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Viber Desktop Launches On Windows 8
Dec 18, 11:00AM
Viber has been busy lately with the launch of new revenue-generating features like a Sticker Market and Viber Out, but today the company is focused on expanding its reach with the release of Viber for Windows 8.Amazon Raises Its Game Against Alibaba, Will Expand AWS Cloud Services To China In 2014
Dec 18, 9:01AM
Another step ahead for Amazon in its bid to become the world's biggest cloud computing platform for businesses, and to specifically take aim at a big regional competitor in Asia, Alibaba: today it announced that it would extend its Amazon Web Services suite of products to China beginning with a limited preview in early 2014. You can apply for early access on the AWS China homepage here. It is teaming up with local players to provide infrastructure to underpin AWS, and is also starting an incubator to develop more localized services to run in the AWS cloud.Klarna Acquires Germany's Sofort For $150M To Build A Formidable European Payment Network
Dec 18, 8:00AM
Klarna, the Stockholm-based payments company that has raised a whopping $250 million from top-tier investors like Sequoia Capital, is making an acquisition of its own. The company, which makes it easy for European consumers to buy goods online before paying, is acquiring Germany’s market leader Sofort. Together, they’ll have 10 percent market share in greater Europe’s $100 billion e-commerce market. Their network will cover 14 countries in the region and 43,000 merchants. Between them, they’ll have 25 million users and partnerships with more than half of Germany’s online merchants. Klarna is buying Sofort from their majority shareholder Reimann Investors. No details were shared about how much the acquisition was structured, but we hear the price is around $150 million. Klarna plans to operate both companies’ products separately. The transaction is still subject to approval by Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority. Klarna may not be well-known in the U.S. but it was started with the mission of allowing consumers to buy goods the way they do in physical stores — by touching and feeling them before they pay for them. Behind Klarna’s network is a complicated set of anti-fraud technologies that can help the company assume the credit and financial risks that an individual merchant might have to otherwise carry. They have a one-click purchase option that they say allows merchants to see on average a 10-30 percent uptick in sales. They’ve grown this business to $200 million in revenues per year. The company, which has 850 employees, has raised $250 million in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, DST and General Atlantic. They are naturally strong in Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark while Sofort, which was 130 employees, leads in Germany and Austria.Wrike Launches Enterprise Platform For Project Management And A Data Driven Business World
Dec 18, 5:00AM
Wrike has launched a new version of its project management platform with an emphasis on real-time analysis and new features such as syncing calendars to work projects. The new platform, Wrike Enterprise, gives the company a deeper focus on the corporate market for its collaboration-centered tools. It gives customers a way to crunch project management data in the order of a million updates per day. This is data around work items such as tasks completed, the original time planned for the project and the historical data that is associated with the project. The data is presented in "instant infographics," that help people see the latest updates to projects, said Wrike CEO Andrew Filev in an email interview.South America Can Now Crowdfund With Bitcoins
Dec 18, 2:40AM
While the rest of us are messing around with our Paypals and Amazon Payments, some folks in Argentina have created the first crowd funding platform in America to take bitcoin. The platform, called Idea.me focuses primarily on artistic, musical, and retail projects although, as evidenced by the project photos, many campaigns have a philanthropic bent. The platform was "born in Argentina" wrote Pia Giudice and is now in seven countries in Latin America. It is the area's only regional crowd funding platform. The platform has seen $750,000 in funding and should be raising $2.4 million in March 2014 in a Series A.Apple Requiring All App Submissions To Be Optimized For iOS 7 By Feb 1st
Dec 18, 12:37AM
Apple is requiring developers to optimize all app submissions for iOS 7 by February 1st, 2014, according to a new posting on its developer portal. That includes new apps and updates to existing apps. In order to optimize apps for the new operating system, they must be built with the latest version of Xcode 5 which includes 64-bit support and access to new features like backgrounding APIs. Apple has been on a push over the past couple of years to encourage developers to support the latest editions of its OS faster than ever. To do this, it’s made a habit of pointing out the adoption rates of new versions of iOS, which are extremely high. Nearly every event mentions iOS 7 adoption, which now tops 76% of all iOS users, and Apple now publishes current statistics on a page on its site. It’s likely that Apple is more anxious than ever for developers to update their apps to fit in visually and mechanically with iOS 7, as it’s the largest change in the history of Apple’s mobile software. iOS 7 introduced a much more complex physical language while stripping out many of the visual cues that developers had relied on to instruct users. For better or worse, this has created a new aesthetic that many un-updated apps did not reflect. However, from the wording of the notice, it appears that this requirement is more about the underlying construction of apps rather than their appearance. You can ‘optimize’ an app (whatever that means) for iOS 7 and build it against the new Xcode without redesigning it. That being said, many of Apple’s standard UI elements have changed in its new SDK so most apps being built in the new tool will need some re-working in order to look and function correctly.Gift Guide: A Few Of Our Favorite Things
Dec 18, 12:28AM
Friends, the moments are ticking away and it won't be long at all before your tranquil living rooms turn into wrapping paper-strewn war zones. What's that? You haven't done your shopping yet? Well, we've decided to take a quick break from our more thematic gift guides and give you the straight dope on the gadgets and gifts that just make our lives a little better. Read on for a glimpse of what really tickles our fancies, warms our cockles, and drains our bank accounts.Stupeflix Launches Replay, An App To Quickly Stitch Your Photos Together Into Videos
Dec 17, 11:51PM
Stupeflix, a startup that offers video tools to app developers, has launched a mobile app of its own called Replay. In many cases, when a developer-focused company launches an app, it's done as a proof-of-concept: "Hey, look what you could do with our technology!" In this case, however, co-founder Jeff Boudier said this was built to address an honest-to-goodness consumer need, using a lot of the video technology that Stupeflix had already built.Facebook Acquires SportStream To Increase Sports Chatter By Providing News Outlets With Cleaner Data
Dec 17, 11:28PM
Facebook wants more users talking about sports on it instead of Twitter, so today it announced the acquisition of SportStream, a startup that analyzes social media mentions of sports and provides clean data access to news outlets and teams. The idea is by getting more Facebook sports chatter data on TV and digital news, more people will choose it as their athletics watercooler.Move Fast And Break Our Comments Section
Dec 17, 11:07PM
You don't know what you've got until it's gone. We've been on Livefyre comments for a little under a year now and while we weren't the biggest fans of Facebook Comments* while we were using them, we've since realized that there is no perfect solution for commenting. And Facebook Comments, as troubled as they can be, are actually not that bad. At least for TechCrunch's purposes.Facebook's Silent Autoplay Video Ads Require Custom Content To Shine
Dec 17, 11:01PM
Facebook could have made it easy for advertisers to port their TV commercials or online pre-rolls into its new video ad unit. Instead, it's spawned a fresh video ad format designed to minimize disruption to the user experience. While advertisers might be a bit annoyed they can't reuse existing creative, Facebook's decision could reduce backlash and preserve its audience. And it's not the first time.Microsoft Chief: "Nobody Ever Buys Windows. They Buy Windows PCs."
Dec 17, 10:44PM
Earlier today ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley published another installment in what appears to be an orgy of access, this time with outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Regarding its executive changes, Microsoft today reported that it will not announce its new leader until 2014, cooling speculation that the new CEO would land before the end of this year. Ballmer’s remarks are worth reading, of course, but two segments stand out. For one, his framing of Microsoft’s soul after its shift towards devices and services instead of software proper is interesting, given that if the board agrees, his views could be similar to the strategic rubric the company is looking for in their next chief: Are we a productivity company or are we a software company? Well, what we are is a company that knows how to create great software for productivity and serious fun, but the expression will be through services, and through devices increasingly. And maybe it always has been. Nobody ever buys Windows. They buy Windows PCs. That’s mostly true, even though enthusiasts do, in fact, buy Windows as a stand-alone product. But Ballmer is correct in saying people buy Windows PCs more than they buy the operating system itself. Even more, they buy ‘computers’ more than they buy Windows PCs, but that is a quibble. Secondly, Ballmer reflected on Surface as an internal project, in relation to its Xbox efforts. Xbox, of course, was a key moment in Microsoft’s becoming a hardware-capable company. In Ballmer’s view, Surface was “in a way… a tougher bet” than Xbox. Microsoft’s Windows platform needs OEM partners to make tens of millions of PCs each month. Its decision to hem in on their space was heavily frictional. When the Nokia purchase closes, however, Microsoft will manufacture hardware across every major Windows form factor: Tablets and PCs through Surface, smartphones via Lumia, and televisions through Xbox. It can now create hardware consumer experiences for every screen Windows wants to land on. That gives the company increased flexibility to reach consumers, and set the discussion. The new Microsoft’s strategy is well on its way to execution. The question now becomes who will see it through.
YourMechanic Launches An iPhone App To Connect You With A Mechanic While On The Go
Dec 17, 9:33PM
TechCrunch Disrupt winner YourMechanic just got a lot more mobile with an iPhone app that will help users to better diagnose repairs that are needed. The app will also send notifications to users as their car is being serviced and could even allow them to see pictures of jobs being done.Google Glass Gets 'Wink To Shoot Picture' Mode, Lock Screen, YouTube Uploading And Hangouts Chat
Dec 17, 8:56PM
Google has just announced a massive update to Google Glass which adds a lock screen, Hangouts chat, direct YouTube uploading via a Glass app and a ‘wink to shoot a picture’ mode. The wink photo mode is obviously interesting as developers had dug up references to it in the Glass firmware a while ago and it’s just making an appearance now. You can shoot images by simply turning the mode on and winking your eye to snap photos. This eliminates the need to snap an image using the photo button or a voice command. There are some immediate privacy issues which rear their heads here of course — winking is a lot less obtrusive than a hand to the face or saying it out loud. “Glass is about helping you look up and experience the world around you without getting bogged down by technology,” reads the posting. “Based on this philosophy, we’ve got a new setting that lets you quickly and easily capture the moments you care about with a simple wink of the eye. Whether it’s capturing an amazing sunset on an evening walk, or photographing your receipt for the lunch you’ll need to expense, you can now stay in the moment and wink to take a picture instantly.” The post says that photos are ‘just the beginning’. It asks you to imagine situations like ‘winking at a cab’s meter’ to pay for a ride, or winking at a pair of shoes in a shop window to purchase a pair in your size and have them shipped to you. “You wink at a cookbook recipe and the instructions appear right in front of you – hands-free, no mess, no fuss. Pretty cool, right?” Sure, maybe. For now, though, it will be a lot easier for people to take pictures with Glass without their subject’s knowledge. It seems likely that this will cause more friction with those who take exception to Google’s head mounted computer. Some restaurants have already banned the devices in the interest of customer privacy. A new lock screen mode will now clamp your headset down until you unlock it via taps and swipes in a pattern you set. You can now also upload to YouTube directly from the Glassware app on your device, an experience that was previously enabled by developers hacking the platform. Google Music All Access subscribers now also have access to their musicAmazon Kinesis Now In Public Beta For Developers To Build Real-Time Apps
Dec 17, 8:50PM
Amazon Kinesis, the company's new data streaming analytics platform, is now in public beta, allowing developers to build real-time apps without having to manage the complexity of multiple clusters. But though it has been heralded as a new type of real-time app platform, it also has some drawbacks that have emerged since its launch at AWS Re:Invent.How The Nokia Purchase Will Impact Microsoft's Financials
Dec 17, 8:41PM
Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s hardware business appears set to sail through, having passed shareholder and regulator approval. The 5.44 billion euro deal will see “substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business” become part of Microsoft, according to the companies. The deal will allow Microsoft to wrest control of its smartphone platform from a third-party that had increasing hegemony over its end-user experience. Nokia has become the de facto Windows Phone manufacturer, as its rising unit volume met slackening competition due to flagging OEM interest. What will the financial impacts of the Nokia deal be for Microsoft? Two questions need to be answered: Compared to Microsoft’s revenue, how large is the Nokia purchase in terms of relative top line? Also, what impact can we expect Nokia’s hardware business to have on Microsoft’s earnings per share? To explore these issues we will source data from both companies, their joint statement, and industry forecasts. We’ll first examine Nokia’s net sales compared to Microsoft revenue, and then weigh their net incomes to determine an expected percentage and dollar decline in Microsoft’s earnings per share using historical data. Revenue Microsoft says it will purchase “substantially all of Nokia’s Devices and Services business,” a statement that is far too generic to use. Happily, it supplied another figure that is quite useful: In 2012, the portion of Nokia that it will purchase generated 14.9 billion euro in net sales. According to Nokia, the larger Devices and Services group had net sales of 15.686 billion euro in 2012. So, Microsoft is buying assets that drive around 95% of Devices and Services’ net sales. We can use that figure to estimate calendar 2013 Devices and Services revenue, which we can then compare to Microsoft’s same-period revenue to get a good handle on their relative scale. 2012 data isn’t acceptable, as Nokia has shrunk in the interim while Microsoft has grown, distorting the comparison. Nokia’s calendar 2013 Q1, Q2, and Q3 net sales totaled 17.209 billion euro. In that three-quarter period, 8.51 billion euro came from the Devices and Services division, or 49.5%. This is a good number, as it jibes with Microsoft’s comment that the Devices and Services net sales from 2012 that is attributable to what it is purchasing was “almost 50 percent of Nokia’s net sales for the full year 2012.” The market expects Nokia to report 6 billion euros in net sales in calendar Q4 ofDropbox Makes Mailbox More Service Agnostic With Support For Yahoo Mail And iCloud
Dec 17, 8:29PM
Dropbox acquisition Mailbox has expanded from its single service roots with support for Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Me.com and Mac.com accounts. Previously, the client supported only Gmail inboxes, making its audience large but limited. Mailbox said it had more requests for iCloud and Yahoo Mail support than for any other feature. This release displays the influence of Dropbox — which has been by its nature a platform agnostic offering. Confining Mailbox to only Gmail was likely a matter of expediency and growth. But now that Mailbox has the resources of Dropbox behind it, they’ve managed to add in additional services for the first time. The Mailbox purchase was a good signal that Dropbox was making moves to expand beyond a syncing service into a platform of tools. Given that it’s on a crash collision course with Box, which is coming in from the opposite (enterprise) direction, it makes sense for Dropbox to be cobbling together a set of unique productivity offerings it can eventually show to enterprise clients as a reason to use the platform. Box is in the process of doing the same. The Mailbox update is out today for iOS. Unfortunately, thought there are now more mail service options, the app remains absent on Android. And the app won’t truly be service agnostic until it gains support for adding custom IMAP or POP services, but that’s for another day.YouTube Finally, Finally, Finally Gets A Channel On Roku 3
Dec 17, 8:14PM
Mark this up as one of those things that we’ve been waiting for forever and had to happen at some point: YouTube announced today that it’s launched a channel on Roku streaming devices. Well, one Roku streaming device at least. The new YouTube app is available on Roku 3 devices in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Republic of Ireland. And it provides fun stuff like HD streaming and the ability to control the YouTube app with your mobile phone.
Foundation: Brian Armstrong on Coinbase and Bitcoin Security
Dec 17, 8:00PM
In this episode of my Foundation video series, I sit down for a chat with Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong. We chat about Bitcoin, his first Android wallet project, and the insane security he uses to protect your coins. Brian on security: “We have over 200 tests that run against the code before every deploy…we keep the vast majority of customer funds offline…we split the keys with redundancy and geographically split them all over the world so that each of the pieces is in a safe deposit box geographically.” Kevin Rose is a general partner at Google Ventures. You can watch Kevin’s prior Foundation episode, an interview with Matt Galligan of Circa, here.
FlyCleaners, An On-Demand Laundry Startup Rolling Out In Brooklyn, Raises $2M
Dec 17, 7:49PM
FlyCleaners, a startup that picks up your laundry, cleans it, and drops it off on-demand, is announcing that it has raised about $2 million in seed funding from Selkova Ventures and undisclosed angel investors. There are a number of variations on the "Uber for laundry" idea already on the market, including Wash.io and Prim. As far as I know, all of them are limited geographically (FlyCleaners is only available in North Brooklyn), but I assume they all have hopes for expansion.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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