GuardTime, the data integrity service, has raised $8m in a Series A round.
Investment comes from Horizons Ventures; Ambient Sound Investments, the fund formed by the founding engineers of Skype; Infocomm Investments; FITOne Capital, a subsidiary of FIT-One Holdings, an IT startup business incubator in Japan; and Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.
The company, founded in Estonia but headquartered in Japan, offers a service architecture that “provides independently verifiable proof of data integrity”, which is often a legal requirement on companies and financial organisations. → Read More
Good job, everyone. Research firm Rescuetime says y’all spent (wasted?) 4.8 million hours playing Pac-Man on the Google homepage since its launch last week. If we convert those lost man-hours to dollars and cents, then you can say the U.S. economy has lost slightly more than $120 million because of Pac-Man. → Read More
We’re down to the final five companies at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield: Betterment, Movieclips, Publish2, Soluto, and UJAM. This afternoon these companies are all making their last appeals to a panel of expert judges, explaining how they disrupt their respective markets. My live notes from the session are below.
The judges:
John Borthwick
Ron Conway
Marissa Mayer
Sam Schwartz
Quincy Smith → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, one of the most interesting talks was when Sean Parker and David Kirkpatrick sat down to talk about the state of Facebook with our own Michael Arrington. Parker was the founding President of Facebook (and still has close ties to the company, as he’s a major shareholder). Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, has a new book coming out, The Facebook Effect, which he spent two years writing getting unprecedented access to the company.
It was a good day for the chat, considering that Facebook just unveiled its new privacy controls. They talked about privacy for quite a bit, but it wasn’t all privacy. They also talked about a number of other things — including Parker’s take on Justin Timberlake playing him in the upcoming Facebook film, The Social Network. → Read More
Yesterday was a sad day for me, albeit one that was a long time coming. Yesterday, Helio, a wireless MVNO co-operated by EarthLink and South Korea’s SK Telecom, let out its final death cry. As I predicted in March, Virgin Mobile, who had acquired the failing company just two years prior, was pulling the plug on the post-paid side of their service that Helio had become. The lights were dimmed, the blinds were closed, and accounts were terminated. Just like that, Helio was dead.
As a small (yet lovely) chunk of our MobileCrunch readers may know, Helio was of some importance to me. On a whim one weekend, long before I became a writer here, I founded a community called Heliocity — which, as you could probably guess by now, was focused on Helio. It was a pretty tightly knit group of 10 thousand-or-so of the geekiest geeks you’ll ever meet, hacking at — and nerding out over — every Helio phone we could get our hands on. That community got me into blogging, which took me to all sorts of industry events, where I in turn met all the people who eventually lead me to my job here at TechCrunch.
To celebrate this nostalgia and recognize the rather cool company that once was, I present: the Helio Ocean 3. This is the phone that was to be Helio’s savior; this is their unfinished magnum opus. Prior to today, it was a myth; no one outside of the company had seen it, and the number of people within the company who had seen it could be counted on two hands. → Read More
“Not a fan of 3D movies? Wait till you play 3D games, that’s when the technology will really shine.” Not an exact quote, but that’s the spirit of what Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President Andrew House said in a recent interview. The idea is that, OK, 3D movies may be just sorta there, but it’s sitting there and playing something like WipeOut HD in 3D where you’ll really gain an appreciation for the medium. → Read More
“We put a bullet in that thing.”
That’s how Sean Parker fondly looks back at Wirehog. According to him and author David Kirkpatrick it was a side-project that Mark Zuckerberg found equally as interesting as Facebook itself. According to both of them, it was also the thing that almost killed Facebook.
The two made the revelation today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. Both were on the stage with our own Michael Arrington to talk about the state of Facebook, as well as Kirkpatrick’s new book about its history, The Facebook Effect. → Read More
The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon saw over 300 hackers battling through the night, fueled by pizza and caffeine. Three projects were selected and the people that hacked those together got a free pass to the conference, and more importantly some stage time alongside the five Startup Battlefield finalists. → Read More
Raymie Stata, Chief Architect at Yahoo, just handed an award he himself decided to dub the TechCrunch Rookie Disruptor Award to an amazing startup that didn’t make it to the finals.
Taking home the award is Art.sy – the picture above shows founder Carter Cleveland.
From our review (also check out the video of their presentation):
The new social site is “the place to discover and share original fine art online.” Okay, it’s easy to say that. But Art.sy’s approach is to make it easy to discover this art through searching. Their custom search engine allows you to find art by period/style, the portion of their career that the artist is in, or the regular stuff like size, color, and, of course, price.
Greenpeace‘s relentless march toward reminding us that we’re killing the planet continues. The organization released its annual “Who’s Green?” list yesterday, and Nokia and Sony Ericsson get A+ marks, while Lenovo and Nintendo are, apparently, the dregs of society. Also on the wrong side of Greenpeace: Dell. The Texas-based company found itself on the wrong end of a rather impressive Greenpeace action yesterday. Oh, dear… → Read More
TechCrunch Nordic – Copenhagen – 26th May 2010
TechCrunch Europe is hosting its 3rd TechCrunch Nordic event – joining the Seedcamp startup programme on their European tour in Copenhagen.
Below you’ll find our live stream from the event which kicks off at 2.30pm Copenhagen time. → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, David Kirkpatrick and Sean Parker sat down with Michael Arrington to talk about the state of Facebook. There were a lot of interesting things said (more on that in posts to come), but one thing that definitely stood out was an answer Parker gave to a question from the audience.
The question asked what Facebook’s next big source of revenue would be? Parker, who was the founding President of Facebook, still works closely with the company as he’s a major shareholder. He noted that Facebook PR might not like his answer too much, but he decided to give it anyway: the Credit system. → Read More
Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has moved swiftly to make its Monetizer AdPlayer product ready for the iPad’s European invasion.
That’s because it now supports HTML5, enabling videos to be monetized on Apple’s tablet. Remember the iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash Video, the current industry-wide standard for delivering online video, so it’s the HTML5 way or the highway as far as Apple is concerned.
And specifically, Monetizer AdPlayer now offers a plug-in for Brightcove, which has already rolled out a HTML5-friendly version targeting the iPad – see the video demo below. → Read More
It doesn’t always have to be the venture capitalists grilling the entrepreneurs – at TechCrunch Disrupt, we’ve disrupted that notion (see what I did there?) and hosted an open-mic session for entrepreneurs to challenge VCs, live and uncensored.
The investors in question were Mark Davis (Associate at DFJ Gotham Ventures), Rick Heitzmann (Managing Director, FirstMark Capital), David Lee (General Partner of SV Angel), Mike Brown (AOL Ventures) and Eric Wiesen (General Partner, RRE Ventures). → Read More
Eighty thousand people have tuned in to TechCrunch Disrupt to watch the launch of twenty new startups and products in the Startup Battlefield – nearly 2,000 in live attendance and another staggering 78,000 on the live video stream.
Of those twenty just ten made it to the second round, where the focus was on the business model. After long deliberations, and after calculating the total score of each startup based on our panel of expert judges and voting from the audience and viewers, we now have the final five TechCrunch Disrupt startups.
The winner takes home an experience of a lifetime, $50,000 in cash and the Disrupt Cup. → Read More
There are a lot of people actively using Google Latitude — 3 million, in fact. But maybe “active” isn’t really a good word for how they use it, since Latitude is a location-based service that’s passive. That is, it is continuously updating your location in the background. You don’t check-in (at least not yet), so there’s not much to actually do. But a new feature today makes this passive service much more interesting.
The new Location History Dashboard gives you a number of ways to view your location history. If you’ve recently gone on a trip, for example, you can see step-by-step where you went and when. It’s a bit like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs — only there are no birds to eat them. → Read More
Is the new Prince of Persia movie racist? Almost certainly not, but that’s the accusation being levied by independent film maker Jehanzeb Dar, saying that the part of The Prince “really needed to go to someone who’s Persian.” So, rather than try to find someone of Persian (or at the very least, Middle Eastern) descent, the film’s producers instead went with a well-known Hollywood actor. Is there anything wrong with that, really? → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt today, web analytics company comScore announced the free availability of its platform for startups.
The company is making Tagging completely free. “Tagging” means putting a comScore tag (i.e. pixel) on a publisher’s web page so that the company can see the totality of a site’s page views at the census level. This data is blended with its panel-based data for a comprehensive view. Previously, the cost of implementing these tags was $5,000, but ComScore will no longer be charging for that set-up cost. → Read More
Remember SEDs? Those surface-conduction electron-emitter displays were around for quite a while, competing with FEDs (field emission displays) until Sony decided to pull the plug on the latter back in March last year. That gave one company, Canon, enough of a push to continue to believe in SED. Canon even filed new patents on SED technology in the US in May 2009. But that’s over now (we kind of anticipated this as early as December 2008). → Read More
We’ve carved out a corner of TC Disrupt and created our own Little Shenzhen sweatshop complete with DIY MP3 players, MakerBot 3D printer, and a pneumatic robot called Stabby. More videos of each event will be posted shortly but if you happen to be at Disrupt, we’re down by the RedBull lounge. → Read More
