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Fab.com New Mobile Apps Focus On Personalized Product Recommendations
Nov 07, 8:33AM
It's been a busy few weeks for Fab.com. First the design-focused online retailer launched an updated Web site the same week it filed a counterclaim against JustFab in an ongoing legal dispute. Then Fab.com co-founder Bradford Shellhammer announced that he was leaving the company. Now its back to business as usual for Fab.com with the latest rehaul of its iOS and Android apps. 
Zendesk And Japanese SaaS Provider Cybozu Announce Product Integration And Marketing Deal
Nov 07, 7:47AM
Cloud computing providers Zendesk and Tokyo-based Cybozu have announced a strategic partnership to integrate and market each other's products in the U.S. and Japan. The deal underscores the rapidly growing adoption of cloud computing in Japan, and is also a potential harbinger of further product integrations between software-as-a-service companies based in different countries.
Discover "The Red Web" At TechCrunch Shanghai, November 19-20
Nov 07, 7:15AM
In August, TechCrunch launched a landmark Chinese edition in partnership with super awesome Chinese blog TechNode. Now we are coming together again, and bringing in some of the leading entrepreneurs, investors and others in the region, for our first joint event in Shanghai on November 19-20. We're calling the event "The Red Web." 
Internet Archive Seeking Donations To Rebuild Its Fire-Damaged Scanning Center
Nov 07, 6:07AM
The non-profit Internet Archive suffered a major setback this morning when a fire broke out at its San Francisco office, causing an estimated $600,000 in damages. Fortunately there were no injuries and no data was lost, but the digital library, which seeks to give "universal access to all knowledge," lost high-end scanners and digitization equipment. The Internet Archive is seeking donations to help rebuild its scanning capabilities for books, microfilm and movies, and allow employees continue digitization work at another location. You can donate here. 
Microsoft Updates Office 365, Brings Real-Time Collaboration To Free Office Web Apps, Adds Yammer To All Enterprise Versions
Nov 07, 5:01AM
It's been six months since Microsoft launched Office 365, its subscription-based version of Office for businesses and consumers. Over 2 million consumers now subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium (the Office 365 "family pack" with five licenses) and 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using it in some form. This, Microsoft says, makes it the company's faster growing business in the history of Microsoft.
How Biz Stone's Biggest Mistake Spawned Twitter
Nov 07, 3:12AM
"The first, second, third company I went to work for, somehow I screwed them all up. Doing startups is all about making mistakes," Biz Stone nervously admitted onstage at the New Context Conference yesterday in San Francisco. He'd just confessed that he didn't prepare anything so will talk about his biggest screw-ups, including one that could earn him many millions of dollars when Twitter IPOs.
The Bitcoin Bubble
Nov 07, 2:10AM
We're back, baby! Bitcoin's price has taken off again, forcing some to defend the value of the currency as utterly un-bubblish. This becomes a humorous exercise. The finance nerd community (of which I'm not nearly good enough to be a member) is done talking about the Trillion Dollar Coin for now, so it's back on the Bitcoin bus. Bitcoin is trading at record price points, currently clocking in at around $264 USD per coin. To put that price point in perspective, in April Bitcoin spiked to around $237. It then fell all the way to around $69 in July. And now we are back north of the $200 mark, rapidly approaching the $300 ceiling.
Silk Road Rises Again
Nov 07, 1:23AM
Like the legend of the phoenix Silk Road has risen from the ashes of a recent US crackdown and is now live and even more secure. At 4:20 pm GMT on November 5 the so-called Silk Road 2.0 reappeared at silkroad6ownowfk.onion, an address on the TOR network. 
Poll Finds Tech-Savvy Users Prefer Smartwatches Over Glass Devices
Nov 07, 1:04AM
A fairly small poll of users on JessicaLessin.com found that, in general, users prefer smartwatches to smart glasses. While this is not definitive proof of any real preference - the sample size is far too small - it does allow us to see what the early adopter will be wearing next season. 
With 30K Active Online Stores, Weebly Launches DIY eCommerce Platform To Take On Amazon And Shopify
Nov 07, 12:38AM
Launching today, Weebly's new eCommerce platform aims to bring simple online store creation to the masses, Rusenko says, and will provide businesses access to a mobile store and checkout, filtered product search advanced merchandising and an integrated shopping cart. The company's new eCommerce tools will be available for free, which includes support for businesses selling up to five products. From there, Weebly offers a handful of plans and pricing options that range from $4/month to $29/month, depending on the number of items one is looking to sell. 
Startups Pitching A "Netflix For E-Books" May Have A Tough Sell
Nov 07, 12:27AM
When it comes to getting consumers to pay for things on a subscription basis, some services fare better than others. A growing number of people seem happy to pay for entertainment-based offerings like Netflix or on-demand streaming music, for example, while "box of the month" clubs and subscription-based shopping sites have been something of a mixed bag. More recently, a handful of startups have begun working to introduce subscriptions into a new category: e-books. 
At $26 Per Share, Twitter's Executives And Directors Own A Combined $3.24 Billion Of Its Stock
Nov 06, 11:46PM
Today Twitter priced its IPO at $26 per share. At that price, the company will raise $1.82 billion from the public markets, and be valued at $14.16 billion, based on a non-diluted share count, and $18.33 billion based on a diluted count. Here’s a fun statistic: The value of the stock held by Twitter’s executive staff and directors is now worth $3.24 billion. Currently, that group holds 124,529,741 shares in the company, or 25.5% of the company. After the IPO, and 70 million shares are sold to the general public, the group will control 22.3% of the company. Evan Williams, who owns the most shares of the group will see his stake fall to 10.4%, but don’t feel sorry for the guy – his 56,909,847 shares are worth $1.48 billion. In second place among the leadership cadre is Peter Fenton, with beneficial ownership of 31,568,740 worth $820 million. Current CEO Dick Costolo has $199.6 million in Twitter stock, while Dorsey has $609 million. Outside of the leadership, external investors are now rich, and almost liquid. Rizvi Traverse controls $2.21 billion in Twitter stock, J.P. Morgan $1.27 billion, Spark Capital $843 million, and Benchmark Capital $820 million. Twitter’s initial public offering saw its price rise, as demand the modest 70 million offered shares was more enthusiastic than what was perhaps anticipated by Twitter. Hoped for, certainly, but expected, perhaps not. A final statistic: According to its filed S-1, existing stockholders of Twitter paid on average $2.21 for the company’s stock over the life of the company. The public has to pay the IPO gate rate. In a nutshell, that’s the VC game. Top Image Credit: Flickr
Twitter Prices IPO Above Estimates At $26 Per Share, Raising $1.82B At Valuation Of Up To $18B
Nov 06, 11:38PM
Twitter will start trading at $26 when it goes on sale, according to an announcement made today by the company on Twitter. That’s on the low side of expected pricing but still above the new official range that Twitter released yesterday. At $26 the proceeds of the sales of 70 million shares of common stock will net it $1.82 billion. This means that the company has a valuation of $14.16 billion based on 545 million non-diluted shares or a maximum of approximately $18.1 billion based on 705 million fully diluted shares. At that pricing, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams owns a 10.4% stake not including options, which is worth $1.48B. Jack Dorsey’s stake is worth $609M and investor Peter Fenton’s clocks in at $820M. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s slice sits at $199M. By far the largest stake is held by Rizvi Traverse which holds 16% valued at $2.21B. Union Square Ventures is set to benefit with a $723.8M stake. Twitter pricing chatter has been hot and heavy over the past few weeks, with some predicting that it would price its IPO well above the new $23-$25 range it set earlier this week in a revised S-1 filing. The pricing range was originally set at $17-$23, which many considered very low and which drove high demand. Yesterday, we noted that Twitter could easily price as high as $25-$28 on IPO. MicroVentures CEO Tim Sullivan told us that the pricing in the private market has been running up hard over the last year. Sullivan noted that it was priced at around $15 last summer, $17 in December, $20 in March and $30 in September. Bids were entered at around $35 recently but could not be filled because the demand was so high. Twitter’s aggressive pricing early on led to oversubscription chatter. Much of the talk about Twitter’s IPO pricing in the run-up has been about comparisons to Facebook’s relatively disastrous offering. It had many issues including a high price, disappointing opening and behind-the-scenes drama, but has eventually far surpassed its opening price of $38 per share. Twitter’s indicated revenue over the past quarter was $169 million, though it also scored a net loss of $64 million over the same period. Twitter will list on the NYSE under the symbol ‘TWTR’. Image Credit: Garrett Heath/Flickr CC
Microsoft Unifies Windows And Windows Phone Developer Programs, Lowers Registration Fees
Nov 06, 10:50PM
Microsoft announced today that it is bringing together its Windows and Windows Phone developer programs. The commingling of both groups is a move by Microsoft to encourage developers to build for more than one of its supported device classes. It also represents another step in Microsoft's effort to unify its platforms on top of a shared Windows core.
AWS Updates Its Elastic MapReduce Console For Exploring Large Amounts Of Data
Nov 06, 10:36PM
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has updated its Elastic MapReduce console, making it easier to manage large amounts of data. The update centers on providing better usability and access to new features that include resizing a cluster by adding or removing instances; cloning a cluster; running Hadoop 2; and targeting a specific availability zone. The EMR console to configure clusters is now on one page: A developer can choose between multiple versions of Hadoop and MapR: The cluster list has also been improved: AWS is notorious for its complexity and usability. The model is to provide the bare minimum and let the user add AWS or third-party services for their deployments. But with the acceptance of cloud computing from the overall market, there comes a higher bar for the way a service is presented. “The new Elastic MapReduce console is a great step forward towards better usability, an area where AWS has struggled in the past,” said Jeff Martens, co-founder and CEO at CPUsage in an email interview with me today. CPUsage is a platform as a service that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. “Kudos to the team in Seattle. I hope this is a sign of more to come, especially for some of the other products in their siloed eco-system which desperately need UI and UX improvements.” AWS executives made a point last year at AWS re:Invent of stressing their commitment to the enterprise market. That’s a challenge for AWS as competing providers like Google offer managed services that abstract the complexity that comes with using cloud services.
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: We're All Getting The Nexus 5, So Break Me Off A Piece Of That KitKat
Nov 06, 10:30PM
Google messed up Daniel Bader's Nexus 5 order, and that makes him sad. Truly, our guest from MobileSyrup and BetaKit deserves better than having half his hopes dashed by a UPS delivery man live on air. We've all ordered Nexus 5 smartphones like the Android suckers we are, and so we chat KitKat and what dreams may come.
With $1.2 Million In Seed Funding, Sprig Launches To Bring Fast, Healthy Meals To SF Eaters For $12 Each
Nov 06, 10:00PM
Here comes Sprig, yet another food delivery service with an interesting new approach to the market. With its own executive chef and delivery team, the service officially launched in some select neighborhoods of San Francisco earlier this week, seeking to make available a few interesting meal choices each night for about $12 each.
Blockbuster's Demise; An Elegy To Video Store Culture
Nov 06, 8:33PM
After years of clinging to life, Dish Network has announced it will pull the plug on its remaining 300 Blockbuster Video brick-and-mortar locations by early next year, signaling another death knell to the age of home video rental. The once-mighty video juggernaut had more than 9,000 locations at its peak in 2004, a number that significantly plummeted over the past decade. I worked for Blockbuster as a teenager in New Jersey in the late ’90s. The job had its ups and downs, and some parts that downright sucked, but it was a generally fun time in my life. With the advent of Redbox, a machine not much larger than an ATM performs a service that in my lifetime once took a building, a payroll, a management hierarchy, and two-dozen employees to deliver. Despite the distinct lack of “experience” involved in sauntering up to a machine and pressing a few buttons to make your selection and pay for it, the store model didn’t stand a chance. While most of us probably haven’t set foot inside a physical video store in a while, those of us of a certain age undoubtedly have a multitude of memories associated with the now almost quaint practice of going out to “rent a video.” When I was a kid, going to the video store was an event. We'd excitedly pile in the car and chatter the whole trip about which movie or game we wanted to rent. As part of the first generation with the technology to re-watch at home a movie we saw in the theater, we took full advantage of this brave new world of home entertainment. My parents grew up in a cinematic era littered with classics; the start of the James Bond film franchise, "The Graduate," "Planet of the Apes" and countless others. Once they saw them in the theater, the only way to ever see them again was as a movie of the week on one of the handful of television channels available at the time. The roots of the "on-demand" home entertainment world we all now live in started with those robust black rectangles called VHS tapes. Everything about the video store was novel. The different membership cards, how they displayed the boxes and the security mechanisms on the tapes themselves were each unique, seemingly with an endless number of permutations. "Ooh, this place cuts one side of the spine
Facebook Like Button, Viewed 22B Times A Day On 7.5M Websites, Gets A Redesign
Nov 06, 8:28PM
Facebook has today updated the design of its Like button for the first time since inception. An image of the new design can be seen below. According to the company, Like buttons appear on over 7.5 million websites and are seen 22 billion times each day. The new design has a Facebook blue background and ditches the "thumbs up" for a simple F with the word "like". F Like. Flike. 
YouTube Starts Rolling Out Its New Commenting System Based On Google+
Nov 06, 8:23PM
In September, YouTube announced that it would soon roll out a new commenting system powered by Google+. After testing it on channel discussion tabs for a few weeks, it's now starting to roll it out to all videos on the site. Given the size of YouTube, this roll-out will start this week, but it will take some time before it is fully effective. Until then, you may see both systems on the site, depending on which video you are watching.
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