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TechCrunch |
Social, Mobile Gifting Service Wrapp Raises $5M From Greylock And Atomico To Launch In The US And UK
Wrapp, a social gifting service, has raised $5 million series A funding from Greylock Partners and Atomico, the VC firm formed by Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype, Kazaa and other companies. The startup had previously raised $5.5 million in funding from Atomico and Creandum. As part of the most recent round, Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman will be joining Zennström, and Creandum partner Johan Brenner on Wrapp’s board of directors.
Co-founded by Rebtel and SendIt f...
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TechCrunch |
Please Censor The Web America, The Rest Of Us Can’t Wait
You might notice many of your favorite websites look different today. Wikipedia is down. Wordpress is dark. TechCrunch has adjusted it's homepage logo to look even weirder than usual. So what’s the big deal?
Right now in Washington D.C., Congress is considering two bills that would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses. Over here on the European version of TechCrunch we think that's a fantastic thing. Utterly fantastic. No, really.
The PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) ...
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TechCrunch |
Ooyala Brings Free, Live Coverage Of The Australian Open To The Web (For The First Time)
Tennis anyone? You have to love this. Realtime event coverage startup Livestream recently brought commercial-free, streaming coverage of New Year's Eve in Times Square to the Web. If you caught more than a few minutes of network TV coverage of NYE, you would have been subjected to the ungodly number (and frequency) of ads. Livestream's commercial-free coverage was a welcome respite.
This morning, Ooyala, one of the biggest web video and analytics providers, is volleying back with some live cove...
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TechCrunch |
Ignite100 Showcases Nine Teams To Investors — Here’s A Quick Rundown
Nine teams from the new Ignite100 accelerator based in the North East of the UK, which launched with a £1m fund that invests up to £100k per team - are presenting to investors in London today. Here's a quick rundown.
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TechCrunch |
Daily Crunch: Another Castle
Here are some recent TechCrunch Gadgets posts: What Is A 3D Printer Good For? Stop-Motion Cartoons Featuring Princesses, Of Course! BMW DesignworksUSA, Thermaltake Team Up For The Level 10 M Mouse Kno Adds New Features To Smart Textbooks In Attempt To Head Off Apple Try-Before-You-Buy Gadget Site YBUY Launches With $750K In Funding Location, Location, Location: MIT Builds A Bracelet That Controls The Office Thermostat
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TechCrunch |
The Day The LOLcats Died, A Song Against SOPA
Today people take to the streets and black out the web to protest unfair piracy legislation. To the tune of Don McLean's 'American Pie' they'll be singing:
"Why, why are laws a thing you can buy? / They got paid off, should be laid off, re-election denied / Our web means more than lawyers, lobbies and lies / So speak up before the internet dies / Speak up before the internet dies". Watch the video...
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TechCrunch |
Accel Leads $52.5M Round In Cloud-Based Data Storage And Backup Company Code 42
Code 42 Software, a Minnesota-based online backup company for consumers, businesses and the enterprise, has raised $52.5 million in funding led by Accel Partners with participation from Split Rock Partners. This is the first major investment from Accel's recently announced Big Data Fund, which is dedicated to funding infrastructure and application companies in “Big Data.” This is the first round of institutional investing for Code 42.
You may not have heard of Code 42, but the enterprise co...
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TechCrunch |
Triangle Startup Factory Re-Launches Accelerator; Promises $50K To Each Founding Team
Today, serial entrepreneurs and mentors Chris Heivly and Dave Neal are kicking off the re-launch of their North Carolina-based startup accelerator, Triangle Startup Factory, in the hopes of providing entrepreneurs with a founder-friendly option for accelerating their early-stage tech businesses. To make Triangle Startup Factory an appealing alternative, the accelerator will run two three-month-long programs over the next four years.
Each batch will consist of five to seven startups, and foundin...
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TechCrunch |
Turntable For Video ‘Chill’ Turns Into Pinterest For Video, Sees 10 Sign Ups A Minute
Chill, a startup that started out Namesake and then morphed as a virtual environment for video watching, has performed the mother of all pivots (again) today, going from a Turntable for video to a Pinterest for video, allowing users to post as well as view, comment on and repost video from people that they follow on a pretty grid interface. The new Chill now supports any video, from YouTube, to Vimeo to College Humor to "pretty much everything under the sun: ESPN, Crackle, Funny or Die, you name...
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TechCrunch |
StartupPlays Offers An Affordable (Virtual) Alternative To Startup Accelerators
Founders and entrepreneurs are likely familiar with some of the more well-established startup incubators and accelerators out there, like Y Combinator, TechStars, 500 Startups, Founder Institute, DreamIt -- to name a few -- all of which provide terrific opportunities and resources for their founding teams. Of course, many of these come with a price, requiring founders to hand over five to ten percent equity for seed investments of around $25,000.
Scott Annan, the founder of Network Hippo and M...
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TechCrunch |
MPAA CEO Chris Dodd: Blackouts Turn Users Into “Corporate Pawns”
President and CEO of the Motion Pictures Association of America Chris Dodd has issued a strongly-worded statement regarding tomorrow's planned outages and protests relating to the SOPA and PIPA legislation. If you didn't already think the MPAA was a ship of fools, this will convince you once and for all.
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TechCrunch |
Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian On SOPA: “The Fight Isn’t Over”
Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be on the run in the face of growing online protests, but SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA, is not dead yet. "The fight isn't over," Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tells me in the TCTV video interview above.
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TechCrunch |
Gillmor Gang 01.17.12 (TCTV)
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — on SOPA, Google +, and the End of Software Mayan 2012 Edition. Not one of my best efforts, but the Gang more than picked up the slack.
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TechCrunch |
Codecademy and The White House Announce Code Summer+ Youth Education Program
Today, Codecademy in conjunction with The White House announced a new program to educate the nation's underprivileged and disconnected youth: Code Summer+.
The announcement was made at an event held by Twilio and hosted by US CTO Aneesh Chopra. There, Codecademy's co-founder Zach Sims explained that as part of Obama's larger Summer Jobs+ initiative, Code Summer+ will offer a "condensed version of our curriculum to get [youth] on track to become engineers." Additionally, partners including Fou...
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TechCrunch |
Facebook In Brazil: A Big Ending To 2011 Finally Pushes It Past Orkut
First there were the stories about Facebook taking over your college campus, then it was your high school or workplace, then your country... now the stories are starting to be about how Facebook has used up all the new users and only has engagement left to gain. But that's in older markets like the US. The company is still growing worldwide every month on its way to a billion users, and it's because of places like Brazil.
In 2011, according to a new study out from leading web measurement firm c...
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TechCrunch |
A Close Look At Samsung And Microsoft’s Surface 2.0 (AKA SUR40)
The Surface has been around since 2007, but the new and improved SUR40 is a much more usable device. Microsoft and Samsung were showing off the new touch-capable table in NYC today, and I was lucky enough to get up close and personal with it.
The specs in and of themselves are impressive: 40-inch 50-point multitouch screen with a 1080x1920 resolution, AMD processors, 1GB of memory dedicated entirely to graphics, a 4-inch profile, and a host of USB/HDMI ports. It's the computer you always wante...
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TechCrunch |
Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare
Entrepreneurial epiphanies surface in random places. For Eric Page, it was watching Brad Pitt’s latest movie, Moneyball. The epiphany caused him to shift Amplify Health’s business model from a provider of technology to a heavy user of technology. While there is a wave of disruptive technology in healthtech, as interesting is the wave of disruptive innovation on the care delivery side of healthcare. These companies aren’t technology companies, however technology plays a pivotal role.
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TechCrunch |
Quora Launches An Off-Site “Follow” Button For Topics And People
Quora has joined the "Button" wars today with the launch of the Quora "Follow" button, created by Quora engineers Shu-Uesugi and Edmond-Lau. In the same vein as the Twitter "Follow" button, the Quora Follow button can be embedded in any website by cutting and pasting a customized snippet of code from the Quora Resources page. Users can choose between a light button and a dark button to taste.
"The goal is to help people discover great Quora users from the outside of www.quora.com," says co-...
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TechCrunch |
Jerry Yang Resigns From Yahoo
Yahoo just announced that co-founder Jerry Yang has resigned from its board of directors.
"My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life," Yang wrote in a letter to chairman Roy Bostock. "However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and ...
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TechCrunch |
Today Facebook Will Fill Your Timeline + Ticker With Shopping, Travel, and More Apps
In September at f8, Facebook announced partnerships with a slew of companies who would develop Open Graph Timeline apps. Airbnb, Path, Ticketmaster, Payvment, Causes and 30 others all said they were onboard to produce apps allowing users to share when they "traveled", "purchased" something online, "donated" to a charity, and other activity. 4 months later and many of these Open Graph applications have yet to launch, but that will change on January 18th according to our sources when a new class o...
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TechCrunch |
Samsung Not Sold On The Bada-Tizen Merger Just Yet
I've long wondered what exactly Samsung would do with their homegrown Bada operating system, and for a little while there the answer seemed clear -- Samsung SVP Tae-jin Kang recently noted that Bada would be merged with the Intel-backed Tizen OS project.
In fact, he said at CES that the work to combine both platforms had already begun, which seemed like a pretty definitive conclusion for Bada.
Now it seems like Samsung may be having second thoughts about the whole process. Samsung representat...
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TechCrunch |
SOPA Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Sleeping (Until February)
Oh, you thought SOPA was dead? That the riled rallying of the entire Internet, the blacking out of dozens of popular websites in protest, or the President himself coming out against the bill would be enough to kill it off?
Nope. It'll be back — they're just taking a little break.
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TechCrunch |
Facebook Study Reveals Facebook Is Not An Echo Chamber (For Some Values Of “Echo Chamber”)
Some of Facebook's scholars-in-residence have published an analysis of approximately 283 million Facebook users' sharing habits. The study, which has to do with the paths by which information is caught up and shared — which types of friends share the most, where you post the most content from, and so on. The study itself was, no doubt, spurred by honest intellectual curiosity, but the summary on Facebook a slightly editorializing bent that suggests things were more purposeful.
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TechCrunch |
Lionsgate Sacrifices “Abduction” To Test Simultaneous Facebook/DVD Release
When you're in charge of getting people to rent a move like Abduction, with its Metacritic score of 25 and a truly remarkable 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, what can you really do? The answer: whatever the hell you want. Short of stuffing free money into every box, few things could really help this one take off — so you might as well experiment, right?
And experiment they shall. Throwing Abduction to the sharks for the sake of testing their teeth, Lionsgate is releasing the film on DVD and Facebook s...
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TechCrunch |
What Is A 3D Printer Good For? Stop-Motion Cartoons Featuring Princesses, Of Course!
Makerbot creator Bre Pettis and his musician friends from Scary Car made this cute little video featuring 3D printed action figures being created in (near) real-time and then discovering love.
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TechCrunch |
TechCrunch Readers Love Slides (And Other Stats From SlideShare)
Okay, it's official. TechCrunch readers love slides. We occasionally embed slideshows from SlideShare like the one below (which is filled with its 2011 zeitgeist stats). In 2011, TechCrunch generated more slideshow traffic for SlideShare than any other tech blog—a dubious honor, but we'll take it.
Since you all love slides so much, here are a few more facts from SlideShare.
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TechCrunch |
Do We Need A “GarageBand For Books?”
My Dad used to take me to Long's Bookstore on the Ohio State University campus when I was young - I'd say this was during the 1980s and very early 1990s although in my mind these afternoons spent on campus are tinged with a 1970s wash out of color, as if I were remembering my time in Kansas before Oz. We'd rumble through the stacks, picking out used titles from the basement that were beaten and worn by years of the students' buy/read/return-for-a-pittance cycle so common at universities. Most of...
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TechCrunch |
Yes, Google Will Protest SOPA on its Homepage
Tomorrow, Google's US homepage will include a link declaring its opposition to the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. The news was reported on CNET and confirmed by Google in a statement emailed to TechCrunch.
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TechCrunch |
Try-Before-You-Buy Gadget Site YBUY Launches With $750K In Funding
Good news, gadget hounds! The new "try before you buy" subscription service called YBUY is exiting its public beta, backed by $750,000 in seed funding. The concept is simple, and should have major appeal for the gadget-obsessed: for just $24.95 per month, you can test drive the latest electronics, home and kitchen gadgets for 30 days before deciding to purchase or return the items.
At launch, the site is serving up highly sought-after gadgets like the iPad 2, Dyson heaters, Jawbone headsets, iR...
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TechCrunch |
An Interview With DECE/UltraViolet President Mitch Singer Goes Horribly Right
Our readers are probably familiar in passing with UltraViolet, a new content rights management system that is supposed to unify the rights architecture on the web, allowing cross-platform sharing and authentication of movies and TV. But for such a major effort by so many device makers and content producers, very little has been heard or said about it. Probably because it's still in its infancy: only 19 titles with UV compatibility were released in 2011, and the first signups occurred in October....
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TechCrunch |
Study: Facebook Pages Shouldn’t Post More Than 1x Every 3 hours
The average news feed post by a Facebook Page receives Likes and comments for 3 hours after being published. To maximize the engagement, impressions, and traffic driven by the news feed, Facebook Page owners should wait at least 3 hours between posts.
This new finding from a study by Facebook Page analytics company EdgeRank Checker could help Page owners avoid cutting short the lifetimes of their posts and overshadowing them with new content.
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TechCrunch |
Trigger Gets $1M From SV Angel, Paul Graham And Others To Make Cross-Platform Mobile Development Effortless
Mobile development platform Trigger is announcing one million dollars in funding today, from way legit investors SV Angel, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, 500 Startups, Russ Siegelman, Steve Walske, RightVentures, Venture51 and John Taysom.
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TechCrunch |
DreamIt Ventures Launches First Israel-U.S. Accelerator
Startup incubator DreamIt Ventures is announcing the first Israel-U.S. accelerator, which will help up to five Israeli startups expand into the U.S. market through DreamIt's NYC 2012 program. The new program, called DreamIt Israel, will take place over four months, with the first month in Israel followed by three months in New York. The startups will also participate in two Demo Day events - one in the U.S. and the other back home with local investors.
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TechCrunch |
Aviary Launches Major Upgrade To SDK, Now Powering 10 Million Photo Edits Per Month
Aviary, the company that makes it easy for mobile developers to integrate image editing into their apps, has a major launch today: they're introducing an overhauled version of their mobile SDK that's both more powerful and significantly better looking than the previous one, which launched in September.
You may associate Aviary with the startup's advanced suite of web-based image editing apps, which is what it focused on for years. But last year it shifted toward this developer-facing mobile SDK...
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TechCrunch |
Bionic Panda Builds A Social Gaming Business On Android, Raises Funding From Top Investors
If you're trying to build a mobile game for the hardcore crowd, you're going to want things like at least moderately elaborate graphics... you'll probably choose to build on iOS first. But if you're trying to build a casual-style game that anyone can play easily, that reaches as many people as possible, Android is looking better and better.
That's at least the thesis behind Bionic Panda, the Android-focused gaming company from veteran entrepreneur Charles Hudson. The company is today announci...
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TechCrunch |
HTC And Sprint Working On Software Updates That Remove Carrier IQ
Most of the furor surrounding the Carrier IQ diagnostic software has wound down by now, but that doesn't mean that the companies involved have already forgotten. HTC has confirmed to The Verge that they were working with Sprint to push out maintenance updates that would remove the Carrier IQ software from affected devices.
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TechCrunch |
Science Data Sharing Site figshare Relaunches, Adds Features
figshare, originally launched in January 2011, is re-launching today with some new features. figshare aims to be a repository for scientific figures, raw datasets, videos and more. The retooled service offers AWS storage, version control, and unlimited public storage capacity. All uploaded data is made available with easy-to-use citation links (and a QR code) and is licensed under CreativeCommons terms to encourage re-use. In addition to faster uploads and an easier-to-navigate interface, figsha...
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TechCrunch |
With Focus On International Expansion, Airbnb Comes To Android And Revamps Mobile Web Offerings
After about a year of being iPhone only, the Airbnb app comes to Android this morning alongside a complete revamp of the Airbnb mobile features.
With over 500K downloads and 125k active users on iOS, and over 10% of its traffic coming through mobile, Airbnb mobile web genius Andrew Vilcsak tells me that the move to Android was inevitable, "The biggest complaint was that it wasn't on Android, which currently holds 48% of the entire world's market share."
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TechCrunch |
comScore Publishes December 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings; Facebook Slips
Audience measurement firm comScore has just released its U.S. online video rankings for December 2011. There are few surprises: Google's YouTube is still king of the hill, while VEVO remains firmly in second place with roughly a third of Google Sites' audience.
In total, comScore says 182 million U.S. users watched online video content in December 2011 for an average of 23.2 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 43.5 billion videos.
What caught my eye, however, was that Fac...
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TechCrunch |
Cálmate: Put Down Your Smartphone To Feel Better
A study by the British Psychological Society found a link between stress levels and the number of times a person picks up their smartphone to check messages and mails. As an addict, I can completely agree with this finding. In short, the more you do it, the worse you feel.
Oddly, the study found that less stress was induced when checking work e-mail rather than other online interactions. The group conducted a survey of 100 Britons in different lines of work.
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TechCrunch |
Reuters Launches Web TV Channel, Bringing 10 New & Original Shows To YouTube
The move to bring original programming to the web continues to heat up this week, with today's announcement of Reuters TV, a new YouTube channel featuring ten new commentary and analysis shows from the news and media division of Thomson Reuters.
The new channel joins nearly 100 other media partners on YouTube who are delivering original content, including a few big names like eHow, Motor Trend, Pitchfork TV, TED, The Onion, WSJ, WWE and more.
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Social, Mobile Gifting Service Wrapp Raises $5M From Gr...
