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Feb 26, 3:27AM
Breakup Notifier creator Dan Lowenhertz should just give up on Crate (his actual job) and just make a whole network of these types of things. After having his wildly popular app Breakup Notifier blocked by Facebook, Lowenhertz has dusted himself off and is back in the game, trying to
"turn a negative to a positive" with
Crush Notifier. >From
his blog:
"So what does the popularity of Breakup Notifier tell us? I believe it's that human beings, above all else, value relationships. I never knew how many people would end up using Breakup Notifier.
Feb 26, 3:01AM
And we're back again with our now weekly update on the insanity surrounding Facebook's stock in the SecondMarket auctions. Last week, the stock saw the beginning of a rally back to $27 a share, good for a $67.5 billion valuation (based on roughly 2.5 billion shares outstanding). This week, the good times continued to roll. Facebook's stock hit $28 a share, to push the valuation of the company back to a cool $70 billion or so. This is still slightly off the record high of $28.26 a share (a $70.65 billion valuation) set in mid January, but it's clear that Facebook's stock is storming ahead once again, and quickly. This was the 11th auction SecondMarket has done on the stock.
Feb 26, 2:03AM
All is right with the world, as genius (and Googler!) Thomas Steiner has made this beautiful Chrome extension that corrects Twitter's subject/object discrepancy on its "Who to Follow" feature. Grammar snobs (I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COMMENT), rejoice! In case anyone's still confused about "Who" vs. "Whom" usage, here's a quick tip to differentiate courtesy of Shit You Should Know: "To determine proper usage of who/whom, separate the who/whom clause and pose it as a question. If that question can be answered with "he", use "who"; if it can be answered with "him", use 'whom'."
Feb 26, 1:14AM
I love Kickstarter. It's maybe the best enabler site ever. In the short time it has been around, we've gotten everything from open source Facebook "killers" to iPod nano watches to RoboCop Statues. But one of the aspects of the service with the most potential is movie funding. A few of these projects have popped up already, and it apparently caught the eye of Napoleon Dynamite himself, Jon Heder. As NewTeeVee points out today, Heder has set up a project on the service to get funding for a movie he hopes to make. Alongside collaborator Nick Peterson (who would direct the film), he hopes to raise $27,000 over the next month or so. Given the fact that he's well, Napoleon Dynamite, he should blow past that in no time. I mean, the iPod nano watch got almost a million in funding.
Feb 26, 12:50AM
This week, Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (ACS) — which was acquired by Xerox (NYSE: XRX) in February 2010 — announced that it's building a new, electronic toll system on the two busiest highways in Los Angeles, to allow all single car drivers, even those in a diesel guzzling Hummer, to shift into carpool lanes for a fee. When average traffic levels in a carpool lane rise overall, so will the fee. The company and city plan to calibrate the systems to keep traffic at a steady 45 miles per hour in the carpool lane (at least). Once equipped with the new toll system, the carpool lanes along Interstate 10 and Interstate 110 will be called ExpressLanes, instead. Los Angeles and Xerox are building this project with the idea of reducing highway congestion overall...Is the death of the carpool lane as we know it environmentally sound, though? 
Feb 26, 12:22AM
Wait wha? According to this SEC form, daily deals site Groupon has raised another $16.2 million. There's no word on whether this is an add-on to its recent $950 million round or just a smaller mini-round, in any case it seems unrelated to any M&A activity. Listed on the form is Blue Media's Eric Lefosky, Brad Keywell and Accel's Kevin Efrusy, among others. Groupon recently turned down an offer from Google, and has raised over $1.13 billion to date when you include the amount on this form. When asked whether this was part of a new round, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason said, "We typically don't comment on these things sorry. Ask me something else."
Feb 25, 11:47PM
Kidlandia, the awesome site that lets you create your own personalized fantasy maps for your kids, has raised $2.5 million led by Alsop Louie Partners with GRP, Net Discovery, Ivan Sutherland and Jim Sandler participating. This brings the startup's total funding to $3.5 million. As we've reported in the past, Kidlandia lets parents and kids create maps of a fantasy land, where the child is King or Queen of their own eponymous fantasy kingdom. You can insert family members or friends names into the map, so other areas of the land incorporate family members' names. The map also features whimsical characters from Kidlandia's brand Kreechurs. 
Feb 25, 9:51PM
It's Oscar weekend so of course every social media service, smart phone app and "tech" blog is going to find some movie angle to remind you that they exist. And because I tend to write the more fluffy cultural pieces, I will be stuck writing about them, even though I hate Hollywood and celebrities of the non-YouTube or TopCoder variety. But Foursquare's map of 2010 movie checkin frequency (above) is an exception to the "blatant attempt to glom publicity off of an 'important' event rule," and deserves reposting. And yes, the mention of Sex In the City 2 on the pink side of the Venn Diagram here makes me ashamed for my gender. Very ashamed.
Feb 25, 9:34PM
It has now been at least a year since I last used the optical drive on any of my computers. And now I'm really starting to believe I never will again. Which I love. Last October, I noted that I was ready for the launch of the new MacBook Airs because I realized I had never once used the optical drive on my MacBook Pro. It was simply a huge waste of space. And since I've switched over to the Air — the best computer I've ever owned — I have zero doubt that this optical drive-free experience will soon be the reality for all Mac computing. And now it's clear that OS X Lion will be the final ingredient needed. 
Feb 25, 8:42PM
How much should a startup spend on marketing? The answer, according to VC Fred Wilson, is zero. The best marketing for a startup when it is just getting off the ground are kick-ass products. Great products market themselves. If you have a line item in your business plan for marketing, you are doing it wrong. That is not to say that startups don't need to do any marketing at all. And, let's be clear, Wilson is taking about consumer Web startups, not enterprise startups or those in other industries. But as he writes in a post today: 
Feb 25, 8:14PM
Bloomberg is launching a new daily hourly television show called Bloomberg West next week, we hear. It's on the air daily at 3 pm Pacific and then again at 8 pm. The show will focus on technology, innovation and business, says the promo clip that has been running regularly on Bloomberg. It's being recorded from their new San Francisco offices. The show is hosted by Emily Chang, formerly with CNN in Bejing, and Cory Johnson, who was most recently a hedge fund manager and is a long time journalist. It'll will be available to 250 million people worldwide who have Bloomberg TV. Promo clip is below.
Feb 25, 7:54PM
Ask a VC was on hiatus for a few weeks, but your Friday investor-talk fix is back. Our guest this week is Tony Conrad, partner at True Ventures and founder of About.Me, which recently sold to AOL along with TechCrunch. There was a pent-up flood of questions this week, and Conrad addressed many of them. In case you want to skip around here they are in order: -Why does True Ventures invest in more product and gadget companies than most VCs? What do they look for? -True's views on International investing. -Conrad's advice on getting into business in Southeast Asia and the moment he knew he'd "gone native." -Does Conrad have a secret "formula" for building companies to flip? And did he sell About.Me so early, because he didn't believe in the business? -Why True isn't betting big in the current game frenzy. -Why True doesn't bet on education or music companies. -And a general roundup of questions about how to pitch True. 
Feb 25, 7:44PM
Apple just can't get a break. Consumer Reports is, well, reporting that in their testing scenarios the Verizon iPhone 4 has the same "death grip" attenuation issues as the AT&T/GSM model, which means dropped calls and signal degradation if you hold the phone wrong. Just as with the previous model, the Verizon iPhone 4 suffers from the same conductive gap issues and the problems manifest when you touch the small spot between the two pieces of metal cladding. 
Feb 25, 6:56PM
It looks like recruiting service Pursuit has been gobbled up by Facebook, the latest in a string of acqui-hires, judging by the brief message on their homepage: "Update: we've found a new home at Facebook! Although we'll be working on stuff unrelated to Pursuit, keep an eye out for great new features from us there and thanks to everyone who helped along the way."
The San Francisco based Pursuit was just three extremely over-educated guys -- Louis Eisenberg, Russ Heddleston, Nicholas Letourneau -- who according to their digital "Gone Fishing" sign, will be dropping Pursuit in um, pursuit of other things at Facebook. This is not surprising, as Facebook acquisitions are almost always about engineering talent versus product. 
Feb 25, 6:10PM
If you're like us, you may have a hard time remembering where you placed one of those remotes of yours that keeps secretively slipping away. You may have even given up after searching for it for hours. As a surprise, for this week's giveaway, we were lucky enough to have Logitech offer to help us give away two, yes two, Harmony Ones. A Logitech Harmony One is basically the only remote you will ever need. Whether you want to watch a DVD, TV show, or listen to music, the Harmony One makes it incredibly simple to do so.
Feb 25, 5:03PM
Over the past couple of years, we've seen a blooming of new Q&A sites which are both social and informative. While Quora gets a lot of our attention here at TechCrunch because of the quality of the answers it generates, it is still tiny compared Formspring, Stack Overflow, and most of its other competitors. Formspring, in particular, is killing it once again after a drop-off in activity in the middle of last year. According to comScore, Formspring had an estimated 1.1 billion pageviews in January, up 65 percent from September, and almost back up to its peak of 1.3 billion last May. Formspring also attracted an estimated 19 million unique visitors worldwide in January, compared to 3.1 million for Stack Overflow and only 496,000 for Quora. (Albeit, Quora's visitors grew nearly 90 percent from December to January alone, compared to 5 percent monthly growth for Formspring. However, Formspring is adding about one million new members a month). 
Feb 25, 5:00PM
As we've written in the past, OneRiot recently switched its business model; shutting down its search portal and focusing exclusively on monetizing via its realtime advertising network. Today, the startup is launching a social targeting service for mobile ads, that the company claims offers highly targeted ads within mobile apps. By way of history, OneRiot first ventured into the advertising world in 2009 with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. OneRiot also launched RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, and rolled out self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise. Currently, OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs says the company is seeing 2 billion impressions per month across its network (for context, Google's AdMob sees 2 billion impressions per day).
Feb 25, 4:51PM
It's that time again: time for a live discussion of a new piece of technology LIVE. Today we're talking about the Xoom for a full hour and I'm going to try to go through what I can and hopefully you can tell whats going on given the various limitations of the MacBook Air's camera and the high gloss of the screen. I'll be going over some of your direct questions and you can feel free to Tweet us with the hashtag #crunchgear, chat, or, if you're feeling particularly Web 2.0, leave a comment. 
Feb 25, 4:07PM
A few weeks ago, social commerce network Lockerz acquired photo sharing app Plixi as a way to boost photo sharing on its platform. It looks like the company has hit the ground running in terms of integrations and today is launching a new photo sharing app. Lockerz, which has raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins newly launched sFund, Liberty Media and Liberty Media's CEO Greg Maffei, revolves around the idea that influencers within a social network can become brand and content advocates and affect the behavior of their friends. The site attempts to build a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play and connect on the Web and allows users can earn points and discounts on brands by sharing content on the site. 
Feb 25, 3:36PM
Auto maker BMW recently established a New York-based venture capital firm dubbed BMW i Ventures that it seeded with $100 million to seek out partnerships that might facilitate BMW-i product adoption in urban markets. BMW-i is a BMW sub-brand solely focused on developing and producing sustainable mobility vehicles. Its first investment was made public this week: BMW pumped $5 million into MyCityWay, a user-driven, location-aware city guide. FirstMark Capital and IA Ventures, who participated in an earlier $1 million seed round, joined BMW.
Feb 25, 3:27PM
According to a late Thursday SEC filing the New York City startup behind Flavorize.com, FlavorMetrics Corp., is seeking a $1 million investment to build a "Pandora for food." The company's web and mobile app is now in private beta. Currently, Flavorize.com allows users in New York City or San Francisco to enter a few key attributes of meals that they enjoyed before — including ingredients, a restaurant or location where they ate something delicious, a specific dish, or a flavor — to generate suggestions, based on the wisdom (and palate) of the crowds, as to what they might try next. The startup — co-founded by chief executive Eunice Chou and engineering lead Franco Yuvienco — will compete for users and dollars against a huge number of search and recommendation tools that are already helping people find recipes and restaurants online...
Feb 25, 2:59PM
We have a bemused relationship with most folks from the PR industry here around TechCrunch, and with good reason (trust me on that one). Most of the time (but not always), we keep our peace when PR flacks go off on us with or without a shred of reason, but sometimes one of them goes off the deep end and we need to point it out. It's a public service we do for the PR industry to show them the error of their ways. Consider this a lesson in what not to do in PR.
Feb 25, 2:06PM
While this device may look like an old Fisher-Price Tape Player, what we have here is a bonafide music playback device designed for Google (probably as some sort of Tchotchke/giveaway) by Chord Electronics. The stereo is a variant of Chord's Chordette Carry with inputs on the back for multiple devices as well as Bluetooth support.
Feb 25, 2:00PM
My, how things change. A few years ago, anyone proposing that Facebook games would turn into a wildly profitable multi-billion dollar industry would probably be met with some pretty strange looks. Yet now market-leader Zynga has a higher valuation than Electronic Arts. Some might say the gold rush has passed, and that the entrenched players are going to be impossible to beat, but now a new wave of companies has set its sights on a related, but fundamentally different genre: casual mobile gaming. Today, a startup called TinyCo (formerly known as Brooklyn Packet) has closed an $18 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and they're setting out to become the most successful mobile gaming company out there. It's a lofty goal and TinyCo has some steep competition, but their thesis — that mobile gaming is about to take off in a huge way — seems right on the mark. Oh, and they now have Marc Andreessen on their board, which isn't a bad start. 
Feb 25, 1:59PM
Last year, AuroraFeint launched the private beta of OpenFeint X (OFX), which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods. Last December OFX exited private beta and today, OpenFeint is releasing a new version of the suite, OFX 2.0. With OFX, developers can create Farmville-like iOS games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. OFX's premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet. OpenFeint says that future updates will allow game developers to offer virtual currency and virtual goods for sale in their games.
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