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Alphabird Acquires Digital Agency Volt Media To Expand Its Presence In Australia
Feb 14, 8:00PM
Audience development startup Alphabird has made a number of acquisitions over the last few years, from social video platform Media Social to video distribution platform Castfire. Well add one more to the list: The company has also acquired Australian digital agency Volt Media to expand its presence there.With 20% Of Reservations Filled, Mailbox Goes Down So You Can Enjoy Your Valentine's Day
Feb 14, 7:32PM
Last week's hot app, Mailbox, is currently down. In a very RIM-esque fashion, the startup's servers are not forwarding mail, resulting in a very quiet Valentines Day. I'm pretty stoked about it. I think this should be a feature. According to Mailbox's twitter page, the company is busy fixing the problem. They quickly issued a couple of official response but one is not very helpful. This one details the problems, stating that they are seeing intermittent issues with our servers syncing mail and new mail created will not be lost.Viggle Tries To Right The Ship After Failed GetGlue Merger, Revenue Rises 88%, Registered Users Up 42% For The Quarter
Feb 14, 7:15PM
Social TV and the second screen experience is quickly catching on among viewers, but the space as a whole is still nascent. While many are eager for a better social TV experience, as there's plenty of upside for fans, advertisers and broadcasters alike, collectively we've all been waiting for one of these players to hit critical mass. When Viggle announced in November that it would be merging with GetGlue, it seemed as if the combination of two of the leading apps in the space would be a step in that direction. But, fast forward two months, and the Viggle/GetGlue merger was dead in the water.Kleverbeast Launches Into Public Beta, Bringing App Creation To The Masses For $29/Month
Feb 14, 7:00PM
Kleverbeast, co-founded by Hatch Labs CEO and founder Dinesh Moorjani, is today launching in public beta to bring quick and easy app creation to the multitudes, letting anyone (even someone with no programming experience) build a beautiful, content-rich app in a matter of minutes. The service employs a simple drag-and-drop dashboard to help users figure out how to lay out their preferred media. Ten or fifteen years ago, website creation was relegated to those who either new how to code or had the money to hire developers. Today, sites like Tumblr and WordPress make it easy for almost anyone to build their own website. But apps are a different story, especially if your vision is a complex, professional-looking app. Moorjani explains that it can cost anywhere between $20,000 on the low-end to six or seven figures on the high-end to get a team together to build an app. Kleverbeast eats that model for breakfast, offering a full suite of app creation tools starting at just $29/month. Plus, once you build the app it can be released onto all major platforms, including iPhone, iPad and Android. The service supports all kinds of media, including photos, videos, animations, image effects, and social media integration. You can also update your app contents anytime, and test out the app on your actual mobile device as you build it. Here are some examples. Kleverbeast offers up a bunch of customizable templates built by Kleverbeast’s own expert design team, but eventually Moorjani believes that the platform may be more open for developers to submit their own templates. The app creation space has been heating up of late, with services like Yapp Events and Appy Couple letting people get a taste for simplified app development, but no one has the same all-encompassing platform as Kleverbeast, covering verticals like fashion, photography, advice, design, small businesses, and almost anything else that would fit into an app format. To prove just how easy it is to build an app on Kleverbeast, the team made me an app in about twenty minutes during the course of our meeting. Here’s a screenshot of the homepage: The service is available as a public beta starting today, and the company is offering a free seven-day trial to let you test out the service.With Its Latest Update, Bump's Mobile App Replaces USB Flash Drives
Feb 14, 6:30PM
Bump, the flagship contacts, photos and file sharing application from the company by the same name, is today getting an upgrade on both iOS and Android in order to support file-sharing to and from your computer. The ability to "bump" your phone with your computer was first introduced in May 2012, but at the time it only supported photos. With the new release, users will be able to share any file from their phone to computer, and vice versa.YC-Backed Virool Raises $6.62 Million "Seed" Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
Feb 14, 6:00PM
Series A crunch? Who cares with seed rounds like this? Today, Y Combinator-backed Virool, a self-service social video advertising platform, is announcing its monster "seed" round of $6.62 million. And Virool even got to pick from their choice of investors, institutional and otherwise, according to co-founder and CEO Alex Debelov.Crocodoc Previews Its Revamped HTML5 Document Converter For PDF, Word And PowerPoint Files
Feb 14, 6:00PM
Crocodoc allows you to upload your PDFs, Word and PowerPoint documents and convert them into HTML5 so you can easily embed them on your own sites. The company, which has converted over 60 million documents since and signed up the likes of Dropbox, LinkedIn, Yammer and SAP as customers since its launch in 2010, just announced the launch of its new HTML5 document converter with a revamped conversion engine, better display quality, faster load times and better mobile performance.ComScore Says 5.3 Trillion Ads Shown In 2012, But 3 In 10 Are Never Seen
Feb 14, 5:56PM
comScore just released its Digital Future In Focus report for 2013, offering a broad swath of data in areas like social networking, search and mobile. But the most interesting finding, at least to me, involved display advertising — that 5.3 trillion impressions were served in the United States, but three in 10 are never actually rendered in-view.Scosche Adds To Your iPhone 5 And iPad Charging Options With New Lightning Line
Feb 14, 5:50PM
Once upon a time I thought I would be very short of charging solutions for my iPhone 5 thanks to the switch to Lightning. Now, for various reasons, I have an abundance of Lightning cables, one might even say an overabundance. But they do lack variety, and that's what a new line of charging accessories from Scosche aims to address.NJ Accelerator TechLaunch Is Looking For Its Next Batch Of Great Garden State Startups
Feb 14, 5:36PM
New Jersey's nascent startup scene is wedged between more established communities in Philadelphia and New York, but that hasn't stopped some ambitious teams like those at Princeton's TigerLabs and TechLaunch from trying to give the state a kick in the entrepreneurial pants. After putting on quite a show last November, TechLaunch is now looking for another 10-12 early-stage ventures to mentor and fund in a bid to put New Jersey on the startup map.Lies, Damn Lies, And Robots
Feb 14, 5:34PM
While it gives me little pleasure to call out New York Times writer John Broder for his clearly weird Tesla S test-drive, I do appreciate the way Elon and the team at Tesla called him to task for seemingly falsifying his experience in the car. I’d like to give Broder the benefit of the doubt – range anxiety is a real and frightening thing – Tesla’s Nate Silver-esque retort is quite illuminating and could change the reviewer dynamic. Full disclosure: I write for the Times every few months and they’re nice guys, mostly. I won’t bore you with more detail on the case (Darrell did that here) but I will note the value of the data provided by Tesla essentially destroys Broder’s punditry. Broder is a car guy, and an opinionated one. He once wrote “yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate," a line that Musk quotes in his blog post as proof-positive that Broder is biased. While his argument in that piece is far more nuanced, that’s what sticks out. A look at his other stories hows a skeptical eye towards electric cars. He also claims that his side of the story is far simpler than Musk describes: . He writes: Virtually everyone says that I should have plugged in the car overnight in Connecticut, particularly given the cold temperature. But the test that Tesla offered was of the Supercharger, not of the Model S, which we already know is a much-praised car. This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a "normal use," no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it. Now that Tesla is striving to be a mass-market automaker, it cannot realistically expect all 20,000 buyers a year (the Model S sales goal) to be electric-car acolytes who will plug in at every Walmart stop. Perhaps his experience was just as he described it – a muddle of confusion, fear, and poor planning. But Musk fights back with actual numbers and the outcome isn’t pretty. In fact, Musk claims that Broder drove the car around in tight circles for a little while just to get it down to zero range. Broder came at his test from the standpoint of a dude who likes to hop in a nice sedan and expects to drive a few hundred miles on a tank ofDating Apps: They're A Sausage-Fest, Flurry Finds
Feb 14, 5:34PM
Like a terrible San Francisco tech party in a poorly lit SOMA bar filled with awkward khaki- or T-shirt clad guys, men outnumber women by almost 2:1 in dating apps, mobile analytics startup Flurry found. They ran an analysis on the 20 top dating apps, which had about 17 million active users and 2.1 billion sessions last month. Dating apps have taken a longer time to mature on Android and iOS, but the category is undergoing a Renaissance of sorts with new apps like OKCupid’s Crazy Blind Date and Tinder, which helps you find potential romantic interests nearby. There are skeptics though. TechCrunch’s Gregory Ferenstein opined today on how most dating services are terrible for finding you love. Anyway, back to the study. The best quote from it is definitely this one: “Women wishing to further stack the odds in their favor may wish to download an Android dating app,” said Mary Ellen Gordon, a data scientist who is Flurry’s director for industry insights and analysis. Oh yes. If you’re younger, you might want to go Android as well, because the platform skews younger and has more people likely to be under the age of 25. Flurry found that people usually open dating apps about eight times a week and use them for 71 seconds on average. Apps for gay men like Grindr and Scruff see even more activity. Users of apps for gay men open them 22 times a week for 96 seconds on average.Trintme, A Classier "Bang With Friends," Lets You Find Facebook Friends Who Want To Hang Out, Not Just Hook Up
Feb 14, 5:30PM
If you kind of liked the idea behind viral sensation Bang With Friends, the controversial Facebook app that lets you privately nominate friends you want to hook up with, but balked at the idea of using an app that's all about the sex, then you might find newly launched Trintme to have some appeal. The name, a combo of "true intentions," is not as clever, sadly - seriously, people, stop making up silly fake verbs! - but the app is similar in spirit. And a little classier, too.The Veteran Team Behind G2 Crowd Looks To Build A "Yelp" For Enterprise Software
Feb 14, 5:12PM
It can be such a headache trying to figure out what internal collaboration tools a company should use. Even at TechCrunch, where we have a few dozen writers, product and sales people, we’ve switched tools many times and have gripes with all of them. Imagine how it must be for a company with more than 1,000 people, or even 10,000. G2 Crowd is aiming to solve that with a site of user reviews on everything from CRM (customer relationship management) software to productivity tools. Behind the company is an experienced team of founders that previously sold BigMachines, a company that specializes in cloud-based product configuration, pricing, quoting and proposal generation, to Vista Equity Partners and JMI Equity at a valuation of more than $100 million. After some time off, co-founder Godard Abel started thinking about new problems to work on. “We then founded G2 Crowd based on our frustration in selling business software,” he said. “We thought there had to be a better way.” On G2 Crowd, people can submit reviews of services like Salesforce, Oracle’s PeopleSoft or SugarCRM and so on. The community is managed with contests and free iPad mini giveaways, and G2 Crowd also uses LinkedIn profiles to authenticate people and help encourage reviewers who actually have expertise in using these products. Interestingly enough, G2 Crowd is not going down Yelp’s path of getting reviewed businesses to buy ads or premium placement in search results. Abel thinks that could distort the reviews or incentivize the company in the wrong way. “We don’t want to do vendor advertising. We don’t want to sell leads. We think it makes you biased,” he said. Instead, they’re going after Gartner. IT managers can spend thousands of dollars on reports from companies like Gartner that help them decide what vendor to use. G2 Crowd will start its research in a lower price range of $99 and up. In those reports will be deeper data dives that will help you understand vendors that comparable companies use. Healthcare companies, for example, might want to know what software other healthcare organizations use. “We believe the data we can get is better than what you would get from Gartner,” Abel said. “Plus, we can gather the content at a lower cost. We’d want to pass on that benefit to the buyer.” Eventually, that one-off research-report business could transition into a subscription model. While research businesses sometimes can have issues scaling dependingHelping To Grease The Wheels Of Capitalism In Emerging Markets, Mambu Raises $2M For Its SaaS For Alternative Finance Providers
Feb 14, 5:09PM
Hot on the heels of closing a "new" €40m fund, Point Nine Capital is announcing its involvement in another investment today. Together with Runa Capital, it's leading a $2 million Series A round in Berlin-based Mambu, the SaaS for alternative finance and "micro-finance" organisations mainly in Africa and South America. Existing investor Kizoo Technology Ventures also participated.With 3,500 Paying Customers, HipChat Launches A Native Mac Client To Vanquish The Lousy Adobe AIR App
Feb 14, 5:00PM
HipChat has been doing some good things since it was acquired by Atlassian back in March 2012, including updating its iOS apps with much-needed improvements, but the sorry excuse for a Mac app it offered built on Adobe AIR remained a huge sore spot. Today, the company is officially launching its native Mac client in beta form, and it's already a complete 180 from the previous version.Adobe Adds Responsive Design Tool Edge Reflow To Creative Cloud, Updates DreamWeaver, Edge Code And Animate
Feb 14, 5:00PM
Adobe's launch of its Creative Cloud subscription service has been a success with over 325,000 paid and one million free members. Today, the company is updating its suite of products for designers and developers by adding the first public preview of Adobe Edge Reflow, a design tool for easily creating responsive websites.BlackJet, Your Own Private Airline, Adds San Francisco And Las Vegas As Destinations
Feb 14, 4:40PM
BlackJet, which we’ve described as the “Uber for private jets” has announced San Francisco and Las Vegas as two new destinations. The company was founded by Garrett Camp, the co-founder of Uber, so it’s no surprise that the young company is already ramping up its coverage areas. What makes BlackJet so interesting is that the company has come up with a model to make private jets available to people at business class prices. If you’re flying from say, San Francisco to Los Angeles, why would you want to mess around with an airline when you could take a nice comfy private jet there? Much like Uber’s black cars, the company hopes that the answer is obvious to you. If you’re in San Francisco, you can attend the launch event for the new destinations along with us in Union Square, and BlackJet will be giving $2,500 memberships to its service to 1,000 lucky guests. You’ll be able to use the free membership, which comes with a complimentary companion site, to use within one year to any of BlackJet’s destination. Currently, BlackJet has flights between New York and Los Angeles and New York to south Florida. Along with San Francisco and Las Vegas, the company plans to add Chicago, Washington, DC, Boston, Dallas, and Seattle as destinations in the near-future. As with Uber, the plans are to add these new routes based on popular demand from its members. Here’s what BlackJet CEO Dean Rotchin had to say about today’s news: In the spirit of making reliable private jet service affordable for millions more travelers, we thought it was just right to demonstrate our powerful new business model by awarding enthusiastic San Francisco travelers who attend our launch event with memberships and companion seats. Simply put, BlackJet is unique in our ability to deliver on this promise. In a way, this service makes complete sense, because if you don’t have to pay to park and gas up your own plane, the crowdsourced cost to do so is manageable. This is one of those lofty and disruptive ventures that is a hallmark of Silicon Valley and the culture of doing something better than those who have done it for years. Here’s what you get with one of the fancy memberships: - Guaranteed seat availability on private jets - Non-stop flights on ARG/US safety-rated jets - 10 clicks / 10 seconds to book seats -A Surface Mini Could Wake Up Windows Phone 8
Feb 14, 4:39PM
I love the idea of the Surface: compelling hardware, striking form factor, and, in the case of the Pro, smart compromises to offer a good value. But the products fail to live up to their promise. They have first generation bugs. But maybe a low-priced Surface with a smaller screen could finally help bring the Surface promise to life. It just better run Windows Phone 8 and not Windows RT.Rovio Beefs Up Global Advertising Team With Hires From Apple, Millennial Media, And inMobi
Feb 14, 4:29PM
As Rovio plans its entry into the cartoon business, the company has announced a round of new hires that will comprise its revamped Brand Advertising Partnership team, making the Finnish-based gaming company "a direct media partner to some of the largest brands in the world." "Our new Brand Advertising Partnership Team in the U.S. will enable us to now partner directly with other lifestyle brands," said Michele Tobin, Head of North American Brand Advertising Partnerships. "The model of simply placing standard display ads in online and mobile properties is not necessarily strategic for the majority of tier one brands, and that model was in need of disruption. Rovio´s fan-first approach and engaged audience creates more native, integrated advertising experiences that more closely align to brands' overall marketing goals."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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