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Facebook Slowly Making Home More Livable With Customizable Launcher Dock And Now Folders
Jul 09, 12:39AM
When Facebook Home launched, its Launcher was a joke. No dock, no folders, no widgets -- basically none of the personalization Androiders know and love. Even if they wanted their friends to come first, few were willing to sacrifice their customized home screens. But with last month's new favorites dock and today's added ability to drag apps into folders, Home's biggest cracks are getting patched.Seculert Raises $10M For Anti-Botnet Cure
Jul 09, 12:25AM
Seculert has raised $10 million in a Series B round from Sequoia Capital for its advanced protection threat technology designed to thwart malware attacks. Existing investor Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) also participated in the round. The company was initially founded with seed-funding from YL Ventures and now has $15.4 million in total funding.More Nokia Lumia 1020 Hardware And Camera Details Surface Ahead Of Official Launch
Jul 09, 12:19AM
In case you're somehow immune to all of Nokia's incessant teasing, the company's going to unveil a shiny new smartphone on Thursday in hopes that a tremendous camera will endear the thing to the masses. The folks at WPCentral got their collective hands on a new render of the forthcoming flagship -- which is apparently going to be called the Lumia 1020 after all -- along with some juicy tidbits about what else Nokia's camera-crazy device has going for it.With Declining Nook Sales, B&N Says Lynch Out As CEO, Huseby Steps Up, Big Strategic Review Planned
Jul 08, 9:54PM
Looks like things at Barnes & Noble will get a bit worse before they have a chance of getting better. The bookseller has just announced that William Lynch has resigned as CEO, effective immediately, as the company commences "reviewing its current strategic plan." No details yet on what the review will entail: B&N says it "will provide an update when appropriate."TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise
Jul 08, 9:39PM
TaskRabbit, the San Francisco startup that runs a marketplace for outsourcing errands and temporary work projects, has laid off a number of staffers as part of a larger restructuring, TechCrunch has learned. Reached via email, TaskRabbit founder and CEO Leah Busque confirmed that layoffs have taken place, though she declined to provide specific numbers of how many were let go "out of respect for those team members who were affected."Why Twitter Finally Killed The "Auto Follow" For Good
Jul 08, 9:34PM
Fresh on the heels of a spam report which painted Twitter as the network with the largest underground economy for the buying and selling of fake followers, the social network has finally taken steps to crack down on one of the tools often used by those attempting to game its service: the Auto Follow. In Twitter's parlance, an auto follow refers to an immediate, and programmatic means of following another user back after they follow you.Hasbro Takes A 70% Stake In Mobile Game Maker Backflip Studios For $112M
Jul 08, 9:34PM
Toy maker Hasbro just paid $112 million in cash to take a 70 percent stake in Boulder, Colorado’s Backflip Studios, the mobile game maker behind Dragonvale, NinJump and Paper Toss. The company was started back in 2009 and never took any outside funding. Their initial games were super-simple like Paper Toss, where players flip a wad of paper into a trash can. But they later got into tower defense games and then eventually into casual simulation games with Dragonvale, where players take care of and raise pet dragons. They’ve seen about 300 million downloads so far and Dragonvale has consistently ranked in the top 20 highest-grossing games on iOS in the U.S. even though it was first released nearly two years ago. But Backflip may also have been spending quiet a bit on marketing, reducing its profit margins as Hasbro said in a statement that the deal will be “neutral to slightly accretive” to its financial earnings this year. With the deal, Backflip will continue making their own games, and then they’ll also publish games using Hasbro’s brands, which include Monopoly, Transformers, My Little Pony and Magic: The Gathering. Backflip has already done work with outside IP (intellectual property) before when they released Army of Darkness Defense. I had heard for years that Backflip had explored various acquisition and funding opportunities over the years, but one didn’t come to fruition until this year. As I’ve written before, there’s still somewhat of a disconnect between what buyers are will to pay and what independent or venture-backed gaming companies are willing to sell for in this market. The deal values company at $160 million, which is another bellwether for the valuations in the industry. One of the top, top-grossing iOS gaming companies in the entire world, Supercell, was valued at $770 million in its last funding round after they made $179 million alone in the first quarter. King is also said to be considering an IPO. The last few big deals in this space were about a year ago with Funzio being sold to GREE for $210 million and OMGPOP being sold to Zynga for $180 million plus an earnout.Jelly Bean Tips Past Majority Adoption Among Android Users With 37.9% Share
Jul 08, 9:15PM
Google updated its Android version usage stats today, and for the first time Jelly Bean has pulled ahead as the most-used operating system. That's probably been helped by a number of OEMs pushing out Jelly Bean updates to their handsets recently, including the AT&T Galaxy S2. Gingerbread is still a close second, however, indicating a lot of older devices are still in use.A Month After Going International, Social Commerce Platform Fancy Raises $53 Million
Jul 08, 8:34PM
Fancy, the shoppable rival to Pinterest, is said to have raised $53 million from investors, bringing the company valuation to $600 million, Bloomberg reported this morning. The July 3 SEC filing disclosing the funding round did not name the full roster of investors. A Bloomberg source “familiar with the matter” said the backers include American Express, Len Blavatnik, and Will Smith. AmEx President Edward Gilligan, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Kering chairman Francois-Henri Pinault, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are listed on the filing. COO Michael Silverman declined to comment to TechCrunch on how the company will be putting this investment to use, but it could have something to do with the announcement last month that Fancy would begin shipping worldwide. The international expansion was the result of demand from non-US users, who account for just under half of all users, Silverman told TechCrunch last month. As we pointed out, Fancy does face tough competition in the U.S. from sites like Polyvore and Wanelo, which rank well above it on the iPhone app store. Moving internationally could lower the field of competitors. Often compared to Pinterest for its image sharing format, Fancy has been working on the idea of social commerce since it enabled users to shop the products in the images directly on the site in February. Another, presumably smaller part of the Fancy business model is sample subscriptions. The company started selling its Birchbox-like “Fancy Boxes” in September 2012 and acquired the artisinal food subscription service Samplrs in February. Fancy could be looking to expand this further, but it seems secondary to the international commerce move at this point. Fancy told TechCrunch this morning that they are now seeing about $100,000 per day in sales. They are also claiming nearly 8 million registered users and over 12 million unique visitors across all platforms last month. We’ll be watching to see where these numbers go in the months following Fancy’s internationalization, especially if this latest investment round has anything to do with it.Samsung Said To Launch Four Versions Of The Galaxy Note III By The End Of The Year
Jul 08, 8:04PM
Talk about trying to cover bases. Korean news outlet ETNews reports that Samsung's Galaxy Note III isn't going to be an only child when it launches later this year -- instead, it will be joined by up to three siblings that will apparently debut at the same time.Play With An MIT Tool That Visualizes How The NSA Can Map Your Relationships
Jul 08, 7:50PM
The brainiacs at MIT created a cool visualization program to map how the National Security Agency can understand your relationships based on who you contact via email and how often. While we still don't know whether the NSA is collecting the content of phone calls and Internet activity, we know from court documents and Senate testimony that the government broadly mines so-called "meta-data" about whom users interact with.Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Lightspeed Ventures' Bipul Sinha
Jul 08, 7:45PM
This week on TechCrunch TV's Ask A VC show, we have Lightspeed Ventures' Partner Bipul Sinha in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we'll ask them during the show.Google And Maker Faire Beat The Classroom With Virtual Science Camp For Teens
Jul 08, 7:22PM
Science class is about to look a lot more boring. One million kids logged on to Maker Camp last summer, so today Google and Maker Faire announced the second year of its online summer camp that teaches teens to build, hack and explore. The six-week program on Google+ includes virtual field trips to NASA and CERN, plus making tensile strength towers, glowing candy, and potato canons.With Today's Updates, Twitter Apps Finally Sync The 'Read' Status Of Your Direct Messages
Jul 08, 6:22PM
Twitter announced updates to its Android, iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps today, as well as its desktop and mobile websites, plus TweetDeck. The main improvement isn't a huge change, but it does eliminate one of the most annoying aspects of the apps — namely, the fact that they couldn't tell if you had read a Direct Message on a different device or app. In other words, if you read a direct message on Twitter for Mac (for example), then opened up Twitter for iPhone, the DM would still show up as unread. I don't think it ruined the Twitter experience for anyone, but even for someone like me, who doesn't get too many DMs and gave up on the "inbox zero" instinct years ago, seeing those read-yet-unread messages could be pretty exasperating.Home Remodeling Platform Houzz Adds Reality Check To Remodeling Dreams, Launches Cost Database For Renovation Projects
Jul 08, 6:13PM
If you need a bout of house envy, there's no better place to go than Houzz, the increasingly popular platform for finding ideas for your home remodeling projects and the professional that can realize them. Today, however, the service is adding a bit of a reality check to these dreams. The company, which currently sees 14 million users every month, recently surveyed 100,000 homeowners in the U.S. about their projects. It's now surfacing this information on its site and in its mobile apps to give homeowners a better idea of what remodeling projects in their local areas typically cost.ObamaCare Gets Price-Comparison Technology On Oct 1
Jul 08, 5:20PM
President Obama just held a blindingly fast press conference on open government, which probably left most citizens scratching their heads in confusion over one of his geekier executive obsessions. The most important point is that citizens will be able to comparison-shop the costs and features of health-care plans, just like we can now do with flights and car rentals. You can check them out at Healthcare.gov, which recently got a major user-design overhaul.After 9 Months, The Softbank-Sprint Merger Will Be A Done Deal On July 10
Jul 08, 4:57PM
It's been nine months since we first caught wind of Softbank's $20.1 billion purchase of a majority stake in Sprint, and the story is finally coming to a close. Japanese mobile carrier Softbank announced today that it expected the deal to close on Wednesday, July 10th after nine months of various obstacles. The FCC approved the merger on July 5th.Canada's Growing Tech Startup Hub In Kitchener-Waterloo To Be Profiled In New Documentary
Jul 08, 4:56PM
Canada has a strong and growing startup community, and one of the emerging hubs where a lot of that energy is concentrated is the Kitchener-Waterloo region, which plays host to the esteemed University of Waterloo. That area's startup community is being profiled in an upcoming documentary called – aptly – Startup Community.To Take On Google, Facebook's Graph Search Engine Needs More Data, Better Signals
Jul 08, 4:44PM
As Facebook begins rolling out its Graph Search engine more broadly to its U.S. English-language user base today, it faces new challenges that were perhaps not at the forefront of our minds when the service was officially announced. Currently, the on-site search engine aims at making the people, places, photos, and other interests posted to Facebook more easily discoverable, but for it to succeed in scraping away a subset of user queries which can be answered using social data - things like restaurant recommendations or new albums to listen to, for example - Graph Search will need to gain access to more data.Feedspot Offers A Solid Google Reader Replacement With Built-In Search And Social Sharing
Jul 08, 4:00PM
Feedspot, the online RSS reader which jumped into action last summer following the removal of social features from Google Reader, is again stepping up to the plate in the wake of the Google Reader demise. The startup, now with another year of development work under its belt, not only offers a solid Google Reader replacement for the desktop, it's also one of the few to include the ability to search within your RSS feeds.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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