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.
GameFounders: An Accelerator For European Game Startups
Jun 22, 2:06AM
There's a new startup accelerator in town, and by town, I mean Estonia. The accelerator is called GameFounders, and it's looking to accept up to 10 gaming startups in its inaugural class. GameFounders says it's the first European accelerator to focus on game developers. It's offering an investment of 15,000 euros in exchange for 9 percent of the company, and you don't need to have formed a company, as long as your team is willing to incorporate after it joins GameFounders. The accelerator is open to any kind of game, as long as it has already launched (even if it's only in beta). At the same time, the website notes that "it is more likely at the moment for mobile games to get investments."Radio App TuneIn Adds 600 New Stations, Reports 267% YoY Listener Growth On Mobile
Jun 22, 1:16AM
TuneIn, the popular guide to online radio stations, today announced that it has seen a 267% increase in the number of its mobile listeners over the last year. The company also announced that its listeners now use the service for significantly longer. Total listening hours on mobile, the company said, increased 348% over the last 12 months. The service, which is available on over 150 platforms, including a number of connected televisions and car, now sees itself as a "mobile first' company. Indeed, iOS and Android, as the company's CEO John Donham told me earlier today, are now the company's two biggest platforms.Don't Delete Your Stupidity. Fix it. Facebook Rolls Out Comment Editing and Edit History
Jun 22, 12:35AM
No more "Arggh! Copy, delete, paste, edit, post." Facebook is now rolling out the ability to edit comments, but users will be able to see the full edit history of a thread. This is just one more feature that I really liked about Google+, since I could essentially live blog with it and fix my mistakes, but that Facebook has now too. Facebook tells me comment editing is rolling out now and will become available to everyone in the next few days on the web. There's no comment editing yet in Facebook's embeddable comment widget for websites or from mobile yet where that damn auto-correct lurks. Also, you still can't edit original posts, all of which would be much more helpful than this. But I guess if you have to say or spell something wrong, do it from your desktop on someone else's news feed post.Stockr Has Emerged To Make Trading More Informative And More Social
Jun 22, 12:05AM
Most hardcore stock traders ravenously consume as much information as possible about the companies that they invest in. That means tracking charts and trends, but also aggressively scanning finance news sites and message boards for more data to trade on. The problem is, if you've ever gone to the likes of Yahoo Finance or Google Finance, you know that the message boards there aren't exactly full of the most informative places to hang out. And they aren't in any way social. Stockr aims to provide an alternative, with a site for finance nerds who want to get relevant information about the stocks they trade, or are thinking about trading. The site mainly seeks to cut through the usual noise by requiring users to login with Facebook to set up watch lists and comment on stocks, press releases, and news items.Meet The Nuud: LifeProof's New Waterproof Ultra-Rugged iPad Case
Jun 21, 11:35PM
LifeProof has made a name for itself as a maker of super rugged iPhone cases that you can take in the ocean, to the beach, or even to the top of Mt. Everest. This thing can survive in some surprising environments. But today, the company has finally answered the call for a LifeProof iPad case, the Nuud. The case vacuums against the glass panel on the iPad so that there's no front screen protector, allowing for the same tactile interaction we've all grown so fond of on Apple' tablet. But that's not to say it loses any of its ruggedness — all the same specs migrate over from the iPhone case.CrowdFlower's Photo Moderation Tool Gets A Little More Flexible
Jun 21, 11:24PM
Crowdsourced labor startup CrowdFlower is launching version 2.0 of its Real Time Foto Moderator today, with updates that should make RTFM more useful for apps with adult and edgy content. CrowdFlower first announced RTFM last month, pitching it as a self-serve tool that app developers can use to tap into the crowd and make sure the images shared by their users are appropriate. This was the company's first big launch after co-founder Lukas Biewald (a former roommate of mine from college) rejoined as CEO, saying he wanted to create self-serve products that could be used beyond CrowdFlower's enterprise customer base.Jimmy Wales, On New Editing Platform: "This Is Epically Important"
Jun 21, 11:04PM
"This is epically important," tweeted Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, about a new simplified editing platform aimed at massively expanding the number of people who contribute to the online encyclopedia. A deceivingly tiny percentage of users actually contribute to Wikipedia, despite the foundation's ernest attempts at making it an inclusive, democratic creation of mankind (estimates put the active contributer base at around 0.7%, who make up 50% of the entries). Wikipedia blames the difficulty in learning its confusing text editor for the reason the active community of editors sits around a paltry 500 contributors. "We identified the difficulty in learning wikitext as a key inhibitor to growing our editor community in the Wikimedia movement's strategic plan," the company writes in the announcement of the new simplified editor. "We want the process of learning how to edit to be trivial, so our volunteers, both new and experienced, can devote themselves to what they edit. That's why we're building the visual editor, so that contributing to a wiki is as easy and natural as other modern editing systems, and new editors are not dissuaded from making their changes."Google Launches Coordinate: A New Service For Managing Mobile Workforces
Jun 21, 11:00PM
Location-based apps and services like Foursquare have made significant inroads among consumers in the last few years, but most of the recent developments around location-based apps have bypassed the business market. While there are some systems out there that let businesses track their mobile workforce, they tend to be proprietary and expensive. Now, Google is trying to enter this market with Google Coordinate, a service that mashes up Google's mapping and geolocation services and APIs with a dispatch system for mobile workforces that's available both on the Web and on Android phones and tablets. This, says Google, will allow organizations to assign jobs and deploy their staff more efficiently. At its core, Coordinate allows businesses to dispatch and track their mobile employees, be they truck or taxi drivers, plumbers or pizza delivery guys. Google itself has been testing the service internally with its on-campus transportation services.Gabi: A Very Unique, Superlative Interface For Browsing Facebook
Jun 21, 10:01PM
We're familiar with it all by now: the Facebook news feed, the notifications and the ticker. Plus, there have been plenty of Facebook clients, readers and iPad apps. Given all of those years of iterations since Facebook was launched all the way back in wee 2004, what is left to be completely rethought? Apparently a lot. I took a look at an app called Gabi from a Berlin-based iOS developer named loui Apps. It's completely unlike any other interface I've seen for Facebook. For one, it's literally about asking superlative questions (see the featured image at the top).Get Ready For The TC Southeast Mini Meetup Tour: July 6 – July 12
Jun 21, 9:55PM
Hot on the heels of the TechCrunch Philadelphia Mini Meetup, I can't help but look forward to what's next: a full-scale tour of the Southeast. We're hitting Savannah, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, and Greenville, in that order between July 6 and July 12. Yep, it's going to be quite the road trip, and with the help of our sponsor Honda, it should be a comfy one too. The Southeast has long been partially ignored in the tech world, but no longer. Even in the pre-meetup conversations we've had with sponsors and members of the community, there's not a doubt in my mind that we'll find a few technological gems as we tour the area.Google Mistakenly Outs Android 4.1 In The Play Store, Galaxy Nexus To Be First Jelly Bean Phone
Jun 21, 7:54PM
Well isn't this interesting -- with just about five days to go until Google's I/O conference, the company may have just accidentally spilled the beans about their next big Android release. For a brief time, users who tried to purchase an unlocked Galaxy Nexus from the Google Play store was greeted by a blurb describing the device as the "the first phone with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean." Assuming this isn't just some random mistake Google has confirmed what nearly all of us expected their new update to be called, though there's sadly little other information to go on at this point.Kiip, The Mobile Ad Rewards Network, Rumored To Raise Another $8-10M To Conquer Games And Beyond
Jun 21, 7:38PM
We've been kiiping an eye on Kiip -- a platform that replaces straight display ads with rewards and contests from brands in mobile apps to offer a less annonying experience for users -- and it looks like we might not be the only ones. The company, which now serves its rewards-based ads into 400 apps across iOS and Android, and has inventory served totalling 100 million moments every month in the U.S., has raised another $8-10 million for what may be an equity stake of up to 20 percent in the company, TechCrunch understands. We're still trying to track down more details for this most recent investment; but up to now Kiip has attracted a strong list of backers. Co-founded in 2010 by ex-Digg employees Brian Wong, Courtney Guertin and Amadeus Demarzi, when Wong was still a teenager, its Series A of $4 million last year came from Hummer Winblad, Path's Dave Morin, True Ventures and Crosslink Capital."In the Studio," Freestyle's Josh Felser Takes a Hands-On Approach to Seed Investing
Jun 21, 7:00PM
"In the Studio" opens its doors this week to an entrepreneur who co-founded, built, and sold his two startups to large technology companies, then teamed up with his co-founding partner to invest their own capital in startups, which provided the basis for their current institutional angel fund and an impressive, diverse array of seed stage investments in consumer technology and infrastructure. Before Josh Felser co-founded Freestyle, an institutional angel fund, with his partner David Samuel, they both built successful internet businesses, Spinner and then Grouper, which were both sold to larger companies. Having worked with Samuel for nearly 15 years, the two decided to invest their own capital in startups for a few years. As sort of a minimal viable product for investing, those two years convinced the pair to raise a fund from outside investors and professionalize their investment activities. With Freestyle today, the pair make roughly 5-6 investments each per year at the seed stage and spend significant amounts of time with their companies, acting as if they were part of the founding team.Pokemon-Inspired MinoMonsters Hits 600,000 Downloads, Reinvents Itself With Version 2.0
Jun 21, 6:52PM
MinoMonsters, the Pokemon-inspired social game from Y Combinator's two youngest founders, has just shipped a major new release. With MinoMonsters 2.0, the game hasn't been so much updated, as it has been reinvented. Whereas before, gameplay involved a combination of exploring worlds and completing quests while simultaneously caring for and leveling up a wide collection of characters, the update is shifting the focus to evolving your monsters and battles.Drobo Drops Out Another Two NAS Enclosures, The Mini And The 5D
Jun 21, 6:49PM
Drobo has just released two new drives, the svelte Dobo Mini and the beefier 5D. The Mini is a four-disk enclosure that takes 2.5" laptop drives and it can automatically set up and and format them for maximum capacity or full redundancy. The Mini is much thinner than the other members of the Drobo family and supports Thunderbolt as well as USB 3.0. You can also add flash storage as a sort of buffer between the slower drives and the high speed connectors. This improves read write speeds and efficiency. It holds up to 3TB of data.Google Play's Top Android Devs Can Now Respond To User Reviews, Snarky Comments
Jun 21, 6:48PM
Google engineer and Android developer advocate Trevor Johns just revealed on the company's Android Developers blog that they're rolling out the ability to talk back to their reviewers right from the Developer Console. Before you Android devs gear up to give that one snotty jerk a mouthful, know this — as of right now, Google has only enabled the feature for their Top Developers, so you're currently out of luck unless you or your company has that trusty blue badge in the Google Play Store.Problems For Monetization: Lawsuit Forces Facebook To Let You Opt Out Of Sponsored Story Ads
Jun 21, 6:47PM
Facebook's business model just hit a stumbling block, as the social network is being forced to let users opt out of having their likenesses repurposed as endorsements in Sponsored Stories ads. The requirement of opt out controls comes as part of a settlement of a class action lawsuit where five Californians said they did not consent to having their names, faces, and activity used to promote companies who paid Facebook. It could have been even worse, as it appears that these controls will work on an story-by-story basis, and won't allow users to opt out of all future Sponsored Stories.Dear Klout, This Is How You Measure Influence
Jun 21, 6:15PM
"Up until now, we've thought a lot about influence in terms of how big someone's microphone is," NYU Professor of Business Sinan Aral, tells TechCrunch, "A more important question is, how much does someone's influence, or their messages, or the things they have to say to us, change our behavior?" The solution, demonstrates Aral in a paper published today in the prestigious journal, Science, is to measure whether users are actually taking action: contributing to a campaign, buying a product, downloading an app, or reading an article. Furthermore, messages must be randomly sent to followers, otherwise we have no idea whether users would have taken an action if they had seen the update or not. Randomization and action-based measures are a high bar, but at least it will get us past knowing whether social media "influence" actually means anything.Chartboost Poaches Clay Kellogg From Google Admob, Passes 2B Game Sessions A Month
Jun 21, 6:14PM
Chartboost, a San Francisco-based gaming and ad platform, just poached Google Admob's head of mobile platform and partnership strategy Clay Kellogg to be its chief revenue officer. Chartboost, which was founded by some alums of an early mobile gaming company that Disney acquired called Tapulous, is a platform where mobile developers can cross-promote their work. Gaming studios will usually do a direct advertising trade where they'll market their titles in other developers' games. Chartboost's platform has grown to incorporate 4,000 app developers with 2 billion game sessions per month between them. The company offers direct advertising trades for free, but developers can pay to promote their app in the company's network on a cost-per-click or cost-per-install basis.Bing Rolls Out New Image Search With Better Search Suggestions, Filters And Bigger Thumbnails
Jun 21, 5:49PM
Just a few weeks after completely redesigning its regular search results pages, Bing rolled out a nice update to its image search feature today. With this update, Microsoft is improving its search suggestions for related searches and makeing it easier for users to filter images by size, color, type and layout. Bing also moved these features to the top of the page. This change gives Bing's image search a significantly cleaner look and also makes these improved features easier to find and use. The service now also features larger thumbnails and less whitespace between images, as well as a longer list of related searches and a list of trending searches to the right sidebar.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
