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Who The NSA Follows, On Twitter
Jun 07, 1:25AM
It's not a surprise that our phone calls are being tracked by the U.S. government. It's not a surprise that our Facebook and Google and PalTalk accounts might be as well. What is a surprise is that the only legit-seeming NSA Twitter account I can find (this one is poetically a squatter) only follows seven accounts.President Obama Visiting Silicon Valley Tonight, As Reports Of NSA's Tech Spying Come To Light
Jun 07, 12:50AM
President Obama's official schedule indicates that he is currently aboard Air Force One and en route to the San Francisco Bay Area for private events being held tonight with some of Silicon Valley's most elite players. The president's visit comes within hours of massive new revelations about the United States National Security Administration's reported collection of personal user data from Verizon as well as from the servers of Internet giants including Facebook, Google, Apple, and others (a number of those companies are denying any involvement in providing data.)Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, Microsoft And Apple Deny Participation In NSA PRISM Surveillance Program
Jun 06, 11:53PM
The Washington Post today reported that Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL (TechCrunch's parent company) and Yahoo participated in the so-called PRISM program which provided the NSA with what looks like virtually direct access to their servers and their users' data. We have now reached out to all of these companies and so far, Facebook, Google and Apple have denied that they are participating.The RK-1 Is An Arduino-Based Mobile Robot You Control With Smartphone Swipes
Jun 06, 11:34PM
London-based roboticist Evangelos Georgiou wants to offer an open-source platform for helping Arduino hobbyists take their projects mobile, thanks to a remote controlled robot called the RK-1 that combines a programmable Arduino microcontroller with apps for iPhone or Android, tank tracks, DC motors and Wi-Fi connectivity. It's a project that could really help out with home hobbyists, or with education workshops and classes to get people young and old more interested in robotics.Report: NSA Collects Data Directly From Servers Of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook And More
Jun 06, 11:02PM
The Washington Post is reporting a top-secret National Security Administration data-mining program that taps directly into the Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple servers among others. “The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time,” reports the Post. Details about the highly classified program, Project PRISM, are somewhat vague, but it appears that the NSA allows the Attorney General and Director of National of National Intelligence “to open their servers to the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA.” “With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook's ‘extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services,’” explains The Post. From there, the NSA mines the data for suspects, then “hops” to their potential contacts, exponentially increasing the number of Americans that the NSA can spy on (by mandate, the NSA is supposed to monitor foreigners). Most of these companies have now denied these accusations. We reached out to Facebook for comment and they replied: “We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.” In a statement to TechCrunch, Microsoft said: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it.” Yahoo told TechCrunch: “Yahoo! takes users’ privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.” In a statement, Google said: “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems,Kamcord Now Makes Mobile Game Recordings More Interesting With Audio Commentary Tools
Jun 06, 9:33PM
It's been just under a year since Y Combinator-backed Kamcord officially launched, and the young team has spent its time raising funding and quietly fleshing out its SDK for iOS games. The team had seen its in-game screen recording tech implemented in over 100 games, and gamers have recorded 500 million videos since those very early days, but now the team has been working on a pair of new features they hope will get even more mobile gamers sharing videos of their exploits. Starting today, Kamcord has provided tools to let players trim down their videos on the fly and add their own vocal tracks into the mix... if game developers enable them, anyway.FWD.us' First Big Call To Action Automatically Phones Your Senator
Jun 06, 9:02PM
Mark Zuckerberg and Joe Green's controversial political advocacy group FWD.us started getting the public involved today with its new Speak Up campaign that calls you and connects you to your senator to show your support for immigration reform. Until now, the only way people could participate in FWD.us was by signing up to volunteer later or sharing the group's messages.OpenStack Cloud Builder Mirantis Raises $10M In Second A Round From Red Hat, Ericsson And SAP Ventures
Jun 06, 8:57PM
Mirantis has raised another $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP Ventures to fuel the growing demand for the build out of OpenStack systems for private and public cloud environments. The financing came in a second round of Series A funding. Mirantis raised $10 million in December from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and West Summit Capital, which also participated in this current round. Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said in an email that when Mirantis did the first part of the round, some investors wanted to put in more money.EasyPost, A "Stripe For Shipping," Raises $850K Seed Round, Sees Transactions Doubling Every Month
Jun 06, 8:48PM
With more commerce moving online every day, the shipping industry is in need of innovation. And one of the bigger pain points developers face when trying to integrate postage and shipping into their applications involves the antiquated technology major carriers like FedEx, UPS and USPS provide - complex SOAP or XML APIs that most developers would say are a nightmare to work with. San Francisco-based EasyPost is trying to solve that problem by offering a simpler, RESTful JSON API instead. Today, the company is announcing $850,000 in seed funding to help with those efforts.Shopgate Raises $7M To Help Retailers Maximize Mobile Storefronts And Sales
Jun 06, 8:26PM
Mobile e-commerce startup Shopgate announced its Series B funding round today, which it revealed to TechCrunch totals $7 million in an interview. The Germany and Palo Alto-based company offers retailers custom native app and mobile web development for their online stores, which Shopgate co-founder Andrea Anderheggen says can help retailers increase their sell-through rates on mobile by between 5 and 15 percent on average, depending on whether they're starting with responsive design-based websites or just traditional web commerce pages.Taxi E-Hail Apps Get The Green Light In New York City Officially, Finally, Once Again
Jun 06, 8:18PM
Good news for New Yorkers who don't want to walk outside and raise their hands in an effort to attract the attention of a yellow cab passing by: The New York State Supreme Court has issued a ruling blocking a temporary restraining order, which had put into question the legality of taxi e-hail providers like Uber and Hailo operating in New York City.Facebook To Simplify Ad-Buying Process By Eliminating Half Of Its 27 Ad Units
Jun 06, 8:08PM
Facebook is wrapping up a press session at its Menlo Park headquarters where it talked about the progress that it's making with advertisers and announced it will be eliminating and consolidating a number of ad units. The big vision, according to Product Manager Fidji Simo, is to simplify the general process of running ads on Facebook. She said that when Facebook looked at its 27 different ad products, it found that "every single product is really good on its own," but "the whole is less than the sum of its parts." The process is too complicated right now, she said (which could potentially scare businesses away or mean that they run less effective campaigns). Ultimately, advertisers should just tell Facebook "who you are, what your message is, and what your objective is," then they should be able to run the kind of campaign that works for them without any "guesswork."Facebook Home Gets A Much Needed Dock To Keep Your Favorite Apps Close
Jun 06, 7:29PM
While Facebook Home hasn't proven to be a smash success so far, it picked up a handful of features today that might just coax a few more users to hop on board. Amongst other things, the new Home allows you to pin your favorite apps to a dock — a basic feature, certainly, but something that's been sorely missed since launch.With $2.5M Injection From Nexus, Indian Housing Marketplace Launches In Bangalore
Jun 06, 6:19PM
Indian housing marketplace, Housing.co.in has expanded out of its home base of Mumbai into another major Indian city, Bangalore—its fifth city in the country. The company, which operates similarly to Trulia and Zillow, provides a real estate search site which displays a visual map of available housing for rent or sale. The search results are filtered by how many rooms are available per property, and there are photos for each listing as well. Housing.co.in just received $2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners from the latter’s newly-raised, India-focused fund of $270 million. Co-founder Advitiya Sharma said the team plans to use its new funding to expand its data science teams. The eventual goal is for its teams to use the housing data collected to display new metrics like area-based pricing, listing decay rates and ratings on neighborhoods, to name some. This round of financing is its fourth in the past year since its birth. The company has never canvassed for funding since it was started in June 2012, Sharma said. Besides Bangalore and Mumbai, the site also serves Gurgaon, Pune and Hyderabad. In spite of its age, Housing.co.in has already crossed 200 employees. The tech team is just 13 people-strong, however, but it will add 21 more engineers from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) within the month. These will add to about 30 IIT-educated engineers already employed, said Sharma.Apple Reportedly Planning Trade-In Program For iPhones, Similar To Existing Third-Party Buy-Back Plans
Jun 06, 6:09PM
Apple is said to be looking into an iPhone trade-in program on used devices in order to "add sales," according to a tweet from Bloomberg today. Bloomberg says that this would be the "first time" Apple has attempted something like this on its homepage, but that's not entirely true – the company started a program to accept iPhone trade-ins back in August of 2012, and would offer up to $345 in Apple Store credit in exchange for a used iPhone 4 or 4S leading up to the iPhone 5 launch in September.Panzura Gets $25M For The Love Of Speed In A Global File System
Jun 06, 5:34PM
Panzura has raised $25 million for its global file system that stores and moves data in a fast, secure manner. Meritec Capital Partners led the D round. The company has now raised $58 million and expects to pursue an initial public offering. Panzura is one of those plays that appeals to the enterprise CIO who looks askance at the cloud but loves saving money and helping the company use the network without employees going nuts in customer support calls about that FILE THAT TAKES FOREVER TO OPEN. Of course security is a big plus, too. But the real story here is about speed: getting that data from those files somewhere fast without having to wait for it on the other end.YouTube Founders Hurley And Chen Have Released An Asian Clone Of Vine
Jun 06, 5:25PM
AVOS Systems, the company founded by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has just launched a new app that appears to be a Chinese version of Twitter's popular six-second video-sharing app, Vine. I hate to use the word clone, but... Clone. The app is called Wan-Pai, (or Wanpai, we're not really sure due to complexities in the translation from Mandarin) which seems to mean "Beat" based on the various translations Google is giving me. (It could also mean Racket, Shoot, or "to play Mahjong".) The app lets you record video in the same manner as Vine, by holding a finger to the screen to record, and letting go to pause.To Spark Children's Imaginations, Hullabalu Raises $1.8 Million From SV Angel, Great Oaks & Others For iPad Storytelling App
Jun 06, 4:59PM
New York-based Hullabalu is launching today with a new take on children's storytelling - instead of digital books with interactive bits as is now common on iPad, this new tablet app itself is the story where the action progresses as children engage with the magical world Hullabalu introduces.Microsoft Launches Bing Translator App For Windows With Augmented Reality Translations, Support For 40 Languages
Jun 06, 4:58PM
Microsoft today launched its Bing Translator app for Windows (including Windows RT). We don't usually write all that much about Windows apps and translation apps aren't exactly new, either, but it's nice to see that Microsoft has finally brought virtually all of the features of its mobile translator app for Windows Phone, including camera-based translations, to the desktop. Bing Translator, which is only available in Windows' Modern UI/Metro mode, supports 40 languages and also allows you to download language packs for offline usage.Amazon's Relational Database Service Hits General Availability, Gets SLA With 99.95% Monthly Uptime Promise
Jun 06, 4:10PM
Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) today officially hit general availability and now offers a Service Level Agreement with a 99.95 percent uptime promise for multi-availability zone deployments. RDS has already been on the market for three and a half years, but Amazon never considered it to be "generally available" because the company continued to add new features and hadn't provided a Service Level Agreement for it yet.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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