MP3s are so last century. As we’ve previously reported, Apple is moving iTunes to the cloud and is slowly signing on record labels to supply content. The latest company to fall is apparently Warner Music. The company signed a deal with Apple last week. → Read More
Does founding a non-profit organization require the same skills as founding a traditional start-up company? Are the most successful social entrepreneurs as skilled in personal reinvention as the top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?
Yes and yes. Take, for example, charity: water, the meteorically successful non-profit organization founded by the charismatic Scott Harrison. Four years ago, Harrison was a nightclub promoter making his living by selling $15 bottles of vodka for $350 at four in the morning. Today, having raised over $40 million, he is running a global non-profit dedicated to solving the world’s water crisis.
So how did he do it? As Harrison told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio last week, it required both radical personal reinvention and an understanding of the importance of marketing in building a new brand. Sounds familiar? Yes, the worlds of the non-profit and for-profit entrepreneur are uncannily similar. The only difference being that one is the business of making money and the other in “business” of giving it away. → Read More
Youwho, an Internet startup very much in stealth mode, has secured $5 million in funding, an SEC filing reveals.
We don’t know anything about the startup whatsoever at this point, apart from what we were able to piece together from a couple of Internet searches:
- One of the co-founders is Andre Brummer, former SVP Product at MyFamily.com
(More after the jump) → Read More
Online forms are not sexy, but every Website that wants to collect information or payments from visitors needs them. Today, SurveyMonkey acquired online form maker WuFoo to its growing bevy of tools for $35 million in cash and stock. I’ve confirmed the price with a source.
What’s really great about this story is that WuFoo is another Y Combinator win. The startup launched way back in 2006 with only $118,000 in angel money (Paul Bucheit, who is now a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the investors). The company never needed to raise money again. It added payment processing options a couple years later, and now more than $100 million in transactions have been processed through its forms. → Read More
Ned Strongin, co-inventor of Connect 4, passed away on April 9 of this year. He also invented Weebles, the little toys that wobble but don’t fall down.
Strongin was 92. → Read More
The Nook Color has always been considered a wannabe Android tablet and the latest update makes the 7–incher more tablet than ereader. Previously, modders opened up the platform to all sorts of Android tomfoolery, allowing users to run nearly stock Android builds that brought email, proper web browsing and apps to the device. Never mind that nonsense, Barnes & Noble just added those features themselves.
The latest update is a doozy. The Nook Color now runs on Android 2.2 and supports Flash, real email, and get this, page turning animations. (Like the iPad!) The Nook Color is open to even more apps, but only designed specificity for the device. Epicurious, Pulse, and Angry Birds are the highlights out of the 125 mostly paid apps but it still can’t run any ol’ Android app. → Read More
This past January, upon seeing a demo of IntoNow, we noted that the media check-in game just changed. Apparently, Yahoo agreed — they’ve just acquired the company for something in the range of $20 to $30 million, sources with knowledge of the deal tell us.
There are a couple fascinating layers here. First of all, IntoNow launched just 12 weeks ago. That’s $0 to $30 million (roughly) in just under three months. Second, Yahoo moved fast — really fast — to get this deal done. And they had to — Facebook and Twitter were interested as well, we hear. → Read More
Scott Devon sure shook up the high-end watch world when people got word of the Tread 1. Divorced from all the “tradition” in Switzerland, this California made watch relies instead on suppliers to outfit the aerospace industry. The basic theme of this electro-mechanical timepiece is that time is told on belts (the treads) and read through windows placed over segments of those belts. → Read More
Yep, an Android netbook. 1SaleADay has the Augen 10.2-inch Android 2.1 netbook up for only $99. Now, this netbook is probably not for the weak. No, it’s probably best to only buy this if you already have your bootloader-cracking merit badge. I’m not saying this generic netbook ships locked down, but rather it’s probably so rough in the user experience department that only die-hard Android fans should apply. Like the other one-item-per-day websites, this deal expires tonight so you better throw your $100 into the wind before then. At least this netbook has a working SD card slot. That’s something even the latest Android tablets can’t boast. → Read More
SugarSync, like Dropbox is a standard file storage/cloud solution for PCs and Macs. I’ve used the iPad and iPhone apps and now Android users can share in the fun with their new Android version. The app is free and works with most versions of Android, including Honeycomb. It allow you to access your files on the go and to upload files to the cloud. It works similarly to the iPad version. → Read More
Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has raised $30 million in new financing led by Technology Crossover Ventures with Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Greenspring Associates participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding up to $208 million.
The company is also announcing that it posted record performance in the first quarter, increasing revenue 52 percent year over year. The company posted annual revenue growth of 41 percent in 2010 finishing the year with $134 million in revenue. → Read More
It used to be that all a marketer needed to know was your zipcode, and they could infer your income range and a whole host of other demographic data about you. But with everyone now using mobile phones that can be targeted down to exact GPS coordinates at different times of the day, areas bounded by zipcodes seem vast in comparison. Imagine if instead marketers could break up the world into 100 million different tiles, each one about the size of a city block, and infer everything from what types of people are likely to be found in that tile at any given time. That’s basically what mobile advertising data startup PlaceIQ is setting out to do.
Mobile advertising inventory still goes largely unfilled because the relevance and targeting isn’t that good. PlaceIQ sifts through tons of data about locations to give marketers a mini-zipcode-like profile of each block. The data comes from both open sources and commercial data sets, including place data, retail data, government data, event data, photo data, social data, and, crime data. This goes well beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, but the company says it doesn’t use any personally identifiable information. Rather, it is making assumptions based on the contextual cues of a person’s location and time of day. → Read More
Do you remember Hexapod, the six-legged robot from Japan that we have shown you earlier this month? It’s maker now has released a few more technical details [JP] and also published two demo movies on its site, which are pretty cool (the spider-like sounds the Hexapod can make are especially terrifying). → Read More
Many businesses offer ‘senior discounts’, which are offered to customers who are above a certain age (typically 50, 55, or 60) under the assumption that many senior citizens are retired and/or living on a budget. There are sites that offer an extensive database of available discount codes, such as SeniorDiscounts.com, but they usually look a bit old (pun intented). Enter Sciddy, a new website from Dirxion.
Decidedly not a group buying site like Groupon or LivingSocial, Sciddy lets senior citizens across the United States find discounts on travel, restaurants, shopping, automotive, education, pet services and whatnot in their neighborhoods. → Read More
Google has released Overstock.com from the ‘penalty box’ after the e-commerce destination was caught artificially boosting its search results earlier this year.
From the brief release: Overstock.com today announced that the search engine penalty enforced on them by Google in late February has been lifted. “We understand Google’s position and we have made changes to remain clearly within their guidelines,” said Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. → Read More
Some time in February of this year, David Fagin noticed he was suddenly being blocked from sending friend requests on Facebook after the social networking giant for whatever reason labeled him as a ‘spammer’. When it happened again, Facebook told Fagin that he was in danger of getting his account wiped out completely to boot.
Fagin, an AOL News writer, subsequently penned an opinion piece, in which he claims being called a ‘spammer’ is humiliating, equivalent to being labeled an online pickpocket or con artist.
This morning, he announced he is suing Facebook for $1. → Read More
Amazon has launched a new content hub for its Books area, called The Backstory. The content destination includes interviews with authors, guest reviews, authors’ favorite playlists, recipes, podcasts, essays and more.
Amazon is also debuting “Author Interviews@Amazon,” as part of the launch which is a new author interview series. Author Interviews@Amazon launches with five video interviews, including celebrity chef Tom Douglas, Joshua Foer, young adult authors Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, and Gossip Girl producer John Stephens. Amazon says that new author interviews will be announced via the Amazon.com Books Facebook page and on Omnivoracious.com, the Amazon.com Books blog. Customers will be able to post questions on these pages for visiting authors that will be incorporated into each interview. → Read More
For some reason, “designer calculators” (of all devices) are a dime a dozen, but this model announced [JP] by Japanese stationery maker Kokuyo is a bit different. First, the calculator (dubbed X-VIZ) is designed to be used with one hand only, and second, it’s the brain child of famed robot designer Tatsuya Matsui. → Read More
Nintendo posted a new financial report today, and in a nutshell, things aren’t looking too good. The company’s net profit dropped a whopping 66% to $944 million in the fiscal year that ended March 31, compared with $2.78 billion in the same period a year earlier. Revenue in the same time frame fell 29.3% to $12.2 billion. → Read More
Like this hamster, I am sure you are currently running in circles screaming “Excelsior” at your houseplants and pets, as it was written it has come to pass: Apple is finally shipping the white iPhone 4 and all signs point to availability this week.
The white iPhone, to be clear, is the same as the black iPhone 4 but it is white. → Read More
