eBay and PayPal have released their Black Friday sales and usage data and it looks like both the marketplace and the payments platform experienced strong growth in terms of mobile shopping.
eBay sales in the U.S. from its suite of mobile apps nearly doubled over Black Friday 2009. Globally, eBay mobile is on track to nearly triple its sales over last year and is expected to bring in well over $1.5 billion in mobile sales this year (previously, the company had publicly stated that eBay would bring $1.5 billion in mobile sales; it looks like that number has been altered slightly). On Black Friday, eBay saw a 30 percent increase in mobile bidding activity, compared to the previous year. And since the launch of its first mobile application in July 2008, nearly 30 million items have been bought or sold using eBay mobile apps around the world. → Read More
According to an SEC filing, ClickFox has raised roughly $17.9 million in fresh funding. ClickFox started out in 2000 as a Web analytics company, but has matured into a full-fledged multi-channel metrics provider that aims to help its clients get a complete view on customer experience.
Update: a press release confirms the financing round, which was led by Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners. → Read More
Glancing at my Twitter stream of an evening, I’ve been surprised at the number of Geeks watching The X-Factor TV show (in the UK) which is similar to American Idol . But then I guess it lends itself extremely well to witty asides on Twitter. This actually makes the show worth watching, much more for the social media discussions around it than the show itself. It’s like being at a football match where the crowd’s chants are more entertaining than the game. If there is a business model for bland, manufactured TV I guess this is it.
So we make no apology for passing on the news that social media monitoring company Brandwatch is claiming that it can predict who is about to exit The X-Factor TV “musical competition” based on what’s being said about it on Facebook and Twitter. I asked what else they track, but sure enough, Twitter tops the list as a data source. → Read More
No word yet when Sharp will release their “Galapagos” Android tablets outside Japan, but over here, the 5.5- and 10.8-inch devices will drop into stores on December 10. Big S will start accepting pre-orders for the tablets, which were unveiled back in September, starting December 3. And they won’t be cheap. → Read More
If you were one of those people that watched the iPhone4 v. HTC Evo Xtranormal videos made by Brian Maupin and caught yourself thinking that today’s mobile phones are just downright overcomplicated, you’re definitely going to like Lëkki. The brand new Paris-based startup launched in September is looking to bring back the good old simple portable phones of the 1990s – but in an environmentally friendly and stylish way.
Forget Facebook, Foursquare, email and all those other time-consuming applications out there. If you don’t want to spend your life on your phone (which also happens to be a clock-camera-calculator-garage door opener-microwave-in-one), Lëkki’s “Back to Basics” approach offers telephones that make calls and send texts – and do absolutely nothing more. → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear: Impending Wikileaks Release Could Be ‘Embarrassing’ To Foreign Governments Smartfish Whirl Mini Signals The End Of The Tired Wrist Era Gran Turismo 5 Review Round-up: Yeah It’s Good (But *How* Good?) Visiting Sports Authority On Black Friday? Don’t forget Your FourSquare Death/Star (Episode 1): The Galaxy Tab, Instagram, and Boxee Box (TCTV) → Read More
Rumors of a Google Groupon acquisition are circling through the blogosphere this Sunday night/Monday morning and for good reason, the scrappy little Vator.tv has come up with a 2.5 billion dollar acquisition price for the deal, according to sources. → Read More
Head over to Amazon’s computer section right now and you’ll notice that you have quite a few choices. Thousands of them, in fact. And honing in on the one that best suits your needs can be quite a chore — especially when the data you need to make a good comparison is scattered across blogs, review sites, and electronics databases.
Sparkbuy thinks there’s a better way. The site, which recently closed a $1 million funding round, has set out to build a ‘Kayak for consumer electronics’, and it’s starting with laptop computers. The gist of it: enter which criteria are important to you, and the site will give a listing of laptops that it thinks you’ll like best. Sparkbuy is entering private beta tonight, and the first 500 TechCrunch readers to enter the invite code ‘TCRUNCH-VIP’ will gain access (make sure to click the ‘Sign Up’ link on the site). → Read More
The flames of contact infogate got stoked again this weekend with the release of a particularly inflammatory Google Chrome Extension “Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends.” The extension was taken down minutes after our post went up and I have still heard no word from Facebook or Google on which was responsible for the shut down (my guess is that Facebook changed its email displays from text over to images before Google could pull the extension). → Read More
To me, one of the most interesting thing about Foursquare is the History tab. It transforms the service from a “where you are” app, into a “where you were” log. In a way, it’s sort of like a diary. I wish Twitter was better at this idea as well. Because what I tweeted a year ago says something about how I was feeling, or what I was doing back then. In fact, a lot of the web services we use on a daily basis would be perfect for this type of passive diary writing. And that’s exactly what Momento, an iPhone app, makes happen.
At its core, Momento is a straightforward diary app. It allows you to easy write “Moments” (diary entries) to express what you are doing or feeling on any given day. It takes the process a step further by allowing you to tag friends (from you iPhone contact list), places, events, and add photos to these entries. But the real killer feature of the app is that it also allows you to import bits of information from a number of services including Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, and any RSS feed. The result is a brilliant log of almost everything you’re doing online. → Read More
I like to cover RED stuff here at CrunchGear, because I just like the idea of complacent industries getting kicked the pants by a newcomer. There have been innumerable delays and price hikes, but the RED line of professional digital cameras has impressed some of the big names in cinema from the start — perhaps most famously Peter Jackson, whose “Crossing The Line” short demonstrated the capability of the early models.
He’s come back for more now, and will be shooting The Hobbit on no less than thirty of the latest RED Epic cameras. → Read More
Short version:
EA Sports Active 2 can be your own personal trainer if you manage to set up Kinect properly and you have space where you can exercise. The online tracking is a nice addition and the exercises are great. If you’re looking for something to keep you healthy on the long run, this is for you. → Read More
We’ve been down this road before: a new iOS version is released that undoes all of the nasty stuff hackers did to the previous version. A week later those same hackers blow out a jailbreak and then a few days later they release a full unlock (the latest iOS unlock is only for 3G and 3GS right now, so iPhone 4 users are stuck for now.) Given that this is pretty much standard procedure, why don’t carriers just give up?
Sadly, most other phones don’t get this sort of white glove treatment. A grey market exists that traffics in phone unlocks for many devices including Blackberries and Nokias. Why? Because someone, somewhere wants to move their phone from country A to country B. The vast majority of phone users will never want to this but there is still plenty of demand.
So why not ship without the lock? Well, there are a few possible answers, barring the obvious “Carriers suck.” → Read More
Last week’s guest on Press:Here was Tim Wu, author of the new book Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Wu also wrote this guest post for us about why we should all fear Steve Jobs.
In general Wu — who gets credit for coming up with the term “Net Neutrality” — has a really important mission whether you agree with him or not: Raising alarm bells that the Internet, like every mass communication medium that has come before, could one day become strangled and controlled by a handful of companies.
From what I’ve read and from our conversation on and off camera last Thursday, Wu seems to stop short of saying what has happened before on radio, telegram and television will happen with the Internet, saying it could happen. The question, he says, is whether there is something inherently different about the Internet from a technology standpoint that keeps it inevitably open. I think what keeps it from happening is something else: The community around the Internet and the age of modern entrepreneurship in which we live.
Unless the FCC totally screws up on Net Neutrality, big Internet companies just don’t have the luxury of shutting upstart rivals out. You want to be cynical and say money drives policy in Washington? Fine. There is more money on the side of the Internet being open than the Internet being closed. → Read More
Remember two years ago when Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system? The thinking was that cell phone manufacturers who depended on the Symbian OS could help keep it going. But it was already too late. The iPhone’s iOS and Android started to take over. Even die-hard Symbian supporters abandoned ship. As the fanboy blogger Symbian Guru explained last summer when he decided to give up on Symbian:
I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations.
Now Symbian is delivering itself another blow—this time self-inflicted. The Symbian Foundation, which hosts all the open-source code, big fixes, and documentation for the OS, is shutting down its websites on December 17. The Symbian OS will still technically be open-source, it will just be impractical for many developers to look at it or improve it. → Read More
Index Seed has released an update on it’s progress since launching in April this year and the stats make for interesting reading.
Index Seed ‘lead’, Robin Klein of TAG, blogs today that (quoting):
• We have an active investment committee comprising 5 partners who meet weekly to review potential investments. Saul Klein, Neil Rimer, Mike Volpi, Danny Rimer and myself (Robin Klein)
• We are supported by a dedicated Seed Associate, Terrence Rohan, by Alex Gezelius (Associate at Venture – who has been invaluable to us) and by Thai Tran – a brilliant engineer who has been an EIR at Index and has acted as our Technology advisor.
• We have backing from the full Index Partnership as well as the operations team including, Legal and Admin – Nicola, Andre, Sayula, Nina and Pet
• We have reviewed over 750 plans and met with over 250 companies
• We have made 12 seed investments so far in 2010 (5 in London, 3 on the West Coast, 2 in Israel, 1 in Estonia and 1 in New York). Many are still in stealth so will only be announced at a time to suit the company’s needs.
• Amounts invested have ranged from $100k to $1m
• We have a standard seed term sheet, refined and made founder friendly, closing deals at minimal legal cost
• Every investment has been made with fellow travellers including: Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Quincy Smith, Ariel Poler, Simon Levene, Aydin Senkut, Marten Mickos, Robert Dighero, Stefan Glaenzer, Alex Zubillaga, Jerry Yang, Yaniv Golan, Avichay Nussbaum, Fabrice Grinda, Michael van Swaaij, Seedcamp, Redpoint, First Round Capital, Betaworks, True Ventures, Polaris, Ron Conway, Joi Ito, Matt Cohler
• Together with the other investors interested in supporting the earliest stage businesses like Eden, Notion Capital, Lars Hinrichs at HackFwd, we have actively backed Seedcamp with investment and attendance at events
What they are still working on includes a 3 week turnaround time on feeding back to entrepreneurs. → Read More
Details about the U.S. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks are starting to come out. Although WikiLeaks itself may be under a denial of service attack, it provided several newspapers around the world access to the raw documents it is preparing to release later today. The New York Times just posted it’s first article summarizing the contents of the cables and highlighting the most newsworthy ones.
Among the 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks, there is one set which deals with the massive computer attack on Google and other companies which was first revealed last January. At that time, Google went public with its contention that the attacks came from China, and linked those attacks to government censorship in explaining why Google was pulling out of China proper. They returned in a more limited way last summer. → Read More
A lot of people, including many governments, have problems with WikiLeaks, the site dedicated to publishing sensitive and often classified documents. (Read more background on the controversial organization). The site is currently under a distributed denial of service attack, according to a Tweet from the WikiLeaks account. The site seems to be withstanding the attack so far. It is up right now.
The DDOS attack comes just as WikiLeaks is preparing to release another set of U.S. government documents—this time diplomatic cables which may prove so embarrassing that the State Department decided to warn foreign governments ahead of their release. → Read More
Earlier this month, I attended the MSC Malaysia MAD TechVentures Conference 2010 in Kuala Lumpur, a two-day tech and web industry event organized by local company MAD Incubator and MSC Malaysia. The launch pad was one of the first of its kind in the country whose Internet and mobile population has been growing rapidly in recent years. (TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa, coincidentally in town, delivered the opening speech.)
TechVentures is essentially a platform for Malaysia’s startups to demo their services on stage to an audience and a panel of judges, both of whom selected a handful of companies (out of 22) as winners. The nine lucky companies received advertising and marketing prizes valued at a total of 1.5 million Ringgit (US$500,000).
Thumbnail sketches of all 22 companies after the break. → Read More
