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TC Cribs: HotelTonight's Sleek New San Francisco HQ - And Dangerously Well-Stocked Bar [TCTV]
Mar 20, 9:39PM
It's time for another episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the hallowed gates of the tech industry's hottest companies to get a first-hand look at what they're really like. This time, we headed to the shiny new San Francisco headquarters of HotelTonight, the company that makes the popular mobile apps for booking same-day hotel rooms at discounted prices. HotelTonight is very choosy about the hotels it offers on its platform, showing deals only from higher-end places with strong reviews and good design. Being that the company's staff is on a first-name basis with some of the most gorgeous hotels in the world, HotelTonight had a pretty high bar to meet when it came to designing its own digs.Google's Keep Could Take On Both Pinterest And Evernote, If It Gets The Google+ Social Plumbing
Mar 20, 9:32PM
Google finally released its personal note-taking app Keep today, after it “accidentally” saw the light of day last week. The product is as expected, a place to save notes, lists or photos on the fly, for safe…keeping. One of the things that jumped out at me after giving it a quick try is that you can switch to a layout that’s very similar to Pinterest, another app that wants you to hoard a bunch of things. The only difference between Keep and Pinterest is that Pinterest is social. While Pinterest isn’t the only social bookmarking site in the world, it’s the one that has the most consumer appeal. That can’t be lost on Google. Social is something Google could turn on with a flick of the wrist, thanks to the plumbing it has built with Google+. Imagine being able to bookmark and share things you find on the web, specifically things you find within Google searches, then throw them on a “board” and share them with all of your friends. Sounds like Pinterest. Most of the chatter about Keep is that it’s a threat to Evernote, which it is in a way, but I think that Keep could be the groundwork for something much larger. Here’s a look at Keep’s simplistic design: And now Pinterest: Sure, the items that you can “keep” are limited to photos, notes and lists right now, but whenever you spend time pumping content into any service, users are going to get the itch to share them, even with a family member or close friend. That’s what’s lacking from Keep, other than being stable, right now. It’s not a stretch to invision all of Google’s social backbone being woven into Keep, much like it has in Drive and YouTube. The social guts that make up Google+ are very applicable to a bookmarking and note-taking service like Keep. If you are to assume that Google is only launching things it has a grander plan for, something that has become very apparent during Larry Page’s reign as CEO, then it’s safe to say that the service won’t stay this vanilla. Another thought that comes to mind is that Google Reader just wasn’t the service for the masses, as far as collecting things. Perhaps we could see some of the Reader functionality in Keep one day. Of course, it’s early days and Google isn’t keen to speak about KeepVine, Tribeca Film Festival Launch #6SecFilms Vine Competition For Viners Obsessed With Vining Vines
Mar 20, 9:23PM
Vine has steadily made waves ever since its launch in January. First it was a porn scare, and then it was widening growth against competitors like SocialCam and Viddy. And throughout it all, we’ve watched stars like Adam Goldberg vine their hearts out. But with today’s announcement that Vine is powering a new 6-second film contest for the Tribeca Film Festival, the app has most certainly graduated into a new tier of awesomeness. The contest is called #6SecFilms Vine Competition, and it’s a “mini festival just for Vines.” Just in case you’ve missed the past two months, Vine is a new app from Twitter that lets you record six-second looping videos (like Gifs) which you can then share with friends on Twitter, Vine and Facebook. Contestants can shoot and enter as many vines as they want in the competition, as long as they’re within the following topics: #Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, and #Series. The panel of judges hasn’t quite been solidified, but director Penny Marshall and “King of Vine” actor Adam Goldberg, whose made quite a name for himself on the video-sharing network, have both confirmed. When you’ve finished shooting your submission(s), share them on Twitter with the hashtags #6SecFilms and your topic (#Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, or #Series), and be sure to follow @TribecaFilmFest on Twitter. Vine’s growth has been solid, according to recent reports, but we can’t forget that most people are hesitant to be creative in new forums. In a recent conversation with 4chan and DrawQuest founder Chris Poole, he explained that many people feel very nervous when creatively approaching a blank slate. The same may be true for Vine, but with promotion from other creative outlets such as the Tribeca Film Festival, Vine and it’s easy-to-use UI should squash those fears.Google's Keep Note-Taking Web And Android App Gets Its Official Public Launch
Mar 20, 8:29PM
After a brief early appearance, Google Keep, the note-taking app from the search giant, is now live. Google has officially unveiled Keep via a blog post, complete with a video detailing how it works, and there's an Android app too, available through Google Play for devices running Android 4.0 and up.VC Firm E.ventures Makes Its Internal Tracking Tool, The Daily Gieselmann, Available To All
Mar 20, 8:14PM
A few years ago, E.ventures co-founder Tom Gieselmann decided to try to use data to give his firm a competitive advantage. And so he built a tracking tool to keep tabs on how different web properties were growing over time. The Daily Gieselmann, named after its founder, has been used by the company internally over that time. But it's now being opened up for anyone to use.Oracle Q3 Misses Wall Street Expectations With $9 Billion Revenue, 65 Cents EPS
Mar 20, 8:12PM
Oracle this afternoon announced the financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2013, a report that seems to have disappointed stock market investors who were projecting a stronger performance from the company. The enterprise-focused software and hardware technology giant said it earned $9 billion in revenue during the quarter, reflecting a sequential decrease from the second quarter of 2013, when it earned revenues of $9.1 billion, and a year-over-year decrease from Q3 2012 when it made revenues of $9.04 billion.Throwback Is An App That Steals Your Photos And Sends Them To Future You
Mar 20, 8:07PM
Joining the dozens or hundreds of photo-sharing apps out there, a new app called Throwback is aiming to put the nostalgia back in photos. Throwback is an app that lets you take a picture, and send it to yourself or a group of friends at some point in the future. In fact, the app won’t let you even see the picture you’ve taken any sooner than a month. When you receive the picture, you’ll be able to save it to your camera roll or anywhere else for that matter, since it arrives in the form of an attachment to your email. The idea comes from founder Calli Higgins. In her own words, “it’s out of an exploration between photography and nostalgia.” “After researching why certain images pang us while others don’t, I realized nostalgia is conjured by revisiting something you haven’t seen in a while,” she told TechCrunch. “ThrowBack is an alternative to the current overexposure of our images and the numbness this can create.” The app is super simple and straightforward. Once you’ve registered an email address, you are given the option to take a new picture or choose on from your photo album. You then select a date, a general range of time (from six months to five years) or click “Surprise.” The soonest you can receive a picture is one month from the current date. You can also choose to send it just to yourself, or to a group of friends. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t integrate with any existing social networks, which seems to be purposeful. The motivation behind the app is to keep these photos “safe” from environments where we tend to blast through hundreds of photos at once, perhaps cherishing them (and the moments they represent) less. The app is still in its infancy, and may have some interesting features in the works to auto-tweet a photo months later or post a Facebook Timeline photo years in the future, but for now Higgins is keeping mum about it. Just like Facebook opened us up to social networking of all kinds and genres (LinkedIn for professionals, Path for privacy, Twitter for brevity and immediacy, etc.), Instagram has paved the way for photo and media sharing of all shapes and sizes. Snapchat broke out as an ephemeral “selfie” messaging phenomenon, followed shortly by Facebook’s Poke clone. Vine, owned by Twitter, seems to be leading a growing packGoogle Continues To Expand Its Google+ Platform Team
Mar 20, 7:20PM
It looks like Google is ready to expand the Google+ platform and is looking for engineers to help it do so. According to a new posting on the Google+ developer account, the Google+ Platform Team is looking for a few good engineers to help “make Google more collaborative and relevant to users.” A while back, we heard rumors about a hiring freeze at Google+ (and that the company wasn’t making any Google+-specific acquisitions, either), but we were never able to really confirm this. Maybe this hiring freeze is now over, maybe it never happened (or maybe some people left the Google+ team and now need to be replaced), but it sure looks like Google is starting to put more resources into the Google+ platform. The job descriptions are sadly very generic, so it’s not clear if there are any specific areas the team wants to focus on. Most recently, Google introduced the new Google+ sign-in buttons that combine the usual Google sign-in experience on third-party sites with some Google+ features, including a new sharing experience on Google+, as well as over-the-air-installs for Android apps. For the most part, however, the Google+ platform has focused more on Hangout apps than anything else, especially given that the Google+ API is still relatively limited. Here is the full announcement: The Google+ platform team is hiring! Come help us connect Google users to the rest of their world. The challenges are substantial, but the opportunity to make Google more collaborative and relevant to users wherever they are is enormous. The work is challenging, fast paced and always changing. Strong analytical skills, unwavering commitment to quality, collaborative work ethic, and cutting edge coding skills are all required. If you’re interested, you can learn more about the positions we’re looking to fill here: Software Engineer – Mountain View: http://goo.gl/HOvCo Front End Software Engineer – Mountain View: http://goo.gl/nuw9O Software Engineer, Mobile Applications (Android / iOS) – Mountain View:http://goo.gl/lYu6OPinterest Acquires Livestar, The Mobile Recommendations Startup Founded By Fritz Lanman
Mar 20, 7:08PM
Pinterest said today it's acquired Livestar, the mobile recommendations app founded by Microsoft alum Fritz Lanman, who is also a noted angel investor who has backed the likes of Square, Getaround, and, as it happens, Pinterest. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but this seems to be an engineering acqui-hire situation. We're told that only Livestar's three person engineering team will be joining the company as part of the deal, and the service as it is will be shutting down immediately. Lanman himself will not be joining Pinterest full-time, but he will continue in his role as an advisor to the company post-acquisition. He will be moving on to a yet-to-be-announced new project, we're told.The Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight Can Tell You How Fast You're Cycling
Mar 20, 7:03PM
A Brooklynite named Matt Richardson has built a working prototype of a bicycle headlight that uses a Raspberry Pi to project his current traveling speed as he rides around the city. Richardson calls it the Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight, and it's one of those jaw-dropping DIY projects that makes you wonder why this isn't something you can buy in a store yet.
Founder Stories: MemSQL's Eric Frenkiel on Building an Enterprise Product
Mar 20, 7:00PM
For this week's Founder Stories, I sat down with Eric Frenkiel, founder of MemSQL, to compare notes on starting enterprise software startups. After being accepted as one of Y Combinator's first enterprise-focused startups, Eric and his co-founder built the now 14-person company in stealth and officially launched MemSQL, a database for real-time analytics, in June of last year.Kinvey Launches Enterprise Back-End Service For Building Mobile Apps That Move Data From Salesforce, Oracle And Other Sources
Mar 20, 6:52PM
On one day, the software runs on complex hardware systems behind the firewall. The next it is software operating as a service in the cloud. And so explains Kinvey, a startup that today announced a way for enterprise customers to scrap their hand stitched, back end systems running middleware for a service that does it for them in a cloud environment.Pebble Firmware Update 1.9 Delivers A Non-Watchface App – The Classic Game Of Snake
Mar 20, 6:49PM
Pebble has just updated its smart watch, complete with a much-improved interface and new watchfaces. But the exciting thing here is the addition of a game you likely remember from the days when your cell phone's screen wasn't much different from the Pebble's itself – Snake.ACLU Sues San Francisco Over Warrantless Cell Phone Searches
Mar 20, 6:46PM
Your phone knows you completely. It knows where you've been, and who you've been talking to. It knows which websites you visit in your idle time, and your many passwords. Hell, it probably knows what you look like without pants on. It knows you. To search someone's phone is to breach not just their property, but their very being. Today, the ACLU has filed suit against the county of San Francisco to (re)try to keep anyone from searching your phone without a warrant.Google Improves Sports-Related Search Results With Interactive League Schedules & More Stats
Mar 20, 6:37PM
Just a day after it started embedding its March Madness bracket into its search results, Google today announced that it has made a few more changes to how it displays results for sports-related questions. League schedules for a number of American sports (with the exception of soccer) are now interactive, for example and grouped by day and week. Clicking on a game brings up more information, including where the game will be played, as well as links to game previews on the league’s official page and the teams’ box offices for buying tickets. Google also says it now exposes more stats about individual players and league standings, but I wasn’t able to trigger them with any of my searches so far. These redesigned cards, as Google calls these enhanced search results, are now live on desktop, tablet and mobile. As our own Josh Constine wrote yesterday, adding this kind of information, these features obviously take away some traffic from established sports sites. Search users want answers, however, and, he wrote, ” publishers should seek to succeed through depth, commentary, visualization, analysis, research, and personality, not just SEO.”Lock Screen Security Hole Found On Some Android-Powered Samsung Galaxy Phones
Mar 20, 5:40PM
Remember that nasty little iOS 6 lockscreen bug that let hackers access apps on any iPhone with a few smooth moves? Well, fresh on the heels of yesterday's iOS update that squashed the problem, another security researcher has found a similar issue on Samsung's Android smartphones. Terence Eden claims to have found a flaw that lets hackers access a phone's apps, dialer and widgets even if it's been locked with a password, PIN, or other security measure.Digg.com Disappears From Google, Old Digg Links May Be To Blame [UPDATE: Google Admits Mistake]
Mar 20, 5:32PM
Digg.com and other links from its website have disappeared from Google's search result pages, following a recent update to Google's algorithms. It's unclear at this time exactly what caused the site to be de-listed, though the current speculation is that it has to do with Digg pointing to bad or spammy links. [UPDATE: See below, Google says it will fix the problem].One Step Closer To Its Grave: Google Starts Removing Links To Reader From Its Top Menus
Mar 20, 5:05PM
Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1 and to say that quite a few people are unhappy about this move would be an understatement. Today, Google Reader moved one step closer to its grave as Google is now quietly removing links to it from the black menu that graces the top of virtually every core Google product. Google Reader itself, of course, is still available for the time being. For now, it seems the link is only gone from Gmail. It’s still available from other products (including Reader itself) and the main search page, but judging from the reaction on Twitter and other sites, it’s clear that this was the main gateway to Reader for many of its users. Chances are, it’s just a matter of time before any mention of Reader will be gone from all of Google’s menus. These changes, after all, always tend to take a while to propagate across Google’s properties. Oddly enough, Google is still allowing new users to start using Reader, but that may just be because there is nobody left on the team to make any major changes to its code. Google didn’t waste any time after it announced the closure of Reader. Right after Google’s CEO Larry Page made the announcement, Google already removed its official app from its Play Store and we’ll likely see more of this in the near future. Already a dozen times today, I've clicked on the "More" link on Gmail to get Reader only to find the link isn't there. This is gonna suck.— (@jrebello21) March 20, 2013 Ummm, I'm sorry Google, but didn't you say July 1st? So why can't I find a link anywhere for my Google Reader that I can use until then?— Heidi (@heidishenk) March 20, 2013 They took the Reader link out of the Gmail dropdown menu?! TOO SOON @GOOGLE.— Katherine (@katherine77) March 20, 2013 Google has already removed the Reader link from the admin bar. Maybe it is a sign that I need to unGoogle my life.— Daryle Dickens (@DaryleDickens) March 20, 2013Realty Mogul Launches Its Real Estate Crowdfunding Platform (For Accredited Investors), Raises $500K
Mar 20, 4:54PM
Realty Mogul, a site where accredited investors can can pool their money to back real estate deals, is going live today. Co-founder and Jilliene Helman argued that in the current financial landscape, real estate is "one of the ways that people can still get yields." She also acknowledged that there's a lot of excitement right now about equity crowdfunding for startups, but she noted that investments on Realty Mogul can start paying off in a few months (in the form of rent checks or loan payments), rather than five or ten years: "Our big focus for investors is cash flow."Dachis Group, The Social Analytics Startup Led By Razorfish Co-Founder Jeff Dachis, Raises $7.5M More
Mar 20, 4:46PM
Dachis Group, the social marketing and analytics startup led by Jeffrey Dachis (who previously co-founded and led interactive marketing agency Razorfish), announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in series C financing, led by Austin Ventures.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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