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Cloud Database Provider MongoLab Raises $3 Million From Foundry, Baseline, And Others
May 18, 2:30PM
MongoLab, a cloud-based database provider created by San Francisco-based ObjectLabs, announced today that it has closed a $3 million series A funding round led by Foundry Group, Baseline Ventures, GRP Partners, Freestyle Capital, David Cohen, and more. The list of investors is notable, considering that it includes several names involved in the backing of other well-known cloud infrastructure players, like Heroku, SendGrid, Urban Airship, SimpleGeo, and Twilio, to name a few.
TurningArt Raises $750K To Be The Netflix For Artwork
May 18, 2:28PM
TurningArt, a startup that aims bring a Netflix-like model to the art world, has secured $750,000 in seed funding led by NextView Ventures with participation from Niraj Shah, Steve Conine, Thomas Lehrman, and Will Herman. Launched in August 2010, TurningArt allows customers to rotate prints of contemporary artists in their home or office for as little as $9.99 per month. Similar to the way you pick movies on your Netflix account, customers can build a queue of artwork they'd like 'rent', and TurningArt will then ship that artwork at their preferred frequency. 
Amazon Expands To Mysteries And Thrillers With Fifth Publishing Imprint, Thomas & Mercer
May 18, 2:07PM
Amazon is launching its fifth publishing imprint today—a mystery and thriller focused vertical called Thomas & Mercer. This joins Amazon's other imprints, including Amazon Encore, AmazonCrossing, The Domino Project, Montlake Romance. Thomas & Mercer launches with four books that will be released in the fall via Kindle, print and audio formats: "Resuscitation" by D.M. Annechino, "Stirred" by J.A. Konrath and Blake Crouch, "The Immortalists" by Kyle Mills and "Already Gone" by John Rector.
Cognitive Match Secures $6 Million For Ad Targeting Technology
May 18, 1:22PM
Cognitive Match has raised $6 million from new investor Antrak Capital and previous backer Dawn Capital. The round brings total funding raised by the company to over $10 million. The funding announcement coincides with recent moves for Cognitive Match CEO Alex Kelleher and the company's SVP of Global Sales, Mike Harris, who both relocated from London to New York.
Gilt Taste: A Pricey Online Marketplace For Artisanal Foods
May 18, 1:22PM
Today, flash sales giant Gilt Groupe is launching its newest vertical—Gilt Taste, a marketplace for artisanal foods. By definition, artisanal foods are ingredients and foods that are hand-crafted, created in small quantities, and tend to be high-quality products. Basically, these are not the type of ingredients you'll find at your local Safeway. Led by former Gourmet Magazine Editor and New York Times Restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, Gilt Taste is a members-only site that aims to give consumers access to artisanal products and ingredients, many of which have only been available to professional chefs until now. But while there is an e-commerce component of the site, there is also a significant editorial presence, with recipes, background on each ingredient, where the ingredient comes from, and more. With its design and high-quality photography, the site feels sort of like a magazine. 
Producteev Launches Google Tasks Sync And Outlook Plugin To Take Your Inbox To Zero
May 18, 12:30PM
ou may be tired of hearing about task managers, but Producteev is a task management service worth writing home about. Few people enjoy using complicated product, task or CRM managers, so Producteev has built a solution with a user-friendly interface that is channel agnostic, and even adds a bit of gaming mechanics. Producteev is a workable alternative to solutions like Basecamp, though the space will surely be keeping a close eye on Dustin Moskovitz's Asana. 
Zaarly Launches Realtime, Local Marketplace To The Public
May 18, 12:28PM
Backed by an impressive list of investors, Zaarly, a web and mobile service that connects buyers and sellers in a localized market place, is launching to the public today. As we've written in the past, Zaarly is a mobile-centric reverse Craigslist service. Here's how Zarrly works. On the site or via the startup's mobile apps, you post what you're looking for (i.e. cupcakes), how much you're willing to pay for it and how soon you need it. Zaarly will then share your request in the local community through the platform, and also allows you also post your request to Twitter and Facebook. 
Former Nokia CFO Rick Simonson Lands At Rearden Commerce
May 18, 12:28PM
E-commerce platform company Rearden Commerce has appointed former Nokia CFO Rick Simonson as its new chief financial officer and president of business operations. Simonson is known for serving as Nokia's CFO for six years before taking over leadership of the company's Mobile Phones business in November 2009 - and for quitting less than six months after his appointment. Simonson is also the man who declared in January 2010, shortly after taking over the reins of Nokia's - obviously key - mobile phones business, that Nokia would be "at par with Apple and RIM in smartphones" by 2011. Yeah, but no.
Silk Scores Seed Funding From Atomico, Others For Content Crunching Platform
May 18, 11:55AM
Exclusive - Amsterdam-based startup Silk, which offers a platform that allows content creators to distribute their work on the Web in a more structured manner, has raised €320,000 (approximately $475,000) in early-stage funding from Atomico and a number of individual angel investors, TechCrunch has learned. Silk, which was originally founded back in 2009, will use the proceeds to finally bring its technology to market. 
The Roundabout Tapes – Documenting The Startups Of London's Silicon Roundabout
May 18, 9:42AM
Many have talked about the explosion of tech startups in the East of London, which has come to be known colloquially as "Silicon Roundabout". But who are they? We've been writing about the emerging tech cluster there since it's first stirrings in 2008, so we've decided to start documenting them for TechCrunch TV. And with the help of our video crew in the shape of producer (and startup founder, even) Chris Leydon and camera guru Olly Newport, we'll be releasing the videos over the next few weeks. Our first interview was with Azeem Azhar, CEO and founder of PeerIndex, which moved into the area recently. 
WITN: Nigeria Gets A Lot Of Attention – Just For All The Wrong Reasons [TCTV]
May 18, 8:22AM
If you've been reading TechCrunch regularly for the last week, you've learned the good, the bad and the utterly unique about Nigeria's tech and media scenes. But is Africa's largest market prime for foreign venture capital investment, and how does it stack up to other frontier emerging markets Sarah has been visiting? Just after she got home, we shot a Why Is This News on her takeaways: Was she crazy to visit Nigeria like some people in the Valley said, or should we all be going there?
Morgenthaler Ventures Adds Angel Mark Goines as Partner, Upping Consumer Web Cred
May 18, 7:29AM
Morgenthaler Ventures is one of those Valley firms who did incredibly well during the Valley's telecom/networking/enterprise software glory years. For all the dot com headlines in the late 1990s, enterprise software has long been the core of the industry's returns, and the telecom networking build out was an order or magnitude bigger than the cash funding the more written about dot com fetes. But like so many Valley venture firms, Morgenthaler has struggled to carve out a franchise in the less techy Web 2.0 era. It has at least one bonafide up and comer it its portfolio in Evernote. Rather than chase secondary investments in deals it's already lost like other firms, Morgenthaler is hoping the new edition of Mark Goines as a partner will help bring in more Evernotes: Companies solving a hard productivity or transactional problems, leveraging the mobile Web. 
Qwiki Cofounder Louis Monier Exits, Joins Proximic
May 18, 7:00AM
TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco 2011 winner Qwiki has a hot iPad app (250,000 downloads in 11 days) and plenty of cash. But one thing they no longer have is cofounder Louis Monier. He's left the company, he tells me, to join Proximic as Chief Scientist. And that means Monier won't be attending Disrupt next week in New York to help hand over the Disrupt Cup to the next winner. 
Why Isn't Google Chrome A Part Of Android?
May 18, 5:43AM
Over the past couple of years covering Google, there's one seemingly simple question that comes up again and again, that Google just can't seem to answer. Why isn't Chrome a part of Android? Read the wrong way, that could seem like a deep question. But it almost never means "why isn't Chrome OS simply merged with Android?" or the like. Most of the time, it's simply a question wondering why Google's very popular web browser is not a part of their very popular mobile operating system? After all, that OS has a browser (the aptly-named "Browser"), but it's not Chrome. Why not?
Amazon Buys The A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co And Cloud.Co Domains
May 18, 1:46AM
Following in Twitter (T.co) and Overstock's (O.co's) footsteps, Amazon has picked up the domains A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co and interestingly enough Cloud.co in a deal made with Colombia-based domain registry .Co. While .Co originally gave Twitter the T.Co domain name for free in order to spread awareness about the brand, Amazon has actually purchased these from .Co for an undisclosed price. In comparison, Overstock's O.Co rebranding was the first negotiated .Co purchase deal, for $350K ( Godaddy also owns the name X.Co, using it as a vanity link shortening service). 
And Now To See If This Social Search Stuff Actually Works
May 18, 1:41AM
Yesterday, in a massively botched press launch, Bing released some new features that begin to really tap into the huge amount of social data exposed through its partnership with Facebook. The alliance isn't a new one — the companies have had a friendly relationship ever since Microsoft made a $240 million investment in Facebook that valued the social network at $15 billion in 2007, and Bing launched Facebook's Instant Personalization last October. But Bing's Facebook integration up until now was a little superficial — if you ran a query relevant to something your friend had previously 'Liked' on Facebook, you'd see that in a special module embedded in the search results page. Beginning today, things are getting much more interesting: Bing will actually reorder search results based on friends' Likes (in other words, your friend's recommendations won't just be relegated to a standalone widget, they'll influence the Ten Blue Links). 
Paul Graham To Hold Y Combinator "Office Hours" At TechCrunch Disrupt. Apply Now!
May 18, 12:14AM
One of many things that make Y Combinator special: They hold regular "office hours" with startups where entrepreneurs can get advice on any topic, from business strategy to design issues. What we talk about at office hours also depends on the startup and where we are in the cycle. Usually we talk about whatever is the most urgent question right now. Sometimes, especially early on, the most urgent question is to figure out what the most urgent question should be. That's less trivial than it sounds; we spend a lot of time telling founders what not to worry about. (About 10% of the time we talk not about immediate problems but about the big vision for the company. You don't have to be bound by this, but it's good to have one. Some startups arrive with a big vision already, but most don't. It's a useful exercise to spend some time thinking about what the path would be from what a startup is doing now to a giant company, even if that's not the current goal of the founders. Helping founders come up with these big visions is one of our strengths, because we've explored so much of the space of startup ideas that we know what's over each hill.)
Book A Cruise On Your Phone: Viator Wants To Be Your Realtime Travel Booking Solution
May 17, 11:36PM
When you plan a vacation, you likely have a destination in mind. Location plays a considerable role in our travel plans, but really what makes or breaks a good vacation is what you do when you get there. Your trip to Hawaii last summer was enjoyable simply because you were in Hawaii and not at the office, but really what you remember is the scuba diving -- and backpacking through volcanoes. These "travel activities" are essential to every travel experience and, perhaps unsurprisingly, have become a sizable business. According to PhoCusWright report "When They Get There (and Why They Go)", the U.S. travel activities market totalled $27 billion in 2009. Not only that, but more than $7 billion in activities were booked online in 2009, and the study predicts that, by 2012, the percentage of activities that will be arranged online will double.
Almost Half Of All Online Orders Now Include Free Shipping
May 17, 11:10PM
Online retail spending reached $38 billion this quarter, up 12 percent from a $33.8 billion a year ago according to Comscore -- Due to an increase in the number of buyers (7%), transactions per buy (9%) and tempered by a decline in spending per transaction (4%). According to a ComScore report released today, nearly half of those orders included free shipping, at 47% versus 53% for Q'1 '11, 49% versus 51% in Q'4 10 (the holiday season) and 41% versus 59% in Q3 '10.
(Founder Stories) How Hashable Rose From The Ashes Of Tracked
May 17, 10:06PM
Before there was Hashable, there was Tracked, Michael Yavonditte's attempt to build a better Yahoo Finance. It was little too complicated, and not social. "I felt like I was on the wrong side of history," he tells Chris Dixon in this episode of Founder Stories. So Yavonditte (who had previously sold advertising startup Quigo to AOL for $360 million) started from scratch, recruited a new team, and Hashable was born—a lightweight mobile app that helps you keep track of your business meetings and contacts, and is replacing business cards for many people.
OMG/JK: Chromebooks And Droided Out Lightbulbs
May 17, 8:07PM
From Google I/O to Microsoft's acquisition of Skype, last week was a huge one for tech news. In this episode of OMG/JK, my colleague MG Siegler and I do an in-depth look at what happened at Google's annual developer conference, which saw the launch of Google Music Beta, Android's @home project, and the first Chromebooks. Don't worry, we'll talk about the Skype acquisition next time, there was just too much material to pack into one show. And, yes, this episode is a bit retro — we shipped out the better cameras to New York in preparation for TC Disrupt next week, so we had to shoot this one in SD.
14% Of Groupon/LivingSocial Subscribers Respond To Push Notifications
May 17, 7:41PM
As I'm writing this the perky blue box on my iPhone has lit up with a "Groupon: 64% off Papa John's pizza" message, in the same format as I receive texts from friends -- This is why these things are so manipulative, it's almost like your BFF has texted you to go grab discounted pizza, which is comforting and unsettling at the same time. According to comScore's State of Retail webinar, these notifications seem to be working -- While 5% /6% (Groupon/LivingSocial) of users surveyed said that they open their respective apps to actively search for offers, 14% said that they engaged with the app, i.e. viewed the deal, searched for deals or purchased offers after seeing a push notification. That's double the engagement with minimal development effort.
All Of July 2009: Tumblr Did 250 Million Pageviews. May 16, 2011: Tumblr Did… 250 Million Pageviews
May 17, 7:22PM
Two years ago, Tumblr founder David Karp shared some impressive numbers. In July 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million pageviews, and 650,000 new posts per day. A year later, we noted that they were "on fire" with 6 million users and 1.5 billion pageviews. If that was being on fire, it's hard to know how to describe them now. On their staff blog, Karp has just shared that Tumblr did 250 million pageviews — just yesterday. Yes, they're now doing roughly the same number of pageviews a day as they were doing in an entire month two years ago. The data, which is being directly measured by Quantcast, doesn't lie. And it's amazing.
Square To Livestream Product Announcement At TechCrunch Disrupt
May 17, 6:20PM
Square, the startup that put the sexy back into payments, has a major product announcement coming up next Monday, May 23. That happens to be the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt in New York as well. What's the announcement? I don't know, but founder Jack Dorsey says it's a big one. So we've added the announcement to our agenda. During the lunch break on Monday the Square event will be streamed onto the main stage screen. And we'll also add it to our free live stream of the entire event so that everyone can watch at home.
NVIDIA CEO: Android Will Overtake iOS On Tablets In 30 Months
May 17, 4:34PM
Today at the Reuters Global Technology Summit, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang threw out a prediction for the future of the tablet market that isn't too far removed from that of the smartphone market over the past few years. Huang said that Android will surpass Apple's iOS-powered iPad in market share over the next 2 1/2 years.
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