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Keen On… So What's The Big Deal About Big Data? [TCTV]
Mar 25, 9:52PM
The new book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think - written by Oxford University professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and The Economist journalist Ken Cukier - is the definitive guide to a new age which, both authors promise, is going to revolutionize the way we live, work and think.Big Moment For Vine As First Wolverine Movie Footage Comes Via 6-Second "Tweaser" Instead Of Trailer
Mar 25, 9:30PM
Vine's ready for its close-up. The first footage of new Marvel comics superhero film The Wolverine was released today through a Vine "tweaser" tweeted by director James Mangold. That's a big departure from the modern tradition of first releasing a trailer on a film's website, Apple's trailer page, and YouTube. Seems Hollywood has realized nothing leaves people wanting more like a great Vine.Google Adds Trail Maps For 100 Additional Ski Resorts To Google Maps
Mar 25, 9:21PM
Winter is almost over, but that isn’t stopping Google from expanding its list of ski runs on Google Maps. Just over a month after its last update, Google today announced that it has added trail maps for another 100 resorts in the U.S. and Canada to Google Maps. Today’s update includes a number of major resorts, including Oregon’s Mt. Hood Meadows and Timberline Lodge resorts, as well as smaller ski areas like New York’s Hunter Maintain Ski Resort. Ski runs on Google Maps are marked by the usual blue, green and black lines to mark the difficulty of the terrain. Ski lifts are shown as red dotted lines. Before last month’s update, Google launched its effort to add ski runs to Google Maps by adding about 90 maps in November 2012. Overall, Google Maps users can now find about 225 different ski resorts on Google Maps. Except for a few European mountains that were part of the first batch, Google hasn’t released any new maps for European ski resorts since. Here is a list of all the newly added resorts:Y Combinator Company BitNami Makes Deeper Move On Booming App Store Market
Mar 25, 8:47PM
BitNami, a Y Combinator company, has announced that it will focus more on being an app store for server software. The goal is to provide customers with a Google Play or Apple App Store experience that can be accessed on their own infrastructure. The BitNami platform provides the server infrastructure that companies would otherwise have to build out themselves to connect apps.Why Startups Are Beating Carriers (Or The Curious Case Of The Premium SMS Horoscope Service & The Lack Of Customer Consent)
Mar 25, 8:29PM
Any startups out there seeking to build a business by setting out to confuse as many users as possible with overly complex pricing structures, while tricking those who can't afford the full-fat service into signing up for ridiculously over-priced rubbish and then making it really hard for them to opt out? If so you'll want to look to carriers for inspiration.Twitter Holding A Mobile-Focused Platform Event April 2 To Discuss "Exciting New Features," No Press Allowed
Mar 25, 8:07PM
Twitter has released an open invite to a developer press event it's holding April 2 on its dedicated developer website today. The event is mobile-focused, Twitter says, and will take place at Twitter HQ between 6:30 PM and 9:30 PM Pacific. Twitter says it will use the occasion to share "some exciting new features for the Twitter Platform" it has been working on.Twitter Verification Has More To Do With Being Good At Twitter Than With Identity
Mar 25, 7:17PM
Twitter has done a great job at keeping the whole "blue badge" verification process a mystery. If curiosity eats away at you like it does me, you're in luck. A new video from comedians Hari and Ashok Kondabolu, featuring Anil Dash who has around 500k followers, shows the magical transformation from start to finish. First off, it's important to know that you can't ask to be verified. Twitter only offers this blessing upon those with enough followers and popularity to deserve it. However, the company promises that follower count has no bearing.Looks Like Those 1M Mystery BlackBerry 10 Devices Went To A Verizon Distributor
Mar 25, 7:03PM
BlackBerry delivered one of the world's most mysterious press releases a short time ago when it revealed that it had sold a cool 1 million BB10 devices to an unnamed partner, but now it looks like some sleuthing has turned up the real client. AllThingsD and Detwiler Fenton both report that the likely source of the order was Brightstar, an international distribution company that counts Verizon, along with carriers around the world as its partners.On-Demand Car Service Uber Finally Embraces Microsoft With A New Windows Phone App
Mar 25, 7:01PM
I'm a little embarrassed to admit how reliant I've become on Uber when I'm traveling -- most regular cab drivers seem to find me terribly repellant -- but now the service is now is working to expand its reach even further. The folks behind the on-demand car service announced earlier today that Windows Phone users now have a native app of their own, albeit one that doesn't look quite as pretty as what iOS and Android users are privy to.NASDAQ's Glitch Cost Facebook Investors ~$500M. It Will Pay Out Just $62M. IPO Elsewhere.
Mar 25, 6:49PM
When Twitter or Dropbox go public, they should remember May 18, 2012. The SEC has just approved NASDAQ's pay out of $62 million to investors burned when the stock exchange's trading systems broke down during Facebook's IPO last spring. Total losses for investors were pegged at $500 million by the Wall Street Journal, though. The debacle should push companies eying big IPOs to look at other exchanges.Bait Car: How Hollywood Has Found A New Way To Make Money
Mar 25, 6:13PM
Paul (not his real name) has never seen the movie The Divide. He's a horror buff and sometimes tries to find odd and decidedly bad flicks to watch with his wife. The Divide would have fit the bill. It made $16,700 at the box office - that amounts to about 2,100 tickets sold - and closed with $130,839 in the bank. It cost $3 million to make.Facebook Rolls Out Replies And Threaded Comments On Page Posts And Popular Profiles
Mar 25, 6:12PM
Facebook today is rolling out two more features for Pages used by brands and businesses and public Profiles for individuals with more than 10,000 followers: it is adding replies and threaded comments. The move -- like Graph Search, designed to increase time spent on the site -- confirms our report from last week, which we wrote about in detail, and which Facebook also later confirmed for us.Tasktop Offers Open-Source Effort To Link And Sync The API Economy
Mar 25, 5:53PM
The complexity of connecting tools in this new API economy is getting compounded by the inability to link this new breed of services so people can talk in context about the code. Application development cycles are shorter and developers are picking tools that make them more productive.The Right Tool For The Job
Mar 25, 5:43PM
The mobile phone is today's PC, but not necessarily in the way you think. They've reached a pleasant plateau hardware-wise, and are poised for a diversification movement like the PC faced in the early 2000s. Pretty soon we're going to stop adding and start subtracting.The Series A Bottleneck Grows Tighter, Fenwick Survey Shows
Mar 25, 5:38PM
While the number of seed financing deals has ballooned over the last few years as the cost of starting a company has fallen, the pace of Series A venture deals hasn’t kept up. Now it looks like the bottleneck between the seed stage and the Series A level has gotten even tighter, according to a survey from Fenwick & West, one of the best-known law firms for startups in Silicon Valley. In their annual survey of companies they work with, they tracked 61 transactions from last year, 56 the year before and 52 in 2010. What they found was that even fewer companies had raised Series A rounds by the end of the year after their seed deals closed. Only 27 percent of companies that raised in 2011 were able to pull a Series A round by the end of 2012. In contrast, 45 percent of companies funded in 2010 were able to secure a Series A round by the end of 2011. What’s interesting is that follow-on financings are picking up some of the slack here. More companies are relying on follow-on seed financings if they can’t get to a full A round. Twenty-three percent of companies funded in 2011 did follow-on seed rounds, compared to 12 percent of companies in 2010. Basically, the path from seed to proving you’re worth a Series A round is just getting longer. At the same time, traditional VC firms are getting more active at the seed level, and led about 34 percent of seed deals in 2012, compared to 27 percent in 2011. You can see that the average size of investment for VC funds in these seed deals rose slightly, while the average investment size from professional angels declined. Not only that, the deals themselves are starting to look more conventional. The use of preferred stock structures rose to 67 percent last year, from 59 percent in 2011. “It says two things. The leverage is changing a bit,” said Barry Kramer, a Fenwick partner in the corporate group. “Last year, the entrepreneur had a bit more leverage than they have right now to get the terms they want. But it’s also a reflection of how more sophisticated investors like venture capital groups are getting involved with seed financing and they’re saying — ‘This is how we do it.’” That said, it’s not all black and white. He pointed out that theMobile Job Search App Proven Now Allows Users To Create Resumes Using Only Their Smartphone
Mar 25, 5:22PM
Proven, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed mobile app which allows users to apply to jobs from their smartphone, has now rolled out an update to its Android version (iOS to follow) that introduces a way for users to build resumes from scratch, directly within the app. That resume can then be used to apply for jobs on sites like Indeed.com or Craigslist, the company says, with more to come.Let's Hear It For New York – Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Tickets Now Available
Mar 25, 5:09PM
In mere weeks, the TC juggernaut rolls into New York for Disrupt, and that means we're going to be giving hackers all over the East Coast (and beyond) an epic platform to show just how amazing their tech scene is. When it comes to Hackathaons, the N.Y. scene has traditionally put Silicon Valley to shame. Everyone remembers GroupMe, born at Disrupt in 2010, who then went on to kill at SXSW a year later and exit to Skype six months after that. But is it really a surprise that the City That Never Sleeps does so well at Hackathons? Of course not. And now it's time to do it all again, with ticket sales for the New York TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon opening today.Sherpa Gets $1.1M From Google Ventures, A16Z, & More For Location-Aware Predictive Intelligence iOS App
Mar 25, 5:08PM
Sherpa, a stealthy startup that has built a personalized predictive intelligence app for the iPhone that's powered by your location data and other personal information, is announcing today that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), Google Ventures, InterWest Partners, Merus Capital, Innovation Endeavors and AngelPad. While Sherpa is not yet ready for a full public debut, the company is opening up the private beta of its iOS app today to a wider number of users -- you can sign up for that at GetSherpa.com.Google Launches Nik Collection, A $149 Bundle Of Nik Software's Plugins For Photoshop, Lightroom And Aperture
Mar 25, 4:40PM
When Google acquired Nik Software, the development shop behind the popular Snapseed mobile photography app, it wasn’t clear what Google’s plans for Nik’s other products were. Today, Google announced that it has created a $149 bundle that includes all of Nik Software’s six plugins for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture. This bundle, the Nik Collection by Google, is about 70 percent cheaper than buying Nik’s old “Complete Collection.” Google will also offer a 15-day free trial. The bundle includes the HDR photography tool HDR Efex Pro 2, Color Efex Pro 4 for color correction and retouching, Silver Efex Pro 2 for black-and-white photography, Viveza 2 for selectively adjusting the color and tonality of images, Sharpener Pro 3 and Dfine 2 for noise reduction. Google’s Vic Gundotra always said Google would continue to offer Nik’s high-end tools and plugins, but today’s announcement will surely come as welcome news to Nik Software’s existing customers, especially given that the Snapseed desktop apps for Mac and Windows got the ax during Google’s latest spring cleaning round. It was never quite clear what Nik Software’s role inside of Google would be, besides likely adding some Snapseed features to the Google+ app, but right after the acquisition, Gundotra assured Nik’s users that Google cared “deeply about their artistry.” Talking to our own Drew Olanoff after the acquisition, the Snapseed Team noted that the company had launched Snapseed to “bring sophisticated photo editing and post-processing to the masses, which was clearly what interested Google in the first place.” For Google, the acquisition was about more than just Snapseed, though, and now that the Nik Collection is available, it will be interesting to see how and when the team will update the actual plugins.Google+ Gets A Mobile Refresh With Photo Editing, Post Tweaks, Location And Community Controls
Mar 25, 4:25PM
Today, Google has announced a mobile refresh for Google+ for Android and iOS that includes some of the functionality that has come out for the desktop over the past few months. Both versions will be available later in the day. Some of the changes are things that we’ve expected, thanks to acquisitions like Nik Software and features like Communities that were introduced on the desktop last year. The upcoming I/O conference should also be an interesting time for Google+, as that’s when we got its last major product edition, Events, along with numbers. These feature updates should give you a better idea of how Google wants to weave Google+ into everything it does. Photo editing, the mobile way On the photo front, you can make all of your edits from within the app now, letting you crop, rotate, change contrast, saturation and brightness and add filters, all with simple gestures that might have become familiar within the Snapseed app. The Nik Software team certainly hasn’t disappeared into an abyss in Mountain View, we’re just starting to see how important that acquisition was. The company also released a full set of professional photo tools today that Nik Software has become so popular for. Scroll more, tap less For posts, Google wants you to be able to make your way through as much content in a short amount of time. The company doesn’t want you to spend hours upon hours on Google+. Within this update, you can see more text in the original post, as well as more comments, and a single tap now takes you directly to a photo, a watch page for a video or a lightbox for a website. The really nice addition here is the ability to swipe through an entire photo album inline, without having to head over to a separate album page. Additionally, the +1, share and comment buttons are more prominent. Location in your profile Your profile on Google+ can now be adorned with your current location if you’re into that sort of thing. If you enable it, you can simply choose where you are, or where you’d like to tell everyone that you are. Without having to dig through content, the location is shown at the top of your profile. You have to turn the location settings on for Google+ to play around with this. Much needed Community controls For Communities, you’re now able toIf 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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