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Firefox Enables WebRTC, H.264 And MP3 Support By Default In Its Nightly Release Channel
Feb 20, 8:05PM
WebRTC, the plugin-free real-time video, audio and text chat protocol most browser vendors now support, is now activated by default in the latest bleeding edge Firefox Nightly release. While Mozilla has long backed WebRTC, it was only available as an option in the Nightly releases so far. Now that it is enabled by default, chances are that it will slowly make its way into the stable release channel over the next few months.Founder Stories: Piazza's Pooja Sankar Proves That If You Can't Find The Right Co-Founder, Build It Yourself
Feb 20, 8:00PM
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Piazza founder Pooja Sankar and learned how her struggles in school inspired her to build an online question-and-answer platform for students to learn together. During our discussion, Pooja shared her story of feeling isolated in her studies and how that empowered her to learn Ruby on Rails and build a prototype that she pitched directly to professors.Here Comes The Next PlayStation! Join Us Live At 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific For The Sony Event Liveblog
Feb 20, 7:50PM
The war for your living room is about to heat up. While Microsoft is still keeping its own next-generation console under lock and key, rival Sony is gearing up to take the stage in New York City and show off exactly what it's been working on for the past few years. Naturally, we'll be liveblogging the whole thing starting at 6PM Eastern/3PM Pacific tonight.Mobli Adds Auto-Edit Feature, Location Filters, Social Sharing And Speed In New Version Of Media-Sharing App
Feb 20, 7:18PM
Mobli is launching a new version of its photo- and video-sharing app, pushing into the next generation of this competitive space with a new feed of stories that’s integrated with Facebook and Tumblr, a new way to auto-edit uploaded photos, and filters specific to cities and other locations. Although it’s going up against competitors ranging from Instagram to Vine, the Israeli and New York company is in it for the long haul. It has previously raised $22 million, fielded some big acquisition offers (we hear), and added up 5 million registered (albeit not monthly) users. Mobli has been busy hiring lately, too, with the new iOS app (iTunes link) being an early result of its expansion. As I covered in my sneak peek last fall, the company has HTML5 for a native app due to performance limitations. If the Android (to be released in a month or so) will be anything like the iOS app, their money is being well spent on the device-first focus. Version 3.0 isn’t just marked by the native rewrite though. Mobli also packed the new version with a bunch of UX improvements. Here are all the new features Mobli 3.0 comes with: First off, the app is significantly faster and more responsive than previous versions — immediately noticeable with the new redesigned main ‘feed’ screen. User-to-user messaging is now baked-in, saving users from having to jump over to Facebook to search and contact others. New Tumblr integration should also find welcome arms among users. Improvements to hashtag-suggestion and search have also been made. This brings us to where Mobli has always shone… filters and effects. To begin with, Mobli now has an ‘Auto-Filter’ feature that analyzes every photo’s colors, brightness, contrast, contents and composition, and applies the filter it feels is most suited for the image. Users can of course chose other filters (there are nine new ones) and effects, but the suggestion is a nice addition. This is on top of my favorite UX feature where instead of having to access the camera roll, the last three photos taken are offered on the bottom of the camera screen. Finally, with the new version Mobli also beefed-up event and location based filters. For example, Mobli can offer specific filters for Paris or New York City, while at the same time offering particular ones for venues such as the Louvre, or Madison Square Garden. Event-specific filters are relevant forPictures Not Worth A Thousand Words? Why Not Boldomatic
Feb 20, 7:06PM
In the deep and rich world of self-generated Internet content, there are few things as stark - and as starkly polarizing - as text on a colored background. Is it meme-cheating? Is it boring? Is writing "i hate mondays" in Helvetica over a field of taupe better than posting a picture of a cat hanging off of a tree limb with the same aphorism under her? Now we can find out definitively with Boldomatic.Forrester: Tablet Ownership In Europe To Rise 4x In 5 Years — 55% Of Region's Online Adults Will Own One By 2017, Up From 14% In 2012
Feb 20, 7:00PM
Analyst Forrester is predicting tablet ownership in Western Europe will quadruple by 2017 -- with the percentage of online adults owning a slate projected to increase markedly from less than a fifth (14 per cent) last year to more than half (55 per cent) in 2017. In 2011 the tablet-owner figure stood at just 7 per cent, underlining how quickly digitally connected consumers are adopting slates.YouTube Partners With Gengo And Translated.net To Make Ordering Paid Caption Translations Easier
Feb 20, 6:58PM
YouTube just announced that it has partnered with Gengo and Translated.net, two popular translation services, to give its users a more streamlined process to get their video captions translated by professionals. Publishers can start the translation process from the YouTube interface, get estimates for how long the translation will take and how much it will cost, but they will still need to finalize the order and arrange payments on the vendor's websites. Google plans to look into adding more vendors in the future.Saber Blast Lets Brands Team Up On Social Media To Form A Marketing Alliance
Feb 20, 6:55PM
Small businesses and new brands are mere sardines in the ocean of social media. But a school of small fish is much more powerful than a lone minnow, which is why Saber Blast, a new alliance marketing tool, has launched out of beta. The service lets any brands sign up and join forces with other companies and brands, by RT-ing and re-sharing social media content. The idea is that a service like Airbnb, a home-sharing marketplace, would pair well with a Lyft or GetAround, other peer-to-peer services focused on transportation. The products overlap in the sense that travelers need both lodging and transportation, and customers are bound to be more comfortable with peer-to-peer services, yet these companies don’t directly compete. Saber Blast would then allow Lyft and Airbnb, or whomever, to form an alliance, wherein they would RT and re-share eachother’s content across their own social media channels. Users have complete control over what they share or don’t share, but the more content you share on behalf of your brand partners, the more likely they are to blast out your content. The entire show can be run from the web, where Saber Blast provides a simple dashboard for alliance forming, requesting promotion from alliances, sharing, and analytics. Saber Blast generates revenue with a paid subscription model, starting at $20/month for 20 marketing alliances and 2,000 email contacts, and incrementally reaching $100/month for the most comprehensive package. Founder Matt Ackerson, who is in his fourth go-around as a founder, says that Saber Blast is more aimed at small businesses and startups, but that it can be beneficial to small and large brands alike.YC-Backed TrustEgg Launches, Lets Anyone Create Trust Accounts For Their Kids
Feb 20, 6:53PM
TrustEgg, a Y Combinator-backed startup which lets parents set up trusts for their children is actually launching. That's a milestone in and of itself, because, as a financial services company, it had been facing a lot of regulatory hurdles. The company has also recovered from the loss of its first co-founder, Gabe Krambs, who left CEO Jeff Brice to take a job that paid the bills. It has since added John Zdanowski, co-founder, CFO, and investor to the team, and has relocated operations to San Diego.With $650K In Seed Funding, YC-Backed Upverter Chases The Dream Of A Hardware Startup Revolution
Feb 20, 6:51PM
Toronto's Upverter is a startup that's poised to effect change that could reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship. That's not something you can say about most of the businesses we cover on a daily basis, whether or not they have good ideas. But it's definitely true of Upverter, the company that's hoping to build a cloud-based hardware engineering platform that can match and overtake its desktop-based counterparts within the next few years.Smartphone Rental Startup Handy Expands Out Of Hong Kong
Feb 20, 6:43PM
Handy, a smartphone rental service out of Hong Kong, has launched operations in Singapore. The company offers smartphones for rent to travelers at $9 (HKD 68) a day—$12 (S$15) a day in Singapore—and the price includes unlimited 3G data and international calls. The Handy brand comes under its CEO, Terence Kwok's startup effort called Tink Labs, and is its first and only project thus far. The firm is less than a year old, but today has 75 people working for it. It started in April last year, and in September launched Handy in Kwok's home country of Hong Kong. So far, it has placed its service counters at tourist hot spots, such as at the Hong Kong International Airport, as well as the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai and a visitor center run by the country's tourism board located in the Tsim Sha Tsui district. Kwok, who was born in Hong Kong but raised in the US, said the decision to expand so soon in Singapore was in large part accelerated by the local tourism board's offer to allow Handy to set up a service desk at its visitor center along the Orchard Road shopping street. "We weren't planning to launch in Singapore till the second quarter of the year, initially," he said. Handy's devices are primarily Samsung Galaxy Note phones, and its software developers have put a custom UI on them that opens at a landing page with deals and recommendations for sightseeing and restaurants. It's still populating the Singapore version with more content, but its Hong Kong version includes deals with tours and ticketed items such as ferry rides that you can book through the app. Just show the phone at the venue and you're set, said Kwok. What I found surprising about the UI was that the company will also let you install apps from Google Play, which many firms don't allow. It'll also allow tethering, so for the price, you could tether a laptop in a pinch and get some surfing done outside of a Wi-Fi zone. So far, Handy has 2,000 phones in its inventory, and is looking to strike up bulk deals with Android manufacturers to increase its stock. When a user rents out a device, the company puts an authorization hold on their credit cards, so in the event of a device getting broken or lost, the amount to fix orContextual Content Engine Vurb Raises $1.5M To Make The Internet Seamless
Feb 20, 6:21PM
VCs like to go around asking the same questions: "What's cool? What startups do you like?" Recently, the consensus answer to those questions is a startup called Vurb. Vurb is a contextual content engine, a platform that connects and compiles relevant information from services like, but not limited to, Yelp, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Amazon and so on. Nothing quite like it exists on the market.Ahead of SXSW, Highlight Makes Another Bid For SoLoMo Supremacy With Photos And Events
Feb 20, 6:18PM
It's South By Southwest time again, and you know what that means -- it's time for another round of apps to announce launches and updates to help make your mandatory fun time in Austin, Texas that much better. Today, social-local-mobile app Highlight is doing another round of updates to its app, allowing users to share photos and events with others around them.Xamarin 2.0 Lets Developers Write iOS Apps With Visual Studio, Introduces Free Starter Edition
Feb 20, 6:12PM
Xamarin, the service that helps developers write cross-platform apps in C# for iOS, Android, OS X and Windows, launched version 2.0 of its platform today. This new version features updates to most of the core features of the platform, but the highlight for most developers is likely the fact that they can now use a Xamarin plugin for Microsoft’s Visual Studio to write iOS apps in C#. The new Xamarin branding now also replaces all the previous Mono-branded names. Xamarin 2.0 Lets Developers Write iOS Apps With Visual Studio, Introduces Free Starter Edition Also new in this version is the Xamarin Studio, a new integrated development environment (IDE) that, as Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman writes in today’s announcement, “is tightly integrated with the iOS and Android SDKs so you can build, test and debug apps on simulators and real devices.” Xamarin Studio features many of the features developers are asking for in a modern development environment, including code completion, a modern debugger and the ability to package and distribute apps right from within the IDE (including support for distribution iOS apps with TestFlight). For Android, Xamarin also includes its own UI builder (for iOS, it uses Apple’s Xcode Interface Builder). The other major new feature is Xamarin’s Component Store, which allows developers to easily add new user interface controls, connections to various third-party cloud services, charts and graphs to their apps with just a few clicks. Some of the components in the store are available for free, but many are obviously tied to paid services and have to be purchased through Xamarin. With today’s launch, the company is also introducing a free (but somewhat limited) Starter Edition of its service that is mostly meant for solo developers. This free version can only be used to develop relatively small apps (up to 32k of compiled code) and, as expected, doesn’t come with any support. Paid versions of Xamarin start at $299 per platform/year for individuals and $999 per platform/year for larger organizations.App Test Platform TestFlight Comes To Android In Private Beta, Says 300K Apps Uploaded On iOS
Feb 20, 6:01PM
Over the past couple of years, TestFlight has become the standard choice for giving beta testers (and tech bloggers) early access to iOS apps. Today the service is launching for Android developers too — including cross-platform developers who already use TestFlight on iOS. As an iPhone owner, I'm less familiar with the Android app ecosystem, but I have heard that there isn't as big a need for something like TestFlight. In an email interview, co-founder Ben Satterfield acknowledged that "over the air distribution on Android isn't a pain point like it is on iOS," but he said that TestFlight has received more than 10,000 requests for Android support from developers.Indoor Positioning Startup indoo.rs Raises "Six-Figure" Seed Round From Tecnet Equity, SpeedInvest, And Techinvest
Feb 20, 5:59PM
GPS technology and the increasing ubiquity of smartphones has given rise to a plethora of mapping and other location-based services that work relatively well outside. But indoor positioning can still be very hit and miss. Hoping to solve this problem is indoo.rs, a startup that has developed indoor location and navigation technology to let developers build apps and services that are able to position people inside buildings, such as airports, shopping malls, and other indoor spaces. It also plans to license its IP to chipset/handset manufacturers to enable them to build indoor positioning support into their hardware in a power and speed efficient way.Citus Data Launches CitusDB, An Analytics Database Based On Google Dremel With Parallel Processing At Its Core
Feb 20, 5:54PM
Citus Data has launched CitusDB for Hadoop, a service that can process petabytes of data within seconds. The offering shows once again that the new class of analytics databases that can analyze everything from data to entire libraries of digital books are the next big thing.Twitter Launches Ads API, So Marketers Can Run Campaigns Through Adobe, Salesforce, Others
Feb 20, 5:25PM
Twitter just announced via blog post that it has launched an advertising API, which will allow brands to run ad campaigns through the company's API partners, rather than having to buy them through Twitter itself. This confirms a report by TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden saying that Twitter would launch its ads API sometime in the first quarter of this year. At the time, Ingrid noted that Twitter's ad-buying interface requires you to upload promoted tweets one at a time, an approach that's unwieldy for large campaigns. She also said that an API creates the opportunity for more sophisticated targeting and tools.WordPress.com Launches Education Vertical For Students And Teachers
Feb 20, 5:20PM
WordPress.com just rolled out a new classroom vertical that is meant to help educators easily create good-looking websites for their classes. Over the last few months, WordPress.com, the fully hosted version of the popular open-source WordPress content management system, started introducing a number of verticals that focus specifically on certain types of sites, be they restaurant sites, homepages for musicians or personal portfolios. Today's announcement marks WordPress.com's first direct foray into the education business.Kids' Clothing Consignment Service thredUP Prepares To Take On Threadflip, Poshmark & More With Move Into Women's Apparel
Feb 20, 5:08PM
Only a month after its expansion into juniors, online and mobile clothing consignment service thredUP is now expanding into women's apparel. This is the company's first step out of the kids' clothes market, representing a shift for the brand which has previously targeted parents -- primarily moms.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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