Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from TechCrunch.
Add feeds@feed2email.net to your contact list to make sure you receive all your emails
Make sure to visit feed2email.net to get more feeds sent to your inbox.
To find out which feeds you are subscribed to, or to get further help, just reply to this email.
Google-Backed Kibits Lets You Share With Real-World Micro-Networks, Raises $1M
Mar 29, 12:03PM
Does the world need another mobile social app? A new startup called Kibits thinks it does, and its investors (including Google Ventures and Charles River Ventures) seem to agree. The company's iPhone (and iPod Touch) app is launching today. At first glance, it may look like another variant on group chat, but co-founder and CEO Matt Cutler says that even though he's "an active user of multiple group messaging apps," Kibits is doing something different.Bump Pay Lets You PayPal Someone Quick, But Only In-Person
Mar 29, 12:01PM
Now it's as easy as a fist-pound to pay a friend back for dinner, drinks, or a cab. Bump, the popular contact sharing app developer, today releases a new standalone iOS app called Bump Pay that lets you transfer money via PayPal to anyone in arm's reach. But that's also Bump Pay's biggest limitation. Unlike Venmo where you send money to any phone number near or far, Bump Pay only works in-person. The standalone app comes from Bump Labs, Bump's experimental wing for trying out new features. Rather than risk complicating its 84 million-install flagship app right away, the developer will only bring money transfers to all its users if Bump Pay generates traction and delight.Circl.es: Meet The Latest Dating Site That Uses Facebook To Help You Find Love
Mar 29, 11:08AM
Online dating is a hard nut to crack. First of all, it's a very personal process ported to a largely impersonal medium -- and then there's the creep factor. Next, it's a big business, but a small set of names dominate mindshare. Sure, with size and scale comes revenue, but it also brings less appealing byproducts like noise, faked pictures, lazy filtering, inadequate profiles, and the difficulty of judging actual interest from spam or "virtual winking". People have become more comfortable with the idea of dating online, but they don't want an experience that explicitly (and constantly) reminds them of what they're doing. Instead, eDaters want to avoid overexposure, and experience "newness" by going beyond their immediate social graph. Although it may sound counterintuitive, a new site launching today called Circl.es wants to give date seekers that feeling of newness by tapping into one of the most familiar platforms ... Facebook.Confirmed: Canadian VC Firm OMERS Ventures Takes $20M Stake In HootSuite At $200M Valuation
Mar 29, 9:14AM
AllThingsD has reported, and we have now confirmed, that OMERS Ventures, a Canada-based VC, has taken a $20-million investment in HootSuite, the social media management platform, valuing the company at around $200 million. The investment is a secondary one, and will be coming in the form of purchases of equity from HootSuite's existing shareholders. These include employees as well as existing investors. That list includes Blumberg Capital, Hearst Ventures, Geoff Entress and Millennium Technology Value Partners, who collectively have invested $4.9 million into the company: $3 million in debt and a $1.9 million capital investment.Barnes & Noble Incorporates In Germany, Closest Sign Yet Of European Nook Launch
Mar 29, 8:02AM
Just as Amazon is launching a new versions of the Kindle in Europe (but not the Fire tablet, yet), one of its big competitors is taking one more step in its bid to enter the European market: Barnes & Noble has incorporated a new company, Barnes & Noble Digital Media GmbH, in Germany. B&N incorporated the German company on March 15, just around the time that the U.S. company came to London to promote the Nook to developers.Developers Are Divided Over Adobe's Plan to Take Revenue Share For Higher-End Flash Games
Mar 29, 7:37AM
Developers are at odds over Adobe's plan to charge a 9 percent revenue share for higher-end Flash games that make more than $50,000 in revenues. So today, Adobe announced a new set of features for developers who create very graphics-heavy games with the launch of Flash Player 11.2. It also unveiled a partnership with Unity Technologies, the Sequoia-backed company with a popular gaming engine that powers titles like Mika Mobile's Battleheart. This could bump up the overall quality of browser-based games, considering that the new version of Flash has powers to tap into hardware for rendering 3-D graphics. But if you read the announcement closely, Adobe reveals its plan to start charging a revenue share for high-grossing games. It affects developers who call two APIs: one that provides access to domain memory, and one that's for hardware acceleration.RentSocial, Launching Today, Adds A Social Layer To The Rental Process [TCTV]
Mar 29, 5:00AM
Looking for an apartment is usually pretty simple: you go on Craigslist, find three apartments that look like they've been used to chop up beeves, and then move in with your buddy whose roommate made meth in the basement. At least that's how it worked for me a few years ago. Now, however, you have stuff like RentSocial. RentSocial is the front end for Yield Technologies property management systems. Yield, for example, makes a product called RentSentinel for property managers to handle renter rolls for large buildings. By plugging into this existing install base, Yield has been able to create a rental research site with real-time updates from each apartment complex, thereby allowing you to find other people who live in a complex you're looking at or, barring that, read reviews of places people have lived.
Box Adds Social Workflow Features To Improve Mobile Collaboration
Mar 29, 2:35AM
Box already made news earlier today with the launch of OneCloud, its suite of productivity applications that are accessible from mobile devices. But it wasn't done — the company also hosted the last stop of its World Tour in San Francisco, where CEO Aaron Levie demonstrated what he called a "reinvention" of collaboration on Box. These features fall under the umbrella of what Box is calling its Social Workflow. He argued that while there are plenty of social business tools, these innovations haven't made their way into content management systems, which he said are "stuck in time and not being updated to move to this post-PC era." The goal is to bring some of the innovations from social network into Box, and also to make the collaboration process work better on smartphones and tablets.Joshua Schachter Launches Newest Tasty Labs Project, Skills.to
Mar 29, 1:52AM
Founder and investor Joshua Schachter has spent a great deal of time trying to solve the problem of not being able to easily find relevant things and people; initially with his first startup Delicious -- which he sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million -- and now with his latest efforts at incubator Tasty Labs. Tasty Labs, which has $3 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, launched its first project (Jig) in August and has now come through with its second service, Skills.to.Zynga Prices $515M Secondary Offering At $12 Per Share
Mar 29, 12:48AM
As reported previously, social gaming giant Zynga is holding a secondary offering of its shares. The company just announced the pricing, which is $12 per share, for 42,969,153 shares. All of the shares will be sold by existing stockholders, says the company, and Zynga will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares. Zynga revealed in an S-1 filing from last week that CEO Mark Pincus will sell 15 percent of his shares, and his voting power post-sale will go from 36.5 percent to 35.9 percent. Investors IVP, SilverLake, Union Square Ventures, Google, Reid Hoffman are also selling in the offering, as is board member Jeffrey Katzenberg. Owen Van Natta, General Counsel Reggis Davis, COO John Schappert and CFO Dave Wehner are selling shares as well.Not All Markets Are Created Equal
Mar 29, 12:00AM
The SEC recently concluded its investigation of the emerging market for pre-IPO shares of private companies, resulting in charges being brought against three market participants. I am proud to say that SecondMarket was not among those investigated or charged with wrongdoing. While the press focused on the SEC "cracking down" on the private company market, the investigation actually focused on wrongdoing that has existed in the securities markets for decades: broker-dealers using improper sales practices and charging inappropriate fees, and unregistered middlemen improperly acting as broker-dealers.Dating App Yoke Hooks You Up Based On Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, And Facebook Data
Mar 28, 11:44PM
Finally, a dating site where you can find someone to actually date, not just sleep with. New dating app Yoke matches you with single friends of friends you're truly compatible with but who don't even need to be Yoke users. Yoke does this by comparing you and their Facebook Likes and listening activity with datasets from Amazon, Netflix, Echo Nest, and a proprietary college graph. That lets Yoke show you potential dates because "you listen to Lil Wayne and she listens to Jay-Z", or "You went to Stanford and he went to MIT". It's got a dead simple Facebook app interface, and lets you ask mutual friends for introductions. These all combine to give Yoke the power to challenge sites like OkCupid and succeed where strict matchmaking sites like Thread failed.New Government ePayment Regulation Costs Small Business $10 Billion
Mar 28, 11:09PM
The small business economy is suffering considerable harm from new regulations being enforced by the IRS this year. There's a new tax form that's causing this trouble for small business owners who collect ePayments and conduct eCommerce. The IRS Form 1099-K requires merchant processors and third-party payment processors, such as PayPal and Square, to report the income that individuals and small businesses were paid through their services to the IRS in 2011. The IRS estimates that 53 million of these forms should have been sent for tax year 2011, making it the 10th highest volume tax form in it's first year of existence. That's a lot of small businesses being hit by the implementation of Internal Revenue Code Section 6050W.Hitting 20M Downloads Across iOS Apps, Azumio Releases Sleep Time To Measure Your Zs
Mar 28, 11:06PM
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Azumio isn't exactly a household name when it comes to mobile apps, so one might be surprised to learn that, collectively, their apps have pulled in over 20 million downloads. That's because Azumio is plugging away at building a suite of biofeedback apps that measure your heart rate, stress, and sleep. Azumio is tapping into a hot trend, as health devices and mobile apps are on the rise and have found eager users outside of the tech community. Companies and devices like Fitbit, Lark, Up, and more have found traction among consumers, but most of them involve external hardware that is worn while you sleep. That's why today Azumio is releasing an app appropriately called Sleep Time, which measures the quality of your sleep and provides you with an alarm clock -- without the extra hardware.Kindle Fire Update Brings Sharing, Book Extras, Print Replica Textbooks To The Masses
Mar 28, 10:54PM
Hey there, Kindle Fire owners -- Amazon's rolling out a brand new software update for you, and it packs quite a few worthwhile (and arguably overdue) tweaks for your budget-conscious tablet. Take sharing, for example. Oddly absent from the Kindle Fire at launch was the ability to share interesting snippets of text like its e-ink brethren, but that functionality has been added, along with the ability to tap into Amazon's people-powered Shelfari service for what the company calls Book Extras -- extra related information pertaining to the book a reader is poring through.Have Money, Will Explore: Amazon's Jeff Bezos Aims To Recover Lost Apollo 11 Engines
Mar 28, 9:39PM
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a knack for using his considerable net worth in interesting ways -- 10,000 Year Clock anyone? -- but for space buffs like me, one venture in particular takes the cake. In a new post on the Bezos Expeditions website, he announced that he and his team of savvy undersea explorers have located the Rocketdyne F-1 engines that helped propel the crew of Apollo 11 on their historic voyage to the moon in 1969.House Shoots Down Legislation That Would Have Stopped Employers From Demanding Your Facebook Password
Mar 28, 9:07PM
Well, that didn't take long. A proposed Facebook user protection amendment introduced yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives has already been shot down. The legislation, offered by Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter, would have added new restrictions to FCC rules that would have prohibited employers from demanding workers' social networking usernames and passwords. The final vote was 236 to 184, with only one House Republican voting in support of the changes.Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Prices IPO At $13 Per Share
Mar 28, 9:03PM
After setting a price range yesterday, mobile ad network Millennial Media has priced its IPO of 10.2 million shares of common stock at $13 per share. This is the high end of the range that Millennial reported yesterday, and values the company at $973.5 million. Millennial's shares will list on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow morning under the symbol "MM." Millennial says that a total of 9.2 million shares are being offered by the company, and a total of 1 million shares are being offered by selling stockholders. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Allen & Company and Stifel Nicolaus Weisel are all underwriters for the offering.YouTube Is Looking For The Next Vlogging Star
Mar 28, 8:25PM
YouTube is announcing a new program to nurture the next generation of video bloggers. The Next Vlogger initiative is part of YouTube Next Creator — where, as the name implies, the site tries to find and mentor future YouTube stars. It already held similar programs for cooking and fitness, as well as nonprofits.Could The Birdy Be The Word In Simple Expense Tracking?
Mar 28, 7:41PM
When I was growing up, my dad had this yellow legal pad that sat right by the door. When he walked in at night, he wrote down numbers and codes. JCF - $12 JSM - $42 CCCl - $37 I didn't understand at the time, but the numbers were daily expenses (rounded up to the nearest dollar), and the codes were tags for which member of the family he was spending on, and the type of spending he was doing. Try as he might to teach me the way of the budget code, I just can't get in the habit. But you know what I'm in the habit of doing every day (no matter how grudgingly)? Email. And that's exactly what expense-tracking webapp The Birdy is banking on.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks
