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ChaCha Sues HTC Over HTC ChaCha
Feb 24, 10:52AM
You could see this one coming from a couple of miles away: ChaCha, the questions and answers service provider, is suing smartphone maker HTC over trademark infringement. The lawsuit is obviously the result of HTC's decision to name its recently unveiled 'Facebook phone' the ChaCha. Sure enough, ChaCha Search, Inc., as the company is officially named, owns the 'ChaCha' trademark in the United States (and Europe for that matter).
Death By Air And Thunderbolt: Is It The End Of The Line For The MacBook?
Feb 24, 8:15AM
As you're undoubtedly aware by now, tomorrow (in just a few hours, really), Apple is expected to unveil their latest line of laptops. News has already started to trickle out about what's getting upgraded and what's changing. Noticeably absent in this talk is the MacBook itself. And that begs the question: is it the end of the line for the product? Simply put: it should be.
NEC Medias: Docomo To Offer The World's Thinnest Smartphone In 3 Weeks
Feb 24, 8:09AM
On Monday, we've just shown you some leaked pictures, but we can now confirm the world's thinnest smartphone, NEC Casio Mobile's MEDIAS N-04C, is real. And provider NTT Docomo, Japan's biggest mobile carrier, doesn't want to lose time in bringing it to market: it will hit stores over here as early as March 15. Read the rest on MobileCrunch.
Online Freight Brokerage Open Mile Raises $6 Million
Feb 24, 6:10AM
A freight brokerage is a service that brings together someone who wants to to transport goods (like oranges, or iPods) with the trucking company that wants to transport them. Open Mile, which is today announcing a $6 million round of Series B funding, is the first such service that attempts to bring these relatively unglamorous transactions online, tapping into a $60 billion industry which is heavily phone and fax based. Read: It's disruptive. The financing was led by Globespan Capital Parters and rounded out by existing investor Charles River Ventures. 
Review: Motorola Xoom – The Android Tablet Redefined
Feb 24, 2:06AM
Few tablets have met with such widespread anticipation as the recently-announced Xoom. It is the closest anyone has come to an iPad equivalent for the Android set. I was impressed with the speed, design, and quality of the device, and although there are a few caveats, I came away optimistic for the new crop of Honeycomb devices that will follow this one. It's an impressive and attractive piece of kit, with a lot going on under the hood. But dangerous pricing and the threat of better and/or cheaper devices around the corner somewhat reduce its charm. If you can't wait, though, the Xoom will probably satisfy your Honeycomb craving.
Disney Acquires Social Network For Kids Togetherville
Feb 24, 2:00AM
Disney has just acquired Togetherville, a social network for kids 10 years of age or younger, we've confirmed with the company. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed at the moment. Togetherville, which exited beta last year, mimics the experience of adult social networking sites, i.e. Facebook but in an age-appropriate and parent-monitored environment. Togetherville promises a safer, more secure environment, where parents can moderate who their children are connecting with. Parents approve each of their child's friends, and can also connect with other parents using Facebook's social graph.
Foursquare's SXSW Plan: "NEW APP + NEW BADGES + PARTIES + CONCERT + MOAR"
Feb 24, 12:15AM
We're now just over two weeks away from this year's SXSW event in Austin, Texas. And just as is the case every year, there will be several startups jockeying to be the one that is the breakout hit. But one of those previous breakout hits, Foursquare, isn't standing still either. In a ridiculously awesome blog post on the matter today, Foursquare hints at their plan for the event this year. Here's the entire post entitled "OMFG!":
Twitter Starts Hiring Sales People In London – But Stays Coy About A Euro HQ
Feb 24, 12:06AM
There's been a lot of speculation in recent months about where Twitter would put down a European base in its efforts to expand its operation. Certainly I've been bugging them in the last few weeks about whether they would come to London. But now we have the answer: London it is - at least for five people whose jobs will be largely about sales and commercial partnerships. 
Google Details Chrome's Background Feature: Run Web Apps Without Seeing Them
Feb 23, 11:24PM
Google has been on a mission lately to outline some of the cooler, newer features coming to Chrome on their Chromium Blog. Today brings one of the biggest yet: Background Apps. This feature has existed on various builds of Chrome/Chromium for some time now. But Google hasn't been touting it, and it wasn't really clear how it would be used and/or useful. Well today, it's very clear. And again, very cool. Essentially, Chrome-based web apps are going to be able to be always open, but hidden in the background.
Make Sense Of Your Social Photos With VVall's GRID
Feb 23, 10:37PM
Ever find yourself posting a ton of pictures to Twitter and Facebook and Dailybooth and so on and so forth, just to have them fall into the digital abyss? The people behind vvall, a stealthish mobile photo app, have created GRID, a humble project that attempts to organize your social photos chronologically, separating your own and your friends' online image trails by date and days of the week. In a wider scope than Twitter apps like Lookedon, GRID right now covers four platforms (Facebook, Twitpic, PiczPlz, and Dailybooth) but aims to add others like Instagram, Flickr and Yfrog as soon as technically possible. This feat is obviously challenging, as there are 82 different apps that post photos to Twitter alone and dealing with all the limitations of different APIs is akin to herding cats. 
Readability Tries Again With Apple — Has The Subscription Policy Already Shifted?
Feb 23, 10:33PM
A couple days ago, Readability was pissed off. In an open letter to Apple, they noted that the new subscription policy "smacks of greed". And they threatened to abandon Apple's platform in favor of the open web. This message resonated with many, as there's a huge amount of unease about Apple's new policy in the developer community. But now, just two days later, Readability has re-submitted their app to Apple for review. And apparently, a "love letter" to the company is forthcoming. So why the change from war to peace? Has Apple's policy already changed? Well, no — not yet, anyway. Readability's Richard Ziade said his tweet was a "joke" and had this to say:
DrChrono Makes The iPad A Doctor's Best Friend In The Exam Room
Feb 23, 10:32PM
As medical records move online, doctors are increasingly bringing laptops into the exam room to take notes, write prescriptions and more. But laptops can be cumbersome, and the iPad has emerged as a popular device for medical professionals. In fact, one out of every five doctors in a private practice own an iPad. Enter DrChrono, a Y Combinator-backed startup that produces an iPad app and SaaS for doctors. The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process.
Keen On… Anthony Wood: The Inventor of Personal Video Recorder on the Future of TV (TCTV)
Feb 23, 7:33PM
Meet the man who killed the television industry. In the mid Nineties, while he was looking at a Fry's ad, Anthony Wood invented the personal video recorder (PVR). From this epiphany, Wood founded ReplayTV in 1997, a PVR company which, for a short while, gave TiVO a run for its money. But Wood not only invented the PVR, he also helped kill it. In 2002, after leaving ReplayTV, Wood founded Roku, a self-styled "cable killer" hardware company which provides a box for accessing on-demand video. Almost ten years after founding Roku, Wood really is starting to scare the traditional cable industry. He's already sold a million Roku boxes and streamed a billion minutes of content from Roku devices. And this year, Wood expects to sell a million and a half boxes, thus making Roku, Wood says, the 10th largest cable company in the US. Video ahead.
Energy Efficiency Startup Transphorm Emerges From Stealth, Raises $20 Million From Google Ventures
Feb 23, 7:00PM
It isn't often that you hear about a startup that's remained in stealth through multiple multi-million funding rounds. But today, we're meeting a company called Transphorm that's done just that — and it's making its debut in style. The company has just closed a $20 million Series C funding round led by Google Ventures, with participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Foundation Capital, and Lux Capital. This brings the company's total funding to $38 million since it was founded in 2007. So what exactly does Transphorm do? The startup is focused on improving energy efficiency, namely in making power conversion less wasteful. CEO Umesh Mishra says that right now, we lose around 10% of the total electricity in the United States to energy conversions — when energy is converted from one form to another. If we could conserve and use that energy, he says we'd be saving more energy than is conserved by alternative sources like wind and solar (see chart). This would lead to billions of dollars in energy savings (the company estimates $40 billion a year in the US alone) and it's obviously better for the environment, too.
Crush-Stalking App Breakup Notifier Amasses Over 3.6M Users, Is Shut Down By Facebook
Feb 23, 6:52PM
Just Monday we were writing about Breakup Notifier, a Facebook app that raked in 100,000 users in less than 24 hours and as of 5 hours ago had a more than modest 3,673,484 users in its database ... And then poof! It's gone, blocked by Facebook. To the uninitiated, Breakup Notifier sent you a helpful email notifying you whenever the object of your 
How TheFacebook Used To Woo Advertisers Back In The Early Days
Feb 23, 6:25PM
I'm not sure exactly how easy (or difficult) it is to come by stuff like this, but I for one thought it was pretty cool. Eli Feldblum and Mayer Reich, co-founders of RankAbove, emailed me a number of documents this morning that Facebook used to send potential advertisers back when they were just getting started (and when the fledgling company was still called TheFacebook). The docs were originally sent to Feldblum by Kevin Colleran - the longest employee at Facebook other than founder Mark Zuckerberg - who still works there as Global Sales Lead, after they had met at a digital marketing conference. The date: Thursday, May 19, 2005.
Joystickers: For When You Wish Your iPhone (Temporarily) Had More Buttons
Feb 23, 6:18PM
The iPhone is great for gaming... in some ways. The App Store as a distribution model? Fantastic. The finely-tuned development platform? Amazing! The lack of even a single physical face button beyond the one that exits the application? Ehhh, not so great. While most game developers have learned to make do in this frightfully buttonless world, there are some ideas that simply require buttons. This has lead to a rather staggering number of games that draw their controls onto the touchscreen — which, for anyone who witnessed the control pad's evolution from the palm-destroying corners of the NES to the pampering curves of today's consoles, is a fairly terrifying idea. Playing a fighter game on a slab of tactility-free glass? No thanks. Enter Joystickers' Classics — they're removable, reusable, arcade-style buttons built to give the iPhone (or just about any touchscreen device) that little bit of extra game.
Should Entrepreneurs Trust a VC Who Is Also Founding a Company? (TCTV)
Feb 23, 5:43PM
There's an age-old debate in Silicon Valley over whether or not you have to have started a company before to be a great VC. While many of the best VCs in Valley history weren't entrepreneurs, the bias is heavily on investors who know firsthand what entrepreneurs are going through. But what about VCs who are building companies at the same time they are backing them? It's a growing trend as serial entrepreneurs want to invest, but not go quite all the way over to the dark side. There have always been angel investors who dabble in deals while they keep their day jobs, but being a partner at an institutional venture fund while doing what's considered more than a full time job of building a company is something new. And it's interesting that this is happening as most prominent angels are making being an angel their only job. We're definitely in a period of redefining all the normal venture capital rules and roles. But are there inherent conflicts entrepreneurs should be aware of? One of the more successful at this balancing act is Tony Conrad of True Ventures. He was hanging around TechCrunch yesterday, so we decided to grill him on how doing two more than full time jobs well is humanly possible.
StackOverflow's Careers 2.0 Leverages Q&A To Get Programmers Hired
Feb 23, 5:30PM
StackOverflow co-founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood know their audience. The Q&A site popular with programmers is today launching its Careers 2.0 effort at careers.stackoverflow.com, unveiling a complete revamp of the "dinky careers site" that was there before. The new site is replete with fleshed out search interface (below), which lets employers search the StackOverflow programmer database by skills and location among other things. Prospective employers can also see the number of "active" candidates (people actively searching for jobs) vs. "passive" (people who would consider job offers if good enough) as well as include students or limit searches to people who have a legal right to work in the United States.
Phononic Devices Raises $10 Million To Turn Heat Waste Into Energy
Feb 23, 4:53PM
A Raleigh, North Carolina-based maker of thermoelectric coolers and generators, Phononic Devices, closed a $10 million series B investment from Venrock and Oak Investment Partners, the companies revealed today. Often explained as "solid-state heat pumps," thermoelectric technology (a.k.a. thermoelectrics) can capture wasted heat, and convert it into power. They can also displace heat and maintain a cool temperature in everything from laptops to refrigerators and lasers. The technology provides an environmental benefit versus compression-based refrigeration and other power generating technologies, because thermoelectric modules don't use toxic coolants or burn fossil fuels, and generate no noise. They have no moving parts...
PCH International, Gadget Maker Extraordinaire, Raises Another $26 Million
Feb 23, 4:33PM
PCH International isn't your normal Chinese manufacturing company. They're located in Shenzhen, a sleepy fishing village in the 1970's that is now home to 9 million people. It's an Irish company, headquartered in Cork, Ireland. And to make things even more interesting, it was named after the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), in California. Founder Liam Casey has been dubbed "Mr. China" - as a Westerner he has a competitive advantage in dealing with U.S. and European brands trying to figure out how to make stuff in China. The company designs, produces and packages electronics and accessories in partnership with major gadget brands. Revenue has skyrocketed, from next to nothing a few years ago to $400 million last year. And they are extremely profitable, says Casey. If you're a gadget freak, there's a good chance something they've made is in your pocket or on your desk. PCH is backed by U.S. venture capitalists. They raised $21 million in 2008 from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Focus Ventures.
Apple Sends Out Invites For Their March 2nd iPad Event — We'll Be There Live!
Feb 23, 4:19PM
Boom! One way or another, word of a March 2nd Apple event trickled out yesterday morning — and sure enough, the invite just hit my inbox. Apple's straying from their generally coy approach with this invite. There are no mysterious curtains or cryptic guitars for people to spend hours poring over in Photoshop here — they straight up put a picture of an iPad right on the invite, right behind a big ol' number "2".
Little Magic Stories: Interactive Art With The Kinect
Feb 23, 4:17PM
Chris O'Shea makes great stuff using a hacked Kinect. This latest experiment is a performance system called Little Magic Stories. It uses a Kinect sensor and a glass screen to create a "Pepper's Ghost" illusion. Kids can create and animate their own little characters and then interact with them, catching eggs, smacking bugs, and running wild on stage.
Exclusive: Grey Area Raises $2.5 Million To Turn Your City Into A Game
Feb 23, 3:59PM
Exclusive - Grey Area, a small Finnish smartphone games developer, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, London Venture Partners and Initial Capital, TechCrunch has learned. The startup is behind a mobile alternative reality game called Shadow Cities, which is a pretty fascinating location-based MMORPG that essentially turns the place you live into a full-fledged game scene.
Google Grants $2.7 Million To IPI To Promote Innovation In Online Journalism
Feb 23, 3:25PM
Search and online advertising juggernaut Google announced a couple of months ago that it would be providing some $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations devoted to innovating journalism. Around 40% of the total fund was recently allocated to the Knight Foundation in the United States. It appears more than 50% of the fund has just been awarded to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest.
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