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.
Factual Releases Three New Location And Mobile Ad Targeting Tools
May 15, 1:40PM
Open data platform Factual.com is beefing up its Global Places offering today with three new APIs that will provide mobile developers with access to a ton of new data which can help them build better location-aware apps. But the company notes that the APIs' launch will be of special interest to mobile ad providers, including mobile ad networks, demand-side platforms and agencies, who are looking for new data points around geography. This is particularly important on mobile where traditional methods of ad targeting - beacons and cookies - aren't viable.BBC Worldwide Extends Its Partnership With Video Site Viki To Cover Advertising
May 15, 1:27PM
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki. On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year -- BBC Worldwide participated in a $20 million Series B round that also included SK Planet, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others -- and a content licensing deal, now BBC Worldwide will also working on advertising for Viki. Through its BBC Advertising arm, the BBC will be pooling together ad inventory from its own BBC Worldwide operations with that of Viki, which is accessed in over 200 countries and offers TV shows, movies and other premium content in over 150 languages -- with those translations powered by its user base. The deal will mean that BBC can add further scale to its own advertising operations to target a class of larger advertisers looking to reach that international audience on a wide scale.Engagio Brings Its Social Inbox To Your Gmail Inbox
May 15, 1:05PM
What's the best way to manage our conversations across all the websites and social networks we're visiting? William Mougayar, founder and CEO of Engagio, says that it's through a Gmail-style social inbox — after all, that's the interface we use to manage most of our communication already (not that everyone's happy about it), and heck, it's the way many of us read our social network updates already. Now he's taking that approach a step further. Instead of accessing their Engag.io inbox in a separate website, they can install a Chrome extension, and then read Engag.io as a separate folder within Gmail itself.Ikea's Upcoming Uppleva HDTV System Further Detailed
May 15, 1:03PM
Taking the term home theater in a box to a new level, Ikea made waves a few weeks back when it announced plans to start selling a self-branded HDTV and home theater system with a starting price under $1000. However, the company didn't out all the tantalizing details at the time. Gigaom managed to get a bit more info on the system including the type of apps included on the rather impressive HDTV.Personalized Music Video Service Cull TV Acquired By Twitvid, CEO Departs
May 15, 1:00PM
Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, following its March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announcing it has acquired Cull TV, an independent music video sharing site, which CTO John Hurliman describes as a little bit like Pandora mixed with MTV.Rock Health Grad HealthInReach Merges With PriceDoc To Bring Price Transparency To Healthcare
May 15, 12:30PM
Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health's inaugural batch, HealthInReach has been on a mission to combat the high cost of healthcare and put consumers back in control of their healthcare by creating a transparent online marketplace for comparing the quality and price of health providers and procedures. The startup has built a consumer-focused (or B2B2C) complement to services like Castlight, whereby those who are uninsured or pay out-of-pocket for medical procedures can use its platform to search for and learn about doctors and dentists based on experience, reputation and prices. To date, over 3 million people have used the service to look for doctors. However, from the outset, HealthInReach intentionally limited its market to southern California (the startup is headquartered in LA), and, as a result, it's been looking to expand nationally and grow its database of doctors, optometrists and dentists. To do so, the company is today announcing a merger with PriceDoc, a similarly aligned marketplace for healthcare providers, in an effort to combine HealthInReach's proprietary tech with PriceDoc's national database of tens of thousands of providers.Kantar Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In
May 15, 12:15PM
New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech -- a market research division of WPP -- show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a majority of sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 18. Drilling down, Android is doing particularly well in some places. In Spain, Android is the platform to beat. It accounted for a 72.3 percent of smartphone sales in the period -- the highest proportion among the markets analyzed by Kantar. But Android's domination is not across the board: in the U.S., sales of devices based on Google's platform actually declined by about 6.6 percent over last year and accounted for 47.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the country. Apple, meanwhile, saw its percentage of sales in the U.S. go up by 12.8 percent to account for 43 percent of all sales. Kantar also says that while now the majority of consumers in the UK and Australia now own smartphones, in other markets that it analyses, the tipping point has yet to be reached.Honestly.com Becomes A Talent Search Engine, Renames Itself TalentBin
May 15, 12:01PM
Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that's because the company has been busy reinventing itself. Today it's unveiling a new product and a new name — TalentBin. Co-founder Peter Kazanjy says TalentBin addresses one of the big problems with Honestly — not enough content. Rather than relying on users to create all the reviews, TalentBin looks at the content that already exists on the Web, specifically people's activity on a variety of social networking site. Kazanjy calls that activity your "professional exhaust," and argues that it contains lots of relevant information about your professional interests and accomplishments. So TalentBin aggregates a person's activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters.Simplee Raises $6 Million Series A For Its Mint-Like Approach To Tracking Healthcare Expenses
May 15, 12:00PM
Simplee, a Mint-like platform for tracking healthcare expenses and then paying them online, is today announcing the close of its $6 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership (aka "s23p"), and includes current investors, Greylock Partners Israel. As a part of the investment, s23p's General Partner Ted Maidenberg and Greylock's Tilli Kalisky joined Simplee's Board of Directors. The funding will help Simplee extend its product from bill tracking and payments to other areas, including plan recommendations, care recommendations, and more. The company is also preparing to roll out its B2B offering to partners, and launch its first mobile app.Look Out: Pinterest Marketing Platform Curalate Lands $750k Seed From NEA, First Round, MentorTech
May 15, 11:46AM
A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions looks like it is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate, which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA, First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers. Although the site is only officially launching today, in its beta format it has already managed to pick up more than 150 brands as customers, its co-founder and CEO, Apu Gupta, tells me. That speaks to how, up to now, there hasn't been an analytics service available quite like the one that Curalate is offering.Facebook Files New S-1, Pricing $34-38 Per Share, Raising $14.7B
May 15, 10:41AM
Facebook has filed a new S-1, and it contains more details on the IPO. It will offer underwriters the right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments. Facebook anticipates that the initial public offering price will be between $34.00 and $38.00 per share.Baidu's New Forked Android Phone: China's Search Giant Wants To Make Windows Phone, iOS Versions Too
May 15, 9:56AM
Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform, the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a "forked" version of Android -- forked Android devices being very popular in China -- Baidu says that it doesn't want to stop there: the idea is to take its platform, the Baidu Cloud Smart Terminal, to other operating systems like Windows Phone and iOS. "We want Baidu's Cloud Smart Terminal to function as a platform that sits on top of all operating systems, such as Windows Phone and iOS," Kaiser Kuo, a spokesperson for Baidu, told TechCrunch today.Auction-Meets-Group-Buying Site BagThat Bags $3.2M From Oxford Capital
May 15, 7:15AM
BagThat, a new UK entrant to the daily-deals/e-commerce space, has picked up an investment of £2 million ($3.2 million) to develop its service, a mash-up of two well-known models for selling products online: auctions and group buying. The funding is being led by Oxford Capital and is the first close on this round. BagThat says it is expecting additional institutional investment in the round.Service As A SKU
May 15, 3:43AM
The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements, and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to tacking barcodes onto un-warehousable services by standardizing and normalizing the units being sold, something I call "Service as a SKU." Just as Amazon figured out how to build the best warehouses and technology in the world for delivering boxes, somebody will do this for "unboxed" services, with customers driven not by discounts or scarcity, but rather by the Internet's hallmarks of customer experience and convenience. And unlike how "ship stuff in a box" ecommerce seems to be gravitating towards a few winners, Service as a SKU is still a wide open playing field.To Capitalize On Demand, Facebook May Sell 50 Million Extra Shares At Increased $34-$38 Price
May 15, 3:16AM
Everyone wants a piece of Facebook, so the company's underwriters will likely exercise their option sell a "greenshoe" of up to 50.6 million additional shares, and Facebook will definitely increase its IPO share price range from between $28 and $35 to $34 and $38, I've confirmed with sources very close to the IPO. This means Facebook could sell up to 388 million shares to raise between $13.1 billion and $14.7 billion at a CNBC-reported valuation between $92B and $103B. A greenshoe is an SEC-permitted over-allotment option that can stabilize a stock's price by allowing underwriters to sell up to 15% more stock than the company originally planned to sell, but with the option to buy back the stock at the offering price if the actual price drops below this. By exercising the greenshoe, underwriters including Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs could help Facebook raise up to an additional $1.72 billion to $1.92 billion by selling up to 50.6 million shares, which could prevent high demand and limited supply from causing the share price to skyrocket and making the stock seem volatile. "Quite likable indeed, har har" laughs some monocle-wearing banker on Wall Street."Innospring: The Incubator That Wants To Bridge The Gap Between China & Silicon Valley
May 15, 2:19AM
By now nearly everyone knows that China has emerged as an increasingly massive and very lucrative market -- but because of major differences in culture, language, business practices, and the like, it is incredibly challenging for even the most well-capitalized of U.S. technology companies to break into the Chinese market. So for small U.S.-based startups, it's nearly impossible. The same is true in reverse: Chinese startups have a very tough time entering into the U.S. market and gaining traction here. That's where a new startup incubator called Innospring is looking to help.Makers Wanted: Are You A Hardware Start-Up? Talk To Us
May 15, 12:51AM
We're about to launch a new video series called Makers here at TechCrunch and we'd love to hear from any and all hardware based startups. I want to hear about robots, toys, and railguns. I want to hear about new distilling methods, winemakers, and electric vehicles. I want to hear about anything that whirrs, chops, grates, goes, or crashes into a fireball. Over the next few months Jordan Crook, Josh Zelman, and I will try to cover every hardware startup we come across. If you think you're worthy of inclusion, please drop us a line at john@techcrunch.com with the subject line "MAKER WANTED." Describe your product and maybe send a photo of your facility? Are you building in the US or Europe? Asia or Mexico? Let us know.Velti: In Mobile Ads, iOS Widens Its Lead Over Android
May 15, 12:33AM
Last month, mobile marketing company Velti reported that iOS had pulled slightly ahead of Android in mobile ad impressions, after being tied at the end of last year. Now, apparently, iOS has taken widened that lead, if not by much — it accounted for 55 percent of mobile ad impressions in April, compared to 45 percent for Android. The data is based on data from Velti's Mobclix Exchange, which serves ads to more than 33,500 apps, the company says.Enterprise, Video Led The $25.1B In M&A Deals Last Quarter, Ernst & Young Says
May 15, 12:13AM
Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter's $25.1 billion in mergers and acquisitions, according to top-tier accounting firm Ernst & Young. The total value of all deals fell by 12 percent from the year before while the number of deals was about the same. While that's not too huge a drop, the firm attributes it to "ongoing economic uncertainty." (Thanks Greece.) Quarterly deal volume has apparently reached a plateau after two years of growth and is being restrained by concerns about the macroeconomic climate. If you're curious what the biggest deals of last quarter were, here are they below.Rdio's Major Redesign Gives Listeners A Unified View, Enhanced Sharing, Private Playlists & More
May 15, 12:03AM
There's currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services -- MOG, Spotify, and Rdio -- each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by offering the best mobile experience for tunes on-the-go. You can check out Josh's in-depth comparison of the battle for mobile supremacy here. While it wasn't Josh's top pick for music streaming on the tablet, Rdio is today taking a big step forward, launching a completely redesigned music listening and discovery experience, starting with the web and its desktop apps. While the company unveiled its plans at SXSW, today marks the first time the new Rdio will be available to all.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
