Jobvite's recruiting platform clients to check a box and flag the job openings they post to be automatically included in Veterans Job Bank. Clients can also easily add a Veterans Affairs Blue Button to their job application submission forms to allow vets to upload thei...
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Playstation Vita Sales In Nosedive After Strong Japan Debut
The Playstation Vita handheld system, unveiled at E3 last year, went on sale just before the holidays in Japan. It saw serious sales: around 325,000 units (500,000 by Sony's reckoning) were sold in its opening week. Naturally numbers tend to drop after the initial rush, and the next week saw healthy sales of around 72,000. But The numbers kept decreasing, and it is now reported that for the week ending January 15, the new device sold only 18,361 units, not including online sales. That's less tha...
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eBay Beats The Street; Q4 Revenue Up 35 Percent To $3.4B, Net Income Up 15 Percent To $789M
eBay just reported fourth quarter and fiscal year 2011 earnings today, which were above analysts expectations. eBay posted revenue of $3.4 billion, up 35 percent from the same quarter in 2010. The company reported fourth quarter net income on a GAAP basis of $2.0 billion, or $1.51 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income of $788.6 million, or $0.60 per diluted share. Net income was up 15 percent to $789 million. Analysts expected earnings per share of $0.57 on revenue of $3.32 billion.
eBa...
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Turntable.fm’s Anti-SOPA Message Is Subtle, But Wonderfully Symbolic
Regardless of where you stand on the SOPA battle, you've got to agree: seeing what seems to be the entire Internet come together to stand against something is incredible. Each company has a different approach, but their goal is the same: make sure everyone goes to sleep knowing what SOPA is.
While I don't want to turn today's protests into a who-did-it-best battle (that's not at all the point), I've got to highlight Turntable.fm's approach. It's about as simple as could be, but it just oozes wi...
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Boxee Brings The SOPA Protests To Living Rooms
SOPA protests are everywhere today. The Internet is collectively up in arms about the proposed legislation. Major sites are shut down, banners are everywhere, but that's online. Boxee is taking the fight to living rooms.
Turn on a Boxee Box today and you'll be greeted with three large black boxes that clearly state STOP SOPA. There's no way to miss them. Featured videos generally occupy the prime real estate on the home screen. But not today. Today they direct viewers to a Vimeo video (embedded...
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No, We Have Not Been Hacked
This is a public service announcement to all four of you that visited http://technews.techcrunch.com today and were confused by the jazzy Black Oak Asset Management splash page above; No we have not been hacked. And, no, this is not some kind of elaborate and arcane SOPA/PIPA protest. And while it would be amazing if we did offer complimentary services from the top attorneys & CPA's [sic] in the area, we don't. I barely know what a 401K is.
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iPad Is The Least Problematic Tablet Says FixYa, The Tech Q&A Site
FixYa, a product Q&A site, took a look at its own holiday stats to collect some facts about many major cell phones and tablets including iOS and Android devices. The conclusion? iPhone owners tend to be most interested in fixing battery and call quality problems on Android users found a number of screen issues including freezing and problematic interfaces.
They also found that the iPad had far fewer support questions than the aggregate number of Android tablets. Obviously the cohort they s...
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Whited00r Aims To Breathe New Life Into Old iOS Hardware
It's a story that's all too common these days -- once you purchase and activate a shiny new iPhone (and it seems more people are doing this lately), the old one is unceremoniously shoved in a drawer never to be heard from again. Most of the time though the device is still good, and with a little help from Team Whited00r, it could be even better.
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Improvement On Age-Old Mathematical Principle Could Yield Improved Images, Video
It's not often that you improve on a bit of math that has been around for 200 years. The Fourier transform was first proposed in 1811 by a Frenchman named Joseph Fourier, though it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that he was given the credit he deserved. His technique broke down a complex signal into a number of component signals, which could be transmitted or processed separately and then recombined to produce the original in a fairly nondestructive way.
In 1965 the Fourier transfo...
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Mark Zuckerberg Posts Against SOPA, Suddenly Remembers Twitter Account
Facebook may not be opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act as prominently as some other websites — it's not blacking out the site today, or even posting an anti-SOPA/PIPA message on its homepage — but CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke out against the legislation in a post on his Facebook account.
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ION Audio’s iPad Guitar Concept In Legal Trouble
Wow. Talk about not doing your homework. ION Audio has apparently infringed on the patents, trademarks and designs of three companies by debuting a new iOS peripheral at CES. The Guitar Apprentice (which is honestly a pretty cool idea) appears to use concepts that Behringer sent to the US Patent and Trademark office over a year and a half ago.
But it’s not just the product concept.
The trademark on the name “Guitar Apprentice” is actually owned by another company called Legacy Learning S...
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Want More Stickiness? Users Logging In Through Social Networks Spend 50% More Time On Site
Site owners, administrators, web business owners, content producers, and everyone in between are always trying to find the best ways to encourage visitors to spend more time on their sites. It’s hard enough getting people there in the first place, but keeping visitors and customers on the site (and engaged) once there? No walk in the park. But doing so is critical -- Just ask Groupon.
As one might expect, there are a thousand ways to increase engagement, and there’s obviously been a lot of...
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Tagged: Four Years Profitable, Big Plans for hi5
Social network Tagged seems to have found a model that works — the company says that 2011 was its fourth consecutive profitable year, and that its revenue grew 35 percent to more than $43 million.
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Verizon To Light Up Five New LTE Markets Tomorrow
While AT&T may be hitting a roadblock on their path to 4G LTE expansion, Verizon LTE seems to be spreading like wildfire. It feels like just yesterday that Verizon rolled out 4G LTE service to its first batch of U.S. markets, and now over a year later 200 million Americans are enjoying higher speeds.
In fact, tomorrow Verizon will expand its high-speed network into five new markets, and expand coverage in three existing markets.
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Remote DJ’ing App PlayMySong Raises $350K Seed Round
Finnish startup PlayMySong, the crowdsourced music DJ'ing service that lets a store's customers remotely program the stereo, has just closed a round of seed funding totaling $350,000. The round was led by Lifeline Ventures, a Helsinki-based accelerator focused on funding web and gaming startups and includes participation from Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Though relatively small, the company says it's enough funding to open an office in New York and head out ...
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Should RIM Abandon Ship?
Peter Rojas published a thought-provoking piece about RIM and BlackBerry 10. He said, in short, that the Canadian company should wipe out Blackberry OS and run Android or Windows or, barring that, sell out completely and offer a software package running on another OS. While both of those are logical positions, I think RIM will end up in far worse shape than those options allow.
RIM is popular for three reasons: the keyboard, BBM, and the back-end software. For most of this decade, IT shops have...
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“At Apple Everything Is A Secret”
Last year, the Steve Jobs biography was the best-selling book on Amazon. But there is another book about Apple coming out which isn't authorized that delves into the culture of secrecy at Apple. Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works was written by Fortune senior editor at large Adam Lashinsky, based on a Fortune story he wrote last summer. (Lashinsky spoke with Andrew Keen on TCTV—Part 1 of that interview is up).
The book details how Apple keeps its s...
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Keen On…. Adam Lashinsky: How Apple Really Works (TCTV)
After Walter Isaacson's magnum opus, do we really need yet another book about Apple? Yes, I think we do. Whereas Isaacson wrote the authorized biography of Jobs, the journalist and author Adam Lashinsky has written a most unauthorized and, in some ways, unpalatable book about Jobs' company which gets Inside Apple and explains How America's Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really works.
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Direct Deals Mobile Ad Marketplace Chartboost Expands To Asia
A month after its expansion to Android, Chartboost, the newly launched (already profitable) direct deals mobile ad marketplace for game developers is expanding to Asia. Starting today, the company is rolling out localized versions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
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Flickr Joins SOPA Protest, Lets Users Black Out Photos
This morning, online photo sharing site Flickr joined the growing number of web companies protesting the SOPA and PIPA legislation, which now include Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and others. For a 24-hour period, starting today, Flickr is letting its members darken their own photos in an effort to raise awareness about the proposed, highly damaging legislation. But that's not all - Flickr is going a step further, and will allow users to darken other members' photos, too. Now that's what ...
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In Face Of Protests, Congressmen Begin To Abandon SOPA Ship
The online uproar against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress is already causing some in Washington to abandon the SOPA ship. A couple of co-sponsors of the bill are pulling their support. Representative Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) is no longer a co-sponsor, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.) is also planning to remove his name from the co-sponsor list, according to Politico. One Congressman, Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) is even joining the protest movement. He changed hi...
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Citi Backs Gift Card Exchange Plastic Jungle
Plastic Jungle, which operates an online gift card marketplace, has received a strategic investment from Citi Ventures, Citigroup's investment arm. The size of the capital injection was not disclosed. The startup has previously raised over $23 million in financing from Jafco Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and First Round Capital, among others.
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Adzuna Raises New Funding To Make Job Ads Fully Social
Adzuna, a startup with something it calls the next-generation job search engine, has raised a round of funding from Index Ventures, The Accelerator Group and existing investors including Passion Capital. The latest funding follows a seed round last year. It's landed £500,000, taking its total funding to £800,000 (£300,000 from Passion Capital in July).
Launched in July 2011, Adzuna is aiming to be a global search engine for classified job ads, effectively aggregating ads, then putting a soc...
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AT&T Eyeing Up Dish Network For Potential Acquisition?
Shortly before the AT&T/T-Mobile merger came to its ignominious end, Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton casually expressed his interest in a partnership with T-Mobile as a means of bringing wireless voice service to Dish customers.
Those plans may not pan out if AT&T has anything to do with it. A new report from Bloomberg indicates that AT&T is apparently so hard up for additional spectrum that they're considering shelling out "the highest premium in more than a decade" to acquire the ...
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Pro Tip: Do Not Buy An iPad Made Of Clay
The story goes that at least ten customers were sold clay iPads over the holidays from Canadian electronic stores. These customers were sold what appeared to be sealed iPad 2s, but turned out to contain slabs of clay rather than, you know, iPad 2s.
Best Buy and Future Shop of Canada opened investigations, but since the stores already compensated the customers, we're in the clear to laugh at the situation a bit.
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Among New Smartphone Adopters, iOS Share Rises While Android Declines
Nielsen just released its latest numbers with regard to new smartphone owners, and it would seem that the iPhone (particularly the 4S) is quite popular among those migrating over to the smartphone segment.
In fact, since the iPhone 4S launched in October, the number of recent smartphone buyers who chose the iPhone has reached 44.5 percent, up from just 25 percent in October.
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Ignition Leads $20M Round In Cloud Security And Identity Company Symplified
Symplified, which provides identity and access management tools for cloud applications, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners. Existing investor Allegis Capital, Granite Ventures, and Quest Software also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total funding to $38.8 million.
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Mobile Payments Company BilltoMobile Launches One-Click Checkout For The Mobile Web
Mobile payments company BilltoMobile, which now has relationships with all four major carriers in the U.S. (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile), is today launching one-click processing for mobile web transactions. Previously, users had to enter in their mobile number manually, sometimes a zip code, then wait for a verification code that was sent to their phone through an SMS text. Now, the company says it's able to identify a user's mobile number automatically thanks to deeper integration w...
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Comcast Leads $5M Round In Subscription Service For Kids Activities Kiwi Crate
Kiwi Crate, a subscription service for kids activities, has raised $5 million in new funding led by Comcast Ventures with existing investors First Round Capital, Mayfield Fund, Felicis Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Consigliere Brand Capital, Uj Ventures and 500 Startups participating in the round.
The company offers a subscription-based service that produces and delivers hands-on activities boxes for kids. The products are science activities, and arts and crafts projects that are designed to...
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South African VC Firm Debuts $200M US Fund, Invests $30M In ‘The Jetstream’
A South African venture capital firm by the name Quantum Capital Fund (QCF) this morning officially launched a $200 million fund in the United States.
QCF's first investment in a US technology venture is a $30 million capital injection into The Jetstream, a mysterious company that is working on a "social media network targeted to a wide variety of people who are on a journey to self-discovery".
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LabGuru Offers Project Management For Science People
Science People AKA Scientists need project management, too. At least that's what Macmillan, a major science publisher, thinks so they've created a new business unit, Digital Science to push their Basecamp-like lab products.
Take, for example, their new site, LabGuru. This site offers collaborative project planning and document storage for labs, allowing science people to work together on major projects like "going to Mars" and "giving diarrhea to mice" (true story! My friend does this for real ...
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API Management Service Apigee Acquires Mobile Data Platform Usergrid
Apigee, a provider of API management products and services, which we've referred to in the past as a "Google Analytics for APIs" has acquired the mobile cloud platform Usergrid. For those unfamiliar, Usergrid helps to make mobile app development easier by providing the APIs needed to manage data, users and events. The company provides these kind of core APIs for the backend so mobile developers can speed their time to market.
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Amazon Web Services Introduces Web-Scale Database, DynamoDB
Amazon just added a new cloud computing service to its suite of Amazon Web Services, a distributed database called DynamoDB. Web applications can spike suddenly in demand or grow so big that they tax traditional databases, or even clusters of traditional databases, which are hard to maintain, especially for smaller companies. With DynamoDB, Amazon offers and on-demand web-scale distrubted database to the tens of thousands of customers who already use other cloud computing services from Amazon.
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Data Storage Company Nexenta Scores $21 Million In Series C Funding
Data storage solutions provider Nexenta this morning announced that it has secured $21 million in Series C funding in a round led by new investor Menlo Ventures and joined by Sierra Ventures and Razor’s Edge Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink Capital.
Nexenta claims its open source storage software solutions help enterprises avoid vendor lock-in and enjoy unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.
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Essay Due? Here’s How To Access Wikipedia During The SOPA Blackout
As you can tell from the homepage, it's a sad, trying day for the internet. Many of our favorite sites like Reddit and Wikipedia have gone dark, leaving only an argument against SOPA on their homepages in lieu of cat gifs and knowledge. All in all, it will shape up to be an incredibly boring day in the name of justice. Because to be honest, SOPA is unconstitutional in the way it'll be enforced, and means rarely if ever justify the ends.
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Motorola Is Now Serving Up Ice Cream Sandwichs To The Xoom
Good news, Xoom owners. No, you're not getting a refund but rather the official Ice Cream Sandwich update should now be available for OTA downloading. This update replaces the Xoom's stock Honeycomb operating system with ICS, Google's latest Android build. This comes just a week after Asus started rolling the update out to its new Transformer Prime tab.
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NetLED: Japan Gets Cloud-Based, Smartphone-Compatible LED Lighting System
First, Japan got the world's first connected home garden device, and now it's time for Nippon to get the world's first cloud-based LED lighting system. Developed by Tokyo-based lighting tech startup Net LED Technology Corp., the so-called NetLED system will go on sale in Japan on February 20 (here's the company's English website).
The 40W lights, which have a 40,000-hour lifespan, come with built-in Wi-Fi: users can control each tube over the web after installing the NetLed app on a smartphone,...
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Cloud Enterprise Performance Analytics Startup Tidemark Raises $24M From Redpoint, Andreessen Horowitz
Enterprise-focused cloud performance analytics company Tidemark, formerly known as Proferi, has raised $24 million in new funding led by Redpoint Ventures with existing investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Duffield, co-founder and co-CEO of Workday participating. This brings the total amount raised to more than $35 million. Redpoint partner Geoff Yang will join Tidemark’s Board of Directors.
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Calling The World: Vox.io Just Might Be The Next Euro Startup Sensation
A European company by the name of Skype taught the world that enabling people to make free voice and video calls over the Internet would be an enticing offer to hundreds of millions of users, and make for a great business at the same time. Now, a Euro startup called Vox.io plans to challenge them by envisioning how digital telephony should work in 2012 and beyond.
They provide a simple tool that lets people make free calls to other vox.io users from their desktop browser, or their iPhone (app l...
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A Step Forward? Bertelsmann & Others Back $100 Million Venture Fund For Innovative Education
Just as (mobile) technology is bringing some exciting changes to the health industry, it's simultaneously over in the classroom trying to save education before it's too late. I'm not sure we're even close to "too late", but it's hard to ignore the fact that, like the health industry, the educational system (and I don't limit that to the U.S.) is broken.
Millions of young people are entering a system that just isn't built to handle the diversity of learning styles -- or the speed of innovation....
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AmEx Puts $125M In And Partners With Chinese Mobile Payments Company Lianlian To License Serve
American Express is making a significant move in the expansion of its digital wallet, Serve to international markets today. The credit card company is announcing the first global partnership for Serve with Lianlian Group, of of China's leading mobile payments providers. Additionally, AmEx has also made an equity investment of $125 million in LianLian Pay.
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Alienware Releases The X51, A $699 Small Form Factor PC That Looks Like A Gaming Console
The Alienware line just got a little brother, its Mac Mini if you will. The X51 is the gaming company's smallest form factor desktop to date. But, since it's an Alienware, it still packs plenty of gaming horsepower and customizable options.
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6waves Lolapps Buys Mobile Games Developer Escalation Studios
Social gaming company 6waves Lolapps (6L) this morning announced its acquisition of Dallas-based Escalation Studios, a mobile games development firm.
Three months ago, 6L already moved to buy Beijing-based social gaming company Smartron5, but apparently they felt there was still some mobile gaming expertise missing.
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Chegg Launches Mobile Reader For Online Textbooks
Having built, bought and partnered its way into the textbook distribution business, Chegg is launching a long-promised mobile web version today that lets readers easily read and mark up their textbooks. Of course the move is timed with Apple's forthcoming announcement event, which based on everything everyone is hearing, has something to do with offering and/or creating digital textbooks.
But regardless of Apple's or anyone else's plans, Chegg's eTextbook Reader has been in the works since Augu...
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Twitter Acquires, Shuts Down Social News Startup Summify
