Almost 115 million households in the U.S. currently own at least on TV set and 36 million own four or more. That’s a huge market and as Apple, Google and Microsoft try wrestle more of this business away from the traditional content and hardware players, the old-school cable and satellite providers now suddenly have to content with this new group of challengers that, until now, barely registered on their radars. According to Forrester analyst James McQuivey, it’s Microsoft that’s winning this platform war so far. → Read More
Independent online video company Funny Or Die is about to get a lot of help from a traditional TV company, as it’s struck a strategic partnership with Turner Broadcasting to collaborate on multiplatform video content. As part of the deal, Turner is taking a small minority stake in Funny Or Die — terms of which have not been disclosed.
“We’re at an inflection point with digitally distributed video,” Funny Or Die CEO Dick Glover told me by phone. He says that as a result, the timing of the deal is poised to coincide with that inflection point and catalyze further growth for Funny Or Die. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
One of the most memorable moments of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year was office hours with Paul Graham, who is the heart and co-founder of Y Combinator. We are doing it again this year. But because Graham is back in Silicon Valley with a newborn baby, we’re doing it in a slightly different way.
Over the past few years, we’ve heard that it’s not only hard to find engineers. It’s hard to find great design talent. And if Apple’s still unbelievable and mind-boggling rise over the last 15 years shows anything, it’s that design matters. Design and simplicity made the difference between Instagram and every other photo-sharing app. It revived Path. It made Square stand out among all of the other credit card readers. So we’re changing Office Hours to focus on design. Design Office Hours will be held on-stage at Disrupt NYC on Wednesday, May 22nd, from 11:55am to 12:30pm. Just like we did last year at New York during Disrupt, six companies will be chosen from the completed applications below to spend time on-stage with some talented design experts. → Read More
One trend we’ve been tracking is the “Internet of Things” — the idea that at some point, all devices will be intelligent and connected, allowing for things like whole home automation. The problem is that most new systems equipped to connect to the Internet are reliant on proprietary software and hardware usually tacked on by the vendor. So whatever devices do come to market Internet-ready tend to be overly expensive, and don’t play well with others.
That’s where Electric Imp comes in. The startup was founded on the premise of decoupling all the connectivity and intelligence for these connected systems from the devices themselves, and instead, letting those applications be powered by a tiny chip, lovingly called an “Imp.” → Read More
Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by what Google calls its new “Knowledge Graph” and they will serve two different functions. Google will use this space to show you a summary of relevant information about your queries (think biographical data about celebrities and historical figures, tour dates for artists, information about books, buildings, animals etc.) as well as a list of related topics. In addition, Google will now allow you to clarify what exactly you are looking for and will use these boxes for disambiguation. Thanks to this, you will soon be able to tell Google you were looking for the L.A. Kings ice hockey team and not the Sacramento Kings when you searched for ‘kings.’ → Read More
Disrupt alumni never cease to impress. TC50 finalist Perpetually and its web archiving technology have been acquired by Portland, Ore.- based Smarsh.
Though the news hit the Web yesterday, we’re told the acquisition occurred earlier this year. Given Smarsh’s pedigree – which also specializes in archiving digital content, including IM conversations, social media interactions, and email – archiving sites as they change and update is only a natural step forward for the company. Details of the transaction were not disclosed. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
Pearson, the educational publisher, today made a move to beef up its international professional IT testing business: it announced that it is buying Certiport, a developer, marketer and distributor of certification exams and practice tests for IT and digital literacy skills, for $140 million in cash from the private equity firm Spire Capital Partners.
The deal will give Pearson’s VUE unit, where Certiport will sit, much further reach into the retail distribution of testing services in markets outside of the U.S. and UK: Certiport currently sells its certifications and assessments through a network of 12,000 testing centers operated by 70 partners in 150 countries, serving the range of skills in the world of IT. In all, it delivers 225,000 exams in 27 languages every month, and generated revenues of $48 million in 2011.
→ Read More
Facebook’s eight year history is famously speckled with a number of buyout offers from the likes of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. But each time, founder Mark Zuckerberg opted to keep his company independent — against the advice of many.
According to new data out of global accounting powerhouse PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a number of web companies are opting to go the same route: Merger and acquisition (M&A) deals are taking a backseat at the moment, as more web companies are setting their sights on the possibility of an IPO. → Read More
Startup Prismatic claims to show you news related to “what you’re actually interested in.” Starting today, users can to reveal those interests to others with newly launched profiles.
When I first heard about Prismatic, my kneejerk reaction was, “Oh God, another Flipboard competitor.” Making matters worse, the company is building a website first and doesn’t have a smartphone or tablet app yet, which is awfully unsexy. But co-founder and CEO Bradford Cross says the company’s is pursuing a genuinely new approach to the problem, which is why it’s sticking to the Web for now and remains invite-only. → Read More
Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin is joining the board of the event ticketing startup Eventbrite, the company is announcing today. The news of the appointment follows what has been, so far, quite a busy year for the startup, which has now sold 60 million tickets, and is expanding globally with websites in eight different languages.
Morin, whose background includes time as the former head of the Facebook Platform and several years at Apple, will bring his knowledge of social to the ticketing company, says Eventbrite. → Read More
Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom, William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a picker in the 1970s.
He writes:
This “job,” if it can be called a job, is all but dead these days because of some of the basic properties of the new market. Barring those folks on American Pickers who find items that will eventually hang in a TGI Fridays, the potential for making a lucrative trade in a post-Internet world by finding and selling odd items is nearly nil. First, a picker depends on arbitrage. Arbitrage depends on incomplete information on someone’s part or, in the case of collectable, desire. → Read More
Mobile payments and identity verification company Jumio is introducing its Netswipe Mobile SDK today, which allows developers to add credit card scanning functionality to their mobile applications. The SDK (software development kit), is available now for iOS, but an Android version is coming soon, the company says.
To jump start usage, Jumio is also waiving transaction fees for the SDK’s first users for a temporary period of time. → Read More
Is the Twitter platform about to get a second wind of dedicated apps?
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful of products that are starting out by filtering out the most relevant news stories, videos and photos from people’s personal streams. Thirst is one of them and it’s coming out with an iPad app today. The company is backed by nearly $1 million from investors including BlueRun Ventures, former Powerset chief operating officer Steve Newcomb and DCM general partner Jason Krikorian. It was started by two recent Berkeley graduates, Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi. → Read More
Contactually, the lightweight CRM solution for email users which launched into private beta at the beginning of this year, is today announcing its public debut with a number of new features in tow, as well as $500,000 in angel funding from YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, co-founder of CapLinked Chris Grey, and a re-up from previous investor, 500 Startups.
As for the new features, there are quite a few, but the major ones include the launch of “Contactually for Teams,” Microsoft Exchange support, a Gmail plugin, and additional integrations with other services and CRM systems. → Read More
Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures. The startup previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding from most of the same backers — Battery is the only addition. → Read More
Here’s hoping that you already managed to get your hands on an HTC One X, because it may be a while before they appear on store shelves again.
According to a release put out by HTC last night, U.S. Customs has blocked shipments of AT&T’s HTC One X and Sprint’s Evo 4G LTE thanks to an ITC ruling handed down last year.
The news may come as an especially large bummer for Sprint customers looking to upgrade to the new EVO, as a new report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that device will miss its original May 18 launch date. Sprint has since scrubbed their website of references to the device’s forthcoming launch, and there’s still no word on a revised launch window. → Read More
The iPhone might be coming to the world’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The world comes from Bloomberg quoting China Mobile’s chairman. The report also details that the phone might not hit the carrier’s 655 million subscribers yet this year. But the two sides are talking. That’s a start. Apple needs China Mobile and China Mobile needs Apple. → Read More
When it comes to business social networking products, Convo, created by Scrybe Labs, probably doesn’t have the name recognition (or the funding) of Yammer. But judging from the demonstration I saw recently, it has a compelling product, and it’s announcing some nice additions today.
CEO Faizan Buzdar came by the TechCrunch office last week to demonstrate Convo and its new features. It was the first time I’d seen the product, and even though the TechCrunch team pretty much lives in Yammer, I was impressed. When you first open the website or the desktop app, it looks pretty similar to other enterprise social networks — a stream of conversations and shared content from your coworkers. → Read More
With smartphone penetration now at 50 percent in the U.S., the world of apps is seeing a knock-on effect in their popularity: according to a new report from Nielsen, mobile consumers are downloading more apps than ever before, with the average number of apps owned by a smartphone user now at 41 — a rise of 28 percent on the 32 apps owned on average last year.
But at the same time, there are hints of people possibly approaching a limit to how much they might use them: despite the rise in app numbers, the amount of time that people are spending in apps has remained essentially flat: collectively, they are being used for 39 minutes per day today, compared to 37 minutes in 2011.
→ Read More
We’ve been covering Gogobot since it first launched in early 2010. It took the social travel discovery and advice site a little while to find its niche, but since about the middle of 2011, it’s been adding new members rapidly. Today, Gogobot is announcing that it has now surpassed the 1 million registered user mark. According to the company’s own data, a new member is signing up for service every 15 seconds. Overall, Gogobot now has 65 times as many members as just a year ago and its users have now shared over 5 million places on the service. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
