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Dropcam Updates iOS Apps With Location Based Control And Time Scheduling
Apr 24, 11:14PM
Dropcam is updating their iOS apps today with two new features that their users have been clamoring for: location awareness and in-app time scheduling.After Raising $6.7M For Startups And Winning SEC Approval, AngelList Opens Up Investment Platform To More Companies
Apr 24, 11:00PM
In December, AngelList, a service that matches early stage startups with investors; debuted the ability to allow accredited investors to actually invest in startups on the platform with as little as $1,000. AngelList also partnered with SecondMarket to create an investment vehicle for these investments. Since December, the company is announcing that it has seen 1,100 investment commitments completely online, totaling over $6 million in funding for startups raising via AngelList. And today, AngelList is opening the platform up to all startups with top-tier investors.Zynga Plans To Accelerate Its Launch Cycle, Says New Games Won't Offset Declines In Q2
Apr 24, 10:56PM
Zynga hasn't been releasing as many new titles in recent months, but things are about to pick up again, executives said during today's conference call discussing the company's first quarter earnings report. In fact, they said they're launching a big new title later today — Draw Something 2. Chief Operations Officer David Ko said that there's been "a little bit of a pause in our title slate." Behind the scenes, he said the company has been reorganizing and reassessing its lineup, with a focus a four core genres (casual, casino, mid-core, and invest-and-express games), but we can "expect to see an uptick in our number of launches in the back half of the year" — though he didn't offer a specific number.Photo Sharing App Pictorious Adds Branded Photo Challenges And Photo Showdown
Apr 24, 10:04PM
Pictorious is a photo sharing startup that is faced with the unenviable task of crawling its way out of Instagram's gigantic shadow. Today they're releasing a bevy of updates to their iOS app, which will hopefully help it mount a better challenge against the photo sharing juggernaut.Google's Got A Problem. Search Ads Aren't Just For Search Engines Anymore
Apr 24, 9:31PM
Search advertising became such a popular and lucrative juggernaut because it offered businesses the ability to reach and persuade people with true purchase intent. But now keyword targeting is available on Twitter and Facebook, which could loosen Google's stranglehold on ads that convince us what to buy.Yahoo! Japan Injects $20M Into Softbank Capital's Early-Stage Technology Fund '10
Apr 24, 8:51PM
Today SoftBank Capital, the NY-based venture arm of Japan's largest wireless provider Softbank Corp., has strengthened its ties to Japan even further, announcing that Yahoo Japan will be injecting $20 million into SoftBank's early-stage Technology Fund '10. The $20 million investment and partnership will help U.S. startups at any point in their development, from early-stage companies who need funding to more mature companies looking to expand into new markets. Yahoo Japan's investment will be an addition to the $100 million early-stage fund, which is a complement to the freshly announced PrinceVille fund.Foursquare's Dennis Crowley To Join Us At Disrupt NY
Apr 24, 8:40PM
Only three days left to scoop up TechCrunch Disrupt NY tickets! You can get them here. And view our amazing speaker lineup here. Foursquare's Dennis Crowley has had a helluva April. The company just closed a $41 million debt round from Silver Lake Partners and Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, O'Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures, and released a re-vamped iOS app. Yahoo M&A has also reportedly been sniffing around.Netflix Spends $2B Per Year On Content, Primarily On Licensing Movies And TV Shows
Apr 24, 8:36PM
Following up on their strong quarterly report earlier this week, Netflix has just released a big ol' mission statement document to their investor relations site, and it's jam packed with all sorts of great lil' details. For example: you know how every Netflix customer's first complaint is that there's just not enough great streaming content? They know — and they're spending $2B a year to fix it.Amid A Challenging Mobile Transition, Zynga's Revenues Decline 18% To $264M
Apr 24, 8:12PM
Zynga's revenues for the first quarter of 2013 declined 18% year-over-year to $264 million as the company is in the midst of doing a big pivot onto mobile platforms. Last year, during the same quarter, Zynga earned $321 million in revenue. Analysts had estimated on average that the company would pull in $209.8 million in revenue and lose 4 cents a share. The quarter had net income of $4 million million and shares are down 13 percent in after-hours trading.Just Sing It Raises $1M For Its iPhone Karaoke App, With Users Recording 500K Songs In Two Weeks
Apr 24, 7:49PM
The makers of Just Sing It have announced that they raised $1 million in funding. I wrote about the app when it launched earlier this month. At the time, CEO Alec Andronikov told me that his vision is to create a truly addictive social experience — users don't just share karaoke performances, they actually play a game where they have to guess what the other person is singing, and they can win virtual coins that unlock additional content. Ultimately, he said he wants to use karaoke as the hook for a broader social platform.Flash Takes Another Step Towards Death As Unity Drops Support
Apr 24, 7:05PM
Oh, Flash. Remember when there was still a little reason to believe that it wasn't a dying medium? When the angry Android masses swore up and down that the absence of Flash would be the death of iOS… only for Adobe to kill their Android effort after just a year? The shambling corpse of Flash takes another punch to the face today, with game engine Unity announcing plans to drop support.Assured Labor Raises $5.5M To Find Jobs For Workers Across Latin America
Apr 24, 7:00PM
Assured Labor, a New York, Mexico City and São Paulo-based startup that helps low- and middle-income workers across Latin America find jobs through their mobile phones, just closed $5.5 million in funding led by Mexican private equity firm Capital Indigo. Other existing investors include Great Oaks Venture Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Kima Ventures, Enzyme Venture Capital, Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin. The company, which came out of MIT’s Media Lab, runs two big job-hunting services called EmpleoListo in Mexico and TrabalhoJá in Brazil that now have 500,000 job seekers and 16,000 employers. They’re growing at a clip of about 1,000 employers per month. (They only just broke into the Brazilian market a year ago.) With Assured Labor, employers looking for potential hires can put job descriptions in through the company’s website. Assured Labor will find the most qualified candidates and text message or e-mail them. Workers register on computers either at home or through web cafes. Once they’re in the system, they’ll get text messages any time a company posts a relevant position and they can text or call back through a private number. Naturally, employers pay to find candidates. This company isn’t really competing with higher end services like LinkedIn. “LinkedIn is going for the opposite end of the job spectrum,” said CEO David Reich. Reich says Assured Labor is more of a social enterprise that targets the lower-earning segment of the market. If you look at the job listings on Empleolisto, they’re for positions like customer service representative or bilingual executive assistant. Many of their clients are still on feature phones, as Latin American markets are only beginning to experience an oncoming wave of affordable Android phones. “I wish that transition with smartphones would happen faster,” Reich said. “A lot of users would have a better experience with us through smartphones. They still have very small penetration, maybe only 10 to 15 percent in most countries in Latin America.”Kids DIY Game Creation App TinyTap Heads To iPhone, Launches Its Own App Store
Apr 24, 6:57PM
TinyTap, a Tel Aviv-based platform that allows children to create their own mobile games and "playable" books, is now expanding from the iPad to the iPhone, as it also launches its own social marketplace for apps. Here, users can sell their TinyTap creations to others, or just share them for free. The move comes roughly six months after the company announced its half a million dollar seed round and detailed its plans for this "app store within an app."Heroku Launches Europe Region In Public Beta, Expects To Be Safe Harbor Certified Soon
Apr 24, 6:42PM
Heroku, the popular cloud platform as a service company, today announced the public launch of its Europe region. Developers will now be able to deploy their services closer to their European customers, which should result in markedly reduced latency for them. The company says it has observed performance improvements of 100ms or more per request for European end users. Heroku is built on top of Amazon’s EC2 platform, so while the company doesn’t explicitly note this in its announcement today, this means it is using Amazon’s data center in Ireland for this service. In the U.S., Heroku’s services are currently based in Amazon’s North Virginia (US-East-1) data center. Given this launch in Europe, it’s likely that Heroku is also looking into expanding its U.S. presence to more data centers across the country, too. Developers, the company says, will also be able to easily deploy more than 60 add-ons from its marketplace in this new zone. Heroku will automatically deploy these in the same region the app is running in, too. The company previously offered this service as a private beta for a small number of users, including Swedene’s TV4 and Betapond. “Deploying our app closer to our users in Heroku’s Europe region gave us a 150ms improvement in web performance. Based on this win for our users, we're moving all of our apps to the Europe region,” TV4′s CTO Per Åström said in a canned statement today. Safe Harbor Coming Soon One issue for U.S. companies that want to bring cloud-based services to Europe is the fact that they have to comply with the EU’s privacy protection laws, which tend to be a bit more strict than similar laws in the U.S. The EU's Directive on Data Protection prohibits the transfer of personal data to non-European Union countries that don’t meet its privacy protection standard. To ensure that this won’t hinder cloud-based services too much, however, Europe allows U.S. companies to be certified to ensure that their privacy policies are compliant with European regulations. Heroku says it is “not yet a registered participant in the Safe Harbor program,” but the company has “laid the groundwork for becoming Safe Harbor certified and expect to have it soon.” Until then, developers have to assume that some of their data will be stored in – or pass through – Heroku’s U.S. data centers.Amazon In Your Living Room: Company Is Reportedly Launching Its Own TV Set-Top Box This Fall
Apr 24, 6:31PM
According to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek, e-commerce behemoth Amazon is preparing to launch a set-top box this fall, in hopes that you’ll consume all of your content through its spin on the now-common device. The company is already working hard to push its Kindle line to consumers, and this box would be for people who don’t want to deal with the fanciness of Apple products, the gaming nature of Microsoft’s XBox, the half-baked Google TV or the little engine that could, Roku. Yes, this is a crowded market, but Amazon has something that these other companies don’t have, which is warehouses full of things to sell to people while they watch TV. I imagine that you’ll be able to shop as you would online or on your mobile device, right on your TV set. That means that the temptation to pick up that new TV, while you’re watching your old crappy one, could overcome you during a show. One button click and a new TV could be on the way. Think of it as Home Shopping 2.0. With some interesting programming to watch, of course. Instead of acquiring a smaller company that already has its own product in the wild, Amazon has decided to build this in-house, under its Lab126 umbrella in Cupertino. Amazon has been building up its content viewers by bundling it with Amazon Prime shipping for free, trying to entice anyone who is already spending regular money with them to try other things out. What shipping has to do with free movies and TV, I don’t know, but customers seem to be happy with it thus far. Reasons for doing a set-top box are obvious, with its original content being the most popular on the platform since it launched. As Amazon finds its way to more niche shows that it can present exclusively, the reasons to grab an Amazon-branded device for your TV makes more sense. In the same way that Apple leverages each of its devices to sell new ones, Amazon is learning how it’s done. It also doesn’t help that it has millions of shoppers visiting its site daily looking for new things. Some could say that Amazon is late to the game, but I see Jeff Bezos and company taking smart, calculated steps to capitalize on mistakes made by others, much like it did with the Kindle, staying close to a purer paperback-esqueWant A Meeting With Tim Cook? You Can Win One For Charity
Apr 24, 6:05PM
ChartityBuzz in conjunction with the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights is auctioning off a coffee break with Apple CEO Tim Cook at his Cupertino office, a prize valued at $50,000. That's right: if you have a great idea for the next Apple TV With Smellovision this could be your chance.Announcing The TC Disrupt NY Hackathon API Workshop Schedule, Prizes & More
Apr 24, 6:04PM
We're now just a few days away from the Disrupt NY Hackathon this weekend, and we've got some exciting news to share. As well as scoring a free ticket to the main TechCrunch Disrupt NY conference, this weekend's hackers will share in almost $50,000 worth of prizes. A few tickets are still available. Coders should register here and designers should register here. Below you’ll find all the information on the prizes as well as the schedule for our hands on API workshops. The API sponsors are providing some of their top talent to give coders a crash course in their product. API Workshop Schedule One of the best things about the Disrupt Hackathons is that we attract the best developers at the best tech companies to share their insights, answer questions and help short circuit the process of building killer apps with powerful APIs. Here's the line-up for our API workshops: 2:00pm – Facebook 2:30pm – Box 3:00pm – Evernote 3:30pm – Foursquare 4:00pm – Amazon Web Services 4:30pm – New York Times 5:00pm – Microsoft BizSpark New API Workshop Microsoft BizSpark will be presenting an in-depth review of developing for the Windows 8 operating system as well as Windows Phone app development basics. Hackathon Prizes Appery.io With the limited time available during hackathons, speed is even more important than ever. That's why the team from Appery.io is going to be at Disrupt with $5,000 in cash plus promotion and free product for the best apps built using their browser-based development environment for iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and the mobile web. With pre-built API plugins – including those of some of our other prize sponsors – you could end up being a winner multiple times over – and get your app from concept to demo in 24 hours – with Appery.io. To find out more ahead of time, check out appery.io/tc13. AT&T Want to hack your way to a better world? AT&T is here to help. In NYC the AT&T Developer Program, AT&T Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund are issuing a challenge to developers participating in TechCrunch Disrupt to build app that helps drive water consumption awareness for buildings. For the most creative as well as comprehensive app, AT&T will be offering a $5k grand prize, followed by a $2k ‘most creative’ prize. The challenge is straight forward: build an app that estimates building water consumption. On a high level,Europe Crowns SoundCloud And SwiftKey Founders Its Startup Heroes
Apr 24, 5:57PM
For the last few years Europe has been emerging as a powerful source of new global startups. Hell, why else would we be doing TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin this year? And we've seen efforts to recognise the heroes of the scene, with a proliferation of startup conferences, as well as awards, such as The Europas (which I chair). Now the venerable European Commission has started to wake up to the talent under its nose and created its own awards ceremony: Europioneers.GreenCupboards Acquires The Assets Of Ecomom, The E-Commerce Site Founded By The Late Jody Sherman
Apr 24, 5:47PM
Ecomom, the Las Vegas-based e-commerce site for eco-friendly kids' products founded by the late Jody Sherman, wound down its operations due to financial insolvency soon after Sherman's death at the age of 47 in January 2013. But there is a silver lining of sorts: Today it was announced that Ecomom's assets have been acquired by GreenCupboards, a Spokane, Washington-based online retailer. Also, GreenCupboards has rebranded itself as Etailz, which will be an umbrella under which GreenCuboards.com and Ecomom operate. The Ecomom.com site, which was shut down a couple months ago, will reopen for business in early summer.GE Puts $105M Into Pivotal, The New EMC And VMware Platform Initiative, But Here's What It Is Missing
Apr 24, 5:23PM
GE is taking a 10 percent stake and investing $105 million in Pivotal, the spin-out from EMC and VMware. GE will work with Pivotal on research and development with the aim of helping customers develop data analytics offerings. GE says its investment aligns with its focus on the “Industrial Internet.” The move shows GE’s investments in developing its own software prowess. GE and Pivotal will use the ”Global Software Center,” which is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif., to develop a software platform that GE will deliver as a service to industrial customers. According to a press release issued this morning, Pivotal’s platform will serve as a way for the company to launch applications and offer data analytics. The Pivotal technology draws from EMC and VMware’s stable of products and services, either developed internally or acquired. VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS, SpringSource and Gemstone and EMC's Greenplum and Pivotal Labs groups form the foundation for one "virtual organization," with 1,400 employees. Cetas, VMware's big data analytics solution, is also part of the group. Pivotal is now calling itself an enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS), a commentary on the lack of any meaning that can be found with the usual “private cloud,” rhetoric that has become the catch-all phrase for anything “cloud,” in the enterprise. In fact, there is not one reference to private cloud in the press release. Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, has tepid reviews for Pivotal. He said it is noteworthy that Pivotal separated its application infrastructure technologies (Pivotal) from systems infrastructure (the remaining VMware assets). It’s ambitious and provides an option for IT versus the range of vendors, such as Red Hat and data analytics companies such as MapR, which has been an EMC partner in years past. Integration is a core missing piece, Natis said in a statement. The effort lacks what is widely recognized as an EMC/VMware weakness. And that’s the lack of a truly independent platform similar to Amazon Web Services or even a SaaS offering to integrate data and applications. He further states that the current composition of technologies does not include a high-productivity development platform: The foundation of Pivotal’s application platform, the CloudFoundry CEAP and PaaS, is using a cloud-based model of elasticity, preserving compatibility with many enterprise Java applications. Offering Java or Ruby frameworks as the primary programming model is a far cry in productivity from the cloud-native metadata-driven application PaaS (aPaaS). And it is missing the social/mobileIf 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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