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Another One Bites The Dust: Yahoo To Kill Buzz On April 21
Apr 18, 1:31PM
We knew this was coming, but Yahoo has announcing that it will not longer support Yahoo Buzz, its a Digg-like product where users can rank stories from publishers. According to a message on the Buzz website: Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations. We appreciate your patronage. The Yahoo! Buzz Team.
On-Demand Video Services Company Envivio Files To Go Public
Apr 18, 12:31PM
Envivio on Friday filed with the SEC for a $69 million IPO. The company, which was founded over a decade ago, has evolved from video encoding technology provider to a company that strives to make video content universally available on any device, any network. In a statement, the San Francisco-based provider of on-demand IP video processing and delivery solutions notes that the number of shares to be offered, as well as the price range for the initial public offering of shares of its common stock, have not yet been determined.
Concur Partners With, Invests $40 Million In India's Online Travel Site Cleartrip
Apr 18, 11:20AM
Concur, a publicly listed provider of travel and expense management solutions, is teaming up with Cleartrip, one of India's leading online travel portals. The deal encompasses both a strategic marketing partnership and a $40 million investment for a minority stake in the online travel company. Concur recently acquired travel organization and sharing service TripIt for up to $120 million.
SilverRail Raises Further $5M For Its Passenger Rail Ticketing Platform
Apr 18, 10:40AM
SilverRail Technologies, the passenger rail ticketing platform, has raised a further $5m in a round led by PAR Captial. Previous investors include Sutter Hill, Grandbanks Capital, Brook Ventures and Accel Partners, with the London and Boston-based company having already raised $9 million in a series A round. SilverRail's non-trivial mission is to consolidate the world's rail ticketing systems into a single system and offer this up via an API, thus removing the complexity of selling rail tickets, irrespective of operators, geographies and currencies. It says it will use the additional funding to expand capacity by integrating with new rail carrier inventory systems.
Metaforic Raises $8 Million To Combat Software Pirates, Hackers
Apr 18, 8:18AM
Anti-piracy software maker Metaforic, based in Glasgow, California and Tokyo, has raised $8 million in a round led by Scottish Equity Partners. Existing backers Pentech Ventures and the Scottish Investment Bank's Scottish Venture Fund participated in the round. Founded in 2006, Metaforic offers two main products: MetaFortress, which helps software developers protect their applications against piracy, subversion and tampering, and MetaSure for secure information storage. 
Dropbox Hits 25 Millions Users, 200 Million Files Per Day
Apr 18, 6:28AM
Dropbox will announce a number of milestones on Monday morning, we've learned. The file backup and sharing service was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. It was in one of the early Y Combinator classes, now has 25 million users and 200 million files are "saved" daily, and more than 1 million every five minutes. That's impressive growth from the 4 million users the company had a year ago (they had two million in late 2009). Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. The service also allows people to easily and quickly share files with others. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free, and they can pay for more. People use dropbox for personal storage, file syncing between machines, and group collaboration on projects. They have desktop software for the usual OSs, and mobile access, that makes things run smoothly.
Burn Notice Prequel Goes All Dual Screen With Realtime Comments
Apr 18, 2:52AM
TV is just not the same without Twitter and Facebook chatter. Tonight's prequel movie Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe comes with social chatter about the show on your laptop courtesy of Echo, the realtime commenting system. The USA Network launched this companion site, which pulls in comments, Tweets, Facebook status updates and Fan Page comments, as well as YouTube video and Twitpic photos about the show. Echo gathers it all into alive chat feed, which is then curated, and the best comments appear on TV. Prior to the show, actor Bruce Campbell answered questions online about the show. In the first two hours, 18,000 fans were commenting in the stream, hoping their comment would be plucked into the curated channel which was shown on TV.
Wall Street Gives Larry Page A Big -1
Apr 18, 2:21AM
Google's first quarterly earnings with Larry Page back at the helm as CEO of Google didn't go so well last Thursday. Revenues did rise an impressive 27 percent, but expenses grew an even larger 34 percent, partly due to across-the-board salary raises and ballooning talent retention packages. The next day, Google's stock took a nosedive, closing on Friday at $530, almost $50 below its close on Thursday before the earnings call. More than $15 billion of Google's market value, or about 8 percent, was wiped out, the biggest single-day drop since 2008. This reaction was not solely because Google missed Wall Street consensus earnings estimates by a three cents. It was also because of Larry Page. Wall Street investors fear Larry Page and the unknown changes he may bring to the company, which up until now has been one of the stock market's most consistent earners. Page's performance on the earnings call, or rather lack thereof, compounded these fears.
Backstage at Cirque Du Soleil's 'KÀ': Part One – Setting The (Awesome) Stage
Apr 18, 1:40AM
What happens in Vegas no longer stays in Vegas. Where once it was possible to fly to the middle of the desert, get absolutely wrecked on frozen margaritas and warm hookers and then return to civilization as if nothing had happened, today it's impossible to so much as open a minibar here without someone taking a photo and broadcasting it on Facebook. Savvy to this new reality, even the most shitty hotel on the strip - which is to say, The Riviera - has a Twitter account. And yet, despite the millions of tweets and status updates that flow in and out of Sin City every weekend, Vegas remains a town to which technology simply cannot do justice.
OMG/JK: Flipping Through The PlayBook, Now In Stunning HD
Apr 17, 11:30PM
It's time for a new episode of OMG/JK. And yes, the title above refers to what may be the greatest technical advance for TechCrunch TV since its inception last year: we're now shooting the show in HD. Now you can almost see the drool coming out of MG's mouth every time we mention the word "Apple". It's very exciting. This week we discuss the sudden death of Cisco's Flip camera line and the launch of RIM's new BlackBerry tablet. We also debate the new, ad-supported Kindle and whether or not Amazon will be launching a tablet of its own in the near future. Tune in!
Hey Kids, What Time Is It?
Apr 17, 5:19PM
As Mark Twain, or Yogi Berra, famously said, reports of Twitter's or Foursquare's death are exaggerated. There's way too much left from picking over RSS's carcass. No, seriously, I really mean that. There's way too much value lurking in Jack Dorsey's original pivot from a bike messenger dispatch service to be mined, and who better than Dorsey to lead the charge as the iPad drives the push notification queue into the new media vortex. It's two minutes past the Big Bang, and not enough time to grab the low hanging fruit. As Professor Irwin Corey, or Wavy Gravy, said Adam said to Eve: Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get. 
Fly or Die: The HP Touchsmart All-In-One PC And The Businessweek iPad App
Apr 17, 2:46PM
It's big screen week on Fly or Die. This week, John Biggs and I take a look at the HP Touchsmart All-in-One PC, a 14-inch Toshiba portable monitor, and the new Businessweek iPad app. As usual, a surprise guest joins us to defend his company's product decisions. HP has been trying to bring touch computing to desktop PCs with its Touchsmart line. The problem has always been that raising your hands to manipulate a touchscreen in front of you from a sitting position is unnatural, uncomfortable, and tiring. To address this issue, the new all-in-one Touchsmart reclines so that you can go from regular keyboard mode to surface computing mode. It is an improvement from past efforts, but to me it's a mistake to have a device with dual modes. You are going to pick one—keyboard/mouse or touch—and ignore the other. Does everything really need to be a touchscreen?
iPhone 4 About To Be Flickr's Top Camera. Point & Shoots? Pretty Much The Opposite.
Apr 17, 7:44AM
What's the most popular camera used in terms of pictures taken that are uploaded to Flickr? Right now, it's the Nikon D90. But in about a month or so, it will be Apple's iPhone 4. What's amazing is that D90 is nearly three years old. The iPhone 4 is not even a year old. Just look at a the chart above. The rise has been spectacular. But it's hardly the first time an iPhone has risen this quickly. Back in 2009, the iPhone overtook the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi as the most popular camera on Flickr. The difference is that at the time, Flickr was counting all the iPhone models together. That meant the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and the iPhone 3GS were all clumped together to overtake the Canon model. Now they're split up, and the iPhone 4 alone is still going to be the most popular camera on Flickr in under a year. It's pretty remarkable, really.
18 Hardcore Months In The Making, Glitch Is Ready To Roll
Apr 17, 2:27AM
Starting next week, there's a new massively multi-player online game launching in beta that you're going to want to play. It's called Glitch, and it's been in the making for well over a year. From what I've seen, it will be well worth the wait. Over a year ago, I sat down with Tiny Speck (the company behind Glitch) co-founder Stewart Butterfield to go over some of the aspects behind the game. A few days ago, we caught up again to go over how far they've come leading up to the beta. "We've been going hardcore for the last 18 months," Butterfield says of the Tiny Speck team. "But only in the last four months have things gotten much clearer," he continues. While they initially expected to launch in beta late last year, it has taken a bit longer than anticipated. But now he feels they're ready to roll, undoubtedly helped by a big new influx of funding and a lot of new employees (they're up to 22 now — minus former design lead Daniel Burka who moved on, but remains involved, Butterfield notes).
>From the Teclosion 2011 Spring Event In Tokyo: 15 Demos From Japanese Startups
Apr 17, 2:26AM
On Friday, I attended Teclosion Spring 2011 in Tokyo/Japan, a one-day web industry event (backed by TechCrunch Japan and Tokyo-based UI design company DESIGN IT!, amongst others) that was very much focused on the local startup scene. The largest chunk of the schedule was reserved for 15 Japanese start-ups, which presented their services onstage to a panel of judges and a crowd of around 300 people. Here are thumbnail sketches of all the services that were shown at the event's so-called "Startup Battle".
Jack Dorsey Is A Real Man, For A Good Cause
Apr 17, 12:31AM
DNA, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher's foundation for sex trafficking awareness, has launched its social media campaign this week, "Real Men Don't Buy Girls." If you get past the absurdity of their ads (and they are absurd on so many levels) and visit the DNA Facebook page you'll encounter some shocking statistics about the prostitution industry. For example, over 12 million people are currently sex slaves around the world and the average of entry into sex slavery is 13 years old. 
Voxy Now Uses Your Location To Help You Learn Language
Apr 16, 10:48PM
TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Voxy, a service that lets you learn a language "from life" has just updated its iPhone app in the App Store, with one pretty disruptive difference; Voxy's ESL app Aprende inglés now uses your location to help you learn a language, presenting you with the related vocabulary, as well things you hear and things you say if you're at a restaurant, for example. The app uses the SimpleGeo platform to bring users context-based lessons for about 150 points of interest including barbershops, dentist's offices, banks, grocery shopping and more. Each lesson is built so a user can complete it in three minutes, so as not to detract from the actual experience of being in a restuarant. 
Square's Disruptive Payment Service About To Get A Huge Retail Boost From Apple
Apr 16, 9:39PM
Mobile payments company Square has landed a big coup—sales placement on Apple's online store. And we've just confirmed with Square that the startup has a deal for in-store sales as well. Apple will start selling Square devices in all of its U.S. retail stores starting this week. Square offers both an iPhone/iPod Touch and an iPad app which allows merchants to process and manage credit card transactions with a handy little credit card swiping device that plugs into the headset/microphone jack. Apple has shown some love for Square lately, so it's not entirely surprising that the payments startup has forged a deeper relationship with the Cupertino-based company. Most recently, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showcased Square's technology at the debut of Apple's iPad 2. But to be featured on Apple's online store and in its brick and mortar operations is a big deal. 
Mobli Aims To Give Mobile Photo/Video Sharing A Little Celebrity Flair
Apr 16, 9:30PM
Given the rapid success that Instagram is seeing, it should be absolutely no surprise the startups are rushing to the mobile photo/video sharing space. But is there room for more than one player? Probably, but again, there are dozens of other players who have already been working on building their user bases for months now as well. The new guys coming late to the game need a hook. Mobli's hook is apparently going to be celebrity participation. Mobli is an Israeli startup that is preparing to enter the space in a few weeks with an iPhone app and website, followed shortly thereafter by Android and BlackBerry apps. "Smartphones are gradually replacing video and digital cameras," Gil Eyal, Mobli's VP of Strategy tells us. But we already knew that, a lot of people do. How can they differentiate themselves?
The Real Reason Mike McCue Needs $50 Million: Google Is Building A Flipboard Killer
Apr 16, 7:00PM
When news came out the other day that Flipboard just raised another $50 million at a $200 million valuation for its iPad news reading app, I gave CEO Mike McCue a hard time on Twitter and here on TechCrunch. Does an iPad app startup really need $50 million, or is this yet another sign of a bubble? McCue responded on Twitter, but yesterday we spoke by phone and he went into great detail about why exactly he thinks he needs $50 million. He came up with the number a few months ago. It's what he calculates he needs to get to cashflow positive, or at least pretty close (more on that below). Raising money is distraction, and his preference was to raise it all at once. But towards the end of our conversation, he also mentioned another concern which was a factor in taking as much money as he can right now. "I see a lot of competition down the pike," he says. Rumors have been reaching him that there is a team of engineers at Google who are "saying they are building a Flipboard killer." He adds quickly, " I have no idea what it is," but hearing about "this desire to kill us" is unsettling and it does add "a little concern about the unknown." 
TechCrunch Interview: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski
Apr 16, 5:56PM
Earlier this week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski took the stage at the Computer History Museum in San Jose, CA for a special Commonwealth Club event moderated by Adam Lashinsky, Senior Editor at Large of Fortune. Their conversation touched on a range of issues related to the FCC, including net neutrality and AT&T's pending acquisition of T-Mobile (which, unsurprisingly, Genachowski couldn't comment on). Immediately following the event Genachowski took some time to speak with us (he says he's a big fan of TechCrunch). Check out the video above for our interview with him, in which we discuss why the FCC's net neutrality rules are more lenient with regard to wireless than they are for wired Internet connections.
Gillmor Gang 4.16.11 (TCTV)
Apr 16, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, JP Rangaswami, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — waxed prophetically in the social garden. Crowley has been the focus of some media attention about a slowdown in checkins, but he seemed more excited about his market position than worried. With good reason, as the Gang explained in a dissection of hyperlocal and personal data harvesting. Rangaswami sees the various outputs of these social tools as providing nuanced clues into the nature of what will get viral at Scoble scale, while Crowley demurred about the view of Foursquare as a media property only to describe just such a nextgen service. As we debated what media is becoming, the consensus emerged of a social landscape where each and varied signals provide a valuable composite sense of where we are and are going next.
What App Developers Want: Letters To Steve Jobs And Larry Page
Apr 16, 5:00PM
The next smartphone wave is about to hit. There are rumors that Android 3.1 (Ice Cream Sandwich) will drop in May, and iOS 5 in June. Greg already posted a pretty compelling user's wish list for the latter, but what developers want is at least as important—because, as the lukewarm-to-appalled recent PlayBook reviews show, it hardly matters how great your hardware is. Nowadays success is all about the apps. Most users probably don't appreciate that while both platforms have come a long way from their inglorious beginnings, both still have some painful, glaring flaws from a developer's perspective. I should know: within the last six months I've been paid to write Android, Blackberry, iPhone, and iPad apps. I've also released my own pet-project travel app on both the App Store and Android Market, so I'm all too familiar with those headaches too. Why should you care? Because these are (often) the main reasons why your apps suck, or crash, or both.
Behind The Scenes At The New York Tech Meetup (TCTV)
Apr 16, 2:42PM
Since launching in 2004, the New York Tech Meetup has mushroomed to more than 17,000 members, making it the largest MeetUp in the world. Once a month the community pours into the Skirball Center on NYU's campus to network and watch nascent companies demo their products. Companies who've taken center stage in the past include Tumblr and Foursquare. Paid tickets are quickly snapped up and the organization recently hired its first Managing Director, Jessica Lawrence to handle growth. I attended the April 6th MeetUp with approximately 800 other spectators, one of which was Craigslist Founder, Craig Newmark. His presences was a highlight for one of the presenters of Lemonade Stand, a company that helps facilitate the online buying and selling of items in a community. (Video after jump).
Welcome To The U.S.! What Spotify Can Expect When It Arrives
Apr 16, 1:03PM
I just read that Spotify is coming to the U.S! Oh, wait. That was an article from 2009. I hope they really mean it this time. I love the product. To grease the skids for them a bit, I've put together a little travel guide for what they can expect in advertising and media circles when they do arrive. Lots of love in digital circles.
Being Swedish I'm guessing they're fantastic dressers and that their accents will make even the Brits envious. American agencies all have European envy, and Spotify is certifiably a big deal abroad. Agency status meetings will be preceded by Absolut and herring in honor of Spotify's arrival.
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