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Crazy-Stupid Or The Future? SoPost Wants To Turn Your Twitter Handle Into A Physical Address
Dec 03, 10:46AM
Chalk this one up as crazy-stupid or the future: SoPost, a new UK startup launching today, is on a mission to reinvent the postal address by mapping things like Twitter handles, Facebook names, email addresses and other social IDs to a physical location to make it easier and more convenient for customers to receive deliveries or for users to send stuff to friends. The problem that it's setting out to solve -- if it is a problem - is that a postal address should no longer be a fixed place, but something much more dynamic, because it frequently changes depending on where you are, at different times. In contrast, a social ID has the potential to remain fixed forever.My-Apps Secures $1.5M From Russia's Life Group To Build A WordPress For Apps
Dec 03, 10:11AM
There are any number of 'apps builders' out there, from Appbreeder, Buzztouch, Apps-builder, Appsbar and Mobileappwizard (you get the drift), and even Apple has patented a tool for simple apple building. However, few have received VC backing, which is why it's notable that My-Apps.com has secured $1.5 million investment from Russia's Financial Group Life, which earlier this year created a $10m tech venture fund. Prior to this My-apps attracted a $300,000 investment from Farminers seed fund and Igor Matsanyuk, one of the Mail.ru Group founders, taking funds raised to dote to $1.8 million.Taxibeat Launches Its Taxi Driver Marketplace And Smartphone App In Paris Just In Time For LeWeb
Dec 03, 9:00AM
What is it about taxi startups launching in time for LeWeb? Then again, you can't beat a captive audience. And so it is that Taxibeat, the hail-a-cab smartphone app and taxi driver marketplace, has launched in Paris this week, just in time to help ferry a bunch of geeks to the LeWeb conference and countless after parties. For Taxibeat it represents a fairly aggressive international roll-out strategy over the last four months, having first launched in the startup's native Athens, Greece, in May 2011, it's recently expanded to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo (Brazil), Oslo (Norway) and Bucharest (Romania). As of today, the company can add the City of Light to that list.Dropbox Follows The Tech Crowd, Opens Dublin Office — Says First European Office Will Be Hub For International Ops
Dec 03, 8:28AM
Dropbox has become the latest tech company to open an office in Dublin -- land of Guinness and low corporate tax rates. Dropbox said the new office, its first in Europe, will serve as the center of the its international operations -- enabling it "to better provide technical support and product acumen" to Dropbox's millions of European users, plus other international customers.Happy Birthday, SMS!
Dec 03, 5:00AM
On December 3rd, 1992 in the little town of Newbury, Berkshire, a UK programmer sent his best mate a few lines of greeting using a unique new technique called Short Messaging Service. The programmer, Neil Papworth, was a test engineer for the Sema Group, and sent the message via PC to the phone of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone employee. The message was "Merry Christmas." Vodafone intended the service as a fun and easy way to communicate internally.What's Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That's What
Dec 03, 3:43AM
Whatsapp, the multiplatform mobile messaging app that has been one of the runaway success stories for ad-free, paid services, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, according to sources close to the matter. We're still digging around on potential price and other details about how advanced the deal is. But as mobile becomes the latest battleground in the Internet's game of thrones, you can see how such a deal could make sense.Golden Gate Ventures And JFDI.Asia Announce Strategic Alliance For Asian Startups
Dec 03, 2:46AM
Top Southeast Asia VCs Golden Gate Ventures and JFDI.Asia have announced a new strategic alliance that will focus on supporting early-stage digital start-up companies as they transition from concept to substantial pre-series A funding.Native Ads In 2013: Scale, Headlines As Banners, Mobile, Samsung, And Yahoo
Dec 03, 1:14AM
Editor's note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Five months ago, I published an article on TechCrunch that provided the first framework for the emerging Native Advertising market. At the time, "native advertising" (a term coined by Fred Wilson) was a new name for an old concept — monetization models that emerge from the underlying user experience of the site or app, integrated into the visual design and driven by content-based ads.Tim Berners-Lee's Open Data Institute Gets Its First Outside Investment, $750K From The Omidyar Network To Top Up UK's $16M
Dec 03, 12:25AM
The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt, is today announcing its first international investment. The Omidyar Network, the investment firm co-founded by eBay's Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, is putting $750,000 towards the ODI. The money comes on top of the £10 million ($16 million) that the UK government, via the Technology Strategy Board, has already committed over the next five years for the project.As Retail E-Commerce Sees Three Billion Dollar-Plus Days In The Past Week, Online Holiday Sales Jump 15 Percent To $20.4B
Dec 02, 11:15PM
We've been wowed by the record breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending data, but it looks like consumers are continuing to spend online for holiday shopping. comScore says that retail e-commerce spending for the first 30 days of the November–December 2012 holiday season amounts to $20.4 billion, which is a 15 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.The Death Of Paper
Dec 02, 10:00PM
What does it say about us as a culture that is slowly killing off its primary method of information transferral. In 20 years, if there are no physical books, what will future cultures know about is in 220 years, when digital memories are likely wiped away?Gift Guide: Philips Hue
Dec 02, 9:00PM
Philips Hue are wireless LED lightbulbs that are controlled via an iOS app -- allowing you to change the shade and intensity of light they beam out, turn the bulbs on and off remotely, and set them to come on at scheduled times. Let there be micro-managed light!The Philosophy Behind Amazon Web Services' Cloud Strategy
Dec 02, 8:00PM
On stage at AWS re:Invent last week, CTO Werner Vogels discussed Amazon Web Services’ cloud philosophy, increasingly driven by a belief in building architecture that is cost-aware and designed to optimize economies of scale so it can do volume transactions at thin margins. The talk, a first-day keynote with Senior Vice President Andy Jassy, predicated the group’s belief in a programmable infrastructure that has more instance types and object storage than any public cloud services provider. For example, Frederic Lardinois wrote about AWS introduction of a "Cluster High Memory" instance type that will offer a massive 240 GB of RAM and two 120 GB SSDs. Jassy also unveiled a "High Storage" instance focused on storage and will come with 117 GB of RAM and 24 hard drives for a total of 48 terabytes of HDD space. The two keynotes illustrated AWS’s view on cloud computing, which differs from enterprise vendors that have focused on selling hardware to customers for “private clouds.” It was the first time AWS has stated so clearly how it views cloud computing and its competitors, which they say have been “cloudwashing” customers into believing that their costly solutions are better than the rest. AWS, through its programmable architecture, has built a $1.5 billion business on volume and thin-as-possible margins. The group has dropped pricing 23 times since 2006, including an approximate 25 percent cut that Jassy announced during his keynote. He attributed the drop in price to what he called a virtuous lifecycle. On Thursday, Vogels showed how a business-driven infrastructure gives customers their own ability to develop businesses that are data driven and optimized to make their operations so tight that they can also operate on low margins. Vogels explained how an architecture can adapt to changing business needs based on automated practices that use data to analyze and then program instances that auto-scale with expected increases or decreases in demand. He described it as “cost aware architecture,” meaning that the infrastructure drives application development, as opposed to the other way around. Embodied in this is the increasing requirement for the applications to be controllable, resilient, adaptive and data driven. Amazon.com started AWS because they needed more infrastructure in order for the business to scale. They also needed a better way to handle the fluctuations that would come when they had ups and downs in web traffic. Customers will often have to estimate physical storage, forCrunchWeek, Vol. 2: Is Mason Out At Groupon; Twitter Vs. PeopleBrowsr And ICOA-Gate [TCTV]
Dec 02, 7:01PM
As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we're introducing a new TechCrunch TV show called CrunchWeek, where we discuss a few of the past week's more interesting stories. The aim is to get a bit more into the stories behind the stories that you read about on TechCrunch's main blog page.
Startup Claims That Party Call, France Telecom's Facebook Calling App, Was Its Idea
Dec 02, 6:38PM
Two weeks ago, France Telecom-owned carrier Orange announced Party Call, an app Orange said it created in "partnership" with Facebook for users to make mobile calls via the social network. Now a small startup, Telesocial, says the idea was theirs first.Paul Graham Says Y Combinator's New Class Could Have "Less Than 50″ Startups
Dec 02, 6:38PM
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just had a few interesting things to say about the accelerator's Winter 2013 batch, the biggest of which is that it's going to smaller than before. There's no firm number just yet, but Graham noted in a new missive on the Y Combinator website that there may be less than 50 startups in the mix this time around.Gillmor Gang: Talking Tablet Smack
Dec 02, 6:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — survived a rare Saturday recording session at the unstable directorial hands of Gillmor. Topics included iPad Mini, Nexus 7, the latest Twitter UI on said iPad Mini, the lack of communication across platform firewalls, and a bit of Windows 8 Surface and Google Glasses smack. Rated B for Buttcast.Iterations: Let's Hear From Developers In "The War For Talent"
Dec 02, 6:00PM
Over the past few years, I've helped a small handful friends move from one gig to another. It's a highly personal process, and I'm not a "recruiting expert." Generally, in my limited experience, it often takes many conversations even before a close friend opens up about their desire to move or try something new. The motivations for each change are so different. Some want to work in a different industry, on a different technical problem, in a different city, for a different boss, for a different title, and so on. And, through these conversations, some patterns emerge, dangerous to extrapolate from, though illuminating given the fact every investor and founder stays up at night wondering how to deploy that early capital to find the right people to build out their vision.Dronegames In San Francisco Features Twitter Fists, Groupon Leashes, MiFi And Botnets
Dec 02, 4:59PM
Today, I got to judge a really cool competition, the Dronegames. Basically, a bunch of teams that like to hack on helicopter-like Drones came together in Groupon's San Francisco office to come up with some really cool creations. I expected things to spin and go upside down, but these folks did things way more advanced. What's a Drone exactly? Let's ask Wikipedia: An unmanned combat air vehicle or combat drone or simply "drone" is an unmanned aerial vehicle that is armed and has no onboard pilot. Currently operational drones are under real-time human control of unknown precision.
Reach Out And Touch No One
Dec 02, 4:00PM
If the Internet, at its most basic level, was built around the idea of one human connecting with another human, is it really changing how this is done? To make it easier and better is no insignificant accomplishment, but are actually changing the way people communicate with one another? It seems to me that we're not fashioning a thunderbolt, but greasing the lightning that's already there.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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