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.
Disrupt NYC To Feature Indian, Brazilian And Israeli Pavilions
Feb 12, 7:46PM
If Battlefield is the soul Disrupt, Startup Alley is the ever-beating heart. It's a wild marketplace where startups gather on the showfloor to demo their creations. And this year, at Disrupt NYC held on April 29-May 1, there will be pavilions dedicated to Indian, Brazilian and Israeli startups.Sony Entertainment CEO Lynton Says Netflix, DVR Change The Way People Watch TV
Feb 12, 7:46PM
Today at the D: Dive Into Media conference, Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Corporation of America and Sony Entertainment, said that the rise of Netflix, DVR are fundamentally changing the way that viewers watch TV content. And that now changes the type of content is being produced and the quality of it.Kickstarter: The SIMPLcase Is An iPhone 5 Case For The Globetrotting SIM Switcher
Feb 12, 7:37PM
Being based in Canada means that I'm often traveling for work, and that means fiddling with SIM cards. A new Kickstarter project from the same people who brought you the X-Wing joke campaign proposes to make keeping track of those SIMs and navigating international border-crossing much easier, with a simple design that adds a couple simple twists to a basic low-profile iPhone case design.PayPal At The Pump – Payments Company Signs Deal With Gas Station Checkout Provider Gilbarco Veeder-Root
Feb 12, 7:26PM
PayPal today announced that it has signed a deal with gas station checkout solution Gilbarco Veeder-Root, which will be implementing PayPal as a payment option at all their gas and convenience stores across the U.S. The initial rollout involves integration with Gilbarco's Passport Point-of-Sale product, but the company says that going forward, PayPal will be integrated into its suite of media and merchandising applications.New Dropbox For Teams Gives IT Deep Control And Visibility, Reveals More About Company's Next Chapter
Feb 12, 7:01PM
Dropbox for Teams has a new set of features that gives IT deep visibility and control over the way both individuals and groups use the service. The new features show how Dropbox is entering a new chapter in its evolution, pointing to a future where a significant aspect of its business will focus on the business market.Storenvy Goes From Getting Kicked Out Of YC To Raising A $5M Round
Feb 12, 6:51PM
Note: This is the second friend in a row whose funding I'm covering this week. Looks like my friends are doing okay for for themselves despite the Series A Crunch. Have at it, comments. Storenvy, a platform for people who'd like to build custom storefronts and marketplace for people who'd like to discover them, is announcing its Series A funding today. The $5 million round was led by Spark Capital and Intel Capital with follow on by First Round Capital.Apple Doesn't Care, That's Why It's Winning
Feb 12, 6:44PM
Apple doesn't care if competitors have cheaper products. It doesn't care if its next big thing cannibalizes its last big thing. Not about buying big money-makers, and certainly not about how you think it should deal out stock. Today at Goldman Sach's conference, Tim Cook played the defiant king of an empire too powerful to be distracted by the present or the past. All he sees is Apple's future.Intel Will Roll Out Its Virtual Cable Service Under A New Brand Later This Year
Feb 12, 6:20PM
Intel wants to be in the video business, and over the past few years has been investing heavily to build a new virtual cable service. The idea is that the company would to provide the same type of bundled TV content as Comcast, Dish, and others, but would deliver that content by streaming it over the Internet.Gut Political Science And Give It To The Physical Sciences
Feb 12, 6:06PM
The federal government spent $200,000 studying why congressmen sometimes make vague statements. It's no surprise why leaders in Congress proposed cutting Political Science from the National Science Foundation dole and giving it to more worthwhile projects in the physical sciences, like cancer research. After wasting five years as a PhD graduate student desperately trying to find value in my Political Science degree, I could not agree more with Congress's proposal.Yahoo Acquires Mobile "Nearby Recommendation" iPhone and Web App Alike
Feb 12, 5:52PM
Today, mobile app company Alike has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo and will be joining the Yahoo Mobile team. Alike allows you to recommend nearby venues that are your “favorites.” This is similar to Facebook’s approach in tagging the things around you that you’re interested in. This could be a great move for Yahoo in pulling together like-graph type information to build out more content on its site. Here’s what Alike had to say about it: Alike is joining Yahoo! Mobile At Alike, we’ve spent the last couple of years working hard to build amazing mobile experiences to delight our customers, which is why we’re thrilled to announce some big news: we’re joining Yahoo! Mobile. We've always been passionate about the growing power of intelligent mobile experiences. We believe that distilled information, deeply personalized and made accessible anytime and anywhere, is what makes mobile experiences a part of our customers' daily lives. In Yahoo! we’ve found a team as excited about this vision as we are, and who are serious about making it real. We’re super excited to join Yahoo!’s mobile team, where we can march toward that vision faster than ever. As of today, we will no longer support the Alike Nearby iPhone and Web apps. Thank you to all our customers, partners, investors, and advisors who've supported us from day one! We've taken a big step on our journey, and we could not have done it without your support. Looking forward to starting our new chapter at Yahoo! Sincerely, The Alike Team When our own Ryan Lawler covered Alike last year, this is how he described the experience: The app ranks recommendations based on how "alike" they are to your search queries, allows users to see how far away a place is, and lets them provide feedback about whether they think one place is like another. Venue pages provide more detail, including address, phone number, hours, etc., and lets users bookmark them for later. Many have thought that Foursquare was a perfect acquisition target for Yahoo, and that might still be the case, or the company decided that it liked the Alike app and team much better. At the very least, Yahoo now has a battle-tested, social-experienced mobile team on its staff. Through a spokesperson, Yahoo has confirmed the acquisition but is not sharing the purchase price at this time. The Alike team created anFacebook's Next Big App Categories Will Be Movies, Books, And Fitness
Feb 12, 5:39PM
As Facebook is working to build partnerships with big media companies, the company sees a huge opportunity for growth in the sharing and discovery of movies, books, and fitness tools on its platform. At the D: Dive Into Media conference today, Facebook VP of Partnerships Dan Rose said the company expects the next wave of its app ecosystem to be driven by those media categories.San Francisco's Exploratorium Teaches iPad Users About Sound With New App
Feb 12, 5:32PM
The Exploratorium is one of the best places in San Francisco to learn about science, especially if you're a kid — and by releasing iPad apps, including today's launch of Sound Uncovered, the institution can teach a broader audience. As the name suggests, Sound Uncovered illustrates how sound and hearing work. It follows the Exploratorium's first app, Color Uncovered (so if you're trying to figure out what comes next, well, there are three senses left to explore), offering 12 "experiences" that bring different concepts to life — some of them based on exhibits in the museum itself, others entirely new.Pulse News Reader Dips Its Toes Into Social With New "Highlights" Feature
Feb 12, 5:30PM
For over two years, Pulse has been providing its over 20 million users with an easy way to read content from blogs and social networks. While other services like Flipboard and Zite used social updates and complicated algorithms to present users with a personalized view of the world, the Pulse team eschewed these ideas and stuck with a more traditional model of presenting you unfiltered feeds. Now, however, the company is slowly dipping its toes into social by adding "Pulse Highlights," a feature that puts a focus on the stories your friends have shared on the service and on Facebook.CEO Tim Cook Confirms First Store In Turkey Amidst Big International Retail Push
Feb 12, 5:05PM
Towards the end of Apple CEO Tim Cook's keynote appearance today at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, he dedicated a good-sized monologue to the state of Apple's retail operation, where he confirmed a new store in Turkey and more international growth; noted that stores have become so important in their communities that you can't really call them stores anymore; and (joked?) that walking into one is akin to taking a Prozac.Mobilewalla Raises $4 Million From Early Amazon Investor Madrona & Others To Bring Quantcast-like Audience Measurement To Mobile
Feb 12, 5:01PM
Mobilewalla, an app search and discovery website, Android application, and somewhat stealthy app developer analytics platform has raised $4 million in new funding in a round led by early Amazon investor Madrona Venture Group (Scott Jacobson). Also participating were notable figures in the Indian Angel Network (IAN), including Venkat Raju, Google India chief Rajan Anadan, and former Yahoo India R&D CEO Sharad Sharma. Infocomm Investments, the VC arm of Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority, was the third investor in the new round. This is the first outside funding the company has taken in since its founding back in 2011.Mobile Messaging App Relay Raises $700,000 To Share Web Videos And Animated Images With Friends
Feb 12, 5:00PM
Mobile messaging is hot, with companies like Snapchat, WhatsApp, and others providing new ways of connecting users on their mobile devices. One startup with an interesting take on the mobile messaging market is Relay, which provides an easy way to share multimedia assets between friends. The company, which is based in Toronto and was part of the Extreme Startups Preccelerator, has raised $700,000 from a mix of Canadian and U.S. investors, including Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, The Social+Capital Partnership, Graph Ventures, and Real Ventures. Relay provides an app for sharing web content easily with others. The app works by allowing its users to search for animated or still pictures and videos, and to deliver them to friends within the app. The viral nature of the app then lets them easily “relay” that content to other users in their network. Users can either search their own camera rolls, or an extensive number of YouTube videos, still images, animated gifs, and other web content. Once users find what they want, they merely select a piece of content and send to another user. Even web pages are served up with a preview image and headline to show what it’s about. The idea is to make it so that users don’t see URLs, but immediately get additional visual context for what’s being shared. The app can be used asynchronously, but if users happen to be on it at the same time, you can see if a friend or contact is looking at a video or image, and can chat about it while it’s being viewed. Eventually, the Relay team wants to move from making mobile content easier to send and view, to making it easier to discover. By keeping tabs on who sends what images, videos, and web pages to whom, Relay will soon be able to provide suggestions based on content that’s popular with its users or is trending.Exec Launches A Cleaning-Only App, Expands to Seattle As Housework Makes Up 50% Of Sales
Feb 12, 5:00PM
Exec — the Y Combinator-backed app that does your errands on-demand — just launched a cleaning-only app. It’s a decision that makes sense as housework has ended up being about 50 percent of the startup’s overall gross sales. Cleaning has a totally different user experience inside Exec. Unlike Exec’s other tasks, which you can call up whenever you want (like Uber), cleaning tends to be a service that people schedule in advance. So Exec’s new cleaning app walks a user through the basic steps of listing how many bedrooms and bathrooms they have, scheduling the cleaning, and then paying for the service directly inside the app. Justin Kan, the company’s CEO, admits that he’s kind of taking a page from Facebook’s playbook. After trying an all-in-one approach to building apps, that company created a portfolio of standalone apps like Camera, Poke and Messenger. Similarly, having apps for specific tasks makes it easier for new users to understand what the apps do. It’s just easier for marketing to new users and then also getting them through the transaction quickly. He wouldn’t say what the company is exploring next in terms of task-specific apps. “With cleaning it’s straightforward. People are already familiar with the concept of a cleaning service,” he said. “Having apps for different things I need to do can make it easier to get things done without talking to anyone.” He added, “That’s where the future is going. If you look at our demographic, younger people don’t want to talk on the phone anymore. They want to quickly look it up and then book it.” Cleaning also happens to be a good way to upsell Exec customers into paying for other tasks. Kan says there’s about a 20 percent crossover between the cleanings and other Exec tasks. Expanding To Seattle The other piece of news is that Exec is expanding to Seattle. Initially, when Kan set up the company, he avoided taking VC money and instead went for a $3.3 million “friends and family” round from other Y Combinator alums, because he wanted to ensure the concept was logistically and financially sound before expanding. (A large slug capital from an established firm can sometimes mean pressure to scale too quickly.) He says he’s finally reached the point where he feels Exec is a sound concept that he can quickly expand to other markets without too much on-the-ground effort. “A lot ofPertino Offers A Cloud-Based Network, No Hardware Required
Feb 12, 4:47PM
Pertino today launched a service enabling any small business to go online and create a network that runs entirely in the cloud. Pertino uses Amazon Web Service (AWS) for its service making it possible for a business of any size to create secure networks. It connects people anywhere in a manner that not long ago would have cost a small fortune in networking gear. It does this by integrating its software in AWS data centers around the world.Apple Closing 20 Retail Stores In Order To Expand Them, Accomodate More Customers
Feb 12, 4:44PM
Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a keynote speech at the Goldman Sachs investor conference that Apple was going to close 20 of its retail stores, in order to move them and make them large enough to serve the ongoing influx of Apple customers. Some of Apple's stores aren't big enough, Cook said, noting that its retail outlets now see 10 million people per week across its 400-plus locations.Tim Cook Talks Up Apple Software And Services: "We Are Not A Hardware Company"
Feb 12, 4:26PM
Once upon a time, Apple was a hardware company that also maintained a software and media ecosystem since it helped drive purchases of Macs, iPods and more. But over the years, the software and services side of the business has become increasingly important, and CEO Tim Cook even went so far as to state out right that Apple is "not a hardware company." Not once, but twice.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
