It’s clear there are plenty of Europeans in Silicon Valley already but plenty more are in town for TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco this week.
Here at TechCrunch Europe we though it appropriate to hold a little networking meetup/party in downtown San Francisco for our readers, where Europeans like us can say hi to each other and interface with people from the Valley, over a glass of absynth (or vodka, or warm British ale – whatever your national drink).
So please join us at a beautiful San Francisco location (see picture) from 7.30pm-ish to 10pm this Wednesday evening after the end of TC Disrupt, for drinks and food. If you are able, please bring a bottle of wine to contribute. We are hosted by the awesome Susan MacTavish Best of BestPR. → Read More
Look out On-Star, Mopar is trying to take over your territory. Chrysler just announced their own tracking system for use in Dodge, Jeep, and Ram vehicles. → Read More
While the main focus was center stage on Monday for day one of TechCrunch Disrupt, there was plenty of action backstage— or rather just a few yards to the right to the stage, where our ad-hoc TechCrunch TV studio is located.
Throughout the day, we ran follow-up interviews with a string of Disrupt notables, like KPCB’s John Doerr and Bing Gordon, Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, David Sze, GE’s CMO Beth Comstock and Intuit’s Scott Cook. If you didn’t catch the action on our live feed, they are all available on demand after the jump. A plethora of videos ahead. → Read More
The battlefield companies have finished their demonstrations, and video of the first session is processed and ready to watch. You can just hit play and watch the whole thing from start to finish, or you can refresh your memory with the summaries and links below, then jump directly to any presentation that piques your interest.
My opinions don’t count, by the way. These were just my personal thoughts on their products and presentations. Hit the links for more in-depth descriptions of the companies as well as rough transcriptions of the Q&A portions. → Read More
Okay, we know now that Amazon is on the verge of releasing an Android-based app store. But last week, before we knew that, we got an interesting tip that such a move was coming soon — this week, actually. And that tip came with a bonus attached — the tipster also heard that Amazon was going to be releasing an iPad competitor alongside the store.
Now, unlike the app store, we don’t have any further information to verify this tablet. But again, this tipster nailed the app store part of this news — and knew a couple other tidbits that turned out to be true. So it certainly seems possible that they’re right again. → Read More
If you’ve had a guitar sitting in your closet collecting dust, now may be the perfect time to pick it up again and start learning some new tunes: Miso Music, an upcoming iPad application from Miso Media, looks like one of the niftiest guitar training applications I’ve seen. And it just won the People’s Choice Award at TechCrunch Disrupt, after receiving the most votes from conference attendees browsing the Disrupt Startup Alley.
The real meat of the application lies in its learning mode. First, you choose a song; Miso has licensed music from Sony/ATV, which gives them rights to include music from The Beatles, Justin Bieber, Carrie Underwood, and more. After picking a song, like the Beatles’ Black Bird, you’ll see a series of colorful dots scroll across the screen representing each note you’re supposed to play (this is called tablature, or tab for short, which is a simplified form of music notation often used for guitars). Tabs aren’t anything new. But Miso will actually listen to what you’re playing. → Read More
That was fast. The RIM just dropped the PlayBook on the world and Amazon promptly announces a Kindle app for the platform. The presser doesn’t go into details but you can probably fill in the blanks. After all, Amazon has a Kindle app for nearly every platform including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, PC, and Mac. Next up, webOS for the PalmPad. → Read More
Within businesses, employees can share information over email, and through collaboration platforms like Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter and others. But Q&A platforms like Quora have recently taken off as a centralized knowledge repository for a vast number of topics that is easily searchable. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Opzi is launching a Q&A platform designed specially for businesses.
Opzi, which was incubated at Y Combinator, is essentially a white-label Q&A site that any organization can use internally to store questions and answers about their business processes. The site was founded by 25-year old Euwyn Poon, who graduated from Cornell University at the age of 18 and then received a J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2007. Poon worked as an associate in a law firm after school and found that it was difficult to sort through knowledge and instructions from his fellow associates online. Poon says that a Q&A-like site for business information within a company could help fill this gap and increase efficiency within an organization. → Read More
The act of DNA sequencing results in massive amounts of data around the human genome. Currently, this data is housed in standalone super computers, which doesn’t allow for collaboration between scientists. SeqCentral is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today as a way for human genome scientists to match their data with publicly available data sets.
SeqCentral offers highly-scalable genetic sequence alignment in the cloud. The service allows you to upload your sequencing data in the clouds, and then compare your data with other scientists genome sequencing on the platform. → Read More
We’ve written about Namesake, a stealthy startup founded by former MySpace execs Dan Gould and Brian Norgard, that aims to match opportunities with people in your network. Today, Namesake is launching its professional community at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Namesake, which aims to create a better way to match and route opportunities that come across your desk everyday, is part LinkedIn, part Twitter, and part Facebook. You essentially create a network on the platform by importing your Twitter and Facebook contacts (the sites doesn’t allow integration with LinkedIn contacts yet). You can then post jobs, recommend people for opportunities, connect people with each other and more. → Read More
It’s no secret that performance can play a significant factor in a website’s success — keep your users waiting, and they’ll get impatient and head somewhere else. There are solutions available to help keep things speedy, like CDNs, but most smaller websites don’t use them. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CloudFlare wants to bring these speedy load times to the masses, and it’s offering some other benefits too, including robust security protection against online threats. CEO Matthew Prince says that, in short, CloudFlare takes your average web admin and terms them into a full-fledged Ops team.
Prince says that speed issues can have a big impact on your site — one study showed that for every 100 milliseconds of time spent loading, you lose up to 2% of your visitors. He says CloudFlare offers an average of a 30% increase in speed and can “stop virtually all web spam attacks”. And he says that you can integrate it into your site in around five minutes. Oh, and it’s free, at least for its basic service. → Read More
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will be bringing himself, his hair and his smile to TechCrunch Disrupt tomorrow, Tuesday, to speak on a variety of topics. This is now officially a TechCrunch Disrupt tradition – at our last Disrupt event in New York Mayor Bloomberg made a surprise visit and spoke about efforts to bring more startups to New York.
Newsom will discuss the startup ecosystem in San Francisco, and will probably touch on Zynga’s massive new 270,000 square foot office lease. He may also mention that he’s running for Lieutenant Governor of California this year.
Attendees can see Newsom live. Everyone else can watch for free on the TechCrunchTV live stream. We’ll update the agenda shortly with details and timing. → Read More
Peanut Labs, a company that has creates embeddable surveys for social media sites like Facebook, has been bought by online research panel E-Rewards. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Peanut Labs creates the surveys that are used in online offers you see on Facebook within games. For example, on a Zynga game you may see an offer that will allow you to earn Facebook Credits if you fill out a survey. The surveys are used by companies to gather data for market research. Users complete a preliminary profile questionnaire that enables Peanut Labs to target their respondents with the most appropriate survey invitations. → Read More
Earlier today, after several tips, we guessed that Amazon may be close to launching its own app store for Android — yes, another Android app store. Sources we reached out to weren’t sure about what exactly Amazon was launching, but many had been asked to sign NDAs about something. Now we seem to know a bit more. And yes, it appears that Amazon is on the verge of launching its own app store for Android.
We’re still going over the details, but if the information we’ve obtained is accurate, it appears there are a number of interesting tidbits around payments paid out through this store. And a number of new restrictions. Ugh. → Read More
http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=JhYW1xMTpv_-XezigxCCVrpwww6ZlcsV&version=2 I recently went to fabulous Salt Lake City to the Raytheon Sarcos facility to see the real life version of the Iron Man suit, the XOS 2. And while this suit isn’t powered by some futuristic kind of reactor embedded within a person’s chest, it’s still very impressive. → Read More
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today, Scott Cook, the founder and chairman of Intuit, and Beth Comstock, the chief of marketing and vice president of General Electric (GE) traded notes on innovation, investing and acquisitions.
Intuit’s best-known products include Turbo Tax, Quickbooks and Quicken, software that helps consumers, the owners of small and medium sized businesses and large financial institutions save or manage their money. The company’s more recent releases include the Intuit GoPayment mobile app and Mophie credit card reader, the latter of which began sales at Apple stores about three weeks ago, and Turbo Tax SnapTax, a mobile app which allows users to “snap, prepare and file” their taxes with a smart mobile device. → Read More
According to a company blog post, social bookmarking and search tool Xmarks is shutting down in 90 days.
Following a rebranding from Foxmarks last year, Xmarks, a social bookmarking and search tool, had been growing steadily in users. After the addition of its search feature last March, Xmarks now had 2 million active users and had bookmarked 1 billion URLS. Xmarks is free as a plug-in to users (and was available on IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). → Read More
Here it is, kiddies. The BlackBerry Tablet. Apparently the name BlackPad didn’t make the cut because this one comes with the clever name of Playbook. Details are still developing as it was just announced, but here’s what we know right now: multi-touch capacitive 7-inch display, 1GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, an e-reader app, and the rumored ability to tether to a BlackBerry phone — all set to drop starting in early 2011 for the US and internationally in Q2.
There’s a lot to like here. The PlayBook runs Flash 10.1 and HTML 5 along with supporting 1080p hardware accelerated video. There’s Micro HDMI and Micro USB connections, along with a 3MP front and 5MP rear-facing camera. That HDMI connection can even output video to dual displays. There’s no doubt that the PlayBook rocks some impressive hardware, but that’s only a small part of what makes a tablet great. Its future lies in the hands of what seems to be a totally revamped OS. → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt this morning, HP’s Executive Vice President for the Personal Systems Group, Todd Bradley shed light on the massive number of devices being sold through his group, which Bradley says is in charge of a $40-plus billion revenue stream flowing through the company.
Bradley says that HP is selling $4 million worth of computers in his group every hour, with 2 computers sold each second. As we wrote earlier, Bradley also sees a lot of potential in the tablet market, estimating that tablets will be a $40 billion market over the next few years. → Read More
We started with location check-ins. Then we moved to media check-ins. Now we’re onto product check-ins. The space is starting to fill up quickly, but are they all too convoluted? If SnapDragon takes off, the answer in hindsight may end up being “yes”.
The new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt isn’t trying to pull you into a specific store (like Shopkick). It isn’t trying to mount an overall attack on in-store shopping (like Barcode Hero). And it isn’t trying to turn barcodes into message boards (like StickyBits). Instead, all SnapDragon is trying to do is get you to scan your barcodes to check-in to products you like. Doing this is more a game than anything else — you can share these products, climb a product’s leaderboard, etc. And as a bonus, it allows you to unlock comic book material featuring the company’s SnapDragon character.
Yes, that’s right, comic books. → Read More
