We brought 4INFO founder and CEO Zaw Thet, VP of Groupon Mihir Shah and Brand In Hand founder John Hadl together to talk about their experiences in mobile marketing here at TechCrunch Disrupt, on a panel moderated by TechCrunch’s own Jason Kincaid.
Panel moderator Jason Kincaid began the panel with the classic mobile marketing example of a consumer having a phone in their pocket and having a push notification give them an alert that there’s a frozen yogurt discount nearby. → Read More
Looks like Jaiku founder and former Googler Jyri Engeström is up to something new. According to an SEC filing, a startup listing Engeström as chief executive officer called Pingpin has just raised $775,000 in financing.
Backers are BetaWorks (the startup’s address matches that of the early-stage investment firm) and True Ventures, as founder and managing partner Jon Callaghan is listed as a director as well. → Read More
Dawn Capital has invested a “substantial” but undisclosed amount in Optimalprint, the European online printing company. Optimalprint says it will use the new capital to expand its existing technology and distribution platform, initially in Europe but eventually globally.
The company, founded in 2007, offers premium quality, low cost printed materials for residential and business customers, such as greeting and business cards, office stationery, invitations and calendars, targeting 50 countries worldwide. → Read More
On stage today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, recalled a story from the days when he backed Excite, one of the original Internet portals. Specifically, he spoke briefly about the time they failed to acquire Google.
This story has been circulated for a while, but not many people know about it. Khosla stated it simply: Google was willing to sell for under a million dollars, but Excite didn’t want to buy them. → Read More
Last month, we noted that PayPal would soon launch a new version of their iPhone app that would be more check-friendly. That app should be released in the next day or so, PayPal’s Laura Chambers revealed on stage today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
On a panel alongside Keith Rabois from Square and Holger Luedorf from Foursquare, Chambers said that this new app will allow you to take a picture of the front and back of a check with your iPhone camera, and it will be added to your PayPal balance. → Read More
When it comes to third-party applications, quantity has never been webOS’ strong suit. While BlackBerry OS is hovering at around 10,000 apps and Android and iOS are well past 80,000 and 250,000 respectively, webOS has yet to move beyond 5,000. Until now. Sort of. → Read More
As anyone with working pair of eyes knows, EA released FIFA 11 yesterday. Far more important than Madden to EA’s global bottom line, FIFA 11 is the company’s latest chance for you take take Real Madrid to Wembley. Well, unless your name is Pedro León! → Read More
Lifehacker has a great primer on killing bad Android apps and uninstalling them before they cause damage. While it may feel great to kill apps and see your phone work faster, in reality you could be doing more harm than good. → Read More
Sorry, we were wrong. 2010 wasn’t the year of tablet like it was deemed back in January. We all had such high hopes for this year, too. We thought that every manufacturer was going to out some-sort of tablet, but that clearly didn’t happened. There are a few tablets from various manufacturers, but there are only really three tablets available now that aimed at the general consumer market: The Apple iPad, the Dell Streak, and within weeks, the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Retailers and advertisers are already gearing up for what they believe will be a feeding frenzy for these tablets this holiday season. That’s not going to happen. The tablet is not going to be this year’s netbook or Furby — unless that smaller Apple iPad rumor is true. → Read More
Geomium, a new location-based social network, gets its official launch today, in London first but with other UK cites and then Europe and the U.S. to follow.
As with other such services, it lets users connect with friends, but it also emphasises meeting new people and throws in venue data such as bars, restaurants, etc., as well as local deals and events — all with a focus on real time. If anything the service is in danger of overwhelming the user while also coming across as another me-too offering: How is Geomium different to the likes of Facebook Places, Foursquare, Rummble, Yelp etc.? But actually, that’s why it might just work. → Read More
In Silicon Valley fortunes can change in a matter of weeks. Last year’s awkward nobody entrepreneur could be today’s mogul, angel or VC. This always creates an interesting social tension: Suddenly the guy who was skulking around coffee shops trying to get his business plan in an angel’s hand is the guy new entrepreneurs are skulking around. No one wants to become too cloistered, because they remember where they came from and they might miss the next Facebook. But on the other hand, being too open is a dangerous slippery slope of a time suck with diminishing returns.
That’s why angels I talked to backstage at Disrupt this week were in love with Formspring. (Note to self: Someone’s valuation is going up in the next round…) It’s a way to interact and answer questions without exposing yourself too much or giving up too much control over what’s published. They called it “office hours” and today a bunch of angels are holding these open forums on Formspring. If you need a break from our Disrupt live feed, head over and ask some questions to some of the Valley’s most powerful mentors and investors. → Read More
Here at TechCrunch Disrupt we do things in realtime. So when news starting breaking that IAC CEO Barry Diller was stepping down as chairman of the board of Live Nation, we did the obvious thing: we asked him.
Diller took the stage at Disrupt this morning to speak with our own Michael Arrington. We we brought up the Live Nation rumor, Diller said that he did tell the rest of the board that by the end of the year, they should start looking for a new Chairman. But he also said that there was “no rush” to do this. → Read More
Many of us may have forgotten that Ask.com is a search engine just like Google and Bing. It seems that IAC’s Barry Diller, who owns Ask.com, seems to have no memory of Ask’s value as well. Diller sat down with Michael Arrington today at TechCrunch Disrupt, and spoke candidly about the future of Ask.com.
Says Diller, “I don’t think Ask.com is going to gain search share; everyone copied us.” He added that Ask is not competitive with Google at all. When an audience member asked whether Ask would be more valuable outside of IAC rather than within the network; Diller quipped: Ask has no value inside of IAC, so why would it add value as a standalone site? He also said that IAC hasn’t been able to grown Ask the way he thought the company would be able to. → Read More
Yes, HDCP was indeed cracked, and now there’s an open-source decoding system for it. Right now the system requires a fairly beefy PC, but that may change as people poke around the code a bit. → Read More
Roaming the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt I came across Teamly, a new web app designed to help businesses manage their employees better. Yes, I know that sounds familiar, but what I liked about it was that this was a super, super simple app compared to a lot of the feature-crammed companies out there in this space.
The issue here is that a lot of corporate systems for managing people are really not designed for small businesses. They are just too complex, being packed full of to-do’s, tasks and projects. So Teamly is out to try and makes all that performance monitoring way easier. → Read More
With 80 million members, LinkedIn is steadily growing as the go-to professional social network. And as the company reportedly readies for an IPO within the next year, all eyes are on LinkedIn to see if the company can scale. Today, Michael Arrington sat down with LinkedIn ‘s CEO Jeff Weiner, a former longtime employee at Yahoo, about plans for an IPO, future strategy plans, and more.
Weiner was mum about taking the company public, saying that an IPO is just one way that would allow LinkedIn to achieve long term goals. Weiner, who was formerly the Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division, did elaborate on his beliefs of where the internet is today and what the future potential of his former employer, Yahoo. → Read More
It’s a red-letter day, folks: Gateway just release a $700 NV laptop with WiMAX built-in, namely the Intel 6250 Wi-Fi/WiMax card. Otherwise this is pretty bog-standard for a laptop although it does seem to mirror HP’s sexy styling on their own Envy line. WiMax connectivity comes from carriers across the country and isn’t included in the package. Press release after the jump. → Read More
Over the past two days, we’ve seen 25 startups (and 2 from the Startup Alley) launch on stage at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Our panel of experts questioned and voted on each. And now we’re down to the final seven in the race to accept the TechCrunch Disrupt Cup from Soluto, the winner of our last Disrupt conference last May.
Without further ado, the final seven startups in the running: → Read More
For anyone that has ever struggled to string together a music playlist – whether it be for listening to at the gym, a party, at work or just casually – you may want to listen up. Playlistnow.fm, a brand new startup coming out of Paris, recently launched a microblogging platform that allows users to discover new music by sharing playlists.
When we covered the startup in TechCrunch France, it was nothing shy of a hit with our readers. Perhaps that’s because the platform also managed to do what Apple’s Ping does not do so well: integrate social. → Read More
