Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from TechCrunch.
Add feeds@feed2email.net to your contact list to make sure you receive all your emails
Make sure to visit feed2email.net to get more feeds sent to your inbox.
To find out which feeds you are subscribed to, or to get further help, just reply to this email.
Warburg Pincus Just Committed Up To $100M For Cloud-Based Janitorial Management Software
Feb 04, 1:36PM
Groundskeeeper Willy's job just got a bit of a boost with Warburg Pincus' $100 million commitment to Dude Solutions Inc. a software company for maintenance management at schools, hospitals, and government offices.FlightCar Targets Business Travelers With New Paid Parking Service
Feb 04, 1:00PM
FlightCar is seeking to boost the number of business travelers who make their cars available through its peer-to-peer rental platform, with a new offering designed to appeal directly to them. While that offering requires that business travelers pay for their parking, they could also make more when their cars are rented.Confide Raises $1.9 Million In Seed Funding To Bring Disappearing Messages To Enterprise Users
Feb 04, 1:00PM
It's been just a month since we first heard about Confide, the confidential messaging app designed for professionals. But already the app has drawn a lot of interest (and cash) from the very people it was made for -- investors, entrepreneurs, and media professionals who don't want their backchannel communications to be leaked.Apple Patents Induction Charging With Orientation-Based Action Triggers
Feb 04, 12:49PM
Apple has received a patent from the USPTO (via AppleInsider) for a method of wireless induction charging that can perform different actions based on the orientation of the device as it’s laid on the charing mat or pad. The patent application was originally published back in September, 2012, and we covered it then, but it’s interesting to revisit in light of recent reports about Apple using induction tech in iWatch prototypes. The New York Times said earlier this week that Apple is working on versions of the iWatch that use induction charging to power up, so that users won’t have to plug them in. The idea is likely that charging yet another digital device has to be as easy as possible for consumers, who already have to deal with keeping their phones, tablets and computers juiced up and ready to go. Apple has a number of patents related to this tech, which is already in use among various Android OEMs as well as Nokia in its Lumia line. Apple has yet to release a device that makes use of the tech, however. An iWatch is a good candidate because of its specific battery challenges, and this positional function switching could potentially apply to a smartwatch, too. You could see triggering an alarm or sleep mode by docking an iWatch in a certain way for overnight charging, for instance, or maintaining an active state for mounting when you’re at your desk and working. Induction charging is far from a lock for a wearable for Apple (nor is the Apple wearable itself, in fact), but Apple is definitely investing in R&D around the tech. And however it addresses it, power management will be a key differentiating factor for any Apple smartwatch, I’d guess, so turning it into a value-add feature with orientation-based actions is an idea with a lot of potential.Website Building Platform BaseKit Raises Further £4.5M
Feb 04, 12:46PM
Website building platform BaseKit, a Seedcamp winner from all the way back in 2008, has raised a further £4.5m in funding. The round was led by Angel CoFund, with participation from existing investors Eden Ventures, NESTA and Nauta Capital.AtTask Picks Up $38M More To Grow Its Enterprise Collaboration Service
Feb 04, 12:30PM
AtTask, a company that vends a collaboration and workflow service for enterprise-level customers, has raised a fresh $38 million in capital, led by JMI Equity. The fund did see participation from prior investor Greenspring Associates.
Localytics Raises $16M To Help Complete The Picture For Mobile Marketers
Feb 04, 12:00PM
Mobile analytics and marketing firm Localytics has raised $16 million in a Series C round led by Foundation Capital and including existing investor Polaris Partners. The new funding is going to help the firm grow its international presence, and will also be used to help it build out its team of experts and library of content for helping its customers make sense of their engagement and usage data. “Last year was a phenomenal year for us, and alongside growth of mobile and the maturity of mobile, we’re able to ride that wave and broaden our platform from analytic to include a tightly integrated marketing platform,” explained Localytics CEO Raj Aggarwal in an interview. “We just saw a lot of growth, and just getting a lot of stuff right in terms of repeatability of business and unit economics.” While the company wasn’t looking to raise money, according to Aggarwal, since they still had plenty of cash in the bank from the previous $9 million they’d raised in revenue, there was a lot of inbound interest from big investors. Timing, given mobile’s current trajectory, combined with a desire to grow the business rapidly, finally led the firm to take on a fresh injection of capital. Foundation was the right partner for this because of their “depth of understanding about marketing software,” in part, Aggarwal said. He also added that their reputation for being a group of people who are really helpful held true during their discussions with Foundation itself, and with its existing portfolio companies. Aggarwal termed this round “extremely competitive,” and yet Foundation was the sole firm to make the cut in terms of new investors. Boston-based Localytics will be focusing on continuing its European expansion using the funds, from its new office in London, but there will also be a focus on finding experts to join the team and help build out its self-service marketing content. “What we’re doing is we’re taking all these best practices and other knowledge from all these verticals, and we’re codifying that and turning them into best practice guides, video seminars, creating bootcamps, etc.,” Aggarwal said. “Obviously, we’re using our tools as a backdrop for how they could do that, but the main point is to educate the industry, because while analytics in mobile is starting to mature a bit, analytics in mobile is still completely new and people don’t know what to do.” TheFuture Ad Labs Turns CAPTCHAs Into Mini-Games (And Ad Revenue)
Feb 04, 11:41AM
We all hate CAPTCHAs, right? Those pesky additions to web forms that try to determine if you are a human and not a computer bot with nefarious intentions. A necessary evil to fight spam and other attacks, perhaps, but conversely also bad for business, dramatically increasing bounce rates and e-commerce shopping basket abandonment.PicHit.Me Nabs $3M To Grow Its Global Photo Market That Wants To Make PowerPoint Users Pay
Feb 04, 11:35AM
Crowdsourced photo marketplace startup PicHit.Me has secured its first tranche of external funding -- closing a $3 million early expansion funding round led by VC firm Almi Invest.Red Hot Remind101 Gets $15M From John Doerr To Bring Free, Secure Text Messaging To Teachers
Feb 04, 11:00AM
Brothers Brett and David Kopf launched Remind101 out of Imagine K12 in late 2011 to tackle what they saw as one of the key problems in primary education: The lack of simple, user-friendly tools that help teachers better communicate with both students — and their parental units. Today, in spite of how critical effective communication is within the K-12 learning equation, schools continue to rely on intercoms, PA systems, paper-based permission slips and phone trees. In other words, the same tools they’ve used for 50 years. Remind101 released mobile apps for Android and iOS last year to help bridge that communication gap, creating a mobile platform that enables teachers to send reminders to students and parents via text and email — be they about permission slips or deadlines — and that acts as a secure, private communications network. The app caught on quickly among teachers and the demand hasn’t slowed down since. By September of last year, Remind101 had six million teacher, student and parent users, a number which today has grown to 10 million, and over 65 million messages are being sent via the Remind101 platform each month. The 10 million user number puts the startup in exclusive company in the education technology world — a fact which has not gone unnoticed by investors. That’s why today, a little over four months after it closed $3.5 million in series A financing from Social + Capital, Yuri Milner, Maneesh Arora and a handful of angel investors, Remind101 is adding another lump of coin to its coffers. Today, the startup announced that it has closed a $15 million Series B round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, with additional participation from its previous investors, including Social + Capital and First Round Capital. As a result of the round, Kleiner partner and veteran investor John Doerr will be joining the startup’s board of directors, alongside Social + Capital founder, Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined the board as part of Remind101′s Series A investment. Although Kleiner Perkins has had its ups and downs of late, adding a veteran investor like Doerr is a big win for the two-year-old startup. While his own investment record, as we’ve noted before, isn’t perfect, there’s a reason that Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page has been quoted as saying that Doerr “sees the future first.” Doerr has been a Kleiner partner since 1980, and has backed companiesLine Messaging App Inks Deal With Carrier Telefónica For Exclusivity In Key Firefox OS Markets
Feb 04, 10:15AM
The Line messaging app that spent last year pushing beyond its home market of Japan has inked a deal aiming to bolster its presence in markets in Latin America. Today it’s announcing a partnership with telecoms giant Telefónica focused on building traction via exclusivity on the lower cost Firefox OS (FFOS) platform. The partnership gives Telefónica subscribers exclusive access to the Line app across what is described as “key Telefónica Firefox OS markets”, including Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, Brasil and Mexico. The deal also includes Spain. The pair said additional markets will be announced “shortly”. This could be a big win for Line — if FFOS takes off. Telefónica has 320 million global subscribers using its network infrastructure, including a significant presence in the LatAm region where Line believes its cuddly cartoon messaging style, which features a range of cute sticker characters and games, can find a Hispanic home from home. An attempt by the company to crack the U.S. market, this time last year, has evidently proven harder, as Line appears to be reconfiguring its strategy around other regions where growth has been easier to come by, such as LatAm and Spain. Turning to the Mozilla flavoured portion of this partnership, the platform launched with much fanfare and a raft of operator supporters at last year’s Mobile World Congress. It’s since been filtering into various markets via carrier launches, with a focus on developing regions where the network operators see a gap to compete with Android at the lower end of smartphones. Since June, Telefónica has launched FFOS in seven countries, while other carriers such as Telenor, Deutsche Telekom and TIM have also started ranging phones running the HTML5-based platform. However it’s unclear exactly how many users there are of FFOS at this point as its carrier backers have not disclosed sales figures. It seems unlikely growth has been rampant or the carriers would have been shouting about it. Still, FFOS’s backers are evidently continuing to push the platform — and to seek ways to differentiate on it via the likes of today’s messaging partnership between Line and Telefónica. Telefónica is presumably hoping to drive interest in its FFOS devices by leveraging Line’s regional popularity, and the popularity of over-the-top mobile messaging in general. So, while the Line application is now available globally via the Firefox OS Marketplace its FFOS app will be exclusive to Telefónica subscribers in the aforementioned (mostly LatAm) markets. That may seemFoodpanda Gobbles Up $20M In Fresh Funding To Fatten Its Global Pawprint
Feb 04, 10:00AM
Rocket Internet-incubated startup foodpanda and its affiliate hellofood have received an additional $20 million in funding from investors including Phenomen Ventures.Wisembly Raises $2 Million To Make Meetings Suck Less
Feb 04, 9:30AM
French startup Wisembly just raised $2 million (€1.5 million) from Alven Capital. It’s the company’s first round of funding after three years of existence. Wisembly wants to be the only tool you ever need to keep track and streamline your meetings in your company. “Wisembly is a collaborative solution for corporate meetings,” co-founder Romain David told me in a phone interview. “It allows you to prepare, facilitate and monitor your meetings.” In other words, Wisembly is an all-in-one platform to assist you when you are leading a meeting — it costs between $13.50 and $27 (€10 and €20) per user per month. To prepare your meeting, you can upload documents, create a poll and more. Then, your meeting attendees receive a link and can interact. When the meeting actually takes place, the idea is to involve as many people as possible in as little time as possible. It’s physically impossible to ask everyone what they think. That’s why everyone can interact in all sorts of way: you can comment, like, vote, or write down a quote from the meeting. It works well for both in-person meetings and conference calls. Here’s what it looks like: Finally, when the meeting is over, you can keep track of past meetings. You get an overview of what happened over time, you can come back and see what the most important part of the meeting was based on likes or comments. You can also see if it was an effective meeting based on various metrics. Meetings are an important pain point in big companies — they drag on, and only a few can speak up. Wisembly wants to fix that, and it works. BNP Paribas, Accenture, SNCF, Danone and around 400 other companies already use the platform. In 2013 alone, Wisembly generated $2 million in revenue (€1.5 million). “When we first started in 2010, we worked on something very different called Balloon,” David said. “Our prototype allowed you to interact and send content around locations — it worked really well for a conference at Sciences Po for example. But very early, we opted for a bigger vision of the product and the company, and chose to target all sorts of meetings.” For now, the company focuses on meetings of 20 persons or more. But the idea is to keep lowering the bar to enter the market of small businesses — it’s a more fragmented butA Deeper Sort Of Social
Feb 04, 8:02AM
If humans are anything, it's adaptive. Give us a tool, and we'll figure out a use for it. That's what happened when we mapped out our social lives to the constraints of the Internet. After we constructed the portals to everything (all of America, Online), we then refined the web, dealing with our basic needs first by building platforms for finding work or friends or romance. We figured out the nuances later, like why we'd need a universal status-update system like Twitter.Getting Girls Into Programming, One Children's Book At A Time
Feb 04, 4:29AM
I normally dislike writing about the issue of women in the technology industry. The media either ends up treating female entrepreneurs with kid gloves or the conversation ends up in some emotionally charged place where people feel angry or violated. And then we’ve made little progress. Are there systematic biases embedded in the industry? Are women not leaning in hard enough? Do we not have enough role models? All of the above? One thing is clear, however. There are just not enough women in the pipeline starting from as early as K-12 schools. If less than 20 percent of computer science degrees are awarded to women in the first place, how can we expect a proportionate number of women to move forward into entrepreneurship or engineering careers? So that’s why it’s refreshing to see someone intervene at such an early stage, and in such a playful, delightful way. Linda Liukas, who founded an educational non-profit called Rails Girls that has taught programming skills to women in 160 cities globally, has switched her attention to a younger set. She’s authoring an illustrated children’s book called “Hello Ruby,” to get girls into coding. And by girls, I don’t mean women in a pejorative sense. I actually mean girls, as in little girls from ages 5 to 7. Liukas says she came up with the idea of her little red-haired protagonist, Ruby, while teaching herself programming. “I would use the Ruby character as a reference. How would she explain object-oriented programming?” she said. Liukas was a business student before she started Rails Girls, which originally was never intended to be a global phenomenon. It grew into a community that has reached 10,000 women through events and weekend workshops. She then went onto work for Codecademy, the New York-based startup that teaches people how to code. She said there’s this huge, untapped potential in younger girls that gets missed. “Teenage girls have such energy, this unhinged energy, that shouldn’t just be expressed in repeating or reblogging,” she said. “They should be creating instead of curating.” She remembered when she was thirteen and dabbled in web development by once making a “really ugly” website about Al Gore. “I was 13. I had all this teenage girl passionate energy and I was really, really, madly in love with Al Gore,” she laughed. She didn’t get back into programming or web development until more than a decadeStumbleUpon and Uber Founder Garrett Camp Is Raising $75 Million For Company-Building Venture Expa
Feb 04, 4:13AM
Garrett Camp, co-founder of both StumbleUpon and Uber, is looking for help in funding his new company-building venture Expa. According to an SEC filing, Camp is looking to raise up to $75 million to bring about a portfolio of innovative new ideas.Twitter Is Hiring Commerce Specialists
Feb 04, 12:49AM
Twitter has not responded to reports, from others and from us, that it is building a marketplace-style platform where users can buy things, but Twitter is quietly building it out anyway. The latest development is that the social network has posted job ads for people to work on a commerce service -- one of the rare times that the company has itself disclosed detail of what it is planning to do. Some of it confirms earlier reports of how Twitter commerce will take shape.Those NSA Transparency Reports From Google Aren't So Transparent
Feb 04, 12:47AM
Google, Facebook, Microsoft and LinkedIn all made headlines today for releasing "transparency" reports about the number of users for which the U.S. government has requested data. We now know that major Internet companies have given up personal information from between 0-15,999 user accounts, but we don't know what exactly was given up or whether additional data was taken without the companies' knowledge.Valve Adds In-Game Music Controls & Playback To Steam
Feb 04, 12:14AM
What fun is playing your favorite game if you can’t blast your favorite tunes? Today, Valve announced a pretty great new feature for its fledgling SteamOS and Big Picture interfaces: in-game music controls. (Wondering what the heck “SteamOS” and “Big Picture” are? SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system Valve is building for a series of dedicated, living-room-friendly PCs they call “Steam Machines”. Big Picture mode is essentially SteamOS minus the OS, meant for people who want the new interface but already have Steam set up on their Windows/Mac/whatever PCs) As it currently stands, switching up your music in the middle of a game (like a game of, say, Team Fortress 2) is a bit of a pain. You’ve got your standalone music player crankin’ away in one window, and your game running fullscreen in front of it. You can alt-tab from one to the other — but that takes ages, and tends to make most fullscreen games freak the hell out for a few seconds. Trying to change up your music queue in between spawns ain’t very easy if your monitor chokes up each time you switch in or out of a game. This problem is made all the worse when you’ve got Big Picture mode running on a TV across the room. Most desktop music players, with their tiny fonts and itty-bitty buttons, aren’t meant to be controlled from more than a foot or two away. With the new Steam Music features, your music is brought right into the Big Picture/SteamOS interface. You tell Steam where your music library is, and it’ll build a shiny new catalog for your perusal, complete with album art and artist photos. And once you’re in a game? Music controls are a keystroke away, having been integrated into the same Steam Overlay that lets you keep track of your friends and achievements without ever leaving your game. Steam Music is currently in early Beta, with Valve rolling the feature out in waves to those who’ve opted-in. To opt in and hopefully get it early, join the Steam Music group over here. The new music control features seem to be meant for Big Picture/SteamOS only at the moment, with Valve promising “desktop features soon to follow” — so if you’re using the good ol’ fashion Steam interface (as I imagine most keyboard/mouse gamers are) you might be waiting a bit longer than your Big-Picture-usin’ cohortsDropbox Is Spilling Over To A Humongous Second SF Office
Feb 03, 11:42PM
Dropbox is growing so fast it will soon run out of room at its San Francisco headquarters. That's why it's just pre-leased a second office a ten minute walk away at 333 Brannan to house spillover of its 500 employees, sources close to the company tell me. SF Business Times first reported Dropbox's had paid for a new space but didn't say why, or if the cloud storage startup would keep the old HQ.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.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks
