Canadian telecom company Mitel Networks Corporation yesterday filed for an IPO of up to $230 million. The company, which provides integrated communication services primarily to SMBs, said it plans to use proceeds from the offering to reduce debts by repaying its revolving credit and loans, and for working capital and general corporate purposes, including potential acquisitions.
Mitel’s IPO would be the largest ever initial public offering by an Ottawa-based company, according to Ottawa Citizen. No pricing terms were disclosed. → Read More
A hacker, Labba, and his buddies have cracked the Kindle’s ebook DRM, essentially allowing folks to extract the text of Amazon’s AZW files into a PDF for viewing on any reader. The hackers have reverse engineered the ebook code and very close to a formal, software-based solution. → Read More
According to the Mercury News, cops in San Jose will soon be wearing head-mounted video cameras to record their interaction with civilians. The devices will sit above their ears and they will be activated whenever they speak with a citizen or suspect. The videos will then be uploaded to a central server. Presumably these things turn off when the officers are in the toilet.
Why is this happening? Because people don’t trust cops right now. The system, called AXON, can also attach to other parts of the body. → Read More
Those wacky NookDevs have hacked the Nook to within an inch of its life, created a softroot for those who don’t want to crack open their Nook cases to get at the soft and sweet MicroSD card inside. The softroot essentially “jailbreaks” the Nook, allowing you to install homebrew software onto the device.
You can download the software here and I’ve mirrored it here so we don’t destroy their server (although I doubt there are enough hardcore Nookers right now). You should check back with the NookDevs often and always. → Read More
Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse’s total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.
In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site’s users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins. → Read More
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group-based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.
An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go. → Read More
Survey results published by Harris Interactive suggest that adult Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online. About 14% spends 24 or more hours a week online, while 20% of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week.
To put things in perspective: Harris surveyed 2,029 adults by telephone for an entire week in July and October 2009, and has been doing these types of polls since 1995.
Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that. → Read More
I don’t have kids (yet), but I’d be all over this if I did … and if I were a native English speaker: TC50 finalist Story Something is cautiously opening up to the masses during the holidays – intentionally.
While the service is still ‘most definitely in beta’ according to co-founder and CEO Jim Rose, it gives you a pretty good idea of what the startup’s building. → Read More
Now you can get the Death Star plans without having to depending on those Bothan spies. Some enterprising publishing company has licensed and released the penultimate Star Wars geek accessory: poster sized blueprints. → Read More
Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse’s total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.
In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site’s users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins. → Read More
Everyday I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase.
For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere: → Read More
Much of the web is based around clickstreams. The latest version of Whrrl, a location-based application by Pelago, wants to take that concept into the real world, with “footstreams.”
Up until this point, since the launch of version 2 of its iPhone app earlier this year, Whrrl’s focus has been on storytelling. That is, allowing users to tag places they’re at with stories and pictures. But the latest version shifts the focus towards creating a digital record of all the places you go in the real world, Pelago CEO Jeff Holden tells us. “It’s about places, not location,” he says. → Read More
2500 years ago, Europe was a filthy mess of dirt roads, battered and cracked by hooves in the summer and rutted by rude wheels in the winter. To travel from the British isles to the tip of the Apennine peninsula would have been the work of months — and messy and rough work at that. Around 450 BC, the Roman Twelve Tables specified (among many other things) the dimensions of roads, and methods borrowed from the Carthaginians standardized their construction to some extent. Mere centuries later, an unprecedented network of trade and communication had been established, some parts of which are still in use today. The Roman roads improved the entire world, and the fact that they were built, managed, and maintained by the Romans was as effective a weapon for Rome as the gladii wielded by the legions who patrolled them. In the year MMIX Google revealed Chrome OS to the world. It was no more remarkable to onlookers than a single stone-paved road might have been to a Roman citizen in 400 BC. A decade or two from now, an historian might look back on the first few years of Google’s expansion and think: how similar was that Roman’s limited scope of observation to our own! For he saw a road, not the beginnings of an infrastructure which would span continents. And we see a suite of products, vessels for selling ads, not the start of a greater endeavor: a blueprint for connecting humanity in the 21st century. → Read More
Zynga’s massively successful moneymaking machine is about to get another way to reach its millions of avid users. Today, the company is starting to test SMS notifications, allowing a small number of users to receive updates directly to their mobile phones. The first 50 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will be able to try it out for themselves, though it’s limited to Mafia Wars only for now. It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for.
Zynga’s ties with Facebook run deep. They now share some of the same investors, including Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies which has poured as much as $400 million into Facebook and just led a $180 million round in Zynga. Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. → Read More
When Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in June of last year, he probably thought he was done with the place. Apparently, he’s not.
As he noticed today, Yahoo is apparently buying ad space from Schachter’s current employer, Google, to promote its own jobs when you do a search for “Joshua Schacter.” As he puts it in the tweet, “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.” → Read More
Realtime news stream startup Mozzler, which launched at our November Realtime CrunchUp, is bringing more of a news reader feel to its stream search. Mozzler lets you search Twitter, Facebook, and Digg for breaking news. Today it is launching a new way to consume realtime news in private beta which brings the experience back full circle to the look and feel of a typical RSS reader—except that you are not reading RSS feeds directly, you are reading your Twitter and Facebook streams.
The new private beta takes any stories Tweeted out by the people or Lists you follow and expands the into headlines with inline photos and descriptions, much like Brizzly does. It lets you sign in with both your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and merges the two streams. Mozzler founder Chris Were will send invites for the private beta to first 50 people who retweet this post and include the hashtag “#mozzlerbeta.” You can also watch this video demo to find out more. → Read More
Back in September, we wrote about a new iPhone app that would allow you to run a background check on a new lover. It’s mildly creepy, but also kind of interesting. Unfortunately, that app, DateCheck, also charged an arm and a leg to run the checks. A new one gives you some background checking ability for free.
The aptly named Background Check App does exactly what it says: Using data from the site BeenVerified, it allows you to do background checks on people via name queries or their email addresses. And it even allows you to check your contacts on your iPhone with just one click. Just imagine the fun that will bring. → Read More
It’s not really an unprecedented product — magnetic levitation works for high-speed trains and other future toys, so why not your audio gear? Personally I might be a little nervous that the whole thing would just slide off at some point if the fields weren’t aligned right, but they’ve probably addressed that. → Read More
One of the founders, Tony Conrad, and several of the investors behind Aol-acquired Sphere are starting their next company. Conrad is joined by Co-Founder Tim Young who is also the CEO/ Founder of Socialcast.
The angel round includes Aol Ventures, True Ventures (Conrad is a partner there), Ron Conway, Scott Kurnit, Founders Collective, Radar Partners (Doug Mackenzie & Kevin Compton) and David Mahoney.
There isn’t much more to say for now until at least some details leak about what the project is about. Sphere, now called Surphace, was bought by Aol in 2008 for around $25 million. → Read More
In the wake of Google’s dalliance with Yelp, another online local advertising company, ReachLocal, filed for an IPO today to raise $100 million. In a guest post yesterday, Paul Kedrosky suggested that startups like Yelp and others may opt to try their luck with IPOs instead of trying to be acquired. It looks like ReachLocal is ready to get the IPO ball rolling again.
ReachLocal provides a one-stop online advertising shop for about 15,000 small local businesses. A peek at its IPO filing reveals its revenues, profits, and financial condition (see tables below). But the one figure which really stands out is how many sales people it is hiring. The company employs 525 sales people who hock local ads around the world, up from 28 in 2006. Those sales people generated $143 million in revenues the first three quarters of 2009, up 38 percent from the same period in 2008. → Read More
