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.
Hey Zynga, Cut It Out With This "Far East" Crap
Jun 06, 12:54AM
This morning Zynga announced that it's expanding its FarmVille franchise into an exciting new territory: Orientalism! Yes, there's a new FarmVille add-on called — wait for it — Jade Falls. Now, fantasy stories set in exaggerated "Asian" locales are a familiar part of popular culture. But at least Disney (Mulan), DreamWorks (Kung Fu Panda), and BioWare (Jade Empire) offered some creativity, humor, and nuance. Jade Falls is ... something else.Ellen Pao Breaks Her Silence: I'm Still At Kleiner Perkins, And I Don't Plan On Leaving
Jun 06, 12:08AM
Ellen Pao, the partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who is suing the legendary venture capital firm for alleged gender discrimination and other claims, has refused to speak to the press since news of the lawsuit first broke last month. But she broke her public silence Monday in a decidedly web-savvy way: She answered a question about her case on online Q&A site and startup space darling Quora.Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning Hint At The Future Of Airtime [TCTV]
Jun 05, 11:35PM
As of today's launch Airtime is a one-on-one video chat network, but what about tomorrow? Co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning tell us "it'd be pretty cool" if Airtime became an app platform. The former Napster founders wouldn't rule out the possibility of photo-sharing on Airtime either. During the star-studded launch party we also got the stunning Olivia Munn, former host of Attack Of The Show, talking about whether Airtime's just for geeks, or if your grandma's going to get onboard.
More Money For Seattle Startups: Madrona Raises $300M Fund
Jun 05, 10:55PM
Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group just announced that it has raised a $300 million fifth fund. This is the firm's fifth fund, and its largest yet. The firm says it had planned to raise $250 million, but the fund was oversubscribed, with most of the money coming from existing investors.Congress Should Pass The Startup Act 2.0
Jun 05, 9:59PM
For investors, Washington policymakers, casual observers of the stock market, and members of the media, the big story for entrepreneurs over the last few weeks has been the highly anticipated initial public offering of Facebook. While the largest tech IPO in history won the news cycle, there was an equally important, if not overlooked story for entrepreneurs brewing over on Capitol Hill.Food Subscription Service Foodzie Gets Gobbled Up By Video Shopping Network Joyus
Jun 05, 9:16PM
Online food marketplace and subscription tasting box service Foodzie has been acquired by video eCommerce service Joyus, in a combination cash and stock deal. "It was clear to me that video was the key to telling stories about food," Foodzie co-founder Emily Olson wrote in an email to users, "The people, the place, and the craft behind the food. Video brings all of this to life." Foodzie will eventually become "Joyus Food," joining Apparel, Home, Beauty, and Lifestyle as a branded category. The company will continue to offer its signature tasting boxes on a one-off basis, but will discontinue its subscription service after July.HTC One X Returns To AT&T Stores On June 10, Available Online Now
Jun 05, 9:09PM
The time has finally come. After a brief stay in U.S. customs, HTC's shining star — the One X — will be back on AT&T store shelves. The device was originally launched back on May 6, but a pesky ITC exclusion order meant additional shipments of the handsome handsets were kept from reaching their final destinations. That means you can go ahead and order the device now, by clicking here, or stroll on into an AT&T store come June 10 with $200 in your wallet (or bank account).Can Paying Friends Be Fun? Venmo Features "News Feed Of Payments" In Redesigned App
Jun 05, 9:06PM
"Josh paid Aaron $391 for best Coachella weekend ever". Peer-to-peer payments app Venmo thinks that when you pay someone back for drinks, dinner, or concert tickets, you're really sharing memories, and your friends will want to see. So today it relaunches its iOS, Android, and BlackBerry apps with a news feed of payments now featured on the homescreen. [Update 6:00 EST: Venmo just published a blog post with some product change specifics.] The redesign follows interface trends from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so Venmo is more familiar for first-timers, and puts the "Pay" button in the navigation bar so you can quickly settle your debts. It has also notified users via email that payments now default to publicly visible to other Venmo'ers. 42% of payments on Venmo were already being shared, even though its news feed was buried deep in the app. Will the redesign be enough to fend off PayPal and help Venmo go mainstream?Don't Know How To Code? Use Scroll Kit To Build Your Next Website
Jun 05, 8:26PM
So this thing called the Internet makes it easy for pretty much anyone to have a voice and get messages across. The problem is that building beautiful, intuitive websites typically requires some knowledge of code. New York City-based Scroll Kit is trying to change that, with an intuitive web app that allows anyone to build compelling experiences with no background knowledge necessary. Scroll Kit provides users with what's basically an empty canvas on which they can place anything -- text, pictures, whatever -- and with one click publish it to the web. The product goes beyond most WYSIWYG web editors, allowing users to control pretty much every pixel of a page and rearrange page elements at will. While the tool proves that you don't need to know how to code to build something beautiful, the real point is to show that even if you do know how to code, that doesn't mean you will be able to build a great website.Sprint's Virgin Mobile Becomes The Second Carrier To Offer A Prepaid iPhone
Jun 05, 8:24PM
Poor T-Mobile. It was one thing when the iPhone was only available at AT&T, but then Verizon got it, and then Sprint, and then the bar dropped quite a bit as U.S. Cellular got it, and most recently Cricket Wireless joined ranks offering the iPhone as an unlocked prepaid device. But now, Sprint's Virgin Mobile has taken on the device, according to the WSJ. Again, poor T-Mobile. But enough of that; back to Virgin's iPhone. (That sounds a bit like a Judd Apatow movie, right?)SeeWhy Creates A Hub For Shopping Cart Recovery Tools With SeeWhy CORE
Jun 05, 8:21PM
There are plenty of products out there promising to help online merchants reach out to visitors who leave without making a purchase. However, SeeWhy founder and Chief Strategy Officer Charles Nicholls says they're all too narrow — he describes everything currently on the market as "point solutions" that don't fix the whole problem. That's why the company is launching a new hub for different technologies, which it's calling SeeWhy CORE. As part of the research around its existing product, the SeeWhy Conversion Manager (which uses automatic email and social media campaigns to bring back customers who just left a merchant's website), Nicholls says the company realized that there's still a big opportunity here. After all, 97 percent of all visitors to e-commerce websites don't buy anything. However, the odds increase dramatically if they're a return visitor, so SeeWhy CORE wants to integrate the disparate tools available to bring that visitor back.Google Now Warns You If It Suspects You're The Target Of A "State-Sponsored Attack"
Jun 05, 8:12PM
Apparently it's not unusual for Google to detect that some of its users' accounts are under attack from "states or groups that are state-sponsored." The attacks are so prevalent, it seems, that Google has now launched a new program that will warn users when it detects such an attack. Whenever Google now detects such an attack, it will show a warning at the top of the user's screen, including a link to a page with additional information about how to best protect your Google account.Microsoft Expands $99 Subscription Xbox Program To Best Buy And GameStop
Jun 05, 8:03PM
Earlier this month, Microsoft decided to try something a little different when it came to selling the Xbox 360. Their plan: to kick off a pilot program under which customers could shell out a mere $99 for a shiny new 4GB Xbox 360 and a Kinect, provided they inked a two-year subscription deal to Xbox Live Gold. Now, it seems the time has come for that pilot program to spread its wings. Microsoft recently announced that later this month, all Best Buy stores and certain GameStop locations would be selling those subscription-friendly Xbox 360s. Well, for a little while anyway.App Devs, Grab Your Credit Cards: You Can Now Buy Mobile-Only Ads On Facebook
Jun 05, 7:28PM
Facebook just made several changes to its self-serve ad options. The big one: That advertisers can now buy mobile-only news feed Sponsored Stories -- potentially huge for app developers looking to buy installs. This could be a key step for Facebook to monetize its massive mobile audience in a significant way — a constant topic among skeptics in the run-up to the company's IPO. Facebook was already moving into mobile advertising, but this new option should be especially attractive to advertisers who want to reach a mobile-only audience.GoPro's New WiFi BacPac + WiFi Remote Combo Kit Will Let You Control 50 GoPros At Once
Jun 05, 7:25PM
What's better than one GoPro camera? Two, naturally. But what about 50? Well, control over 50 GoPro Hero cameras is exactly what you'll get with the freshly announced WiFi BacPac + WiFi Remote Combo Kit. The combo will allow you to WiFi-enable both your HD Hero and HD Hero2 cameras, a la BacPac, which is an attachable casing. Then, the WiFi Remote will go with you wherever your creative and sport-tastic desires may lead, including underwater, to control up to 50 GoPro cameras at a time from up to 600 feet.Keen On… Larry Sanger: Does Wikipedia Need To Be Censored? [TCTV]
Jun 05, 6:59PM
When we think Wikipedia, we think Jimmy Wales. But most of us don't know that Wikipedia actually had a co-founder - a fellow called Larry Sanger, who not only worked on the original version of Wikipedia (called Nupedia) with Wales back in 2000, but claims to have been the guy who "brought to the idea of the wiki" to the crowdsourced encyclopedia. But Sanger doesn't seem to have any pride in being the (co-)inventor of Wikipedia and, in his words, "inflicting" it on the world. Indeed, he fell out with Wales and quit the company in 2003 and ever since has become Wikipedia's most persistent and articulate critic. And today Sanger has a new critique of Wikipedia.Loosecubes Secures $7.8M From NEA, Accel To Become The Airbnb For Shared Office Space
Jun 05, 6:44PM
Loosecubes, the community marketplace for shared workspace, has today announced that it has secured $7.8 million in series A financing, bringing its total funding to $9 million. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates and Revolution Ventures, with participation from previous investors, Accel Partners and Battery Ventures. As a result of the round, Tige Savage of Revolution Ventures and Alex Kinnuer of NEA will be joining the startup's board of directors. For those who work remotely, far from company headquarters, or are busy plugging away at an early-stage business, finding cool, local office space can be tricky -- and expensive. There are a number of cool initiatives that offer community workspace for startups and their founders, but Loosecubes aims to simplify the process through a marketplace that connects those with empty desks, studios, ands sofas to workers looking for a friendly, productive setting in which to work.No Resumes, Just Skills: Smarterer Grabs $1.75M From True, Google Ventures; Tony Conrad Joins Board
Jun 05, 5:46PM
Boston-based startup Smarterer has been quietly building a gamified platform that provides job searchers with a simple way to show employers what they know by taking quizzes in subjects that range from engineering to music. Smarterer crowdsources its test designs and employs a smart ranking system to give its candidates a score and lets them broadcast their successes to the world. Today, the startup offers more than 500 skills and today announced that its community has now answered over 10 million questions -- at an average of 70K questions per day. To harness this growth, Smarterer is taking on another round of capital, as it officially closed $1.75 million in series A financing today, bringing its total funding to $3 million. True Ventures led the round, with participation from previous investor Google Ventures and a dozen or so angel investors. True Ventures (and About.me) Founder Tony Conrad will be joining the startup's board as a result of the round.Achievement Unlocked! Sidequest Pokes Fun At RPG Gaming Tropes
Jun 05, 5:43PM
In honor of today's arguably lackluster Nintendo presser, I present Sidequest, a game that asks you to do all sorts of side quests. Over and over again. Ad infinitum.Is The U.N. Really Trying To Take Over The Internet? Nope.
Jun 05, 5:15PM
At a U.S. House of Representatives hearing earlier this week, a number of government officials from both sides of the aisle, as well as Google's chief Internet evangelist and inventor of the TCP/IP protocol Vint Cerf, warned that the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) could try to wrestle control away from the U.S.-centric ICANN and "take control of the Internet." For the most part, all of these fears are completely speculative at this point and as the ITU's secretary-general Hamadoun I. Touré himself clearly pointed out earlier this year, "this is simply ridiculous."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
