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.
StyleSaint Wants To Turn Virtual Fashion Tear Sheets Into Custom Apparel
May 21, 9:35PM
As we covered earlier today, the fashion vertical in tech has exploded, with myriad unique companies clamoring to take a bite out of Amazon's lunch, and a chunk out of the trillion dollar apparel industry. One of the most unique premises I've seen thus far is StyleSaint, a startup which at first glance seems like a Pinterest for fashion, but with a unique real-life twist. To use StyleSaint in its current form, log in with Facebook or Twitter and create an account, once logged on, you can chose from over 55K "tear sheet" images from which to create your own Stylebook, once you've got more than ten tear sheets loaded, you can hit the "Create Stylebooks" link in the top right and StyleSaint will automatically import, then publish, the last ten sheets you've torn. Alternatively you can drag-and-drop the tears to create a custom stylebook. Click on "Create" to publish to the site.Led By Former Microsofties, GitHub Brings The Party To Enterprise With New Windows Client
May 21, 9:33PM
GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everything from jQuery and Ruby on Rails to node.js and Redis. At the outset, Github was just a side project, a tool to make developers' lives easier (its first slogan: "Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass.") Github is still a boot-strapped operation, but as both its user base and its own hacker collective (now at 73 strong) have grown, there has been an increasing demand for tools that fall outside Apple's domain. Today, about 50 percent of GitHub's traffic comes from Windows users, and, as a result, the startup has finally heeded demand and is now officially bringing the party to Windows, launching a desktop app to address the challenges of developing on Windows and to make it easy for Windows developers to collaborate in open-source and private repositories.Punch! Launches A Platform For Building Interactive iPad Apps, Sans Developers
May 21, 9:24PM
It's a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren't available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform. David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2. Vignette. TypePad. And yes, his startup Punch!, where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at Disrupt.The Power Of Disrupt: gTar Raises $30,000 On Kickstarter In Two Hours
May 21, 9:20PM
Incident took the stage this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and debuted the gTar. It's safe to say that they are already a major contender for the Disrupt Cup. The startup wowed the crowd with their iPhone-powered teaching guitar. The judges loved it. The crowd loved. And most importantly, fans turned to the startup's Kickstarter campaign where funding took off like a rocket. Prior to hitting the stage, the gTar had raised just a touch above $10,000. Now, almost exactly two hours after their Disrupt debut, their Kickstarter funding (a.k.a. pre-orders) is north of $42,000 and rising fast.Digital Video Consolidation: Avail-TVN Picks Up $100M From Carlyle, Buys UK's On Demand Group For $27M
May 21, 9:14PM
A double-whammy in the digital video space today: Avail-TVN, a video services provider that works with companies like NBC, Univision, and brands like Mattel, has announced that it has picked up $100 million in financing led by the Carlyle Group, and it is using those funds to make an acquisition outside of the U.S., buying rival video service provider On Demand Group in the UK from its existing owner, SeaChange International, for $27 million. Avail-TVN says that the deal will make it the largest provider of digital video services in the world. The move is a sign of how the digital TV industry is already fairly large in its geographical reach, but in many cases is still only providing incremental revenue on top of more traditional TV revenue streams -- and so companies that work in this space, which can be capital intensive, are best suited to bulk up their scale to survive.KurbKarma: A Social Network, And App, To Find Parking Where And When You Need It
May 21, 8:46PM
We have all been there: you are in your car, you need to park, and you cannot, no matter how much you try, find a space. You see cars pulling away, but it's too far for you to get there before another car swoops in. You see people walking and you trail them, hoping they're heading to a vehicle. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but a new startup, KurbKarma, is launching today at TC Disrupt New York to try to solve it. "Parking where and when you need it" is the basic idea here: you have people who have spaces they are about to leave; and you have people who need spaces. The app (available for iOS) works like an ad hoc social network to link these people up. Those who have a space can post their status on an app, those who need a space find one on the map. The app integrates with Google Maps to plot spaces near you, and lets you send messages -- several sendable with the touch of a button -- to let the space owners know how far away you are. Spaces are "sold" with KarmaKredits: people who donate their spot pick up good Karma, in the form of KarmaKredits. People who need a space use their KarmaKredits to buy them. Each space "costs" two KarmaKredits.Open Garden Lets You Crowdsource Your Mobile Connectivity
May 21, 8:35PM
What if you couldn't just share your Internet connection with the few WiFi devices tethered to your phone or hotspot, but with pretty much everybody around you? Open Garden, which is launching at Disrupt today, lets you create a mesh network that ties together all the Open Garden-enabled devices around you into one large network that then automatically shares Internet access and bandwidth between all of these devices. Basically, Open Garden wants to become a crowd-sourcing platform for mobile bandwidth.CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book
May 21, 8:23PM
One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn't in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won't know until I pick up. CallApp, a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It's creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a "universal social contact book." It's drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they can want, they can add their contact book into the company's general database.Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots
May 21, 8:19PM
Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your front yard in a lawn chair, sipping lemonade while attempting to read the latest news on your WiFi-only iPad. You're just out of range of your WiFi signal. Your neighbor's signal is super strong, but that selfish hooligan didn't leave it wide open for you to leach onto. Wouldn't you love to be able to use a portion of his spectrum anyway while away from your own? Well, you still can't, however...K3 Server Is Making Enterprise Application Integrations More Efficient, Reduces Work By Half
May 21, 8:09PM
How is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code...and frankly, a lot of manual labor. BroadPeak Partners has a better idea. The company is today introducing its application known as K3 Server, a system that aims to disrupt the traditional enterprise interface market by making it easier for I.T. to build, and for end users to tweak, the way code is handled, transformed, reconciled, mapped and enriched as it moves in between systems.Major Steal: King.com Poaches Talent Behind EA's Sims Social To Lead New London Studio
May 21, 8:00PM
King.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA's Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end (with her departure first being noted by Business Insider last week). King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn't taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago, is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany's Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards. King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago.UberConference Aims To Fix Crappy Conference Calls
May 21, 7:57PM
We all hate conference calls -- having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you've actually logged in, there's a whole lot of talking on top of one another, and a lot of re-introducing yourself so that everyone knows who's talking at any given time. UberConference, which was created by Firespotter Labs and is being launched as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, hopes to fix all that by providing a visual interface to all others on the call. Audio conferencing is not just a pain in the ass, but it's also a huge business -- a $3 billion business in the U.S. -- that's mostly controlled by the big telco providers, such as AT&T and Verizon. By providing an easy-to-use alternative, UberConference hopes to disrupt the existing market.At TechCrunch Disrupt, Startup Alley Is Where the Shootouts Happen
May 21, 7:45PM
Well folks, while you may think all the action is on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the flip side of the coin is the enormous amount of buzz, energy and networking that happens in Startup Alley. Today there are 44 companies exhibiting in the Alley itself, not to mention the 20+ companies in the Israeli pavilion which makes its second appearance at Disrupt. We'll have another brand new 47 companies in Startup Alley tomorrow. You can check out all the companies today here. But none of this is just for show because attendees to Disrupt get to vote on their favourite companies, and those votes, plus the votes of TC staff, means one of them gets to pitch at the end of each day.Incident Launches The gTar at Disrupt, An iPhone-Powered Electronic Teaching Guitar
May 21, 7:25PM
The gTar by Incident is disruption defined. It takes the guitar, an instrument with a steep learning curve, and adds a bit of digital wizardry in the form of an embedded iPhone to make learning dramatically easier. The company brags that their modern take on the guitar allows for three levels of difficulty, rather than the traditional single really difficult one. But thanks to the iPhone and a clever app, this $450 electronic guitar essentially teaches users the ins and outs of the instrument. The startup recently turned to Kickstarter to raise $100,000. However today they gave the crowd at Disrupt a musical treat -- a demonstration at Startup Alley. And the device seemed to work as advertised.Koemei Is Out To Transcribe All Video And Make It Searchable
May 21, 7:14PM
Lord knows there is a lot of online video out there these days, but only a tiny proportion of it has been transcribed (less than 1% according to some estimates). Searching the mountains of video generated by businesses, governments and educational institutions for the valuable information within is almost impossible because the words hidden in the audio are invisible to search. Waiting for it is not just the world, but the many people who can't access that video because of their disabilities. Transcription unlocks the gold-dust buried in them there video hills. This would involve transcription on a vast scale, but this is exactly the problem Koemei aims to tackle. It's a SAAS platform for speech recognition in video. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt it announced it has completed an integration with YouTube's API in preparation for a potential launch. It also announced the successful completion of its first pilot with the University of Geneva and IMD Business School.After Walking Away From Acquisition Talks With Facebook, Ark Opens Its People Search Engine
May 21, 7:04PM
Following a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups...at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services to help you find out which of your high school classmates live in New York, see which friends are single, and connect with strangers who share your interests by layering up to 30 characteristic filters. The problem of too much social data and too little discoverability is so widespread that Facebook even discussed a possible acquisition of Ark. But instead its PhD founders decided to see how far they can ride their cute penguin logo. Soon it will launch native mobile apps with some of most useful push notifications I've seen. And as part of its limited launch today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, Ark is accepting new users at ark.com/tcd until the end of the conference on Wednesday.Fab Seeking To Raise $100M At A Super Fab Valuation
May 21, 7:02PM
Earlier today we spoke to Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg at TechCrunch Disrupt, on the anniversary of his company's pivot from gay social network to design-focused flash sales site, and a week after its mini-pivot to curated social shopping site. In addition to expounding on the past, Goldberg spoke about his expanding vision for the new eCommerce, and how he saw Fab as essentially competing with retail giant IKEA, rather than other eCommerce sites like One Kings Lane and "some companies that recently went public." ;)A Stroll Down Startup Alley: Bras, Coffee, And Lots Of Photo/Video Sharing
May 21, 6:57PM
Everyone comes to Disrupt for the Battlefield. Of course, the panels are interesting, and few can resist a fireside chat between Fred Wilson and Michael Arrington, but the true gem of our massive conference is the Startup Alley. These companies are some of the most promising startups in the country, and with our Israeli Pavilion, the world. This year's batch, in particular, is above-and-beyond impressive. I caught up with a few different companies, and each one of them brings something totally different to the table.Cyfeon Solutions Launches Answer Factory, A Database Tool That Aims To Collate The Web
May 21, 6:48PM
The web is a vast, mostly useless, wasteland with bits of information held in random silos scattered about. Cyfeon Solutions' Answer Factory attempts to unite these locations in the spirit of increased productivity. As I was told by founder Brandon Smith, its goal is to provide business users a solution that allows them to make better business decisions by pulling in data from multiple sources from across the web.Apple Wants Immediate Ban On Galaxy Tab 10.1 In The USA
May 21, 6:41PM
On Friday May 18th, Apple filed a motion for a U.S. preliminary injunction against Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1. This follows a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Northern District of California), siding with Apple on the question of whether Samsung is in violation of an iPad-related design patent (U.S. Patent No. D504,889). According to Foss Patents, the source of this story, the request could be valid and is likely to be upheld. Samsung has until May 25th at high noon to respond. (OK not really...about the high noon thing). What does it mean though? Will the Galaxy Tab 10.1 disappear from U.S. shores if Apple emerges victoriously with their injunction?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
