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China Reportedly Lifts Ban On Facebook In The Shanghai Free-Trade Zone, But Continues Crackdown On Internet Freedom
Sep 24, 5:28AM
The Chinese government will allow access to some banned Web sites in the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone, including Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times, the South China Morning Post reports, citing anonymous government sources. We have emailed the three companies to ask for confirmation. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg met with the State Council Information Office in Beijing during her recent trip, but said she was there to promote the Chinese edition of "Lean In." It's unknown if the meeting was related to the lifting of the ban on Facebook in the free-trade zone.FormaFina, A Fab For The New Rich Of South America, Raises $1.4M
Sep 24, 3:39AM
For those who haven't yet heard of FormaFina, think of it as the Fab of South America. The e-commerce startup, which sells curated, limited-run collections of decor products in Argentina and Brazil, has raised a seed round of $1.4 million to anchor itself in the Brazilian market. FormaFina's investors include Redpoint eVentures — a Silicon Valley fund dedicated solely to Brazilian startups — IG Angels, El Paso Advisors, Start Capital, 500 Startups, and Plug&Play. Several angel investors also participated in the round, including baby.com.br co-founder In Hsieh and Hans Hickler, formerly the head of DHL US.Surface 2: Repeat Or Redemption?
Sep 24, 2:27AM
Myself and the inimitable Chris Velazco took to the TechCrunch TV screens to dig into the new Surface hardware that Microsoft announced today. Chris and I are both long-time Surface owners and users, so we speak with a bit experience and fondness. The hardware, we surmise, is great, but we remain a bit unsure about the software that Microsoft has compiled for its tablet hybrids. Can the Windows Store provide enough application density and depth to allow for the Surface 2 to avoid the sins of its predecessor, the Surface RT? It remains an open question. For more on the new Microsoft hardware, head here. And if you want a behind-the-scenes talk with the creators of Surface, I wrote this just for you.Source: Cella Irvine Is No Longer CEO At Vibrant Media
Sep 24, 1:00AM
Cella Irvine has stepped down as CEO of ad tech company Vibrant Media, according to a source with knowledge of the company. I emailed and called the company earlier this evening, but I haven't heard back yet. (I did manage to speak to someone at Vibrant for a few seconds, but they immediately transferred me to a spokesperson who didn't pick up.) Irvine joined the company in October 2011. She previously served as the CEO at the New York Times' About Group (which The Times later sold About.com to IAC) and as Chief Administrative Officer at ad agency Digitas.Digital Health Startups Get The Same Toys As Everyone Else
Sep 24, 12:51AM
Until this summer, a significant subset of US-based healthcare entrepreneurs were unable to legally use one of the most fundamental, integral, and efficiency-boosting development tools out there: Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cue the sweaty palms and standing arm hairs of any developer reading this.Up Close And Personal With Microsoft's Surface 2 And Surface Pro 2
Sep 24, 12:38AM
Now that the dust from Microsoft's Surface event has settled, we're left with two new tablets and one grand vision for the holidays -- with three Surfaces now on the market, Microsoft has carved out a seemingly strong position for itself as people began to plan for some big purchases. But really, how solid are Microsoft's hardware plans? Alex went over most of the details during his own hands-on impressions, but here's another take on the company's new Surface tabletsjust for the sake of completeness. Oh, and if you've got about an hour to kill, you can watch the full event unfold here.C9 Hires A New CEO And Raises $12M For Sales Forecasting SaaS
Sep 24, 12:09AM
C9 has a new CEO and $12 million in funding for its platform that helps customers forecast sales revenues. The Series D round was led by existing investors Mayfield Fund, InterWest Partners and Leapfrog Ventures. The company has raised a total of $40 million.Digital Chocolate, Which Nurtured Some Of Gaming's Best Talent, Sells Its Barcelona Studio To Ubisoft
Sep 23, 11:41PM
Digital Chocolate, the long-troubled gaming company from original EA founder Trip Hawkins, has sold its 46-person Barcelona studio to France’s Ubisoft. The sale comes just months after the company closed down its Helsinki office. Ubisoft confirmed the acquisition to us and Digital Chocolate has yet to respond to immediate requests for comment. Ubisoft is picking up all of Digital Chocolate Spain’s technologies and brands, but they’re not acquiring any of the company’s other studios. The company has been downsizing for more than a year, with layoffs and Hawkins stepping down in 2012 to form a new educational gaming company. It’s another tough chapter for the 10-year-old company, which has raised at least $55 million to date in four separate venture rounds. Somewhat Ironically, even though Digital Chocolate had trouble finding its footing on emerging gaming platforms like Facebook and iOS, the company has nurtured some of the industry’s best talent. Former Digital Chocolate Helsinki head Ilkka Paananen, for example, went on to co-found and run one of the world’s most lucrative iOS gaming companies, Supercell. He’s called his time at Digital Chocolate his “MBA” of gaming. Other Digital Chocolate alums have scattered across the industry to senior positions at companies like Flurry or Angry Birds-maker Rovio. From what I understand, the company had a difficult time grappling with and balancing between emerging gaming platforms. Digital Chocolate lacks any titles on the iPhone’s top 500 grossing charts in the U.S., according to App Annie. Then it only has two titles that are among the top 500 games on the Facebook platform by monthly active users, according to AppData. Not only that, because of the company’s geographically distributed nature, it had a hard time coordinating title development between studios that were scattered across the world in places like Mexicali, Helsinki, Barcelona and St. Petersburg. (Some of those offices were shuttered last year too.) Many gaming companies in the industry are distributed too, but it seems like individual offices weren’t given enough creative license to design and build titles on their own.Facebook Partners With PayPal, Stripe, Braintree To Autofill Billing Info In Mobile Commerce Apps
Sep 23, 10:00PM
Facebook wants to put an end to typing billing details on the small screen, help developers and payment processors earn more money, and prove that its app install ads make money for ecommerce companies. So today it's rolling out last month's test of "Auto-Fill With Facebook" in partnership with PayPal, Stripe, and Braintree to two ecommerce apps, JackThreads and Mosaic, with more to come.Betaworks And Tim Ferriss Among First Using General Solicitation To Ask Crowds For Investment
Sep 23, 9:06PM
It's day one of the new general solicitation rules allowing companies to openly advertise that they're fundraising, and Betaworks is wasting no time. It's just emailed asking its thousands of Openbeta testers to invest in it through AngelList Syndicates. It's not the only one diving head-first into general solicitation, indicating the new rules will have a profound effect on startups.Apple Froze App Store Rankings On Friday, And Odd Behavior Continues
Sep 23, 7:56PM
In the last three years, the only times Apple has ever frozen its App Store rankings has been over the holidays. So it's interesting to note that the company actually froze rankings for a total of eight hours on Friday, and things still aren't quite back to normal in terms of the store's usual behavior and ranking results. The change to the App Store could possibly indicate either an intentional freeze on Apple's part or even bandwidth concerns or other bugs and glitches.Gmail's Ongoing Email Slowdown Nearing Resolution
Sep 23, 7:40PM
Good news! Today you can blame your non-responsiveness to all those important emails you’ve been ignoring on Google itself. The company’s online email service Gmail has been experiencing issues leading to delayed emails and attachments failing to download, the company confirmed. Earlier this morning, Google said an estimated 0.24 percent of its Gmail user base was affected by these problems, but in an update released later this afternoon, the delays were said to being affecting “less than 50 percent of Gmail users.” Given the wording of that announcement, it sounded like, at first, things were getting worse instead of better. Gmail has some 425 million users, according to a public announcement detailing the size of its user base, which was revealed last summer at its Google I/O developer conference. Google has been providing regular updates regarding the situation throughout the day, the first appearing at 10:25 a.m. ET and noting that it was then starting to investigate reports of an issue with Gmail. This was followed by an update over an hour later that informed customers that delays were involved and some attachments were failing to load. Updates released at 12:43 p.m., 1:45 p.m., 2:05 p.m., and 2:45 p.m. ET so far only said that the team is continuing to investigate the problem and will update when there’s more information available. At 3:00 p.m. ET, the company added that the service has been restored for some users, and it expects full resolution within an hour, but this time frame may change. Google did not say which percentage of the “less than 50 percent” of users has had service restored. We reached out to Google via email for comment on what may have caused this issue, and other details, but you know…SEC Allows General Solicitation, Effective Today: What Changed And What To Watch Out For
Sep 23, 7:20PM
Today, the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission's final rules allowing general solicitation went into effect. In the fundraising context, general solicitation means publicly advertising the fact that you're raising money. Previously, this was a big no-no.CloudBees Platform Now Connects To iOS Tool Chain For Enterprise Developers To Build And Test Apps
Sep 23, 6:43PM
Developers are pushing to do more app development in the cloud, but IT has a history as a command and control environment that has focused on locking down infrastructure more than opening it up. CloudBees is a company that is offering a middle layer that connects the cloud and enterprise worlds so developers can build apps in a fluid and continuous manner but with the security and processes that IT demands. Today the company is announcing the ability to continually test and build OS X and iOS apps by connecting on-premise systems with cloud services. CloudBees is also announcing new ways to use virtual private networks (VPN) for connecting cloud services with database and source-code repositories.Google Will Start Blocking Most Netscape Plug-In API Plug-Ins In January 2014, Will Whitelist Silverlight, Unity & Others
Sep 23, 6:42PM
The name "Netscape Plug-in API" (NPAPI) sounds like a relic from another age of browsers, but Chrome, Mozilla and other browsers still support this architecture for writing browser plug-ins today. But its time is quickly coming to an end. Mozilla will block NPAPI plugins in December and Google today announced that Chrome will start blocking webpage-instantiated NPAPI plugins by default in January 2014. The Chrome team plans to completely drop NPAPI support from the browser by the end of 2014.Valve Introduces SteamOS, A Linux-Based Platform To Bring Steam To Your Living Room
Sep 23, 6:22PM
Valve just announced the first part of its living room strategy with SteamOS, a free Linux-based operating system that takes the 'Big Picture' feature one step further. In addition to playing your game collection, SteamOS allows you to watch movies and listen to music. The company has yet to announce a hardware partner for SteamOS, but this could certainly be the operating system behind the rumored Steam Box computer. OEMs will be able to use SteamOS to build gaming computers, as Valve states multiple times that it's an open platform.Flipboard's Mike McCue Confirms $50M Raise, Says Windows 8 App, More International Versions Coming By End Of Year
Sep 23, 5:59PM
Flipboard, the mobile-first "social" magazine that lets people tag, assemble and then share collections of stories from around the web, has now raised another $50 million at an $800 million valuation led by Suhail Rizvi, with Goldman Sachs close behind and existing investors like Insight Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins also participating (KPCP has confirmed its investment directly with us as well).BlackBerry Signs Letter Of Intent To Go Private For $9 Per Share In Deal Valued At $4.7 Billion
Sep 23, 5:45PM
Today BlackBerry announced a $9 per share offer for its outstanding stock, a deal worth around $4.7 billion. The $9 per share price is a slight premium over its current stock price, which traded at $8.23 before it was halted pending the news. BlackBerry had declined more than 5 percent on the day. Fairfax Financial, which offered the $9 per share deal, already owns about 10 percent of the company’s stock. BlackBerry’s board has approved the transaction, and a letter of intent has been signed. This feels like a pretty much done deal. However, the board is open to rival offers provided that they are “alternatives superior to the present proposal from the Fairfax consortium.” Fairfax will pursue funding for the deal from, according to the release, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and BMO Capital. There is a kill fee of $0.30 per share if BlackBerry backs out and accepts a different bid. BlackBerry had about $2.8 billion in cash and equivalents at the end of its most recent quarter. That, paired with whatever value its intellectual property might retain, means that the value of its business operations is vanishingly small. The $9 per-share price for BlackBerry is less than a 10 percent premium on its closing price, calculated on a very, very bad day for the company’s stock. Expect some investors to be less than enthused to see the company exit for so little. It’s hard to not view this as the end of BlackBerry as we have known it. Fairfax, to its credit, is putting a brave face on the matter, stating that the deal will “open an exciting new private chapter for BlackBerry, its customers, carriers and employees.” So, it claims to not have plans to break the company into small pieces and vend it off in chunks. Even more, Fairfax intends to “continue the execution of a long-term strategy in a private company with a focus on delivering superior and secure enterprise solutions to BlackBerry customers.” If that is true, and Fairfax has a real plan to turn the company around, and perhaps transmorgify it back into a firm that pushes technology forward instead of reacting to its change in a ham-fisted fashion, more power to it. BlackBerry appears set to join Dell in the hopefully healing purgatory of life as a formerly public and now private firm. Top Image Credit: HonouAngelList Beefs Up Syndicates With New Backers Model, Lets Accelerators Raise Funding Too
Sep 23, 5:18PM
With the loosening of the SEC’s restrictions around general solicitation or public fundraising by startups, AngelList is launching a suite of products that could extend its influence (and its revenue model) in the tech ecosystem today. Much has been made of how AngelList’s new ‘Syndicates’ program could revolutionize early-stage funding for startups. Regular angels can essentially raise a venture fund on the fly, bring in a group of friends who are accredited investors and provide a startup with an early round of reasonable size. Then the lead angel takes carry from the deal. This is competitive to the role that more traditional venture firms might play in first-round financing. Since the program was launched last month, more than $1.7 million has been raised through syndicates on AngelList (and the number is now higher with a few more deals in the works). Today, AngelList is taking that program a step further with “Backers,” a way that angels can round up financing commitments in their network ahead of investing in companies. It could give angels even more leverage to pledge hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed-stage capital when they take meetings with companies. Here’s a hypothetical example: an angel can step forward and say they typically invest $25,000 (see the slide below). Then the 10 other angels they typically co-invest with can also pledge a similar amount, giving their syndicate more than 10 times the angel’s original financing power. With syndicates, the lead setting up the deal takes a 5 to 15 percent carry of the investment’s returns. Then the group of investors pays a 5 percent carry to AngelList. “This creates a very clean signal,” said AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant. “You’re putting in money at the same valuation as the lead. They’re only being paid in carry and they have skin in the game.” With syndicates, follow-on investors are basically betting on a lead angel’s judgment in a specific company. But with backers, they’re betting on the lead angel’s overall investment judgment. AngelList will launch a syndicates leaderboard soon that will show how much angels are able to pool together from their network for a startup and how much carry they typically ask for. This could make the seed and Series A market for financing much more competitive and transparent. Ravikant shied away from pointing out any firms or investors that might lose out in this environment, saying, “AnyoneBacked By First Round's Dorm Room Fund, Addy Is A Location-Sharing Service That Goes Beyond Addresses
Sep 23, 5:05PM
Khaled Naim, CEO of startup Addy, is hoping to create a new way for people to share their location. What's wrong with plain old addresses? Well, they usually get the job done, at least if you live in an urban or suburban area in the United States, but even then, I'm guessing that you've had moments where they don't quite work — say, when you've had to explain to someone, "Okay, the address is on Street X, but you actually need to park on Street Y, and the entrance is on Street Z." Or maybe you're having a barbecue on the beach and have to tell everyone that they'll to find you between Entrance A and Entrance B.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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