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Source: Cisco Takes Secretive Role As "Unnamed Silicon Valley Industry Titan" In WhipTail's $31M Round
Dec 14, 8:17AM
According to multiple sources, Cisco has taken a secretive role as the "Unnamed Silicon Valley Titan" in a $31 million round for WhipTail, a flash storage company that also took investment from SanDisk and other investors. The Series C round of funding included investment from Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital. Silicon Valley Bank provided debt financing. SanDisk's investment in WhipTail was made through SanDisk Ventures, the company's newly formed strategic investment arm. Cisco's total investment was not available. Cisco executives did not respond to a request for comment.Alibaba Group's Taobao Removed From "Notorious Markets" List By US
Dec 14, 5:56AM
The US announced on Thursday that Taobao Marketplace, owned by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has been removed from its yearly list of the world's most "notorious markets," so-called because they are rampant with pirated and counterfeit goods.TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Finalist 8 Securities Raises $3M, Set To Launch In Japan
Dec 14, 5:08AM
Stock trading portal 8 Securities, a TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 finalist, just announced that it will launch in Japan next month. The Hong Kong-based startup hopes to tap into the Japanese market, which it estimates has over 16 million online investors. It also closed a $3 million funding round last week, with all eight private investors from its initial round of $8 million returning.Salorix Launches Amplfy 2.0 To Help Brands Find The Most Relevant Social Media Conversations
Dec 14, 2:32AM
Salorix has upgraded its social media engagement platform Amplfy with what the company says is improved artificial intelligence that help brands find the social media updates that are worth responding to. One of Salorix's big goals is to take customers beyond monitoring their own mentions and a specific set of keywords. Instead, it focuses on specific industries (such as automobiles or electronic goods) and uses AI to identify relevant conversations, to prioritize the comments that come from users who are influential and likely to respond, and to suggest relevant content in the system. For example, a Salorix spokesperson told me that Ford could use Amplfy to get notifications about conversations about muscle cars, point out the updates worth responding to, and suggest a response that would point the user to a relevant page about the Mustang.As Expected, Nothing Happens At The UN (This Time, Over Internet Regulation)
Dec 14, 1:49AM
The world is safe from a cataclysmic world government takeover of the Internet. As we predicted earlier this month, the United States has refused to sign a United Nations' Internet Telecommunication Union (ITU) proposal to enact more regulation over the web. "It's with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the US must communicate that it's not able to sign the agreement in the current form," said Terry Kramer, U.S. ambassador to the international gathering. "The internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years."China Gets The iPhone 5, But Will This Help Apple's Market Share?
Dec 14, 1:45AM
The iPhone 5 made its highly-anticipated arrival in China today, but despite strong pre-orders (China Unicom received 300,000 pre-orders), it remains to be seen whether this will help Apple's eroding share of the world's largest smartphone market.As Google Maps Humiliates Apple, The Silver Lining Is Millions Will Finally Upgrade To iOS 6
Dec 14, 12:41AM
Apple is getting embarrassed right now as Google's new iOS Maps app shoots to the top of the charts. But there is one upside to the beatdown. After three months of holding out to avoid Apple Maps, many people are now upgrading to iOS 6 or an iPhone 5. Last night I watched several people learn of the existence of Google Maps for iOS, and the first thing they did was update their phone's firmware.UK Universities Forge Open Online Courses Alliance: FutureLearn Consortium Will Offer Uni-Branded MOOCs Starting Next Year
Dec 14, 12:01AM
Twelve UK universities are pooling their resources to get into the brave new world of MOOCs. What are MOOCs? The short answer is 'massive open online courses' -- typically free, online and open to anyone who wants to participate. The universities are forming a new company to offer MOOCs next year under the FutureLearn Ltd brand name.Apple Expands Its System Status Page To Be More Comprehensive, Tracks Services, Stores And iCloud
Dec 13, 11:17PM
Apple is still pretty new to the cloud computing and storage game - and sometimes it shows. The company's various iCloud services have been suffering from numerous outages lately, but thanks to the company's new System Status Page, which it quietly rolled out today, its users will at least be able to get a comprehensive view of how Apple's online services are doing.Clothing Startup Everlane Opens A Pop-Up Store In New York, Now Has 400,000 Active Members (TCTV)
Dec 13, 10:28PM
Clothing startup Everlane has opened a pop-up store in New York for the holidays. We jumped on the opportunity to talk with founder and CEO Michael Preysman right in the middle of Everlane’s clothes. With 400,000 active members, the company is certainly catching the attention of many fashion aficionados. Everlane isn’t simply an online clothing shop selling the clothes you already know. The startup has raised $1.1 million in order to control everything. It designs its own clothes and carefully picks partner manufacturers to strive for quality while keeping prices affordable. The result is t-shirts made in the U.S. for $15, wool scarves made in Scotland for $65, or beautiful cashmere sweaters for $120 — the cashmere to make the sweaters is sourced directly from Mongolia. Brick-and-mortar stores cannot achieve this quality at those prices, because the startup cut out the middleman. Moreover, Everlane wants to create a personal experience: The company considers its members a community and, as such, collects feedback to help it determine which clothes to design and sell. You can read Leslie Hitchcock’s review to understand how they treat customers differently and why services like Everlane will soon matter in the fashion world. The pop-up store is only open for two weeks at 74 Gansevoort and will close forever on December 16. You can see clothes, try them on, make custom ties and belts, and get patches put on your cashmere sweaters. As you can't buy most of the stuff in store, Everlane shows once again its competitive advantage: it remains an online-only company. Video production by Steve LongMixpanel Launches A Site For Analytics Education, With Video Lectures From YouTube, BranchOut, And Others
Dec 13, 9:30PM
Analytics statup Mixpanel has launched a new page on its website that co-founder Suhail Doshi described as "TED for analytics." The goal, he said, is to help companies get a better understanding of what kind of data to collect and how to use it. To that end, Mixpanel invites experts to its office for six weeks or so for an "office hours" event where they deliver lectures to customers and other friends of the company. Now Mixpanel is sharing those videos with a larger audience. Doshi emphasized that he's aiming for general education, not the promotion of Mixpanel products or customers.Meet Eboz, The Guy Who Claims To Have Hacked Pakistan's Web (And 89,000 Other Sites)
Dec 13, 9:29PM
It all started with a score that needed to be settled. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote up some news about how various, high-profile sites in Pakistan and Romania were getting defaced by hackers. I did a little digging around to see who might have been behind the events.All Hail Cabs In NYC! (Soon From Smartphones)
Dec 13, 8:54PM
Starting February 15th, New Yorkers will be able to hail cabs via smartphones in Manhattan. The contentious one-year pilot program is being hailed as a win for transportation innovation, smartphone rideshare apps like Uber, and people who dislike holding their arms at a 45-degree angle. Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairman David Yassky called e-hailing apps “inevitable.” The pilot will test the waters for cabs within 1.5 miles of passengers in norther Manhattan and the outer boros and half-a-mile in most of Manhattan, according to transportationnation.org. Despite some early trepidation from five of the commissioners, the program was approved unanimously, 7-0, with two abstaining. Additionally, apps must comply with the current payment systems administered by Verifone and Creative Mobile Technologies (CMT), which, for the moment, could exclude popular smartphone payment system Square. “Look, if we're gonna bring e-hailing apps to New York, we're gonna do it right, and we don't want a kind of half measure that won't provide real service to customers,” Chairman Yassky told Betabeat about the upcoming limited pilot. Uber is declaring the ruling a victory for its smartphone app for taxis, UberTaxi, which had been shut down over alleged legal difficulties. But it’s unclear how Uber will be able to adjust to the metering requirement. We will update readers as the story develops.'Google For Entrepreneurs' Program Partners With Korean Accelerator Kstartup
Dec 13, 8:21PM
Seoul-based accelerator Kstartup just announced that it's partnering with the Google for Entrepreneurs program. In fact, according to Kstartup co-founder and partner David Lee, this is Google's first such partnership in Asia. Lee was an early Googler (one of the first 200 employees), as well as a partner at SK Telecom Ventures and co-founder of XG Ventures. (He's not the David Lee at SV Angel.) Through the partnership, he said, Google will provide an undisclosed amount of funding and other resources to help with Kstartup's operations. It's a three-month program that happens twice a year, providing free office space in the Gangnam district ("Psy not included"), as well as business and technical mentorship. Lee said he's also raising a fund to make seed investments in the Kstartup companies, but that's separate from the Google partnership."In the Studio," Tintri's Kieran Harty Brings Virtualized Storage To The Enterprise
Dec 13, 8:00PM
"In the Studio" approaches the end of 2012 by welcoming the type of entrepreneur that doesn't end up in the tech blogs very often, if ever, as they're generally working on technologies that most of us would never fully understand and, given the stakes, spend the first few years of initial development in stealth mode for fear of being scooped by the competition. Kieran Harty, CEO and co-founder of Tintri, is one of the most quiet, unassuming folks I've met in my short time in the Valley. Someone reached out to me about Harty's background, and while I'm usually uninterested in getting pitched to be on this show, I found his story, his company, and his technology to be fascinating. Harty left Ireland for Stanford, studied under legendary professor and Google angel investor David Cheriton, earned a PhD in distributed systems, started out at TIBCO, then took a job as VP of Engineering at an early-stage company that happened to be VMware, helped build the team from 25 people, and left after many years, finally ready to embark on his own and participate in the culture of the Valley he had sought after many years ago.Mike Maples Gets On Board Blueseed's Sea Platform
Dec 13, 7:57PM
I'm going to go out on a limb here, but my guess is if you went around and asked people in the startup community what they thought about Mike Maples at Floodgate, they would describe him as a sensible and successful entrepreneur turned investor and someone you'd most likely be thrilled to have on your team. In my personal opinion as an investor, I think he makes some pretty sound investment decisions. His previous bets include Modcloth, Chegg, CoTweet, Formspring and an early investment in Twitter.Hardware In The Cloud: How Makers Can Help With "Reshoring" Efforts
Dec 13, 7:55PM
A bit of writing over at Make Magazine caught my eye today and I thought I’d talk a bit about reshoring and “artisanal manufacturing,” two buzzwords that could reshape the way things are made here and abroad. In Make, Stett Holbrook notes that with Foxconn’s hints that it is moving some manufacturing to our shores comes the tantalizing idea that rather than “ramping up” manufacturing, hardware makers here in the U.S. could simply use America’s unused manufacturing cycles. In other words, there is no reason to build huge factories when, for example, there are thousands of unused manufacturing tools at our disposal across the country and around the world. Travis Good, also a contributor to Make writes: The true opportunity comes when pro makers can tap into the idle cycles of the US's automated manufacturing capacity. As a small example, Ted Hall (ShopBot) is trying to make it possible for pro makers to slip their production needs into ShopBot fabricators' shops with his 100,000 Garages. He's doing it as a means of turning his customers' idle capacity into opportunity but the notion can be generalized. We still produce more than anyone, but it's automated and inaccessible via the Cloud. Imagine, then a sort of Shanzhai market for components here in the U.S. Small manufacturers could offer small-batch jobs to hardware hackers and larger orders could be completed by multiple manufacturers working in concert with a centralized QA testing system in place to ensure each part was made correctly. In fact, this vision of “crowd-sourced” manufacturing isn’t far off from what it was like in 18th century Switzerland. Watch and clockmakers during that time would travel to the Jura mountains in the Fall and drop off metals and other raw materials with farming families who would soon be cut off from civilization by heavy snows and impassible roads. Instead of lying dormant all winter, these families would grind out gears, hands, and plates for the watchmakers in Zurich and then, when the snows thawed, send the finished product into the cities. In this way many farm families gained valuable experience in making metal parts and watchmakers could build hundreds of watches without spending a fortune on manufacturing costs. The same could be done for smaller batch hardware manufacturers in the U.S. and with the rise of crowdfunding, this is becoming ever more important and lucrative. Why, for example, make gadgets overseasApple's Best Of App Store 2012 Rewards Creativity, Google; Skype And Rovio Take Top App Spots
Dec 13, 7:46PM
Apple has released its annual "Best Of" feature for the iTunes and App Stores, and this year there are some apps at the top of the list that indicate Apple is interested in rewarding apps that foster creativity on its iOS devices. The iPhone app of the year is Action Movie FX (from J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Interactive studio) and the iPad app of the year is Paper, the amazing drawing and notebook app from FiftyThree.Digital Memoir Maker Storytree Expands Into Photo Books With SimplePrints iOS App
Dec 13, 7:45PM
Storytree, the 500 Startups-backed company originally focused on capturing and sharing family memoirs online and via mobile, is today announcing a new application called SimplePrints. Inspired by Storytree's previous efforts in preserving memorable moments, the new app allows you to build photo books using your iPhone photos or those stored online.Lookcraft, A Fashion Startup For Sharp-Looking Men, Targets Their Girlfriends This Holiday Season
Dec 13, 7:26PM
Lookcraft, a New York-based startup that ships men a collection of clothing to choose from, is targeting their girlfriends this season. The company is offering a way for users to pick out clothes for friends and significant others. Lookcraft, which sells men's designer clothes, is somewhat comparable to Chicago's Trunk Club. It sends a bundle of clothing, usually worth around $800 to 900, to men after they go through a quick style quiz and share their sizing. The items are shipped for free, you pick what you like, and send back what you don't. You're only charged for what you keep, and it's not a monthly subscription service (so no you're not locked into being billed every single month).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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