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Manpacks Launches Its Startup Perks Program With Free Condoms
May 25, 1:18AM
Well, that's one way to get some attention for your product launch. Manpacks is announcing a new Startup Perks program, and to promote it, the company mailed boxes of free condoms to more than 100 startups, including Path, Udemy, Scribd, and GetAround. Supposedly, the boxes started arriving today — includes a custom URL where workers at that specific company can sign up for the program.Yahoo Courts Second Screen App Developers With New Tools To Connect Phones And TV
May 25, 12:00AM
Launched in 2009, Yahoo's Connected TV was one of the first platforms to introduce an open app development kit (ADK) for Internet-capable TVs. Now it's making those apps even more powerful, by allowing developers to build apps that integrate TV and mobile capabilities. At a meeting with developers Thursday evening, the Yahoo Connected TV team is rolling out the newest version of its ADK, in addition to open source availability of its device communication library for Android devices on GitHub.Office Perks Startup BetterWorks Will Shut Down On May 31
May 24, 10:48PM
BetterWorks, the employee perks startup led by Los Angeles entrepreneur and investor Paige Craig, has told its customers that it will be shutting down May 31. The company offered tools to help businesses manage discounts and rewards programs for employees. In the past few months, BetterWorks still seemed to be rolling out a steady stream of new features like catering and groups and permissions. In fact, Director of Product Varun Krishna told me that BetterWorks was seeing growing interest from larger enterprises (though in retrospect that may have been a polite way of saying that it wasn't making enough money from small- and medium-sized businesses).Bazaarvoice To Acquire PowerReviews For $151M
May 24, 9:28PM
Two big customer review platforms are teaming up: Bazaarvoice just announced that it has agreed to acquire PowerReviews. The agreement is for up to $31 million in cash, plus stock, bringing the total estimated value to be $151 million. Bazaarvoice says the acquisition should close before the end of July.Meddik Grabs $750K From Chris Dixon, Founder Collective & More To Build A Better WebMD
May 24, 8:30PM
Thanks to health-focused startup accelerators like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longer a disqualifier for entrepreneurs looking to enter the health space. There are plenty of problems to tackle, and there's growth capital to be found. To that point: One of the first graduates of BluePrint's healthtech accelerator is a startup called Meddik, which wants to combine the Web's medical data with advice from regular people (and experts) to create a smart repository for health information. To give it the fuel it needs as it gears up for launch later this summer, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $750K in seed funding from a flock of notable angel and early-stage VCs, including Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, as well as Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia.Facebook Acq-Hires Part Of Design Firm Bolt | Peters To Beef Up User Research Team
May 24, 8:03PM
Knowing how users react to Facebook's product changes is crucial to the site making the right moves, so today it closed an acq-hire of part of design research firm Bolt | Peters -- specifically its leading man CEO Nate Bolt and several other employees from the six person consultancy. Those coming over will be joining Facebook's design team that's headed by Kate Aronowitz. Bolt | Peters started 10 years ago and specialized in recruiting actual visitors to a website through its tool Ethnio and then observing their usage remotely so it could deliver insights on what to improve to their clients, which numbered over 90. Bolt | Peters will shut down on June 22nd, and has already spun out its Ethnio real-time research service. Facebook tests product changes more frequently than nearly any service. Bringing in Nate Bolt and some of his teammates will help it understand exactly how users feel about changes and avoid blunders like Beacon.European Startups Need To Get A Valley Education, And Fast
May 24, 7:32PM
This is guest post by Julia Szopa , program director at the blackbox.vc incubator in Silicon Valley which specialises in moving European startups into the US. It is not uncommon for European entrepreneurs to come to the Silicon Valley to learn how to launch globally. However, they often play "the startup game" by the wrong rules. With scarce venture resources in Europe, founders learn to compromise way too much and accept what's typically unacceptable by those who build great, successful companies with global potential."In the Studio," How Bizeebee's Poornima Vijayashanker Fell in Love with Building Software
May 24, 7:00PM
"In the Studio" continues this week with an engineer who began programming at the end high school, double-majored in CS/EE in college, dropped out of Stanford's graduate CS program to become the second employee at Mint.com, and after spending some time at Intuit (which acquired Mint), now has her own company focused on building software for the small-medium business market. Poornima Vijayashanker is not your average engineer. Growing up in a household where electronics were regularly taken apart for fun, she started coding toward the end of high school and ended up majoring in CS for her undergraduate degree. After a brief stint as an R&D engineer for Synopsis, she wanted to dive into the Valley's startup scene and elected to enroll in a master's CS program at Stanford. It was there she initially met Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, and when the opportunity arose for her to join the small team, she dropped out of Stanford and helped build the company. From that experience, she ended up at Intuit, where she started plotting her next move, and now is the founder and CEO of Bizeebee, member manage software to help small business manage their customers, inventory, and a host of other services.Turn Your iPhone Into A Bouncy Ball With The M-Edge iPhone SuperShell
May 24, 6:38PM
Ok, maybe not a bouncy ball, but pretty damn close. M-Edge came out with a SuperShell for the iPad towards the end of last year, but the idea of a bouncing iPhone seems much more appealing. The case comes in four different colors — black, blue, purple, and pink — and has a finely dimpled finish to it to help with grip.Siri-ing John Malkovich
May 24, 6:06PM
Apple is continuing its "famous person uses Siri" commercials by bringing in famous person John Malkovich to add a soup̤on of Old World weltschmerz and philosophizing to what is, in short, a way to schedule a wake-up call without unlocking your phone. The commercials feature Malkovich in what appears to be the house above the nasty places in Hostel where he muses on fine meats and the meaning of life. I don't quite get these celebrity appearances but, in the end, I suppose they're good for brand awareness. Siri isn't for the geeks - it's for the folks who may have once been in love with BlackBerries. Siri suggests a certain ease, a certain subsumed technicality that would draw in the C-level exec and, in parallel, well-known superstars. It is, in short, a little assistant that will never talk back to you, never ask for a raise, and never request that you stop cursing.FB Launches Facebook Camera РAn Instagram-Style Photo Filtering, Sharing, Viewing iOS App
May 24, 5:00PM
Insta-who? Today Facebook begins rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS to English-speaking countries, a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends. Developed by Facebook's photos team without the help of Instagram because the acquisition deal hasn't closed yet, Facebook Camera looks a lot like the app TechCrunch leaked images of a year ago, and is designed for quicker publishing than Facebook's multi-featured primary mobile app. Facebook Camera lets you rapidly pick one or more photos, apply filters, tag friends and locations, add a description, and post. While its 14 filters, batch uploads, and streamlined interface are a big step up from Facebook for iOS, the design isn't as beautiful as Instagram and neither are the photos you'll see in it. When asked if Facebook Camera would become a direct competitor to the photosharing network it bought last month, a spokesman told me "As Mark asserted, we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently, so I anticipate some healthy competition."Google Adds Subscription Billing To Its Android App Store
May 24, 5:00PM
In what should be a very welcome addition for Android developers, Google is adding subscription billing to its app store. That should give developers yet another to earn revenue on top of in-app purchases of virtual currency, downloads of paid apps and advertising. It will probably most benefit mid and hardcore game developers, who are more likely to have rabid fans willing to pay for monthly access. It will also help magazine publishers, who are still figuring out how to sell content on tablets. All of the subscriptions are auto-renewing and can be set with monthly or annual fees. Developers set the price themselves. There's also an HTTP-based publisher API that lets enterprise-scale backend servers validate or cancel subscriptions. It's inter-operable with subscriptions on the web, so users can take their paid access with them across devices and web destinations.Kayak Teams Up With Skyhook To Bring Reliable Location Services To Its Kindle Fire App
May 24, 4:13PM
Amazon's Kindle Fire is one of the most popular Android-powered tablets, but it doesn't feature a GPS chip. Given how important location-based services have become, that's a bit of a drawback for many developers and quite a few apps that want to access location features on Amazon's tablet actually crash. To avoid these issues, Kayak teamed up with Skyhook to provide location services for its updated Android app. Kayak, of course, relies heavily on location services to show its users information like nearby hotels and airport information.Failure Is Not An Option: Why Kickstarter Hides Failed Projects
May 24, 4:04PM
Dan Misener, in a fit of inspired data mining, scraped half of Kickstarter to find failed projects. He could not, it seems, find a single one. Why? Because Kickstarter hides them behind a non-searchable wall. They exist, sure, but you won't find them with google and they never, ever show them in their "Discover" browsing system. And good for them. In a general sense, Kickstarter isn't a marketplace. It's not like Etsy or eBay or Amazon where the slow-sellers sit next to the hot items. It is, instead, more of a competition. It's a competition for eyeballs, for cash, and for media attention. It is more a dog show than flea market, and you don't keep the ugly dogs on stage after the first round of judging.Crowdfunder Closes $400K Seed Round, Launches Public Beta
May 24, 4:03PM
Crowdfunder, the Los Angeles-based startup creating an online platform for the "crowdfunding" of startups and small businesses, has launched the first public beta version of its site this week. The launch comes on the heels of Crowdfunder closing on $400,000 in seed funding from a group of angel investors earlier this month, CEO Chance Barnett tells me. But: Since the crowdfunding portion of the JOBS Act has not taken effect yet -- it's still being reviewed by the Securities and Exchange Commission -- Crowdfunder is holding a unique sort of beta launch, with a series of contests planned in cities across the US.10 Million Translations Later, SayHi Translate Rolls Out Major Update
May 24, 3:45PM
One of the hot companies at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York this week was the real-time people-powered translation service Babelverse. Quite often, though, Google Translate-style machine translation is good enough and there is clearly a huge market for all kinds of translation services. SayHi Translate, a $0.99 iOS app that focuses on machine translation, just announced that it has now translated over 10 million phrases since its launch just four weeks ago. To celebrate this milestone, SayHi is releasing version 2.0 of its app today, which features a redesigned and easier to use interface, as well as new controls over how its spoken translations sound.Huddle Lands $24M Series C To Go Big On Enterprise Cloud Storage And Collaboration
May 24, 3:35PM
Huddle, the six-year-old company that makes cloud collaboration software for the enterprise, has closed on $24 million in new funding, bringing its total equity funding to $40 million. The new round, which serves as Huddle's Series C, was led by Jafco Ventures, with DAG Ventures participating along with previous backers Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures.Predictive Startup Recorded Future Raises $12M From Balderton And Google Ventures
May 24, 3:14PM
There's a lot of talk these days about what you can do with "big data." Here's one of the more eye-catching uses: A startup called Recorded Future pulls data from around the Web to give customers a better handle on — that's right — the future. The company just announced that it has raised $12 million in Series C funding from Balderton and Google Ventures. Balderton partner and former Business Objects CEO Bernard Liautaud is joining the board.Kayak's First-Ever CFO Leaves Ahead Of IPO, Links Up With Next-Gen Flight Search Startup, Superfly
May 24, 2:45PM
Today, Israeli startup Superfly, which offers a secure tool that combines worldwide flight information with personal travel preferences to help people organize and maximize the value of their travel rewards among other things, is quietly launching a shot across the bow of the industry's giants -- in this case, uber popular metasearch engine, Kayak. That's because the startup now has the benefit of calling on the significant operational and financial experience of Willard (Bill) Smith, who was, until recently, Kayak's CFO. Smith joined Kayak in May last year (as the company's first-ever CFO) to help the startup prepare for and actually move forward with its perpetually-delayed IPO.Social Ad Network 140 Proof Launches Partner Platform, Signs Up Jumptap
May 24, 2:21PM
Ad startup 140 Proof is opening up a partner platform for companies that want to take advantage of its social ad targeting. The company currently delivers ads to 50 social apps, including Echofon, TweetCaster, and Plume. Underlying the network is something that 140 Proof calls "Interest Graph Targeting," where users are assigned different "personas" based on what they say and who they follow. Those personas allow advertisers to serve ads to people with specific interests, and the new platform makes this interest targeting available to other companies.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.
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