Under the radar startup ReadyForce has raised $12.2 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Founder Collective and other investors.
The startup seems to still be under wraps according to its website, which is pretty bare. We do know that ReadyForce was founded by Bill Trenchard, former CEO of LiveOps, and is developing “applications that will create a virtual marketplace for on-demand labor.” → Read More
With the iPad launching on Saturday in the U.S., Apple’s stock price continues to rise. Today, shares closed at $232.39, another all time high. Notably, this push Apple’s market cap past $210 billion for the first time, as it’s now as $210.73 billion. But even more notably is that Apple is now under $50 billion away from its chief rival, Microsoft.
Microsoft ended the day down slightly, to close at $29.60. This pushed Microsoft’s market cap to $259.61 billion. As I wrote, it’s now a question of when Apple will pass Microsoft in value, not if. → Read More
There’s less than a week to go until the iPad’s April 3 launch date, but up until now footage of people actually using the device has been relatively scant — there’s the Steve Jobs keynote address, a few Flip-cam recordings from the twenty minutes reporters had after the keynote, and a whirlwind commercial. Today, we’re getting much, much more: Apple has just posted a series of eleven Guided Tours that walk you through many of the device’s core features, including Safari, Mail, iBooks, and the iWork suite.
We can’t embed the videos here (you’ll have to head to Apple’s site to watch them), but here are some screenshots showing off the device. → Read More
I almost bought a Sony PS3 specifically so that I could use Linux on it. Now, I’m glad I didn’t, because Sony has announced that in an upcoming firmware release they’re going to remove support for alternate operating systems. The official explanation for the removal of this feature is “due to security concerns”, but no specific security concerns have actually been mentioned yet. → Read More
USB 3.0 hard drives are little on the expensive side right now. But there’s a new option in town that will let you give the faster interface a-go with a spare hard drive. → Read More
According to research sponsored by Toshiba, more Americans are afraid of losing digital data — photos, documents, etc — than they are about losing their wallet or an audit by the IRS. This is probably because more people have suffered a digital loss than have been audited by the IRS — we all say “It can’t happen to me!” until it actually does happen, and only then do we change our behaviors. But the reality is, backing up data has historically been tedious, if not actually challenging. And restores are so rarely done as to require the user to search for the long discarded product manual so they can figure out how to do it… → Read More
Montblanc is a pen company. They do watches as an aside, some sort of weird cross-marketing thing that presumably they’ll use to convince watch lovers to go and pick up some pens. However, they have truly outdone themselves with the TimeWriter 1 Metamorphosis.
Ariel at ABlogtoRead found the full details on this watch but, in short, when you pull down a lever the entire face changes. One face, with the lever up, shows the time and date. When you pull the lever you release a single-push chronograph. While the technology isn’t that impressive, the presentation is amazing. Watch the video about and fast forward to about 5 minutes to see how it works. → Read More
Whether it is all the media attention or there are just a lot of lonely people out there with a deep need to talk to strangers, Chatroulette is on a roll. In February, 2010, the young site attracted 3.9 million visitors worldwide, up from 944,000 in January, 2010, according to the latest data from comScore (see chart above). Google Trends for Websites shows a similar growth curve, with about 500,000 unique daily visitors.
The quadrupling of visitors measured by comScore coincided with the relatively new site being discovered by news sites and blogs. It may just indicate the intense level of curiosity about the site, which matches random people together in a simple video chat environment. When you get bored (or creeped out) you can click to start a new session. Or it may be tapping into the basic human need to communicate. It gives “instant communications” a whole new meaning. → Read More
There’s never a shortage of controversy surrounding Google Street View. Even if you think the service is useful and/or cool to look at, you have to admit there’s something creepy about Google cars driving around countries collecting these data with cameras mounted on the roof. And it appears that someone in Germany had just about enough of that.
Police are investigating an incident in Oldenburg, Germany where a parked Google Street View car was vandalized overnight (in German – rough English translation). Apparently, the perpetrator let the air out of the car’s tires and also cut a wire that hooks the roof-mounted camera up with the inside of the car. It seems that nothing was stolen from the car, and none of the equipment on the outside was even taken. So it would seem this is clearly just a sign of protest against Google. → Read More
Everybody hates their email inbox. I’ve begged entrepreneurs to fix the problem. So far, nothing.
A new service called Attention Auction isn’t going to fix that problem, either. But it’s a start.
People bid to get you to read their email. You find someone you want to contact, see how many other messages are in their inbox and how they are priced, and then bid for your message to get in the line. If your message isn’t read you can increase the price and push it higher in the queue. As a recipient you’ll see messages sorted from the highest price to the lowest. Open the message and get paid. → Read More
The iPad isn’t the only upcoming slate computer. Archos has the 7 Home Tablet coming real soon as well. The 7-inch Android tablet doesn’t have an official release date as of yet, but a German retailer states that it will be shipping in a week. Why the iPad launches on April 3rd? Coincidence? We think not. → Read More
In the 2000 elections, incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was defeated by Governor Mel Carnahan in the race for one of Missouri’s U.S. Senate seats. The only problem? Carnahan was dead.
I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town. → Read More
Popular podcasting site BlogTalkRadio has raised $1.9 million in Series B funding from the Kraft Group, Howard Lindzon, Roger Ehrenberg and founder Alan Levy. BlogTalkRadio, which was founded in 2006 and allows anyone can set up a podcast or “radio talkshow” over the web using phone calls, had previously raised $4.6 million in Series A funding in 2008 led by the Kraft Group.
This additional funding will be used for product development and to help BlogTalkRadio expand its solutions to other verticals. few key verticals.BlogTalkRadio’s unique platform allows individuals and companies to use a phone to conduct a live broadcast via the web. Participants dial a phone number, enter the broadcast and then the entire conversation is streamed on air live through the BlogTalkRadio Web site. The site also archives all radio shows as podcasts, so they can easily be uploaded to iTunes and then shared on other blogs, sites etc. → Read More
If only this were true, friends. If only this were true. Click through for the original, amazing, and real Adobe video. → Read More
Warner Bros. UK is offering an internship to “IT literate” students that requires them to spy on fellow file-sharers. The intern will have to maintain accounts on private BitTorrent sites, as well as procure new accounts, in order to supply Warner Bros. UK with information on how that whole “world” works. Not a bad idea from Warner’s perspective. → Read More
A new study from the University of Utah suggests that a very small percentage of people are able to drive safely while using a cellphone. The actual percentage, 2.5 percent of the population, isn’t high enough to affect policy, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Well, kinda. → Read More
Selling updated maps has always been a clever revenue source for top-tier GPS makers. But TomTom is breaking the mold and just starting offering free map and traffic updates across most of its product line. XL and XXL units starting at $199 are now available with the feature. Hopefully TomTom will continue marching the feature down-market, outing new, lower-priced models with the same lifetime trend. Click through for the presser. → Read More
Things are not going great at Elevation Partners. Its initial $1.8 billion fund – that was met with great fanfare when it was raised by rockstar investor Roger McNamee, rockstar gaming executive John Riccitiello and actual rockstar Bono – is about 70% invested and the two biggest deals are duds. Elevation invested some $300 million in Forbes and a whopping $460 million in Palm—a company with a stock hovering around $4 per share, down some 75% since October.
Yet, things aren’t quite as bad as they look from the outside for two reasons. First: Elevation has hedged its risky strategy of putting so much money behind a few bets by concocting a complex system of puts and convertible issues that limit the downside of its worse deals. For instance, even with Palm at the lowly $4 a share, Elevation roughly breaks even on the fund, which not every venture fund raised in 2005 can say for itself.
The second reason? The fund secretly bought up some $90 million of Facebook shares on the secondary market late last year. One person with knowledge of the transaction told us: This deal – which anyone with $90 million could have struck – could be the only thing that tips the fund in the black, a crucial bragging point as Elevation gets ready to think about raising its second fund in a brutal fundraising environment. → Read More
The good word of the rumor mill said we’d be hearing about Push-to-talk on the Verizon BlackBerry Tour soon, and sure enough: ol’ VeeZeeDub has just made it official. → Read More
I guarantee that the outside water spigot at my mom’s house has weathered rings left over from water balloons. There just isn’t a fool-proof way to fill up the balloons on a naked spigot. Sure, there are those little nozzles that thread on, but those don’t work well either. But the AquadAntics Water Bomb Factory is just what the name implies: a venerable water balloon factory. You have to see this thing in action. It’s set to revolutionize summer time. Click through for the video. → Read More
