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Let's Get Ready To Rumble: TechCrunch Is Coming To Austin, Seattle, San Diego, And Boston
Apr 09, 10:31PM
TechCrunch is rolling into Texas, Washington, California and Massachusetts this year for our patented Meetup+Pitch Off events, parties dedicated to exposing the coolest startups in your home town. We want you to attend. Here’s what’s up: Austin is happening on May 30 at Stage on Sixth, 508 East 6th St.. Seattle is happening on July 18 at a location that will be announced shortly. The San Diego location is also TBD but the event will be held on August 22. Up next we will have Boston in November. What do you need to do? First, mark your calendars. We will be selling $5 tickets to these events to help cover the cost of beers. 21 and older only, please. Second, apply to the pitch-off. Registration for Austin is currently open with others coming soon. We will pick 20 companies in each city and these winners will get 1-on-1 time with the TechCrunch folks in attendance. Please also give us the name of the most important, coolest, or funniest person in your startup ecosystem. It could be your boss, a VC, or hardware hacker you know. We’re going to need judges and we want to pick some great people from each city. We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Second Place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third Place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. These events are usually a blast and we love meeting all of you in real life. Startups are the TechCrunch’s lifeblood and these events are great ways to meet the folks working on the ground floor to make a cool new future. See you soon! We also need sponsors so if you’re looking to get your name up in lights, email us at sponsors@techcrunch.com or purchase packages for Austin, Seattle, San Diego, or Boston.Microsoft's Latest "Scroogled" Ads Attack Sharing Of Information That Google Developers Need To Process Transactions
Apr 09, 9:41PM
Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play. Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy. In the two videos below, Microsoft uses animations and words to walk you through “what might happen” if your data were to end up in the wrong people’s hands. It’s a fear campaign, and it really doesn’t have any basis whatsoever. Take a look at the videos and we’ll get into what actually happens when you buy an app from Google Play. In the second video, a “real life” situation is played out on the front steps of an apartment building: A Google spokesperson provided us with the following statement: Google Wallet shares the information needed to process transactions and maintain accounts, and this is clearly stated in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice. Why the mention of Google Wallet? The main difference between Google Play and the Apple App Store is that Google uses its “Wallet” service to process transactions. While it’s not a third-party service in the sense that it’s a different company, it is a function of the process that is not embedded into the Google Play experience. It’s something that users are made aware of in the terms of service and privacy policies when they sign up. More importantly, when merchants and developers sign up to sell things in Google Play, they must buy into not sharing any of the information that they get, which is name, email address and general location — the things that all companies selling things online need in order to process your transaction and provide support. Better start your attack against Amazon, Etsy and everyone else on the Internet, Microsoft. The timing is interesting on this, because this is the way that Google Play has always worked. Its privacy policies haven’t changed since last July, in fact. At the end of the video, if you got that far, you’ll notice that Microsoft ends things with a big “Windows Phone doesn’t do it this way.” Instead of doing an advertisement on how great Windows phones and apps are, Microsoft has decided to go after how “horrible” Google is. The “Scroogled” site even has a big old link to explore Windows Phones. Isn’t that convenient? If MicrosoftFuzeBox Adds 50K New Enterprise Subscribers In Q1 2013, Debuts Improved iPad Client
Apr 09, 9:31PM
San Francisco-based virtual meeting player FuzeBox has had some impressive success to kick-off 2013, posting a 200 percent rise in demand for its product in the initial quarter of the year, with 50,000 new subscribers added in just a few short months. The company also now counts 30 percent of the Fortune 500 among its clients, and is debuting new features for its iPad client to help continue its adoption as more meeting attendees shift to mobile.Vudu Headquarters Robbed, Hard Drives With Private Customer Data Stolen
Apr 09, 9:17PM
There's been a break-in! And this time, it's a physical, real-world break-in — not the digital variety we've grown accustomed to. Vudu, the video streaming service acquired by Walmart in 2010, has just sent an email to customers letting them know of a break-in that occurred in their Santa Clara, CA office on March 24th. While it appears that credit card info is mostly safe (Vudu says they never stored it), the thieves walked off with multiple hard drives containing data like customer names, encrypted passwords, addresses, and phone numbers.As Aereo Fights A Clone, Fox Threatens To Go To Cable If Courts Continue To Rule In Aereo's Favor
Apr 09, 9:00PM
This is a story about multiple lawsuits, a clone, and yet another tale of David vs. Goliath, except this time David and Goliath are kind of the same person. After winning in the courts against a cohort of major broadcast networks just last week, two major problems have befallen the streaming TV startup Aereo. The first is a clone called AereoKiller LLC, which claims to operate under similar technology on the West Coast. The second problem is that News Corp has threatened to turn Fox into a cable channel, putting it out of the reach of Aereo's technology, in the wake of the recent Second Circuit court decision.GitHub For Mac Now Supported In GitHub Enterprise
Apr 09, 8:29PM
According to a GitHub post this morning, GitHub for Mac is now supported in GitHub Enterprise. The support comes as part of the latest release of GitHub for Mac. The features, “Clone in Mac,” username auto-completion and notifications, are now available with a user’s enterprise repositories. According to the blog, GitHub is also supporting simultaneously logging in to GitHub.com, making repositories available all in one place. Here’s what the log-in page looks like: And here are the login instructions: GitHub has put an emphasis on its enterprise platform, a hosted environment that runs on a virtual machine behind the firewall. The company raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz last summer for its enterprise push. GitHub for Mac runs on OSX. GitHub originally launched the client in the fall of 2011.Developer Community Coderwall Launches Pitchbox, A New Recruiting Service
Apr 09, 8:15PM
Y Combinator-backed Coderwall started out as a social site for developers to list their achievements and projects, but it has been moving into recruiting — first by allowing companies to build their own profiles and now with the launch of a new service called Pitchbox. It's a separate site from Coderwall, where developers describe the salary and work they'd want from their dream jobs. Then Pitchbox uses a combination of human curation and automation to recommend positions that they might be interested in, delivered as a personalized pitch. If the developer is interested, Pitchbox arranges for a 10-minute conversation with a developer at the recruiting company.Netflix Adds Landing Pages To Feature Original Series Hemlock Grove On Xbox, Web, iPad, PS3, & Wii
Apr 09, 8:05PM
Netflix is quickly building a stable of its own original content, but those programs end up getting lumped in with all the movies and TV series that it's licensed from other content providers. To combat this, Netflix is running landing pages on a wide range of devices to show off the new series that it's investing in, with the next one being Eli Roth's Hemlock Grove.Foundation Capital Raises $282M For Seventh Fund, Will Focus Mainly On Early-Stage Investments
Apr 09, 8:00PM
Foundation Capital is announcing its seventh fund, Foundation Capital Fund VII. The VC firm has raised $282 million in new capital, bringing total capital under management to $2.7 billion over 17 years. We're told the focus of this new fund will be primarily early-stage investing in the consumer internet, information technology and cleantech sectors.TripAdvisor Buys Luxury Travel Site Jetsetter From Gilt
Apr 09, 7:57PM
Word has just come in that TripAdvisor has acquired Jetsetter, Gilt's private community for exclusive travel deals.Rackspace Rolls Out Its Mobile Plan As Vendors Get Giddy About Backend Data Pipes And Spigots
Apr 09, 7:35PM
Suddenly all this backend stuff is hot. Who would have ever thought that data pipes and the spigots would get so much attention? Salesforce is getting into the game and now so is Rackspace with the launch of its mobile push. Rackspace does not call its new offering backend as a service (BaaS). Instead they call it a “mobile-ready” stack that pre-packages the backend for developer so they do not have to reinvent the wheel every time they start a mobile project. Rackspace CTO John Engates wrote in an email that the company is packaging its expertise and experience to cut deployment time from days to minutes. The goal is to let developers focus on building the frontend of the apps, like user experience, while Rackspace deploys and runs the backend for them. Engates said Rackspace has also built in its own reference architectures that developers can use to optimize the development process. Engates said the first stack is for a LAMP PHP based deployment with MySQL, Varnish acceleration service, memcache and other components that optimize for a mobile backend deployment. All of this brings me back to a conversation online about the meaning of BaaS and the connections to platform as a service (PaaS). Whatever you want to call it, the whole backend is getting abstracted and the big players want in. And that’s just fine for the likes of Kinvey, a BaaS provider that has specialized in providing its own service, which serves as a mobile SDK so developers can connect to systems of record and pull that data into their apps. CEO Sravish Sridar seized the moment this morning and added Salesforce to its “map,” so to speak. Make no mistake, despite the conspicuous absence of arguably the hottest buzzword in cloud service, BaaS is exactly the category Salesforce just entered – and for that reason, we've added them to our category-defining "Subway Map" graphic. The map has 29 vendors. Sridar writes that one analyst says there are as many as 47 vendors in the space. And here’s why. Sridar accurately and insightfully draws the correlation that the CIO sees mobile as the way to transition workloads to the cloud. That really sums it up. Mobile is the path to the cloud and companies like Rackspace and Salesforce want to automate as much as they can for developers, the ones who are building out the app-centric enterprise.Google Gives $3M Global Impact Award Grant To Three Organizations To Support "Global Human Trafficking Hotline"
Apr 09, 7:28PM
Google’s non-profit arm announced its Global Impact Awards program last December and has announced three organizations that would be receiving $3 million in grants. All of these organizations are focused on setting up human trafficking helplines to help identify potential victims and provide them with support, no matter where they are in the world. The three organizations — Polaris Project, Liberty Asia and La Strada International — are working together to form a “Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network.” In Google’s announcement today, the company says that 21 million people are enslaved in one way or another globally and generating $32 billion in profit for those who are managing the illegal activity. The hope for these organizations is that they can collect data from all local helpline services to be able to view patterns and triangulate the hotspots in the world that are most egregious. Dating back to 2011, Google has invested $14.5 million into anti-trafficking efforts. Two outside companies, Palantir Technologies and Salesforce.com, are providing analytics and data-integration tools, as well as a hotline center to help scale the anti-trafficking network. Here’s what Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google Giving, had to say about the announcement: In the U.S., Polaris Project has collected data from over 72,000 hotline calls, helping local and national anti-trafficking communities better understand the dynamics of the crime. No such actionable hotline database has existed globally — but it doesn't need to be that way. Clear international strategies, increased cooperation, and appropriate data sharing amongst anti-trafficking organizations will help victims, prevention efforts, and sound policymaking. Slavery can be stopped. Let’s get to it. Here is the announcement of the awards: You can read more about Google’s non-profit efforts in an interview that I conducted with Jacquelline Fuller for The Weekly Good.Box Updates Its Outlook Plugin And Makes It Available For Users With Free Accounts, Too
Apr 09, 7:20PM
Desktop-based email clients aren’t exactly a hot topic these days, but millions of users still rely on their trusty Outlook client. To bridge the gap between Outlook on the desktop and the web, the popular online content-sharing and management service Box has long offered an add-on that allows Outlook users to use Box for managing email attachments. Until today, this add-on was only available for paying Business and Enterprise customers, but starting now, even users with free Box accounts can install this plugin. Using Box instead of traditional email attachments, the company argues, allows users to ensure that the size of an attachment is “no longer an issue since you can replace them with shared links to Box.” In addition, using Box allows users to manage permissions and track who has accessed a file. All of this, Box says, happens inside the native Outlook experience and the system will ask users if they want to use Box whenever they attach a document to an email directly. Users can also convert existing attachments and those they get from other users into shared links on Box. In addition to making the product available to all users, the add-on is now also available in a number of new languages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Chinese. Here is what using the plugin looks like:Local Business Marketing Startup Circl Ties Facebook To Foot Traffic, Courtesy Of Mobile Measurement Tools
Apr 09, 7:09PM
Circl a new startup helping businesses run online promotions using social media and email marketing, is launching today with already over 1,000 customers who have signed up for the platform, over 100 of which who have since gone live. Although there are plenty of competitors in this general space, what makes Circl interesting is the way it ties into mobile in order to track the success of various promotional campaigns.Tim Armstrong Defends Aol's Content Business, Announces New Ad Tool For Publishers
Apr 09, 7:00PM
Aol CEO Tim Armstrong sang the praises of programmatic, automated advertising today during his keynote presentation at the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco, and he announced a new Marketplace tool to help publishers manage their ads. So when Fortune's Adam Lashinsky took the stage to interview him, he asked: Was it meaningful that Armstrong didn't talk about Aol's content and publishing business? After all, Lashinsky pointed out that Aol has made some pretty big investments in content, especially with the acquisition of properties like the Huffington Post and, yes, TechCrunch. Armstrong answered that he still sees content as a big opportunity — he was just tailoring his message to the audience.AT&T Counters Google Fiber In Austin, Says It Invests "More Than Any Other Public Company" Into U.S. Communities
Apr 09, 6:37PM
In the worst-kept secret in Austin history, Google announced in conjunction with the city that it would be the second location to get Google’s Fiber offering. Just a few hours after that announcement, AT&T made its own plans known for Austin, and it includes (surprise) 1 Gigabit Fiber, as well. This ties to its previous announcement of the VIP expansion project for broadband access. The “advanced fiber optic infrastructure” will be given the same treatment that Google has gotten, which we’re told is just access to build out and work with the city, meaning no financial incentives are involved. Here’s what Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO, had to say in a release today: Most encouraging is the recognition by government officials that policies which eliminate unnecessary regulation, lower costs and speed infrastructure deployment, can be a meaningful catalyst to additional investment in advanced networks which drives employment and economic growth. Since rumors about Google’s plans have been stirring for weeks, AT&T had time to plan its move. While consumers should absolutely have many choices for Internet service, Google has been working on getting cities excited about having its Fiber service come to their own neighborhood. In its release today, AT&T does say that it has invested $98 billion in capital in the past five years to U.S. communities and points out that it’s “more than any other public company.” The company also says that its potential capital investment is dependent upon “the extent we can reach satisfactory agreements” with cities, putting the onus on Austin. We have a serious competition brewing. In a marketing campaign that is similar to NFL’s Super Bowl selection process, cities are putting together presentations and rallying cries on why they should be the next lucky location to get Google Fiber. AT&T hasn’t done anything like that yet. Can AT&T bring out the warm fuzzies that Google has been attempting to with its Fiberhooding? Unfortunately it has legacy PR problems from wireless connectivity and speed issues that will drag down any announcement like this. [Photo credit: Flickr]Austin's Mayor Lee Leffingwell: Being The 2nd Google Fiber City Will Be An Advantage
Apr 09, 6:34PM
Earlier today, Google announced that it would bring its gigabit Google Fiber Internet service and Google Fiber TV with about 200 HD channels to Austin, Texas, by the middle of 2014. After the event, Google hosted a phone call with press and analysts to discuss the announcement in more detail. During the call, Austin’s Mayor Lee Leffingwell reiterated that the city reapplied for Fiber after it lost out to Kansas City in the first round. He said that he believes Fiber will be a major driver for the city’s economy in the long run and that Austin will benefit from what Google learned by rolling out Fiber in Kansas City first. ”It’ll be good for everybody involved. It’ll make Austin a much more attractive city for those who want to bring their businesses to Austin.” Leffingwell also stressed that the city did not provide any monetary incentives to get Google to roll out Fiber in Austin. Kevin Lo, Google’s general manager for Fiber, also stressed that Google is doing this as a part of its strategy to make early investments in Internet technologies. Thanks to its efforts in Kansas City and Austin, he also argued, many cities now talk about getting gigabit Internet access to their cities. There is clear customer demand for these gigabit networks, Lo stressed. More than 90 percent of the original Kansas City fiberhoods met their sign-up thresholds. There, Google is ramping up the rollout and is currently working in 40 percent of its fiberhoods already and has finished work in 10 neighborhoods. Fiber In Austin: Similar To What’s Now Available In Kansas City, But Not The Same As for the products that will roll out in Austin, Lo pointed out that Google plans to roll out a service that will be similar to what it is currently offering in Kansas City (including the free offering it makes available in Kansas City), but the exact details and the pricing will likely be somewhat different. So far, Google argues, the company hasn’t done enough engineering work to nail down all the details. What Google is rolling out today is just a starting point, Lo noted. The company’s objective is to roll out as fast as possible, but Google is focused on what “users, entrepreneurs, companies and business will do with a gig,” so it wants to on-board users as fast as possible. Google, Lo said, wants to beDefense Experts Warn Of Cheap Enemy Drones On The Battlefield
Apr 09, 5:46PM
While many current drone programs are extremely complex - and costly - cheap drones used for spying, mapping, and even attacks could turn the tables on world militaries by giving terrorists and less well-funded groups access to UAV technology.Cisimple Exits Beta, Makes Mobile App Building, Testing & Deployment…Well, Simple
Apr 09, 5:32PM
Cisimple a startup that helps automate the build, testing and deployment process for mobile applications, is today exiting its beta and making its new testing platform available to all developers. The company is also the first to integrate with Kickfolio's API, another newly launched startup which brings iOS applications to the browser using HTML5.Keen On… Marketplace 3.0: Why The Future of E-Commerce Might Be Japanese [TCTV]
Apr 09, 5:23PM
In his new book, Marketplace 3.0; Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business, Mikitani lays out his vision for the future of online retailing. As he told me, buying products online will be marked by a shift away from what he calls "standardization" toward a more customized experience.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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