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500px Snapped Up Recommendation Engine Algo Anywhere For $2 Million In Cash And Stock
Jul 10, 2:51AM
500px, the Toronto-based startup that powers a super-slick photo sharing site, announced today that it has made its first acquisition with the purchase of Algo Anywhere, a startup also based in Toronto that specializes in recommendation algorithms. 500px says Algo Anywhere's recommendation engine technology will integrated fully into its site to power new personalization features. The pricetag was some $2 million, which came in a mix of cash and stock, a source involved in the deal tells me. That's a very nice takeaway for a bootstrapped two-man startup that was founded just 10 months ago.The Oatmeal's Legal Battle Ends (I Hope) With A Giant Bag of Money
Jul 10, 2:06AM
Okay, there isn't much news here, but this is too fun not to post. If you're reading this, you probably don't need a lot of recapping of the legal dispute between cartoonist Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, and Charles Carreon, attorney for FunnyJunk. (In fact, the first commenter on my last post about the story had clearly been following things more closely than I had, and caught one a mistake). So you may remember that wayyyy back at the beginning of this story, when Carreon first threatened to sue Inman if he didn't pay $20,000 in damages and remove any reference to FunnyJunk from his site, Inman said he was going to raise $20,000 for charity instead, then send Carreon a photo of the money, along with a cartoon supposedly depicting Carreon's mother having sex with a bear.YC's Parallel Universe Developing Spatial Databases For Matrix-Style Games
Jul 10, 12:59AM
Parallel Universe is an Israeli technology company that promises video game companies the capability to make Matrix-style games through parallel processing, allowing millions of objects to be tracked in real-time. Founder Ron Pressler is a software engineer who has been developing simulated environments for the Israeli Air Force. He is part of this summer's Y Combinator class. Spacebase, the company's first product, is an offshoot of the military technology Pressler developed. It offers server-side, in-memory, low-latency, dynamic, concurrent and distributed spatial data-store for 2D and 3D spatial objects. Primary markets for the technology include MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, defense applications and location-based services.Sexy Payments Startup Stripe Swipes $20M From General Catalyst, Sequoia, Thiel And More
Jul 10, 12:16AM
White-hot payments startup Stripe has closed a $20 million Series B round of financing, led by General Catalyst with existing A-list investors Sequoia, Peter Thiel (personally) and angels Chris Dixon, Aaron Levie and Elad Gil also following on. Redpoint will be coming on as a new investor. Stripe's valuation during this Series B was in the hundreds of millions, up to a half-billion dollars, according to a source (It's unclear whether that valuation is pre- or post-money). The relatively under-the-radar company has already raised $20 million in prior funding from the aforementioned investors as well as PayPal co-founders Max Levchin and Elon Musk, with the under-reported $20 million Series A happening 12 months before this round closed.M.Dot Builds Better Mobile Site Creator, Gets Archimedes Labs' Largest Investment Yet
Jul 10, 12:02AM
Archimedes Labs, a Palo Alto incubator, has made its largest startup investment to date, backing mobile web development startup M.dot. Neither side would disclose financial details. M.dot is still in private beta testing, and co-founders Dominik Balogh and Pavel Serbajlo tell us they plan to launch this fall. M.dot is a free app that allows users to build a mobile website from scratch or a mobile version of their existing website. "Mobile will probably disrupt much of what we know of web 2.0," Keith Teare, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of TechCrunch, tells us. Teare, who led the investment, is intimately familiar with the web hosting business; his prior experience includes UK giants Easynet, NetBenefit and NetNames. He says the enormity of the web hosting business and lack of an equivalent for mobile intrigued him. "Could this possibly disrupt web-based businesses?" Teare asks.PadMapper Gets Craigslist Postings Again, Without Craigslist's Help
Jul 09, 10:30PM
Late last month, Craigslist dealt a big blow to apartment search website PadMapper, sending creator Eric DeMenthon a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he take down any Craigslist postings on his site. Now DeMenthon has found a way to bring Craigslist back to PadMapper, though not in the way he would have liked.Facebook Acq-Retired Face.com, But Here's Why It Will Bank By Reviving Its Facial Recog API
Jul 09, 9:57PM
Tagged photos are Facebook's lifeblood, and it would be happy to suck them out of other apps. That's why I suspect Facebook will resurrect Face.com's facial recognition API, even though it just shut it down less than a month after acquiring the Israeli company. Reopening the API will let other apps' users easily tag their Facebook friends in photos...which can then be shared back to Facebook where they generate notifications, return visits, and engagement the social network can monetize with ads. It's all part of Facebook's on-going quest to become the Omni-news feed, collecting content from everywhere for data-mining and display.It's Official: Pinterest, SF Mayor Ed Lee Confirm Move To San Francisco, Lee Opens Pinterest Acct In Celebration
Jul 09, 9:47PM
Pinterest is pinning its name on a new office door: the company today officially announced that it is moving its offices from Palo Alto to San Francisco, confirming our reports from June that were further confirmed this weekend by Pinterest's international growth executive Sarah Tavel. Pinterest tells us its office will be at 572 7th Street for now. The news was delivered today by San Francisco's mayor Ed Lee, who has rung in the news by launching his own Pinterest account.Pinterest Traffic Passes Google Referrals, Bing, Twitter & StumbleUpon
Jul 09, 9:19PM
Online sharing service Shareaholic just released new data showing that Pinterest is now beating out Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google in referral traffic (not Google organic, of course). The study is based on Shareoholic's network of over 200,000 publishers, which reaches more than 270 million people monthly. The company has been keeping its eye on Pinterest this year, finding in January that the emerging social network had topped Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined, for example. And in February, Pinterest beat out Twitter for the first time.DC City Council "Uber Amendment" Would Force Sedans To Charge 5x Minimum Taxi Prices (Kill UberX)
Jul 09, 9:17PM
Uber cannot catch a break in Washington, DC. The city taxi commission tried to shut the private car service down last January over rule violations that it wasn't actually committing. Now the local government is taking another shot, considering a legislative amendment tomorrow that would force sedan car services like Uber to charge at least five times the minimum cost of cabs. To be clear, the overall legislation is great, in that it forces taxi companies to start taking credit card payments and using GPS. But the amendment part does not even bother to hide its intentions. The section's name is literally "Uber Amendments," and comes with a layman's explanation that "[t]hese requirements would ensure that sedan service is a premium class of service with a substantially higher cost that does not directly compete with or undercut taxicab service." (I've obtained the full amendment from Uber, and you can check it out below.)GitHub Pours Energies into Enterprise – Raises $100 Million From Power VC Andreessen Horowitz
Jul 09, 9:01PM
Andreesen Horowitz is investing an eye-popping $100 million into GitHub, the ever popular repository for developers to post code and collaborate. It's GitHub's first infusion of venture capital. Founder Tom Preston Warner said the round will go to developing GitHub Enterprise, a server side version of GitHub.com.Penelope Trunk Calls Bullshit On Traditional Publishing, Launches Her New Book Exclusively On Hyperink
Jul 09, 8:55PM
Writer and entrepreneur Penelope Trunk has a new book coming out called The New American Dream, but you won't find it in your local bookstore. Instead, she's publishing it exclusively with startup Hyperink. That's not how the book started out, says Trunk (who writes a popular blog and also authored a couple of controversial TechCrunch posts about women and startups). Her previous book The Brazen Careerist (also the name of Trunk's last startup) was published traditionally, and she had a contract to do the same with The New American Dream.Congressman Darrell Issa Signs Declaration Of Internet Freedom
Jul 09, 8:07PM
Representative Darrell Issa (CA-49) signed the Declaration of Internet Freedom, a broad online declaration that aims to keep the internet free and open. Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is the first elected official to sign the document. Issa has been an outspoken opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Last month, he drafted "A Digital Citizen's Bill of Rights."Gamification Startup SessionM Brings On Hires From Apple And Google
Jul 09, 7:36PM
SessionM CEO and co-founder Lars Albright says the company has been recruiting aggressively since it raised a $20 million Series B a few months ago. Today, he's announcing three big hires from Apple and Google: - Gerald Hewes, who led the analytics, optimization, and insights team for Apple's iAd program, and who's now SessionM's vice president of engineering.
- Amy Jerusalmi, who joined Apple through its acquisition of Quattro Wireless and led the iAd account management team. She is joining SessionM as vice president of client services.
- Deborah Powsner, who led product marketing for Google+, and is joining as SessionM's senior director of marketing.
Keen On… The Boy King: The Truth About Mark Zuckerberg From Facebook Employee #51 [TCTV]
Jul 09, 7:33PM
A few months ago, I had Doug Edwards, Google employee #59, on the show to confess all about Google's early days. But whatever Google ex-employees can do, ex-Facebook employees can do better. So instead of employee #59, we've lined up Facebook employee #51 to reveal the most intimate truths about what it was like to work at Mark Zuckerberg's production in the very early days. Katherine Losse was not only the 51st person to join Facebook, but she's now written a memorable tell-all about her experience as Zuckeberg's personal ghostwriter in The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network, And it was thus a great honor to skype with Losse about both her new book and her Facebook experience.CEO Heins Wants To Restore "Faith" In RIM, Hints At First BlackBerry 10 Phone In January
Jul 09, 7:19PM
And RIM's post-earnings PR offensive continues. This time, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins sat down with the folks at CIO for an in-depth interview about himself and the company's future, and as you may expect he had a few juicy tidbits to reveal. The most notable of those little revelations has to do with the company's forthcoming BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Last month RIM infamously delayed the launch of their first BB10 devices until "Q1 2013" and left it at that. Interestingly, Mr. Heins seems to have put a finer point on that launch window.Role Reversal: Hulu's Original Programming To Air On "Real" TV
Jul 09, 6:54PM
Some interesting news for streaming service Hulu today: in a role reversal of sorts, the company is bringing its own original programming to television for the first time with the debut of "Spoilers" on Canada's SPACE, a sci-fi/horror/fantasy channel. The show features filmmaker Kevin Smith ("Clerks") and guests discussing their favorite summer movies. The deal also makes the show available for streaming on the TV channel's website at SPACECAST.com.VoiceBunny Launches "CrowdVoicing" Service, Aims To Be The Amazon Mechanical Turk of Voiceovers
Jul 09, 6:52PM
VoiceBunny, a startyup coming out of beta today, aims to make it easier and cheaper to get a professional-quality voiceover. Co-founder and CEO Alexander Torrenegra says that using the traditional process, recording a 60-second voiceover would take four weeks and thousands of dollars, largely because you need to recruit the talent through casting directors and talent agencies. Things are improving as the process moves online, but Torrenegra says that in many cases, the whole idea of auditioning multiple voices is an unnecessary inefficiency.TechCrunch Giveaway: A New iPad And Free Ticket To Disrupt SF! #TCDisrupt
Jul 09, 6:43PM
We hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July and an awesome weekend. You may have noticed that we didn't have a Disrupt SF ticket giveaway last Friday. That is because we wanted to wait since we have something extra special to give away this week. We noticed last Friday that we had a brand new iPad in the office (yes, the new one, the "new iPad") and we were feeling celebratory, so we decided to give it away. This week's giveaway winner will not only receive a ticket to one of our biggest technology conferences of the year, Disrupt SF, but also will receive this brand new iPad.Marc Benioff, Ben Horowitz And Joel Klein Are All Ready To Disrupt SF
Jul 09, 5:33PM
Our TechCrunch Disrupt event is coming back to San Francisco this September 8 to 12, and the agenda is coming together fast. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz will open the show, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will be coming by to share his latest on enterprise disruption. Meanwhile, former New York Schools chancellor Joel Klein is also on the agenda to discuss his work on education technology at News Corp. Just a reminder, the applications deadline for the Startup Battlefield competition is approaching fast. Applicants have until Friday, July 13th, at 11:59pm PT. This a big opportunity. The winner takes home $50,000, bragging rights... and the publicity and connections that can help them get major exits, like Yammer's recent $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft or GoInstant's acquisition by Salesforce today for $70 million. Startups who are ready and meet all of the qualifications can APPLY NOW.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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