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Whatser Raises $475,000 To Increase Merchant Footfall Using Social Media
Oct 24, 7:50AM
Back in 2010, Whatser launched as a way for friends to share their favourite locations. But by October the following year, after running out of runway, the startup voluntarily declared itself bankrupt. Today, however, sees the rebooted company rise from the deadpool with the launch of its social media management dashboard designed to help local merchants increase footfall.
SparkLabs Launches $30M Global Seed-Stage Fund With Ex-Facebooker Net Jacobsson And Former Horizons VC Frank Meehan
Oct 24, 7:09AM
SparkLabs started with the mission of helping grow South Korea's young startup industry. Now it wants to bring its impressive network of mentors to entrepreneurs in the rest of the world with a new $30 million seed-stage fund called SparkLabs Global. In addition to SparkLabs co-founder Bernard Moon, the new venture's primary operating partners are former Facebook executive Net Jacobsson and Frank Meehan, previously of Horizons Ventures. The fund will look in emerging startup ecosystems for early stage companies that want to rapidly scale into international markets. 
LinkedIn's Intro Feature Is Very Cool, And A Spectacularly Bad Idea
Oct 24, 7:01AM
Earlier today LinkedIn launched a new iPad app and what appeared to be a pretty slick feature for iOS Mail called Intro. It presents the a profile of email senders right within the body of the message, with more details available on a tap — in a similar manner to other email tools like Rapportive. Intro appears to deliver all of the details of your contacts to your fingertips in a nifty interface. It's also a spectacularly bad idea for you to activate this feature. See, iOS Mail does not have an official extensible framework. Apple does not provide any APIs or frameworks to developers that would allow this kind of modification of its interface. Instead, LinkedIn is acting as a 'man in the middle' by intercepting (with your permission) your email and injecting HTML code into it that enables a style sheet to pop open over your content, containing an extended profile that offers information on positions held, connections and a bunch of other stuff. The implementation, explained in a LinkedIn blog post, is pretty admirable from an engineering perspective. As 'hacks' go, this is a really clever solution to Apple's fairly restrictive Mail.app policies. But when you dig into the methods that LinkedIn is using to enable Intro, it becomes clear that this is a much more sticky proposition than it appears. Right off the bat, the installation process requires that you install a configuration profile that contains a set of signing certificates and an encrypted profile. Then it asks for your email username and password, unless it’s a Gmail account in which case the more secure Oauth method is used — which requires no password given to LinkedIn. Those enable LinkedIn to (presumably securely) obtain permission to act as a middle man between you and your email provider. This proxy server is what is used to intercept (yes, as in grab, open and modify) your email and inject the code that makes Intro possible. There don't appear to be any humans involved in the process, and one would pray that your email contents remain un-readable somehow but I'm not sure how that's possible. The 'top bar' that enables the feature is not a field or part of the header, it's additional content that gets inserted into the body of the email. LinkedIn appears to confirm that this is how this works. "We understand that operating an email
Mobile Payments Provider Fortumo Launches Program To Help Chinese Developers Expand Into New Markets
Oct 24, 5:14AM
Mobile payments provider Fortumo has launched a program that will serve as a "one-stop shop" for Chinese developers that want to distribute their apps in other countries. Called Fortumo Expand, the program offers Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 developers access to the Estonia/U.S.-based company's network of mobile carriers in 80 countries, as well as localization, testing, distribution and marketing services. 
Viber Releases Update To BlackBerry App To Catch Up With iOS And Android
Oct 24, 3:15AM
If you’re a BlackBerry fan, it may feel a bit like you can’t catch a break. But today Viber wants to change all that, delivering an updated version of the free calling and messaging app to the BlackBerry platform. The update marks the first big upgrade that BlackBerry-flavored Viber has seen since bringing voice calls to the platform in April. BlackBerry has been supported by Viber since May of last year. The new update includes a few details that Viber has already gone the extra mile to implement on other platforms, like iOS and Android. For example, user images and read receipts are shown in conversations, and users can now use custom location sharing. Overall, the UI received a much-needed facelift. To be clear, this app supports BB 5, 6, and 7, but not the new BB10 operating system that’s compatible with newer BlackBerry devices. Viber CEO and founder Marco Talmon reminds us in the press release that BlackBerry is the third larges platform for Viber, a company with over 200 million registered users. iOS and Android comprise first and second place. Official quote: Our continued support for the community of Viber users on the platform goes hand-in-hand with our efforts to reach the broadest possible audience of users around the world. Viber has also included Bahasa Indonesian as an available language in the BlackBerry version. On top of the new features, the new BlackBerry version has also been translated into Bahasa Indonesian, allowing Viber users who speak the language to easily access the app. Viber recently flipped the switch on monetization with the launch of a sticker market. However, the sticker market isn’t available in the latest BlackBerry release. The update will be rolling out over the next 24 hours.
Cruise.me Makes Booking A Cruise Social And Not Horrendously Difficult
Oct 24, 12:12AM
Although the founders of SF-based Blueseed have garnered some attention recently for their desire to turn a cruise ship into a floating coworking space for foreign entrepreneurs, booking floating vacations for everyday folks remains a surprisingly untouched area of the travel startup scene. 
UK Peer-To-Peer Lending Platform Funding Circle Raises $37M, Targets U.S. SMBs In Merger With Endurance Lending Network
Oct 23, 11:02PM
Small businesses have been called the lifeblood of our economy, and today a financial services startup has picked up a significant round of funding to help them circulate better. Funding Circle, a UK-based peer-to-peer lending platform that lets individuals and institutions loan money to small businesses, has picked up a $37 million round of funding. Along with this, it's announcing plans to take its business to the U.S., its second market, in a merger with San Francisco-based Endurance Lending Network. Its ambition, in the words of co-founder and CEO Samir Desai, is to become the "NYSE for small business lending." 
Inside A Google Ventures Design Sprint
Oct 23, 10:30PM
Design isn’t something you would normally associate with a VC firm. But as more firms are adding value-added services, Google Ventures has created an all-star team of designers from Google, Mozilla and more to help portfolio startups create beautiful and easy-to-use products. In particular, Google offers its portfolio startups the opportunity to participate in a Design Sprint, which is an intensive, visual bootcamp around a design problem for portfolio companies. We were able to embed ourselves in one of these recent sprints, in which a few members of the Google Ventures Design team were helping CircleUp, a startup that connects investors with retail and consumer companies that wouldn't attract traditional venture funding. The entire process, which would normally take six months for a startup to work through, is compressed to five days (hence the word “sprint”), and starts with the design team spending time with the startup’s product and engineering teams to understand the problem and challenge. Day two is spent drawing out and sketching a number of solutions, day three is when the team decides which idea is best for the user, and day four is spent developing a prototype. Lastly, GV’s design team and the startup expose the design to potential users to understand what works with the design and what needs to be changed. As GV Design Partner Jake Knapp explains, this thinking and structure is based on a strategy developed by IDEO and Stanford's d.school. As we witnessed with CircleUp’s sprint, the entire process is interactive, visual and effective, ending with real prototypes that have been tested by real users. The room where the Design Sprint takes place looks like a real research and testing lab, complete with pictures, Post-its and voting stickers all over the walls, as well as a giant timer clock. With CircleUp, we sat down with Knapp, who previously worked on design for Google Search, Chrome, Ads, Gmail, Apps, Google+, Security, Commerce and the 2011 Google-wide redesign, as well as Braden Kowitz, the first designer to join GV who also led design for Google Buzz, Gmail, Apps for Business and more. CircleUp founder Ryan Caldbeck tells us that GV taught his team how to think differently about design and come to conclusions that could have taken months. And Caldbeck tells us that the company adopted the eventual product that came out of the sprint, adding, “Ninety percent of what we used came
Pinterest Raises Massive $225 Million Series E, Valuing The Firm At $3.8 Billion
Oct 23, 10:06PM
According to sources at AllThingsD (which TechCrunch now confirms) Pinterest has closed on a significant new round of financing: $225 million in new funding, with Fidelity Investments in the lead. TechCrunch sources are now confirming the full AllThingsD report. The funding values Pinterest at $3.8 billion, an exceptionally rich valuation for the young company. The round included participation from current investors Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Valiant Capital Management, but not its most recent investor Rakuten. The Japanese e-commerce giant invested $100 million in the service in May 2012. That May 2012 round of funding was said to value Pinterest at $1.5 billion, or less than half of what the company is now worth on paper. That’s an impressive $2.3 billion market cap bump in just over a year. The funding is being used for international efforts. The company has hired country managers recently in Italy, France and England. The $225 million will also be used to purchase “talent” and “technology.” Expect Pinterest to pick up a number of small firms in mostly stock transactions that contain a cash component. Pinterest has now raised $565 million. The question now is how will Pinterest make good on a $3.8 billion valuation. The answer might be an untraditional advertising model. Charging advertisers for impressions or relatively rare mobile clicks might not earn enough money. But if Pinterest developed an advertising scheme that looked more like a revenue share where it gets paid dollars when its ads lead directly to people buying things, opposed to getting paid cents when people click, it could earn revenue worthy of its valuation. Still, given its high valuation, the company has almost priced itself out of acquisition range. If it can’t IPO, it may struggle to find an open door elsewhere. UPDATE: Pinterest also confirmed the funding, investors and valuation, with a statement from co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann to AllThingsD: “We hope to be a service that everyone uses to inspire their future, whether that’s dinner tomorrow night, a vacation next summer, or a dream house someday. This new investment enables us to pursue that goal even more aggressively.” They’ve also released some stats: Pinterest will use the additional capital for corporate purposes, including international expansion that builds on 125 percent international growth since the beginning of the year. Pinterest recently launched in UK, France and Italy and plans to launch in 10 more countries before the
Intuit Acquires Level Up Analytics, A Consulting Firm With A Specialty In Data Analytics
Oct 23, 8:36PM
Intuit has acquired Level Up Analytics, a Mountain View-based consulting company that focuses on data science, big data and analytics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. All the employees from the Level Up Analytics team will join Intuit. In a statement, Intuit described the deal as an “acqui-hire,” its fifth this year. The company did not provide the names of the other consulting firms. Intuit acquired 14 employees from Level Up Analytics: three founders and 11 scientists, architects, and engineers. In a blog post, Level Up Analytics wrote that its clients include companies in the financial services, advertising, mobile, payments and social networking fields. The Level Up Analytics team will help build products on top of Intuit's collective data of more than 45 million customers that ranges from individual purchases and spending habits to business inventories, transactions, and trends. The company’s web site explains that its core business is to “weave techniques from machine learning, data mining, predictive modeling, graph and social network analysis, natural language processing and software engineering into its products and analyses.” Its clients have used its services to churn analysis, information extraction, data standardization, recommendation systems, data modeling and a host of other services. Intuit has made several acquisitions this year. In August, the company acquired tax software startup GoodApril.
Healthcare.gov Ignores Birthdates, Dramatically Underestimates Prices
Oct 23, 7:53PM
Healthcare.gov’s newest feature is presenting consumers with disturbingly misleading health insurance prices. CBS uncovered how the beleaguered federal insurance marketplace website is underestimating the actual cost of insurance by 50% or more, because–and I’m not making this up–it forgets to ask users their birth date. CBS found (and TechCrunch confirmed) that Healthcare.gov estimates that a 48-year-old North Carolina resident ineligible for government subsidies will pay $231/month for a “Silver” plan. But, the website for Blue Cross Blue Shield, the actual insurance provider, reveals a price tag of $360 (few cost estimates are pictured below. healthcare.gov’s cheapest prices are pictured in the top image. Blue Cross’s cheapest price is bottom picture). See, on Healthcare.gov’s new “Shop and Browse” feature, users are only asked whether they are under 49 years of age. Problem is, the calculator appears to be averaging in the cost of consumers who are also in their 20s, some of whom are eligible for steeper discounts. The shocking oversight gets even worse. While Healthcare.gov is exceedingly careful to note that the prices are just estimates, it only says that plans are likely to be cheaper. Healthcare.gov and the state-run websites have been making headline news for ongoing issues with crashes and logins. President Obama chided the press for being impatient, saying that even Apple has glitchy rollouts. True, companies have troubled launches, but I’m pretty sure Apple never mislead users into thinking they could get an iPhone for $200, when it was actually $400. We’ve noted before that the government’s calculator can be seriously misleading and is better done by tech startups offering sophisticated calculators which accounts for individuals’ unique needs. However, the Affordable Care Act lets states optionally partner with tech startups; California and New York have chosen to delay partnerships for roughly 2 years. Another day, another government screw-up.
German Chancellor Merkel Less Than Pleased That U.S. Likely Tapped Her Phone, Calls Pres. Obama In Protest
Oct 23, 6:54PM
Earlier today the German publication Der Spiegel reported that that country’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, likely had her cell phone tapped by the United States intelligence apparatus. Germany is a key ally of the United States, both economically and politically. According to Spiegel, the Chancellor called United States President Barack Obama in protest over the revelation. The United States National Security Council told Spiegel that the country is not currently monitoring Merkel’s communications, and will not in the future. It did not comment on past actions. That is only a denial of a sort. And, as we have seen previously, whenever the United States agencies tasked with national security and intelligence release a carefully worded statement, what they don’t say is usually more relevant than what they state plainly. It would have been simple for the National Security Council to definitively state it has never monitored the Chancellor’s communications. It chose to not do so. The White House released a statement that mirrored the Security Council’s remarks: “The President assured the Chancellor that the United States is not monitoring, and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel. But regarding everything up until this morning? Yeah, shh. This is only yet another ding to the United States’s credibility in the European region. After it became known that the United States was recording French phone calls by the tens of millions monthly, that country wasn’t too pleased. The NSA has been caught poking around Germany before to boot. The list goes on. The role of that National Security Agency – the governmental group at the very heart of the current espionage and surveillance dragnet and its ensuing scandal – is to collect and decode foreign intelligence. Recently, it became known that the United States also tapped the email address of now former Mexican President Felipe Calderon while he was office, and the communications of then candidate for the presidency of that country, Peña Nieto. It’s hard to keep your allies close while you systematically spy on them, and then get caught. Top Image Credit: Flickr
Microsoft Acquires Apiphany, An API Management Service To Integrate With Windows Azure
Oct 23, 6:26PM
Microsoft has acquired Apiphany, an API management company that it will integrate with Windows Azure. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. A short post about the acquisition is on the Windows Azure blog, citing the increasing value of APIs and the new level of management required to expose APIS reliably, securely and at scale. In the post, Microsoft General Manager said Apiphany provides businesses of any size the tools they need to expose particular endpoints while selectively gating access to more sensitive data and services.” Apipahny, of Washington, D.C., with customers such as the Washington Post, offers a portal for companies to manage their APis. API Analyst Kin Lane, in a review last May, said Apiphany has three main components for API deployment and consumption It has the ability to manage the operations that come with managing multiple APIs, services for developers that provide access to various combinations of API resources and operations and access to apps that are registered with the platform. Apiphany’s acquisition points to the consolidation of the API management market.Earlier this year, Intel bought Mashery for more than $180 million and CA acquired Layer 7. Mulesoft acquired Programmable Web. And then Facebook jumped in and bought Parse. The service Apiphany provides will be missed as it was one of the last to offer an affordable platform for developers to manage their APIs. It cost $50 per month. Other services, bowing to market and investor demands, have focused more on enterprise plays more so than developers.
About.me Launches Collections, A Pinterest For People
Oct 23, 6:26PM
The folks at About.me have been busy since it spun out of Aol. A spin-out often puts the wind back in your sales, and the team, led by Tony Conrad and Ryan Frietas has not been content to idle. Instead they are iterating on product, today launching Collections for all About.me profiles. Users can now find About.me Collections in the drop-down menu on their home page. Clicking on the link will bring them to two pre-populated Collections -- Twitter Friends and Facebook Friends.
Apple Crosses Its Hardware Rubicon
Oct 23, 6:06PM
According to legend, a vision delivered by the gods caused Julius Caesar to commit the ultimate act of insurrection by crossing the Rubicon. Splashing through this minor river dividing Caesar's province from Italy proper committed him to an inevitable armed conflict with the Roman Senate. Though Apple hasn’t set about conquering any empires, it has crossed its own Rubicon in one way: It has decided to offer its operating system OS X as a free download for all users and its iLife and iWork suites as free downloads with the purchase of a new iOS or Mac device. Thus, it has erased the boundaries between its hardware and software offerings for the first time in a decade. Apple has offered its operating system free before. Until OS 9, updates were offered for its Macintosh computers as a matter of course. Patches fixed bugs and added features free of cost. When it shipped OS X for the first time, that all changed. Since then it has only offered one free update as a concession to customers who felt OS X 10.0 came out a bit half-baked with regard to the performance of its new Aqua interface. But that's only sort of accurate. Apple actually began offering a free version of OS X in 2007, when it began selling the iPhone. "iPhone runs OS X! Why would we want to run such a sophisticated OS on a mobile device? It’s got everything we need," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the time. "It let us create desktop class applications and networking, not the crippled stuff you find on most phones, these are real desktop applications." Specifically, the original iPhone ran an operating system internally called “OS X 1.0.” Now, Apple has unified its OS pricing strategy and offers free OS updates on both iOS and Mac hardware. In many ways, this is a culmination of a path that Apple has been trundling down since it first began writing operating system software for its own hardware. I've joked before that Apple had a hardware + software epiphany in the 70s and that it took other companies like Microsoft decades to come to the same conclusion. That's a simplification because Microsoft has actually been building hardware for a long time. The big difference is the level of commitment Apple gave to integrating its software with hardware, and the bet that it made in the
Microsoft Confirms That The Desktop Start Screen Tile Is No Longer The Default In Windows RT 8.1
Oct 23, 6:00PM
Microsoft today confirmed with TechCrunch that it has made the desktop Start Screen tile non-default in Windows RT 8.1. You can return the tile to the Start Screen in any size if you wish. It also exists in the "all app view" that is new to Windows 8.1, if you don't want it on your Start Screen at all. Yesterday I noted that the change greatly deemphasizes the desktop in Windows RT. This matters, as it indicates that Microsoft may be moving to an all 
Hulu Finally Brings Free Videos To Mobile – But It's Just Clips, And Only Works In The Browser (For Now?)
Oct 23, 5:22PM
Days after naming its new CEO, Fox Networks Group president Mike Hopkins, Hulu has finally launched free video content for mobile users. But don’t get too excited – it’s just clips, not full-length episodes. And they’re only available for now in the mobile browser, not within the Hulu Plus mobile application. According to a blog post penned by Senior Product Manager Karan Nischol, mobile users who visit Hulu.com from their device’s web browser will now be taken to a page where Hulu’s editorial team has curated a collection of recent clips from popular shows on the service. The option to view the clips is one of two on Hulu.com’s updated landing page – the other still directs users to download the Hulu Plus app for access to the full episodes instead. If you choose to “instantly watch top clips,” however, you’re then taken to the ”Trending Now” page, where there are currently clips from shows like Jimmy Kimmel, Jay Leno, SNL, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, The View, WSJ Live, Grimm, Family Guy, and several others. You can also dig into clips by genre by selecting a category option from the menu at the top. Here, you can choose to navigate to Trailers, Comedy, Celebrity, News, or Latino sections instead, and Hulu says that more channels are coming in the future. In addition, there’s another option to upgrade to the full “Hulu Plus” experience from this menu. As you view the clips, you can choose to share them on Facebook, Twitter and via email using small sharing buttons at the bottom. The way the mobile site is designed is very app-like – it even uses that standard left-side navigation (aka “hamburger” navigation, named for the three stacked lines you tap to reveal the menu, which could resemble a sandwich of sorts). You could easily imagine this interface working in the Hulu Plus app, if the company decided to go the freemium route with clips for logged-out or free users, and full episodes for those who pay. Whether or not Hulu does so, it’s still a notable change for the company to provide any of its content to mobile users, where so much video viewing today now takes place. We’ve reached out to Hulu with some other questions about this feature, including the number of clips and networks available, as well as other questions regarding
Yahoo Acquires Startup LookFlow To Work On Flickr And 'Deep Learning'
Oct 23, 5:18PM
LookFlow, a startup that describes itself as "an entirely new way to explore images you love," just announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo and will be joining the Flickr team. The company writes on its homepage, "Fret not, LookFlow fans. Keep an eye out for our product in future versions of Flickr — with many more wonderful photos and all that Flickr awesomeness!" It also says it will be helping Yahoo to form a new "deep learning group." 
LinkedIn Launches Intro That Embeds Rapportive Info Into The iOS Mail App, Plus An iPad Redesign
Oct 23, 5:06PM
LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner says the barrier to his vision is scale, so it's beefing up its mobile experience with Intro, an integration adding LinkedIn and Rapportive info to Apple's Mail app, and a redesigned iPad app. Intro works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Aol Mail, iCloud, and Google Apps, and inserting LinkedIn profile photos and job titles below the To/From section of emails in Apple's Mail app.
Pulse Will Become A One-Stop Content Shop For LinkedIn, Using LinkedIn Profile Logins For Curated Content
Oct 23, 5:02PM
LinkedIn, the social network for the working world now with over 238 million members globally, is presenting an update on its mobile strategy today. As part of that, its parted the curtain a bit to show us how its planning to integrate one of its recent acquisitions, Pulse. Pulse, the news aggregation and news reading app, will become the "content brand" for LinkedIn, according to Ankit Gupta, Pulse's co-founder. 
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