Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from TechCrunch.
Add feeds@feed2email.net to your contact list to make sure you receive all your emails
Make sure to visit feed2email.net to get more feeds sent to your inbox.
To find out which feeds you are subscribed to, or to get further help, just reply to this email.
YC-Backed Kippt, An "Evernote For The Web", Lures Developers With New API, App Gallery
Apr 10, 10:37PM
Kippt, which lets you collect and share content from across the web, is looking to attract developers with a brand-new API and gallery of apps. The two-person startup has relied on outside developers to have a mobile presence on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Kippt just relocated back to San Francisco from Helsinki, almost a year after graduating from YCombinator’s summer batch. “An API is not only good for us, but it’s good for our users,” said Karri Saarinen, who co-founded Kippt and leads design. “There are some companies that fear this kind of openness will somehow harm the company, but we feel it brings value.” He pointed to more than a dozen third-party apps that bring Kippt to the iPhone, or turn it into an elegant mobile reading list. Popular reading app Pocket added support for Kippt recently too. Saarinen said that some developers have already organized hack days around the API. It’s steady progress for the product, which started as a side project while Kippt’s other co-founder Jori Lallo was collaborating with Leah Culver on message board app Convore. Over time, however, Kippt started to take on a life of its own. Like a more evolved version of early social bookmarking site Delicious, Kippt is a tool that lets people save and organize links into lists, and share them with friends and work colleagues. A recent re-design made the tool much more visual with image previews and a Pinterest-like layout for collections of links. Saarinen shies away from the word “bookmarking” though. The idea with the recent redesign was to make saving links much more about the content, rather than the URLs. “People know what bookmarking is, but that they also have this pre-conceived idea of what it should do,” he said. Kippt has a freemium revenue model: there’s a pro version for $25 a year that won’t have any advertising and will give people unlimited links.Glass Explorer Edition To Ship Within The Next Month, Google Confirms
Apr 10, 9:00PM
Today during Google Venture’s “Glass Collective” event, Google told us that it hopes to get the Glass hardware into the hands of developers “within the next month.” The exact date for when Google plans to ship the first publicly available versions of Glass remains unknown, but Google has now confirmed to us that it is now very close to shipping the $1,500 devices to developers. Shipping Glass within the next month, of course, makes sense, given that Google will host its annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco from May 15 to 17. Glass will surely take center stage at this event, and if Google wants to get developers excited about the project and talk about (and launch) Glass’ Mirror API during I/O, it needs to get the hardware into the hands of developers soon. Last year, Google allowed I/O attendees to pre-register for Glass, but the company never really reached out to these developers since — except for sending them glass blocks with their wait-list number engraved on it. Google also recently allowed others to compete for the right to be among the first to buy Glass by posting their reasons for wanting Glass on Twitter and Google+. That project, which was going to bring about 8,000 additional early testers into the Glass community, was heavily criticized because it seemed Google (and the company it partnered with for this) just picked people randomly. Google later rescinded some of these invitations. Users who won the right to buy Glass have to pick it up in person in L.A., San Francisco or New York. It’s not clear if developers will have to do the same, but it would make sense for Google to allow developers to pick their kits up at I/O.Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins And Andreessen Horowitz Team Up As "Glass Collective" To Invest In Google Glass Ecosystem
Apr 10, 9:00PM
Today, Google Ventures announced a partnership with two of the biggest technology venture capital firms in the world, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, on what they’re calling the “Glass Collective.” While this isn’t a fund, the three firms will be sharing seed investment dealflow for entrepreneurs and developers who are working on Google Glass software and hardware. If one firm sees an interesting opportunity, it will go to the others with it. The hope of this collective effort is to kickstart the developer ecosystem for Glass and bring it to mainstream users as soon as possible. Steve Lee, product lead on the Glass team, confirmed that Google will start shipping, hopefully within the next month, the Glass Explorer kits to developers who showed interest in Glass when it was introduced last year at Google I/O. So the three firms want to get in front of the activity that is currently, and will be in the future, happening in the ecosystem. With the billions of dollars that the firms have, it’s safe to say that they’d like to corner the market on Glass investments immediately. This is similar to the approach that Kleiner Perkins took with its iFund, which has invested more than $450 million into mobile applications. While the forming of the group doesn’t guarantee that the two firms will participate in a round of funding for any given project, the firms do tend to invest in other companies together already, so sharing what they’re seeing among one another makes sense. It was also made clear that there are no plans to bring in any other firms, so the “Glass Musketeers” will be going at this on their own. During the announcement, Google Ventures’ Bill Maris was joined by Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. The three discussed their excitement for the immediate potential of Google Glass as a platform, not just a wearable computing product. The Glass API, called “Mirror,” was announced and shown off at this year’s SXSW. Before the meeting started, we were able to test out the latest iteration of Glass, which has come a long way in just the past few months from what I could tell. That fact, tied with the obvious implications for real businesses to form around Glass, made these firms want to jump in early. Maris started off by discussing his introduction to Glass: I first saw and heard aboutIRS Doesn't Deny Snooping Emails Without A Warrant
Apr 10, 8:54PM
The IRS refuses to deny whether its Criminal Tax Division rummages through suspected tax dodgers’ emails without a warrant. In response to the American Civil Liberties Union request for its privacy policy, the IRS dumped 247 records, revealing that the agency definitely believed it could access emails without a warrant before a court deemed the practice illegal. The agency is conspicuously silent on whether it still applies those old spying rules. “The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communication,” wrote IRS Criminal Tax Division's Office of Chief Counsel in 2009. Under a law widely acknowledged as an antiquated privacy law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), governments can access emails opened or older than 180 days without a search warrant. The giant loophole was responsible for the notorious resignation of General David Petraeus after the FBI gained access to his mistress’ incriminating emails. Recognizing that people now regularly store email in the cloud indefinitely, a federal court in U.S. v. Warshak needed probable cause to compel a company like Google to hand over access. Here’s the kicker: The IRS won’t say whether it now applies the privacy protections in Warshak to its investigations. Sometimes, what isn’t said can mean more than what is.Sendicate Takes Its Email Newsletter Service Out Of Beta, Launches An API
Apr 10, 8:35PM
Sendicate, a startup aiming to make it easy for businesses to create beautiful email newsletters, is moving out of beta testing today with the launch of version 1.0. In addition to removing the beta label, the company is launching an API, so that other products can integrate with the Sendicate service. When the company launched its open beta in November, it was pitched as an attempt to reinvent email newsletters for the present day, without being weighed down by legacy technology. In advance of today's launch, co-founder and CEO Chad Jackson also said that Sendicate is an attempt to meet the needs of publishers, marketers, and e-commerce sites that want something more than a generic email service but can't afford an expensive enterprise product.Google Wants To Operate .Search As A "Dotless" Domain, Plans To Open .Cloud, .Blog And .App To Others
Apr 10, 8:09PM
If it gets it, Google wants to turn .search into a “dotless domain,” the company told ICANN a few days ago. Last year, Google applied to manage the .app, .blog, .cloud and .search generic top-level domain (gTLD) names as part of a major expansion of the domain-name system. ICANN, which is managing this expansion, hasn’t awarded any of the gTLDs yet, and the whole program remains controversial. But in May, Google sent a letter to ICANN telling the organization that it would soon provide some specific details about its plans for these top-level domain names. Now, Google has done so through its Charleston Road Registry subsidiary (we have embedded the full letter below). At the time, it looked like Google was ready to open up these gTLDs to the public and wasn’t just planning on using them for its own services. In its letter to ICANN, Google now confirms that it is working with “the relevant communities related to .blog and .cloud to develop technical standards relating to the operation of those top-level domains.” Google’s Plans For A Dotless .Search The most interesting plan here is to use .search to operate a redirect service on the “on the ‘dotless’ .search domain (http://search/) that, combined with a simple technical standard, will allow a consistent query interface across firms that provide search functionality, and will enable users to easily conduct searches with firms that provide the search functionality that they designate as their preference.” Dotless domains (think http://example and email addresses like mail@example) are something ICANN has discussed for a while now and that security experts are not in favor of. Google plans to run http://search/ as a redirect service that “allows for registration by any search website providing a simple query interface.” “The mission of the proposed gTLD, .search, is to provide a domain name space that makes it easier for Internet users to locate and make use of the search functionality of their choice,” Google writes in its amended application. What exactly this will look like in practice remains to be seen, however. It’s definitely a novel use of the domain system, and judging from the amended application, Google will open this functionality up to third-party developers and its direct competitors. Of course, it remains to be seen who will actually get to manage .search. Besides Google, Amazon, dot Now Limited, and Donuts.co have also applied for this gTLD. .Blog, .AppWell, That Was Fast: Twitter Already Shut Down Ribbon's Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature
Apr 10, 7:58PM
This morning, payments startup Ribbon announced support for "in-stream" payments on Twitter.com, allowing users to click a button directly within a tweet in order to make a purchase without having to leave the Twitter.com website. However, it appears that Twitter has already shut this feature down - almost immediately after its public debut.Internet Pioneer Dwight Merriman To Speak At Disrupt NY This Month
Apr 10, 7:40PM
We're very pleased to announce that Dwight Merriman, the co-founder and former CTO of DoubleClick and now the co-founder of hot New York startup 10gen, will be joining us onstage at Disrupt NY this month. He's been at the forefront of Internet advertising and engineering for the past two decades and is an icon of New York startups.Bitcoin Suffers A Correction Amid Apparent DDOS Attacks On Some Exchanges
Apr 10, 7:37PM
Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and is now trading at around $150. We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is falling because of there are apparent distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp. A denial of service attack happens when an attacker overwhelms a target with external requests, so that it can’t honor regular requests from legitimate users. This also happened last week when Mt. Gox when Bitcoin reached $142 and hackers attacked the exchange. At that point, Mt. Gox said it had suffered ”its worst trading lag ever.” The Tokyo-based exchange said last week that hackers are engaging in a strategy to manipulate the price of the currency: “Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit.” It looks like this may be happening again. Aside from that, any kind of 400 percent increase over 30 days is probably unsustainable from a technical point of view. A correction at this point would be healthy and natural.Movile Helps Users Get Connected With Apps To Find And Share Access To Free Mobile Hotspots
Apr 10, 7:30PM
Mobile content company Movile has over the last several years distributed content and applications for a primarily Latin American audience. But what happens when a mobile user isn't connected to a wireless data network? To help solve this problem, Movile has introduced a pair of applications that will help users connect to free Wi-Fi networks.ComiXology Reverses Ban On The Latest Issue Of Saga, Says Apple Isn't To Blame
Apr 10, 7:01PM
ComiXology just published a blog post discussing (and ultimately backing down from) a recent decision to ban the latest issue of Saga from its iOS comics store. Yesterday, Saga writer Brian K. Vaughan described the situation thusly: "Unfortunately, because of two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex, Apple is banning tomorrow's SAGA #12 from being sold through any iOS apps."Mozilla Makes Leadership Changes: CEO Gary Kovacs To Step Down Later This Year, Mitchell Baker Becomes Executive Chair
Apr 10, 6:21PM
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, Firefox OS and other online tools, today announced that its CEO Gary Kovacs, who joined Mozilla in 2010, will step down “later this year.” The organization has already started a search for his replacement. Kovacs will remain a member of Mozilla’s board of directors. Previous to becoming Mozilla’s CEO, Kovacs was the senior vice president of markets, solutions and products at Sybase (through its acquisition by SAP), the general manager and vice president of mobile and devices at Adobe and the vice president of product marketing at Macromedia. More Leadership Changes At Mozilla In addition, Mozilla is making some changes to its leadership team. Mitchell Baker, for example, will become the executive chair “as she returns to a deeper involvement in Mozilla's daily activities.” Her focus will be on “ensuring that organizations and individual contributors have the tools they need to make meaningful contributions to unlock the potential of the Web.” Jay Sullivan, who was previously Mozilla’s senior vice president of products, will now become its COO and Harvey Anderson has been appointed senior vice president for business and legal affairs. Li Gong has been appointed senior vice president for mobile devices, in addition to his current role as the organization’s president of its operations in Asia. Brendan Eich will remain Mozilla’s CTO and senior vice president of engineering. These changes, Mozilla says, come as it is building up its “pivot to mobile.” As Mitchell Baker, who was Mozilla’s CEO from 2004 to 2008, notes in a blog post today that Kovacs joined Mozilla “to make a dramatic pivot — to move Mozilla from the desktop browser world into the mobile ecosystem.” She also noted that he has “reinvigorated our focus on working with commercial partners, a trait that was central in Mozilla's early life but less so during the Firefox desktop era.” Kovacs himself notes in today’s announcement that "the past two and a half years have been pivotal in the evolution and rapid growth of Mozilla. I am very proud of our accomplishments as a team. In our mission to empower the next two billion Web users, we've made great advances in desktop and mobile and in our ability to lead at the pace of the market. With this solid foundation and a strong team in place, this is the right time for me to announce the transition plan and a voteGoogle's Forthcoming Chat Client "Babel" Shows Up All Over The Web In Screenshots, Bug Reports, Forums & More
Apr 10, 6:14PM
Google Babel, the forthcoming unified messenger service from Google that's all but confirmed thanks to a number of screenshots, bug reports, developer forum posts and more, is now being said to only include Google Talk, Google Hangouts and Messenger in its initial release. Google Voice integration, apparently, is on the back burner.Payments Startup Ribbon Now Lets You Buy In-Stream On Twitter.com, Launches YouTube Support & Price-Matches PayPal
Apr 10, 6:00PM
Ribbon, the AngelPad-backed payments startup that introduces a simpler checkout experience when buying from merchants online or via social media, is today rolling out two big new features: support for YouTube payments and a new Twitter "in-stream" payment option that lets you buy without ever clicking away from Twitter.com. The company has also reduced its fees in order to be more competitive with payments competitors like PayPal and Stripe.San Francisco's All-Age Science Museum Explores Mental Illness And, Subtly, Homosexuality
Apr 10, 5:43PM
San Francisco's swanky new $300 million science museum has taken the bold initiative to encourage kids to ask, "what is normal?" Within the Exploratorium's sea-side digs, a dingy 20th century exhibit on mental health is nestled conspicuously between light-bending experiments and lasers. Mental health clipboards detail the treatment of unfortunate individuals who were institutionalized and drugged for behaviors that, today, we would consider quite normal, including homosexuality. "Normalcy is a shifting landscape," explains co-curator Pamela Winfrey, who wants kids and adults alike to understand how medical science helps define convention.YC-Backed Backlift Launches A Back-End Service For Front-End Developers
Apr 10, 5:26PM
Backlift, a Y Combinator-backed startup that’s launching today, describes itself as a back-end service for front-end developers. The service takes all of the work of setting up a server environment out of the equation and just lets front-end developers focus on their work. All a user needs is a Dropbox account – Backlift uses Dropbox as a file syncing service – and a text editor. With Backlift, a developer doesn’t need to know how to set up Rails, Django or node.js to get started. As Backlift founder Cole Krumbholz told me last week, the idea behind the service is to allow developers to jump right into working on their front-end code. For many people, he said, front-end tools can be a bit daunting and he wants Backlift to be a great learning tool, but he also aims to make it a platform for prototyping and, soon, a platform for hosting applications. To get started, users simply sign in with their Dropbox account, create a new app based on a number of templates, including numerous backbone.js sample apps, a Google Maps API-based site, and basic Bootstrap-based sites. You can also use other popular technologies like AngularJS, CoffeeScript and Handlebars. Backlift then creates a new folder in your Dropbox account (and hence on your desktop, too) and you can start editing it with your favorite text editor. Every time you save an edit, Dropbox will sync with Backlift and you can immediately see the changes on your site (syncing starts less than a second after your changes are uploaded to Dropbox). Given that most applications need to work with at least some data, Backlift also offers a basic API for working with data, as well as an admin dashboard for adding users and browsing, importing and exporting the data in your database. One of the companies that has been using Backlift extensively during the beta phase is Automatic.com – the YC-backed company that recently launched its hardware for turning any car into a connected car. “We have our own Amazon S3 servers, however Backlift is a much easier, faster, and secure way of working on the site as we got it ready for launch and showed investors,” Automatic.com’s visual and interactive designer Gabriel Valdivia told me. The service, Krumbholz told me, will evolve constantly and the team plans to launch quite a few new features in the near future – though heZillow Revamps Its iOS App With New Homescreen & Improved Navigation, Adds Mortgage Marketplace To iPad App
Apr 10, 5:08PM
The real estate market in the U.S. is quickly picking up pace again, and last month, Zillow‘s mobile traffic hit a new record with 89 homes viewed per second (up from 75 homes the month before). Today, almost exactly four years after it first launched its Zillow for iPhone app, the service is relaunching its iOS apps with an updated homescreen and restructured navigation. On the iPad, Zillow has now also integrated its Mortgage Marketplace and financial calculators. As Zillow’s CEO Spencer Rascoff writes today, the company believes that this new “streamlined interface [...] significantly improves the Zillow app experience for home shoppers.” Specifically, he thinks the “enhanced design allows users to more easily access all the information Zillow has to offer and to customize their experience based on their goals.” The first thing Zillow’s users will likely notice is the new homescreen, which now finally separates searches for houses and rentals from the get-go. In earlier versions, Zillow would display rentals and houses that were for sale simultaneously until you filtered one of them out. Given that most people don’t look for rentals and a house to purchase at the same time, this always felt like an unnecessary step. Zillow has also recently put a lot of emphasis on its rental marketplace, so it’s just a logical step to highlight that in the navigation now. This new navigation structure also extends to the new homescreen, which now looks quite a bit more modern and, as Rascoff writes, “enables shoppers to access the breadth of Zillow's inventory and personalized shopping tools with just one tap.” Both the new homescreen and navigation are available on the iPhone and iOS. Until now, however, only the iPhone version included an integration with Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace for finding lenders and the service’s mortgage calculator. Now, the iPad version also features these tools.>From The Founder Of Pixable, Contactive Wants To Be The Caller ID For Our Web-Centric World
Apr 10, 5:06PM
It was just seven months ago that intelligent photo aggregator app Pixable sold to SingTel, the Singaporean telecom giant, in a $26.5 million deal. It was a very nice exit for the startup, and it would be understandable for its founders to take a well-deserved breather afterward. But it turns out, Pixable's co-founder and CEO Iñaki Berenguer isn't one to rest and vest. In the time since then he's founded and led the development of Contactive, a brand new SingTel subsidiary that aims to redefine the concept of telephone caller ID for the modern world. Contactive, which Berenguer began working on in October 2012, launches today for the Android, and the app is available here.Cinemagram Launches Its Vine Competitor For Short Looping Video On Android
Apr 10, 5:05PM
Cinemagram, a startup among those that pioneered short animated video clip sharing on the iPhone when it originally debuted back in 2011, has officially launched its Android app today. The new app brings Cinemagram's "cine" creation tools to Google's mobile OS, allowing users to create very short animated GIFs and share them with their followers and on social networks.Roku Hits 5M Streaming Players Sold In The U.S., Has Streamed 8B Videos And Music Tracks
Apr 10, 4:17PM
Roku just announced via its blog that it has sold 5 million of its streaming Internet media players since its launch back in 2008. The devices have managed to stream a total of 8 billion pieces of content in that time, impressive for a device that started out as essentially a dedicated Netflix box. Roku recently introduced its third-generation hardware to market with the Roku 3, which went on sale in March.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.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks
