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
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has secured $500,000 in funding from Western Technology Investment. The startup previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding in June led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrock’s offices and officially launched at DEMO in March.
Founded in 2008 by Michael Cerda, Cc:Betty is a service that routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, “she” will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place. Cc:Betty will track messages with up to 100 recipients and can organize emails with up to 20 MB in size, including attachments. → Read More
[UK] Build an API and they will come. OK that’s not always the case but throw in a genuine revenue stream and support for a hot mobile gadget with an affluent customer base (the iPhone) and you probably stand a much better chance.
That’s the hope of London-based Touchnote and it appears to be coming true. The company, which competes with US-based Shoot It!, turns a digital photograph into a postcard and then sends it to anywhere in the world, has seen its service integrated with ShoZu’s iPhone app.
San Francisco-based ShoZu, which describes itself as a media hub, enables users to push various content, such as photos and status updates, from their mobile phone to multiple social networks and other online destinations. The partnership with Touchnote extends the list of supported destinations to the physical world via a postcard in the mail. → Read More
Step 1: Be a huge nerd. Step 2: Deconstruct a SNES controller and a flash drive. Step 3: Solder shit. Step 4: Become an even bigger nerd. [Ben Heck Forums via hackaday] → Read More
We’d like to heartily thank the sponsors that have supported us this year at TechCrunch Europe. Without these guys, we would never be able to afford to create the kind of events and content around Europe and showcase the startups scene here. These companies all provide value for the tech startup community in their own way. Please visit their sites, contact them, follow themon Twitter and use their services. They are awesome. And if you’d like to join their ranks please contact our events and sponsor managers 2 Pears. So, in no particular order: → Read More
I’ll just say it. Everything is better with a digital picture frame. If someone put a digital picture frame in a toaster, I would buy three. So with that in mind, imagine my excitement when I saw this Insignia alarm clock with built-in digital picture frame. I know, right? Awesome. </sarcasm> → Read More
Whoever says the legal system in this country is broken, well, you’re right. Comcast was caught tampering with its customers’ packets two years ago. It bitched and moaned like nobody’s business, earning itself no friends. The Federal Communications Commission sanctioned the gigantic corporation in what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Big deal. A class action lawsuit was filed, which was just settled for $16 million. Comcast raked in $34.3 billion in revenue in 2008, meaning that this settlement amounts to four hours of revenue. That’s right: four hours. Take that, corporate America! → Read More
The iPhone is already touted for its gaming prowess almost endlessly, but it looks like things are about to take a pretty big leap forward. Epic Games has been crackin’ away at an iPhone port of their Unreal Engine 3 — the engine that powers such jaw-droppingly beautiful games as BioShock, Mirror’s Edge, Gears of War 2, and a bunch of others — and they’re now far enough along that they’re looking to show it off. → Read More
This is just cool. The pic is of a camera blast shield that’s used to capture those spectacular but deadly explosion videos. The best part is that this is homemade device seems somewhat easy to make. That is, of course, if you’re interested in building a camera to record all the shit you blow up. Video after the jump. → Read More
It has been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored.
If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was. → Read More
Still haven’t gotten all those holiday gifts? You still have a wee bit o’ time left. Whether you’re planning to run out to a brick and mortar store or you’re willing to test the limits of expedited shipping, here’s a quick rundown of ideas and info from our gift guide. → Read More
We break out normal coverage today to bring you a highly unusual video of the unboxing of a new Nokia N900. The handset comes in what is called a “hack box” which is a shiny black cube. The only way to open it is to hack your way via a mini USB port attached to a computer which brings up an interface, as gadget blog TracyAndMatt found out. The video shows them entering an unlock command, which pops open the lid in a cloud of smoke. Inside is the normal mobile phone gear, but also mysterious a small plastic fox… Check this out:
Thanks to @richardmoross for the tip. → Read More
Gotta love cops. A woman in Boston got mad at her 14-year-old son for being up at 2:30am playing Grand Theft Auto. (At least the kid wasn’t smoking dust in the street at that hour.) In fact, she got so mad that she called 911 for help. You know, “You have to help me. My son is up in the middle of the night playing video games! I don’t know what to do!” The cops responded, no doubt aggravated that they hadto deal with this garbage, by saying, “Calm down, ma’am. Just put your dumb kid to bed.” That’s not an exact quote, but you know that’s what they were thinking. → Read More
Kublax, the first UK startup to appear resembling Mint in the US, now has new competition in the shape of Money Dashboard, a free online personal finance service for UK consumers. The invite-only beta launch of the service brings an individual’s bank accounts, credit cards, store cards and loans together on one screen to give the user a picture of their personal finances. It plans to launch in Spring 2010. It’s understood to now have in the region of £1.5m in venture investment backing.
Users can aggregate bank accounts, tag transactions and use budgeting tools provided and It will be independent of financial institutions. Founded by Gavin Littlejohn in 2006, the site has on its management team Non Executive Chairman Stuart Sinclair, former CEO of Tesco Personal Finance and David Robinson, founder and former CEO of Bright Grey.
It’s good timing. Some 75 percent of UK consumers are using online banking, up from 54 percent in 2005 according to the British Banking Assiciation.
However, Money Dashboard, although it will be different from Kublax, is in fact powered by the same underlying financial tools provider, Yodlee, a US-based provider of personal finance management and payments solutions. → Read More
Ranking cell phone companies is a tough thing to do. Some of these companies have a bunch of popular handsets, whilst others have just one or two yet manage to sell as many or more. Rank the companies by cumulative sales across all of their lines and the results will swing one way; rank them model-by-model, and they might look completely different. Such is the case with the iPhone, according to the latest numbers from The Nielsen Company. While RIM’s marketshare with their BlackBerry line is still nearly double that of Apple’s, the iPhone has now surpassed everything else to become the most popular phone in the US. → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
