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Jan 31, 9:00AM
Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: nanox: High-Quality iPod nano Watch Conversion Kit WiGig: Panasonic Tablet Wirelessly Transmits A Full DVD Video In 60 Seconds (Video) Flying People Spotted Over New York City…Film At Nine
Jan 31, 7:59AM
Last September, Salesforce
bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly for $50 million-plus to help expand its service cloud offerings to small businesses. Today, Salesforce is debuting a brand new Assistly-inspired social and mobile customer service platform for small businesses, called Desk.com. As you may remember, Assistly helped companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.
Jan 31, 6:25AM
When it comes to networking, there is no shortage of ways to connect with other professionals to talk shop. LinkedIn has become the most popular professional networking platform, with over 100 million users using the site to post their work experience, look for jobs, and connect with prospective employers. Facebook, too, has its own professional social network
in BranchOut, or you can try startups
like Identified or just go for some good old fashioned meetups.
Jan 31, 3:32AM
If you tend to play on the magenta network, a leaked document out of T-Mobile may require your attention. According to
TmoNews, the carrier will impose new rules for domestic data roaming on April 5. Instead of the unlimited data goodness you've likely grown accustomed to, the carrier will cut you off after you burn through an allotted amount of data. Here's how it'll work:
Jan 31, 3:09AM
Does Twitter need Google or does Google need Twitter? It's a question complicated by recent events, such as the two companies not coming to an agreement to extend their previous partnership through which Google showed Tweets in search results. That deal wasn't renewed,and then Google decided to promote its own Google+ results in search, which
didn't go over well with Twitter at all. Asked about this at by Peter Kafka at the D: Dive Into Media conference this evening, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo responded:
Jan 31, 3:01AM
So you want to take a photo of you and your buds on the slopes or at the bar or at A&F or whatever and you know, just know you're going drop that shnitz on the floor. So what do you need? A freakin' Kevlar cord, Mr. Brojangles. That's what you need.
Jan 31, 2:45AM
Whether
a "drastic change" is needed or there is already
"a lot of change", former RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis (the same one who
flipped out on the BBC during an interview) still believes in the BlackBerry. Forget the fact that the company's figures are half what they were at the beginning of 2011, and never mind the fact that the stock dropped 8 percent on the first day that new CEO Thorsten Heins was at his post. Lazaridis still thinks a $50 million investment in RIM stock (from out of his pocket) is well worth it.
Jan 31, 2:27AM
Online content, portal and comprehensive front-end technology solution
Synacor filed its amended S-1 today for an IPO looking to raise $75 million. The filing revealed that this month Synacor acquired
Carbyn, an HTML5 operating system that lets users put their files, applications and more in the cloud and access them from any device. It paid $1.1 million total for the company, $600,000 up front with $500,000 deliver in April 2013, and it hired 7 Carbyn employees.
Jan 31, 2:05AM
Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel's video analytics. The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic's 3D camera and move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you're moving, Intel's AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer.
Jan 31, 12:51AM
Last year, Nick Paumgarten
wrote an interesting article for The New Yorker that detailed the rise of online dating and the effects it's had on web culture. What struck me most were some of the eye-opening statistics he shared about the size and popularity of the industry, beginning with the fact that fee-based dating sites have become, collectively, a billion-dollar industry -- that "one in six new marriages is the result of meetings on Internet dating site." What's more, online dating is now the third most common way for people to meet.
Jan 30, 11:45PM
Having spun out of online broadcaster
Justin.tv last year,
SocialCam has managed to get a strong footing on iOS and Android. It
passed 3 million downloads in December, and it's now sending 3 million notifications a day, with video uploads and following counts up by 700% and 800% in the last few months, according to cofounder
Michael Seibel. But the three-man team is going back into
Y Combinator, the early-stage seed fund that Justin.tv had grown out of, instead of taking the more obvious routes of raising venture funding or simply continuing to build on its own.
Jan 30, 10:59PM
One of the most buzzed-about startups over the last few months has been
Codecademy — a site that looks to make programming accessible to just about anyone, with a variety of interactive, web-based courses that have users writing their first lines of code within a few seconds. The site's 'Code Year' program, which invites users to receive one programming lesson each week, racked up a whopping
100,000 signups in only 48 hours — and it even has the White House
on board. But, as anyone who has spent much time on the site can attest to, Codecademy has had one big problem: there just aren't that many lessons available. And the ones that
are on there sometimes seem to be moving too quickly, without many practice exercises to explore and reinforce what you've just learned. Today, the company is launching a feature that will go a long way toward fixing that. Meet the Codecademy
Course Creator.
Jan 30, 10:35PM
Largely forgotten social network Bebo may have shut down today. Bebo users certainly seem to think that this is the end. The Bebo website is down, and as a result there's a steady stream of sad tweets using the "#bebo" and "#ripbebo" hashtags. And if it's a false alarm, the company isn't doing much to combat that impression — the most recent posts on both the Bebo and Team Bebo Twitter accounts date from November.
Jan 30, 10:25PM
How did Facebook become worth so much money that it could
file for the biggest IPO in tech history? By building a highly defensible product, platform, and advertising business on top of brilliant talent and valuable data. It now has several competitive advantages that protect it from disruption and could give it a long life as the primary online identity provider. Here are the 5 components that make Facebook a smart long-term bet for investors, regardless of its exact IPO pricing.
Jan 30, 8:46PM
The perks of getting into a top startup accelerator just got a little better. Microsoft is now offering startups in its new
BizSpark Plus program $60,000 worth of costs for using its Azure cloud computing program. This includes
any company that's a part of
TechStars or its affiliated
Global Accelerator Network, as well as
Seedcamp,
Dogpatch Labs, and a list of others. Let's say your hot new startup has just launched to the public, gotten TechCrunched, and is dealing with its big first wave of traffic. This deal will let you quickly scale up to meet the demand without blowing your seed funding on emergency virtual machines. An
open cloud services platform, Azure works with major development languages including node.js, java, php and Microsoft's own . net, among others -- the point, from Microsoft's perspective, is to get in with the next batch of companies before they get hooked on offerings from rivals like Amazon.
Jan 30, 7:57PM
As everyone waits for Facebook to
file for its IPO this week, one of the big questions is what will its valuation be. Will it hit the magic $100 billion? Well, we are not going to find out this week because IPOs don't get priced unti right before the offering, which isn't expected until April or May. And a lot can happen between now and then. (What will be filed is the preliminary S-1 with all of Facebook's financials and other corporate information). But if Facebook went public today, chances are that it would get a valuation of around $85 billion.
Jan 30, 7:41PM
Internet marketing agency
BlueGlass Interactive has just acquired Voltier Digital, a digital agency specializing in content marketing, infographic creation and data visualization. Voltier, whose
clients include eBay, CEO.com, Fanhattan, WellHome, COLOURlovers.com, Greatist, and others, will be relocating its entire six person team to BlueGlass's Tampa offices immediately. In addition, Voltier's three founders, Dan Tynski, Nicholas Santillo and Chris Tynski, will hold senior roles on BlueGlass' production and marketing teams. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Jan 30, 6:44PM
The
latest technology to be adopted by the Obama campaign—
Square. The mobile payments device is now being used by the Obama for fundraising, says the company. Staff, fundraisers and others are being equipped with the card reading devices, says Square, enabling the campaign to take donations on the go via Android devices, iPhones or iPads. "Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, running for president or local assembly, Square makes it easier than ever for candidates, organizations and volunteers to fundraise for their cause," said a spokesperson for Square.
Jan 30, 6:37PM
Solera Networks just announced that it has raised $20 million in Series D funding from Intel Capital (the chip-maker's investment arm) and others. The company says its DeepSee Platform can index and classify all network traffic, giving companies a comprehensive picture of their network security in real-time, either for spotting risks before a security breach or responding quickly once a breach has occurred. Both domestic and international sales supposedly grew more than 100 percent last year.
Jan 30, 5:56PM
Twitter has posted a seriously awful/hilarious recruiting video to YouTube, which the company says was the product of last week's "
Hack Week." During this time, employees were able to take time away from their day-to-day work to collaborate on new ideas. Although it was only posted on Friday, the video has already seen over 400,000 views at the time of writing. Why so viral? Because it's parodying the entire genre of startup recruiting videos by purposefully being bad. Really, really bad. So bad it's funny. Or at least that's the hope. The video has everything: amateurish effects, cheesy music, stilted speech, bad acting, poor production quality, and sayings like:
"Man this is a sweet job. But working at Twitter isn't just a sweet job, it's a way of life - a way of life that's like a sweet job." Yeah, you pretty much have to watch this one.
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