MavenSay, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans, as a result. The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge… → Read More
Real-time parking startup ParkMe wants to help find you parking — in real-time. The company, which originally started out on the Web, has been making a big push behind mobile apps, which is really smart, because most times when you’re looking for parking, you’re not on a PC, but you have a smartphone nearby. And it just launched on Android. → Read More
HasOffers, a startup that helps mobile app developers see which ad efforts are actually paying off, is announcing that it has raised a $9.4 million round of funding led by Accel Partners.
The company was founded in 2009 — the product that it initially built, and the one that’s still highlighted on the HasOffers website, is a system that helps ad networks and agencies manage their… → Read More
Google Checkout is being sunsetted as the company focuses on shaping Google Wallet into a viable PayPal rival. Google Commerce announced today that Google Checkouts will be retired on November 20. → Read More
Founders Fund, the firm founded by Peter Thiel and other PayPal executives, famously declared that it wants to back companies with big, ambitious visions (not just dinky web startups). And that description certainly fits Hampton Creek Foods, a startup that wants to move the world from animal-based foods by creating alternatives that are genuinely tastier, healthier, and cheaper.
Founder and CEO… → Read More
Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow’s superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup. → Read More
Automated Insights, a startup that translates raw data into plain English, is launching a new product that could make analytics data a lot more accessible.
The new product, called Site Ai, pulls data from existing systems (it started with Google Analytics and Clicky, and the company is currently taking votes on which service to integrate next), then it summarizes that data in normal sentences. → Read More
The bookend to Yahoo’s Big News Day — a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr — will see the company drop is Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it’s keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users… → Read More
It’s easy to forget that Yahoo has had a long on-again-off-again love affair with online video. Remember Broadcast.com, which kicked off the Mark Cuban Era? But you might not remember that, because other online video platforms long ago left Yahoo in the proverbial dust. Today, as Yahoo streamed its Flickr product and Tumblr acquisition announcements, we were given a demonstration of why Yahoo has… → Read More
Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service is now offering one full terabyte for users, enough storage space to hold whole swathes of the world’s photos. The service is offering this benefit in addition to its full resolution photo storage service. While the average user will probably not touch the outer limits of this storage space in a lifetime, this alone is probably enough to draw… → Read More
The new Flickr is live.
Smack-dab in the middle of Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition day, Yahoo is holding a major press event here in NYC. But announcements coming out of this event aren’t related to Tumblr as much as Flickr, the photo-sharing database and social network acquired by Yahoo in March of 2005 for $35 million.
Today, Flickr gets a huge revamp including a totally new look and feel… → Read More
Dell has decided not to build out its public cloud and will instead rely on partners such as Joyent to provide infrastructure services. A source close to the matter said layoff notices at the company went out on Friday. The group had more than 300 people in it. It is not known who was laid off or offered other jobs in the company. A spokesperson said Dell would not comment about personnel issues. → Read More
Today has been quite a roller coaster ride for Yahoo — the company put days of reports and rumors to rest this morning when it confirmed that it would acquire the social blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and now CEO Marissa Mayer has confirmed that Yahoo’s New York employees will now be moving.
They’ll all soon be working right around the corner from Times Square in the same building… → Read More
The tech-dominated San Francisco Bay Area isn’t exactly known as a hub for high fashion — Facebook’s new James Perse staff hoodies are about as fancy as things get around here — and fashion shows aren’t typically in our purview here at TechCrunch TV. So when we were invited to attend the Geek 2 Chic fashion show, an event hosted by Microsoft benefiting the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship… → Read More
This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Mayfield Fund Managing Director Navin Chaddha in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show. → Read More
The valley has a bit of a thing for drones lately — have you noticed? Airware, which builds brains for commercial unmanned aircrafts, just raised $10.7M. Longtime Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson left his position to go full-time on his DIY drone company, having raised $5 million.
Later this week at the AngelPad demo day, another drone-centric company will make its debut: DroneDeploy. → Read More
Square’s not just for businesses apparently, as an invite-only page for a product called “Square Cash” has popped up. Not many details are known about it, but we’ve reached out to the company for comment. → Read More
Dude, you got a Linux-powered Dell! In all the years I’ve reviewed laptops I’ve never been as pleasantly surprised by an Ultrabook as I was with the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition. This ultrathin, ultralight SSD laptop originally came in Windows flavor but, much to my surprise, I far prefer the Ubuntu edition of this device. It is solidly built, acceptably priced given the solid state drive, and… → Read More
Laptops are the new desktops. While you can buy a solid tower PC for about $500, this price represents how little manufacturers care about the desktop world. Barring a few huge gaming rigs, laptops are where it’s at.
We have been arguably remiss in avoiding formal laptop reviews and so we’re trying to remedy that with a series we’re calling Laptop Week. This week we will focus on some of the… → Read More
10 days, people! TechCrunch invades Austin in just ten days from now, with our legendary Meetup + Pitch-off series.
The magic started in New York this year, with a hugely successful pitch-off, an amazing turn-out and lots of fun memories. So we’re heading out on the open road with the event, which includes a networking meetup as well as a 60-second pitch-off competition with awesome prizes. → Read More
As AT&T comes under the gun for blocking Google’s new video chat app Hangouts on its cellular network, the company is today hoping to put a better spin on the news by offering a new statement detailing its changing position on support for pre-loaded video chat apps. During the second half of 2013, AT&T says it will begin to enable pre-loaded video chat applications over cellular for all… → Read More
Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.
The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section. → Read More
Last week, representatives of many of the world’s leading cities – including London, Boston, Mexico City, Barcelona and Christchurch – came to San Francisco to learn from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about how to make their cities smarter. One of the people behind this LLGA Cities Summit was the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati and now one of the… → Read More
Tumblr is still shipping. Despite all the noise surrounding the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition, the company has just pushed out an update to its iOS application introducing a new user interface that now includes the almost Path-like post chooser, previously introduced in the Android version. This interface design is becoming more common today, but it’s most reminiscent of things like Mac’s… → Read More
According to a new study, we really don’t have to worry too much about the nearly 1 in 4 children without access to FarmVille at home.
“Our results indicate that computer ownership alone is unlikely to have much of an impact on short-term schooling outcomes for low-income children,” report Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson in a new study of a large-scale randomized computer give-away… → Read More
In the wake of releasing eight comedy series pilots into the wild last month, Amazon is starting to make decisions concerning which pilots will be purchased for development and which will get the axe.
According to Reuters, the company has chosen to build out Alpha House, a show featuring John Goodman about four Senators in DC who live in a house together, as well as Betas. Betas tells the… → Read More
How much of Tumblr is porn, and what is Yahoo going to do about it? On the latter, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer spoke to its plans for addressing content that is not “brand safe” earlier this morning on a call about its $1.1 billion acquisition of the site, saying that Yahoo will need to have “good tools for retargeting,” and will “monetize in a way that is… → Read More
Las Vegas-based apparel retailer Zappos rolled out an update to its iOS app today that saw the company fold some neat new features into the mix. Strictly speaking though , it’s no drastic overhaul — the Zappos mobile team instead focused largely on improving the fit and finish of their iOS-centric mobile experience.
There are a few new graphical flourishes here and there (users can now change… → Read More
If the last few years have all been about building compelling mobile-first or mobile-only experiences, the latest trend seems to be bringing those experiences back to the web. (Just look at Instagram!) Anyway, with that in mind, social TV startup Dijit became the latest to follow this lead, with the launch of NextGuide Web. → Read More
Last fall, fashion commerce startup Monogram launched an iPad app that was aiming to be kind of like a mobile, shoppable magazine for those hip to fashion. It had all the makings of a great mobile commerce app: It looked good, it was easy to use, and it allowed viewers to buy all the latest fashions really easily. → Read More
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