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Browser maker Opera has released its 2012 State of the Mobile Web report which measures social networking popularity by looking at the number of Opera Mini users who visit them. Data is aggregated from the servers powering the browser's data compression -- enabling the company to build up an (anonymous) picture of the mobile social web across more than 190 countries.
Whatever it is it is palpable. A sort of buzz in the Valley that all is not well, and a slight nervousness among entrepreneurs, investors and startup employees as they flit about their day-to-day. We may not be in the middle of an outright private market collapse, but there will definitely be fewer tigers and monkeys at this year's holiday parties. The fingernail biting is not just caused by the Series A crunch, which has been happening for a year, although that is definitely a part of it ("20 percent of companies that have gotten a seed round in the last year will be able to raise a Series A" Sarah Lacy wrote on Wednesday, aptly comparing the current jostle for venture money to a game of musical chairs).
Basho Technologies Riak Cloud Storage (Riak CS) now can be replicated across multiple data centers. The new capability, combined with its existing AWS S3 compatibility, gives a potent boost to the fast growing distributed storage service.
Plyfe, a startup that allows brands to promote themselves through games and rewards, is moving onto mobile today — Plyfe games can now be played on the company's mobile website, as well as embedded in smartphone apps. The company is also announcing that it has raised $750,000 in bridge funding. The basic idea: Games are a much more engaging way than traditional advertising for brands to reach consumers and fans.
Paypal co-fouder Peter Thiel, along with existing investors, has invested $49 million in Xero, the online accounting software for small businesses. It is Thiel's third investment in Xero. Earlier this year, Thiel and existing investors put $16.6 million into the company. Thiel invested $3 million in New Zealand-founded Xero in 2010.
One of the most popular topics in education technology these days is the subject of MOOCs, otherwise known as Massive Open Online Courses. Thanks to the buzz around MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udacity and edX, there are few universities and colleges that aren't currently struggling with whether or not they should hop on the bandwagon.
AngelPad, the startup accelerator program founded back in 2010 by ex-Googler and investor Thomas Korte, held its fifth ever Demo Day at its downtown San Francisco headquarters today. The twelve startups that comprised AngelPad's Fall 2012 class each took the stage to give their snappiest three-minute pitches to a very packed room full of the industry's most prominent investors. A bit about the program: AngelPad provides startups with ten weeks full of mentorship from industry veterans that covers all aspects of launching a company along with $20,000 in initial funding to help founders get their products off the ground in the best way possible.
There is some consolidation in the error-tracking/monitoring space. Exceptional, the error-tracking service for cloud developers, has announced the acquisition of the Ranger monitoring service to extend the U.S. company's 'DevOps' platform. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although Exceptional CEO Jonathan Siegel tells me it's a "solid six-figure purchase," and covers the Ranger product (which has just been updated to version 2.0) and existing customer base-only.
Start-Up Chile, the government-sponsored startup accelerator, is hosting its 3rd demo day today. The focus of this demo day is on social enterprise and green tech and, for the first time ever, the program partnered with Common Pitch to host today's event.
You might think Zynga's newfound flexibility from the end of its exclusivity agreements with Facebook would encourage investors. Instead, $ZNGA is down 13.36% after-hours, likely because it's lost its special relationship with the social network. Now it can launch games elsewhere and use non-Facebook payments and ads on Zynga.com, but it might stop getting valuable preferred treatment.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, took the stage at the company's re: Invent developer conference for a wide-ranging discussion with the company's CTO Werner Vogels about Amazon's web service and retail business, as well as his view about entrepreneurship and his personal projects, such as the 10,000 year clock and the Blue Origin space program.
As you might have heard last night, PeopleBrowsr, the maker of social influence service Kred, has filed legal actions against Twitter for cutting it off of its full firehose of data. It was given a temporary restraining order, which has kept the current data deal in place. Twitter told TechCrunch last night that it had every right contractually to do so, whereas PeopleBrowsr is crying "anti-competitive" practices.
Kiosked, a Finnish startup that raised $5.75 million from Rovio's elusive chairman Kaj Hed after bootstrapping for several years, is finally starting to show off what it's been working on. Naturally, the company's products are starting to appear with Angry Birds merchandise on Rovio's Facebook page. Kiosked is trying to change affiliate marketing by making videos and images more interactive with direct links and e-commerce promotions. The company's technology turns any image or video into a storefront where links to products can pop-in from the right-hand side.
Android phones! There are some that I love. The HTC One X was one of those, thanks to a very attractive external package alongside an Android skin (Sense) that had a fairly light touch and didn't mess with most of Android's good features, but brought some nice additional touches to the mix. The HTC One X+ is like the One X, but made better in nearly every important respect. Not surprisingly, that improves my impression of it, too.
Amazon.com Founder and CEO said in a fireside chat at AWS re:Invent with CTO Werner Vogels that he was surprised by the success of Amazon Web Services. Bezos said they were optimistic that AWS would do well, but they did not anticipate such huge growth.
In 2010 we held the first TechCrunch Moscow. We were back last year, and will return again this December with two days packed with speakers and startups. You can register here. Co-organized by Digital October, Kite Ventures, and AOL Tech Media, and backed by numerous partners, the third TechCrunch Moscow will feature some of the world's leading technology entrepreneurs, including Brent Hoberman, founder of Lastminute.com and Mydeco.com, Lukasz Gadowski, founder of Team Europe, Dmitry Stavisky, VP of Evernote, Arkady Volozh, co-founder and CEO of Yandex, Christian Saller, Managing Director of Kayak Europe and many other leading names.
Rap music has certainly evolved over the decades to become a pretty mainstream thing, but the act of rapping itself is not exactly seen as a commonplace hobby. But Detroit-based entrepreneur Erik Torenberg thinks that's something that should change. According to him, everybody has it inside of them to freestyle rap -- it's a talent that can be tapped into with the right amount of mentorship and practice. And, he says, rapping is a very valuable thing: It's an incredibly effective creative outlet that makes you more confident in expressing your thoughts and feelings.
Zynga just filed a document with the SEC outlining new terms to its agreement with Facebook. Overall, it seems that Zynga and Facebook establishing a little more distance and flexibility in their relationship, with Zynga being treated more like any other game developer. According to the filing, any "standard Zynga game page" that uses Facebook data will now be governed Facebook's standard terms of service, meaning that games on Zynga's new-ish platform Zynga.com are no longer obligated to use Facebook ad units and Facebook credits. In exchange, Zynga's right to cross-promote its non-Facebook games using Facebook data and email addresses is now "limited by Facebook's standard terms of service."
When I spoke with one of the leads on Google search a while back, he told me that one of the biggest features to come along for the company was "instant search" and autocomplete. Basically, you didn't have to type out a whole search string before performing said search, which required more thought and brain power. Now when you go to Google, you can type a few letters and it will try and predict what you're looking for based on a number of factors. What if Google Maps worked like this? Today, on its Geo Developers blog, the team highlighted a service that has built it, and it's quite cool.
Today, the dark day Syria shut down its Internet, web freedom should be at the very forefront of all of our minds. Web freedom was also center stage earlier this week when Stanford Law School hosted an event called "Sticky WCIT: Is This The End Of The Internet." I asked several of the experts attending the event whether a WCIT meeting next week in Dubai might be a big threat to the free flow of digital information.
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Opera Maps Global Mobile Social Network Usage: Facebook Most Frequently Visited On Phones In Macau, Twitter In Paraguay
Nov 30, 10:37AM
Browser maker Opera has released its 2012 State of the Mobile Web report which measures social networking popularity by looking at the number of Opera Mini users who visit them. Data is aggregated from the servers powering the browser's data compression -- enabling the company to build up an (anonymous) picture of the mobile social web across more than 190 countries.R.I.P. Frothy Times, A Return To Normalcy
Nov 30, 8:55AM
Whatever it is it is palpable. A sort of buzz in the Valley that all is not well, and a slight nervousness among entrepreneurs, investors and startup employees as they flit about their day-to-day. We may not be in the middle of an outright private market collapse, but there will definitely be fewer tigers and monkeys at this year's holiday parties. The fingernail biting is not just caused by the Series A crunch, which has been happening for a year, although that is definitely a part of it ("20 percent of companies that have gotten a seed round in the last year will be able to raise a Series A" Sarah Lacy wrote on Wednesday, aptly comparing the current jostle for venture money to a game of musical chairs).Basho's Amazon S3 Compatibility Gets Potent Boost With Replication Capabilities For Riak Cloud Storage
Nov 30, 8:10AM
Basho Technologies Riak Cloud Storage (Riak CS) now can be replicated across multiple data centers. The new capability, combined with its existing AWS S3 compatibility, gives a potent boost to the fast growing distributed storage service.Plyfe Brings Its Brand-Promoting Games To Mobile, Raises $750K
Nov 30, 3:35AM
Plyfe, a startup that allows brands to promote themselves through games and rewards, is moving onto mobile today — Plyfe games can now be played on the company's mobile website, as well as embedded in smartphone apps. The company is also announcing that it has raised $750,000 in bridge funding. The basic idea: Games are a much more engaging way than traditional advertising for brands to reach consumers and fans.Peter Thiel And Existing Investors Put Another $49 Million In Accounting Software Company Xero
Nov 30, 2:03AM
Paypal co-fouder Peter Thiel, along with existing investors, has invested $49 million in Xero, the online accounting software for small businesses. It is Thiel's third investment in Xero. Earlier this year, Thiel and existing investors put $16.6 million into the company. Thiel invested $3 million in New Zealand-founded Xero in 2010.CourseTalk Launches A Yelp For Open Online Courses And What This Means For Higher Education
Nov 30, 12:19AM
One of the most popular topics in education technology these days is the subject of MOOCs, otherwise known as Massive Open Online Courses. Thanks to the buzz around MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udacity and edX, there are few universities and colleges that aren't currently struggling with whether or not they should hop on the bandwagon.AngelPad Debuts 12 New Startups At Its Fall 2012 Demo Day
Nov 30, 12:12AM
AngelPad, the startup accelerator program founded back in 2010 by ex-Googler and investor Thomas Korte, held its fifth ever Demo Day at its downtown San Francisco headquarters today. The twelve startups that comprised AngelPad's Fall 2012 class each took the stage to give their snappiest three-minute pitches to a very packed room full of the industry's most prominent investors. A bit about the program: AngelPad provides startups with ten weeks full of mentorship from industry veterans that covers all aspects of launching a company along with $20,000 in initial funding to help founders get their products off the ground in the best way possible.Exceptional Buys Ranger To Give A Monitoring Shot In The Arm To Its 'DevOps' Platform
Nov 30, 12:01AM
There is some consolidation in the error-tracking/monitoring space. Exceptional, the error-tracking service for cloud developers, has announced the acquisition of the Ranger monitoring service to extend the U.S. company's 'DevOps' platform. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although Exceptional CEO Jonathan Siegel tells me it's a "solid six-figure purchase," and covers the Ranger product (which has just been updated to version 2.0) and existing customer base-only.Start-Up Chile Hosts Its 3rd Demo Day, Announces The 105 Startups In Its Next Class
Nov 30, 12:00AM
Start-Up Chile, the government-sponsored startup accelerator, is hosting its 3rd demo day today. The focus of this demo day is on social enterprise and green tech and, for the first time ever, the program partnered with Common Pitch to host today's event.Zynga Shares Sink 12% After Renegotiated Partnership With Facebook Makes It Just A Regular Developer
Nov 29, 11:43PM
You might think Zynga's newfound flexibility from the end of its exclusivity agreements with Facebook would encourage investors. Instead, $ZNGA is down 13.36% after-hours, likely because it's lost its special relationship with the social network. Now it can launch games elsewhere and use non-Facebook payments and ads on Zynga.com, but it might stop getting valuable preferred treatment.Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos Talks AWS, Innovation, Customer Service & Space Travel At Re: Invent
Nov 29, 11:30PM
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, took the stage at the company's re: Invent developer conference for a wide-ranging discussion with the company's CTO Werner Vogels about Amazon's web service and retail business, as well as his view about entrepreneurship and his personal projects, such as the 10,000 year clock and the Blue Origin space program.More On PeopleBrowsr And Its CEO Jodee Rich, Who Has Been Involved In Long Legal Battles Before
Nov 29, 11:16PM
As you might have heard last night, PeopleBrowsr, the maker of social influence service Kred, has filed legal actions against Twitter for cutting it off of its full firehose of data. It was given a temporary restraining order, which has kept the current data deal in place. Twitter told TechCrunch last night that it had every right contractually to do so, whereas PeopleBrowsr is crying "anti-competitive" practices.Kiosked Has A Plan To Change Affiliate Marketing, And It's Starting To Show Up With Angry Birds Merch
Nov 29, 10:59PM
Kiosked, a Finnish startup that raised $5.75 million from Rovio's elusive chairman Kaj Hed after bootstrapping for several years, is finally starting to show off what it's been working on. Naturally, the company's products are starting to appear with Angry Birds merchandise on Rovio's Facebook page. Kiosked is trying to change affiliate marketing by making videos and images more interactive with direct links and e-commerce promotions. The company's technology turns any image or video into a storefront where links to products can pop-in from the right-hand side.Gift Guide: HTC One X+
Nov 29, 10:27PM
Android phones! There are some that I love. The HTC One X was one of those, thanks to a very attractive external package alongside an Android skin (Sense) that had a fairly light touch and didn't mess with most of Android's good features, but brought some nice additional touches to the mix. The HTC One X+ is like the One X, but made better in nearly every important respect. Not surprisingly, that improves my impression of it, too.Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos Said He Was Hugely Surprised By The Success Of AWS
Nov 29, 10:17PM
Amazon.com Founder and CEO said in a fireside chat at AWS re:Invent with CTO Werner Vogels that he was surprised by the success of Amazon Web Services. Bezos said they were optimistic that AWS would do well, but they did not anticipate such huge growth.TechCrunch Moscow Returns On 9-10 December — Unpacking Russia's Tech Boom
Nov 29, 10:16PM
In 2010 we held the first TechCrunch Moscow. We were back last year, and will return again this December with two days packed with speakers and startups. You can register here. Co-organized by Digital October, Kite Ventures, and AOL Tech Media, and backed by numerous partners, the third TechCrunch Moscow will feature some of the world's leading technology entrepreneurs, including Brent Hoberman, founder of Lastminute.com and Mydeco.com, Lukasz Gadowski, founder of Team Europe, Dmitry Stavisky, VP of Evernote, Arkady Volozh, co-founder and CEO of Yandex, Christian Saller, Managing Director of Kayak Europe and many other leading names.Meet Rapt.fm, The Startup That Lets Rappers Show Their Skills With Freestyle Battles On The Web
Nov 29, 10:13PM
Rap music has certainly evolved over the decades to become a pretty mainstream thing, but the act of rapping itself is not exactly seen as a commonplace hobby. But Detroit-based entrepreneur Erik Torenberg thinks that's something that should change. According to him, everybody has it inside of them to freestyle rap -- it's a talent that can be tapped into with the right amount of mentorship and practice. And, he says, rapping is a very valuable thing: It's an incredibly effective creative outlet that makes you more confident in expressing your thoughts and feelings.Zynga Loosens Its Deal With Facebook: No Longer Tied To Facebook Ad Units, Credits, Or Exclusivity
Nov 29, 9:56PM
Zynga just filed a document with the SEC outlining new terms to its agreement with Facebook. Overall, it seems that Zynga and Facebook establishing a little more distance and flexibility in their relationship, with Zynga being treated more like any other game developer. According to the filing, any "standard Zynga game page" that uses Facebook data will now be governed Facebook's standard terms of service, meaning that games on Zynga's new-ish platform Zynga.com are no longer obligated to use Facebook ad units and Facebook credits. In exchange, Zynga's right to cross-promote its non-Facebook games using Facebook data and email addresses is now "limited by Facebook's standard terms of service."Google Loves This Third Party Instant Street View Search App, Will They Buy It?
Nov 29, 9:43PM
When I spoke with one of the leads on Google search a while back, he told me that one of the biggest features to come along for the company was "instant search" and autocomplete. Basically, you didn't have to type out a whole search string before performing said search, which required more thought and brain power. Now when you go to Google, you can type a few letters and it will try and predict what you're looking for based on a number of factors. What if Google Maps worked like this? Today, on its Geo Developers blog, the team highlighted a service that has built it, and it's quite cool.Keen On… WCIT: Is This The End Of The Internet? [TCTV]
Nov 29, 9:41PM
Today, the dark day Syria shut down its Internet, web freedom should be at the very forefront of all of our minds. Web freedom was also center stage earlier this week when Stanford Law School hosted an event called "Sticky WCIT: Is This The End Of The Internet." I asked several of the experts attending the event whether a WCIT meeting next week in Dubai might be a big threat to the free flow of digital information.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
Restaurants are kind of notorious for having painful web experiences -- either with websites that are horribly basic and out of date, or needlessly souped up with music and Flash animation. So it was good news today when web publishing stalwart WordPress.com 
Whether or not one believes Khan Academy is helping to reinvent education, it's hard to dispute the fact that Khan (and now his team) are an educational video-producing machine, or that the platform 
So, 
When the news broke earlier this evening that 
In February of this year, 
When I first saw this tiny 
Technology is increasingly becoming a part of the classroom experience, particularly thanks to smart devices. Tablets and iPads offer students a more portable, engaging and interactive experience than many of the tools of old, and schools are catching on. 
I interviewed Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy today at the AWS re:Invent conference. Before the interview I asked my Twitter followers for questions to ask. I could not use all of the questions but I've included a few here to give you a snapshot of the full recording, which is embedded below.
In 1996, people in the U.S. bought about 2.3 albums per year. Today, thanks to services like Spotify and Rdio, some of us listen to that many albums a day. Last-minute concert ticket app 
Financial software giant Intuit offers a Square-competitor, GoPayment, which allows users in the U.S. and 
Groupon shares (
Norman Winarsky, vice president of SRI Ventures, offered his thoughts today on how Apple has handled the acquisition and subsequent relaunch of Siri as an integrated service in iOS. He was diplomatic about some of 
Microsoft might be figuring out that the best way to get users to use its product isn't by charging an arm and a leg for updates and releasing them only once every few years. Redmond is reportedly switching to an approach like that taken by rival Apple, delivering inexpensive, annual updates that are less dramatic but which are designed to get all users on board a unified platform.
TiVo reported solid third-quarter financials thanks to subscription growth from MSOs and payments in litigation it settled with Verizon earlier this year. It reported service and technology revenues of $61 million, which was up 18 percent from a year ago. It also reported net income of $59 million, which was bolstered by $78.4 million from litigation proceeds due to the Verizon settlement.
In case those Black Friday and Cyber Monday 
Microsoft started a rather 
Windows Phone 8 has made its fair share of headlines lately but there hasn't been has much official chatter about Windows Phone 7.8, the update intended to bridge the feature gap between older and newer Windows Phones. Well, consider that quiet streak broken — Microsoft confirmed today the the 7.8 update would begin rolling out in 
There's no denying times are tough for smartphone maker HTC, with sliding revenues and shrinking margins -- and no let up expected for Q4. But the company is aiming to put a new public face on its situation next year: it's announced the appointment of a new chief marketing officer, Benjamin Ho, who will join in January -- replacing current CMO, John Wang, who HTC confirmed will be stepping down.
Tapestry, the latest contender in the fashion-tech startup space, wants to connect a shopper's digital identity with the physical products in the store they're in by using barcode/NFC-scanning smartphone apps which shoppers use to build up a virtual collection/wish-list of items they might like to buy in future that are linked to the retailer's ecommerce database.
Looks like 
As funding dwindles across the life sciences industry, researchers at major universities are increasingly adopting the entrepreneurial models forged by the tech world. With help from groups like 
This evening at 
Today, there seem to be more business accelerators than there are startups to fill their classes and cohorts. It seems that not a week goes by without the launch of another accelerator or seed starter fund. In fact, 
A decade ago, the news cycle for a CE product worked like this: a PR person contacted a major title - Laptop, say, or PC Magazine - and offered an exclusive for a cover story. "Hey," they'd say. "Hot new laptop coming out! It's got that new Wi-Fi!" An early version of the laptop would arrive at the title's office and someone would write a detailed review of it because, let's face it, there was little else to do at the office before the Internet was pervasive. Then, two months later the story would go to press and then maybe end up on some nascent Internet CMS hacked together by a designer after hours. The circle of life, then, for a tech product was about half a year. Plenty of time for back and forth, hand-holding, and handsome product shots.
Does the Internet exist to inspire and inform society and therefore limits copyright holders ability to block information? Hidden between the lines of Google's otherwise predictable "
Mozilla just launched a special customized edition of Firefox for fans of Microsoft's MSN portal. Firefox with MSN comes with MSN as the default home page and automatically opens msnNOW, the memetracker-like version of MSN as a Firefox app tab. And of course, this edition offers an MSN theme and uses Bing as the default search engine instead of Google, which is the standard for regular Firefox releases.
Two of the team of eight designers at 
Microsoft just 
A TechCrunch 
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to earn $1.5 billion in revenues this year, but overall the organization still remains under-appreciated as a core asset of Amazon.com. But that may change this week as AWS holds its first conference in Las Vegas. The event should give more attention to an organization that has had arguably the deepest impact on IT and the enterprise software market.
In a surprise shake-up at mobile app marketing company Tapjoy, 
The Internet has a hard time taking things seriously and will happily enact silly vengeance on websites daring enough to leave important tasks up to a vote. Time's coveted "Person of the Year" poll has been hijacked by thousands of pranksters 
In typical Microsoft fashion, the company just announced a number of momentum numbers for Outlook.com and also launched quite a few new features for its web-based email service at the same time.
