Short version: Superior Drummer will save you a lot of money if you’re into music production. The steep learning curve is compensated with the depth of settings and options offered. → Read More
A few weeks ago, social commerce network Lockerz acquired photo sharing app Plixi as a way to boost photo sharing on its platform. It looks like the company has hit the ground running in terms of integrations and today is launching a new photo sharing app.
Lockerz, which has raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins newly launched sFund, Liberty Media and Liberty Media’s CEO Greg Maffei, revolves around the idea that influencers within a social network can become brand and content advocates and affect the behavior of their friends. The site attempts to build a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play and connect on the Web and allows users can earn points and discounts on brands by sharing content on the site. → Read More
Auto maker BMW recently established a New York-based venture capital firm dubbed BMW i Ventures that it seeded with $100 million to seek out partnerships that might facilitate BMW-i product adoption in urban markets. BMW-i is a BMW sub-brand solely focused on developing and producing sustainable mobility vehicles.
Its first investment was made public this week: BMW pumped $5 million into MyCityWay, a user-driven, location-aware city guide. FirstMark Capital and IA Ventures, who participated in an earlier $1 million seed round, joined BMW. → Read More
According to a late Thursday SEC filing the New York City startup behind Flavorize.com, FlavorMetrics Corp., is seeking a $1 million investment to build a “Pandora for food.” The company’s web and mobile app is now in private beta.
Currently, Flavorize.com allows users in New York City or San Francisco to enter a few key attributes of meals that they enjoyed before — including ingredients, a restaurant or location where they ate something delicious, a specific dish, or a flavor — to generate suggestions, based on the wisdom (and palate) of the crowds, as to what they might try next.
The startup — co-founded by chief executive Eunice Chou and engineering lead Franco Yuvienco — will compete for users and dollars against a huge number of search and recommendation tools that are already helping people find recipes and restaurants online… → Read More
We have a bemused relationship with most folks from the PR industry here around TechCrunch, and with good reason (trust me on that one).
Most of the time (but not always), we keep our peace when PR flacks go off on us with or without a shred of reason, but sometimes one of them goes off the deep end and we need to point it out. It’s a public service we do for the PR industry to show them the error of their ways.
Consider this a lesson in what not to do in PR. → Read More
My, how things change. A few years ago, anyone proposing that Facebook games would turn into a wildly profitable multi-billion dollar industry would probably be met with some pretty strange looks. Yet now market-leader Zynga has a higher valuation than Electronic Arts. Some might say the gold rush has passed, and that the entrenched players are going to be impossible to beat, but now a new wave of companies has set its sights on a related, but fundamentally different genre: casual mobile gaming.
Today, a startup called TinyCo (formerly known as Brooklyn Packet) has closed an $18 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and they’re setting out to become the most successful mobile gaming company out there. It’s a lofty goal and TinyCo has some steep competition, but their thesis — that mobile gaming is about to take off in a huge way — seems right on the mark. Oh, and they now have Marc Andreessen on their board, which isn’t a bad start. → Read More
Last year, AuroraFeint launched the private beta of OpenFeint X (OFX), which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods. Last December OFX exited private beta and today, OpenFeint is releasing a new version of the suite, OFX 2.0.
With OFX, developers can create Farmville-like iOS games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. OFX’s premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet. OpenFeint says that future updates will allow game developers to offer virtual currency and virtual goods for sale in their games. → Read More
ContextIn, an Israeli company I first got to know when they launched their semantic technology platform at my Plugg conference back in 2009, has recently shifted focus to the buying side of the online advertising equation. We’ve now learned that the company has raised “a few million dollars” in a Series A round led by Spark Capital and Pitango.
I have to admit I’m not 100% clear on what they are building – the company has yet to formally launch its solutions publicly – but the general idea is to bring an algorithmic approach to the optimization of media buying across the various display ad exchanges (e.g. AdECN, Right Media and DoubleClick Ad Exchange). → Read More
Japan’s biggest business daily The Nikkei, usually a very reliable source, reported yesterday in its evening edition that Sony succeeded in developing what appears to be a pretty powerful CMOS sensor. According to the report, Sony’s device can “convert multiple pixels into signals simultaneously”, which results in a reduction of the conversion time by up to 75% when compared to existing sensors. → Read More
Vocus, the publicly-listed provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, has moved to acquire Facebook apps maker North Social, which enables businesses to create, manage and promote their business on the popular social network.
Vocus bought substantially all of the assets of North Social. Under the terms of the agreement, Vocus paid $7 million in cash and could pay up to an additional $18 million over the next 24 months based on the achievement of certain milestones. → Read More
Fresh off the heels of Box.net raising $48 million, cloud storage startup Scality is set to announce next week that they’ve raised $7 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by IdInvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity), with previous backers CAPE, Galileo and Scality CEO Jerome Lecat chipping in. → Read More
Fresh off the heels of Box.net raising $48 million, cloud storage startup Scality is set to announce next week that they’ve raised $7 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by IdInvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity), with previous backers CAPE, Galileo and Scality CEO Jerome Lecat chipping in. → Read More
Last week, we reported about Japanese robot maker Vstone’s plan to start the world’s first full marathon [JP] for humanoids, and that race started today at 10am Japanese time. It will take the 5 participants until Sunday to complete the full marathon (42.195km) in Osaka, and thanks to Ustream, you can see them running live until the very end. → Read More
What Is Thunderbolt And Will It Change Your Life? Stealth: The Arcade Table With 60 Built-In Games LaCie Is The First With A Thunderbolt-Equipped External Drive Startup Company QuakeGuard Develops Early Warning System For Earthquakes Hooray: Alan Turing’s Papers Successfully Acquired For Public Display → Read More
For the past two years I’ve been holding onto the belief that Israeli entrepreneurs should devote particular focus on the opportunities available to products and services that cater to Small & Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs). Slowly but surely, more and more companies have indeed started targeting this space, the most notable being Kampyle, SohoOS, and Clarizen.
Today, Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple is announcing a $1.1M round led OCA Ventures with participation by the I2A Fund, as well as angel investors. → Read More
If there was any doubt in peoples’ minds that Apple intends to kill off the optical disc, it was put to rest today. This morning’s unveiling of the OS X Lion Developer Preview came with the news that it would only be available one way: through the Mac App Store. And while Apple wouldn’t say if they intended to release the final version of Lion to consumers this summer in the same way, it’s pretty clear that they’re going to do just that.
But this important push into the post-optical disc era hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for all so far. → Read More
Google search is powered by algorithms. Computers slice and dice data looking for signals that a web page is more or less interesting than other web pages for a given query. PageRank is a big part of this, where Google looks at inbound links to a site as well as the text relevant to that link. But Google also uses lots of other signals to determine the relevance of a web page. They have to, because PageRank on its own is infinitely gameable.
If no one ever tried to game search results PageRank would work just fine. Inbound links are simply votes for various web pages. If you take the authority of the site linking into account, it makes for really good search results. That’s why Google was so great in 1999, when there was less incentive to game search results, and less expertise by the people doing it.
But today all that’s changed. There’s a feeling that Google’s algorithm is falling further and further behind the very motivated people and companies out there fighting that algorithm. It’s an arms race, and Google is losing that arms race. → Read More
Offhand internationalization doesn’t seem like it should be a problem for websites, or at least it should be a problem that should be easy to solve. Well not so much, at least according to Wordchuck founder Shelly Roche.
We brought Roche into the newly redesigned TCTV studio to talk about her efforts at automating translation (in over 20 languages!) for the Ruby on Rails community, what its like to not win a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon, and her future plans for the internationalization of web content, a project which evolved out of her own attempts to make localization less painful for her own personal development efforts. → Read More
Silicon Valley startup company, QuakeGuard, is expanding its state-of-the-art earthquake detection system first piloted in Palm Springs, CA. Now, there are twelve locations, and 120 more on the way and they can provide early warnings to people who use the system. → Read More
You may not remember, but back in November I wrote about a brave guy who was trying to raise half a million pounds to buy a large lot of notes and papers by the hugely influential logician and computing pioneer Alan Turing. As it turns out he didn’t get near that huge amount, but he did raise quite a bit, which, added to a generous £100,000 from Google and a sum from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, proved to be enough to purchase the papers after they failed to sell at Christie’s. They’ll be on display at the Bletchley Park Museum (Turing’s workplace) after they’ve completed restoration work. Congratulations to all involved. → Read More
