This $69 dongle apparently streams audio from multiple sources including through services like Pandora and SIRIUS XM through your iPhone. The device connects to any aux-in on any stereo and a small app streams the audio over Wi-Fi.
It works for iPhone and iPod Touch now and will soon work with Android.
Video after the jump. → Read More
We are only a few hours away from kicking off the second TechCrunch Disrupt conference here in San Francisco and we are thrilled to announce the 25 startups that were chosen out of nearly 1,000 applicants to pitch ideas and applications over the next few days. We will also hear pitches from the two StartupAlley companies that receive the most votes over the next two days.
These startups will battle it out over three intense days, with one of these companies eventually taking home $50,000 and the official Disrupt trophy. → Read More
IBM today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BLADE Network Technologies, a privately held data center switching company based in Santa Clara, California.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
BLADE, founded in 2006, specializes in software and devices that route data and transactions to and from servers; the company provides blade server and top-of-rack switches as well as software to virtualize and manage cloud computing and other workloads. → Read More
Microsoft has released an updated Bing for Mobile iPhone and iPod Touch app.
The updated app brings with it new features for the mobile versions of Bing Travel and Maps. → Read More
OneHourTranslation.com was born when its founders were trying to translate Hebrew blog posts into English. Discovering no one could do it for less than a few dollars per “page” – a page being anything under 500 words or so – they were stuck paying big bucks for translation. Why? Because the system wasn’t centralized.
Fast forward to today. The service costs $ 0.07 per word and there are a number of languages available. The service works by contacting a network of thousands of freelance translators who are vetted by a community process and then allowed to pick and choose the jobs they want to take. It is, in fact, like having your own translator on staff.
We last talked about the company’s TwitTrans service but now they’ve created a number of CMS plugins including services for Drupal (WordPress is coming soon) as well as an API so you can build your own apps. Essentially this injects a translation project into the service and returns the translation once its done. This allows you to quickly and easily translate blog posts on the fly or even translate an entire website as it is updated, all in an amazingly short time. → Read More
iStreamer by AllOfMe is an iPad app that offers a realtime, timeline-based stream of data from social and RSS feeds as well as images and search keywords. Designed to make it actually kind of fun to browse your friends’ feeds, the app is fully touch-controlled and lets you get a birds’-eye – or worms’-eye – view of your streams. The app costs $4 and is available today on the iTunes store. A lite version will follow that allows you to open only one feed at a time. → Read More
Permuto, a startup that develops an intent-based ad-serving technology, has raised $10 million in funding from Onset Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Clavier and others. This brings Permuto’s total funding to $16 million. As part of the announcement, Permuto is rebranding itself as Buysight.
Buysight’s ad-serving technology captures the intent of what shoppers are looking for on search engines, shopping engines and more and then serves them highly targeted advertisements while they are browsing the web. And Buysight promises to deliver these intent-based ads in realtime. → Read More
Yandex, operator of Russia’s largest search engine, has invested in Tel-Aviv based facial recognition technology startup Face.com, marking its first investment in an Israeli company. In total, Face.com has raised $4.3 million in Series B funding in a round led by previous investor Rhodium.
The news was first reported by TheMarker (in Hebrew) but we’ve confirmed the news with a Yandex representative, who declined to say how much it is investing in the startup. → Read More
XING, the European social network for business professionals, has recently passed the ten million registered user mark (even if it still advertises 9 million members on its main website).
The publicly-listed company says the second quarter of this year proved to be XING’s most successful period of member growth in the last 15 months. → Read More
Online training software startup Mindflash.com is debuting its software to the public today after being in private beta over the past few months. We have a 20 percent discount on the software for TechCrunch readers here.
Mindflash.com is a portal small businesses can use to train employees. Geared towards non-technical users, Mindflash allows participants to upload and share training documents or videos on the web. They can even include quizzes and games to test employees’ comprehension of the content. → Read More
Content delivery and web services giant Akamai has unveiled its Edge Tokenization electronic payment security service today, which secures payments consumers are making on web sites.
Edge Tokenization allows for credit card data to be converted to an anonymous token prior to a Web transaction landing on a merchant’s infrastructure. So retailers don’t have to route customer credit card data on their own infrastructure, and this reduces the risk of information theft. → Read More
As we all know, early adopters hate pulling out their phones. They would, quite honestly, prefer to leave their phones safely ensconced in little leather holsters on their belts, glancing at them only once or twice during the day and spending the rest of the time riding tandem bicycles with loved ones and eating delicate smoked cheeses. This is, it seems, the message Microsoft is trying to impart with these new Windows Phone 7 ads which tout the phone’s simple interface by suggesting that you’ll get more done with less. True? Possibly. A valuable marketing message? Probably not. Windows Phone 7 is obviously the most exciting thing to come out of Redmond in a while and to suggest it is so simple that you barely have to use your phone is to misunderestimate the user base for these things. The first users will use these phones until their fingers bleed and only after a bit of coaxing will people who don’t want to use phones start using WinPho. I’d suspect those users already have Android phones or, barring that, some mix of Blackberry/iPhone usage in their lives, so it will be an even tougher slog for WinPho. Generally, Microsoft would be better off suggesting that you can launch nuclear missiles with your phone than suggest that Blackberry users are inconsiderate shilly–shalliers. One more video after the jump. → Read More
It took them a while, but now it seems Sharp is serious about entering the e-book and tablet business. The company announced “Galapagos”in Tokyo today [press release in English], with Galapagos being the (terrible) name both for Sharp’s cloud-based e-book service and two new Android devices supporting that service. → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear: Review: Mint Floor-Cleaning Robot Build-A-Bear Workshops Now Doing The Star Wars Thing Beautiful “Naked Radio” Repurposes Parts, Looks Amazing Video: Panasonic’s Mini Robot To Travel 500KM On Batteries Sunday Afternoon Read: History Of Game Controllers Netflix Adds Every SNL Season Ever To Watch Instantly → Read More
Last week I sat down with Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha to prepare for tomorrow’s Super Angels To Super VCs — The Changing Face Of Venture Capital panel at TechCrunch Disrupt.
As part of that conversation I asked about some of the big exits that Sequoia-backed startups have enjoyed over the last couple of years. After naming a few I became more curious and asked for more data.
Sequoia supplied it, and the dollar amounts are…really large. I looked at the current value of Sequioa-backed companies that IPO’d in the last two years, and the acquisition value of the companies that were acquired. The total? Over $12 billion: → Read More
Textbook rental juggernaut Chegg raised another $75 million from a Hong Kong investment firm called Ace Limited. This new round, which is a series E, brings the total capital put into Chegg so far to $219 million. The company raised its last round of $57 million just last November.
Chegg rents textbooks to college students, which is a capital-intensive business, requiring warehouses, keeping massive inventory, logistics, and shipping. As Chegg grows, so does its need for capital. But the more it scales, the harder it becomes for others to compete. Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig will be speaking at Disrupt tomorrow, where I will ask him what he plans to do with so much capital. → Read More
This guest post is by Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups and GeeksOnaPlane.
As we wrap up our GeeksOnaPlane video series for TechCrunch TV, I thought I’d offer a perspective on Asia from the eyes of a Silicon Valley geek and investor (not to mention the father of two Japanese-American kids).
I am extremely optimistic about tech entrepreneurship around the world, and in particular in the emerging powerhouse economies of Asia. My new fund 500 Startups is only a few months old, and yet we have already made 8 investments outside the US (4 in Europe, 4 in Asia). Earlier this year, on a trip to Japan I made an investment in MyGengo.com, which provides a crowdsourcing platform and API for language translation. Over the spring & summer, we made several other investments in Europe after meeting companies last year in London at SeedCamp. And our most recent deal happened just this past Thursday, and is our first portfolio company in China — ChinaNetCloud out of Shanghai. → Read More
Many of you may know Blippy’s Philip Kaplan, but many of you may not know that Blippy’s Philip Kaplan (Drums) is in a boy band with Mayfield Fund VC Raj Kapoor (Vocals/Gold pants), Investor Tim Chang (Bass), Facebook’s Ethan Beard (Guitar) and Prashant Fuloria (Guitar).
If you are just learning this now now, don’t fret. There’s still opportunity to familiarize yourselves with the smooth stylings of entrepreneur side-project Cover Flow (there’s nothing dorkier than being named after an iTunes interface). The nerd fivesome met each other through “business” according to Kaplan, and mostly play songs from the ’80s and ’90s, with some Lady Gaga mixed in. Really. → Read More
The topic of Google’s birthday is always a little tricky. The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, the first technical spec is from September 20, 1998, and the first employee was hired on September 21, 1998 (Craig Silverstein — a fellow grad student with Sergey and Larry at Stanford). And yet, the search giant seems to prefer to celebrate their birthday today, on September 27 (which it is on the East coast of the U.S. right now).
Well, it’s their birthday, and they can celebrate when they want to — and that’s apparently exactly what they started doing in 2005. And they are today with a new doodle logo by Wayne Thiebaud, an American painter often associated with the “Pop Art” movement. For Google’s 12th birthday today, he painted them a nice cake. → Read More
If you’ve been eagerly following the peculiar-looking BlackBerry Style 9670 clamshell, then you’re probably keen to see how it compares to their other clamshell, the Pearl Flip.
The fine folks over at PoderPDA have put up two videos outlining the device: one focussing on hardware (the first video below), which also compares the phone to some other BlackBerry models; the other on software (the second video below), which shows the device running BBOS v6.0.0.203. → Read More
