Spiceworks, a startup that develops Web-connected social IT management software, has raised a whopping $25 million in new funding from Adams Street Partners, Tenaya Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding up to $54 million.
Spiceworks develops a desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is mainly used at small to medium businesses to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. → Read More
Be Your Own Souvenir Lets You 3D Scan Yourself And Take Home A Figurine Nintendo Can’t Sell The 3DS And It’s Your Fault The White iPhone Is Official, Available April 28 It’s A Nintendo Controller Messenger Bag! Apple (Finally) Responds To Location Data Tracking Kerfuffle, Says It’s Innocent → Read More
In February I wrote about new startup and luxury home rental service Inspirato. Think timeshare for the rich – members are able to stay at luxury homes around the world for a relatively inexpensive price that’s about 1/3 of market price.
It’s a twist on the Exclusive Resorts model, with the biggest difference being that members don’t have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to join. Instead they pay a relatively modest fee of $15,000 plus a couple of thousand dollars a year.
The company raised $5 million in late 2010 to get things started. Today they’re announcing another $11 million in funding. It’s not from venture firms, either. 50 or so wealthy individuals invested in the round. That’s an average of about $220,000 per person. Most of those investors, says cofounder Brad Handler, got a free membership as part of their investment. Funnily enough, a lot of the investors are venture capitalists acting as individual investors, not through their firms. → Read More
A little bird has told Reuters that Panasonic’s earnings call, due to start shortly, will bring news of huge layoffs in the works. The company is expected to announce 40,000 jobs will be cut from its 380,000-strong workforce. The cuts, which would take place over the next two years, would be the result of continuing “streamlining” in the face of tough competition. Just a little bad news to end the night! Update: The report was updated; Panasonic will be cutting 35,000 jobs over two years, as a result of restructuring, competition, and quake-related earnings drops. → Read More
This information was in the link I put earlier, but just so it’s clear: Sony states that all credit card information in their breached database was indeed encrypted, though the “personal data” wasn’t. What does that mean? → Read More
LetsLunch, the service that helps you network less-awkwardly, is expanding from its comfy Silicon Valley confines and launching in New York today. We first wrote about the service here, and it’s gotten a nice niche following since then. People have scheduled more than 1,000 lunches through the service, and about 70% of the time people take time to write a testimonial of the lunch afterwards.
I respect founder Syed Shuttari’s strict adherence to his vision. A lot of people have suggested he have the “commoners” bid for lunch spots with the more well-known investors and Valley personalities on the site. Shuttari is insistant that would create the wrong vibe, and that the key is the two people meeting on an equal footing. I couldn’t agree more. I want to lunch with people who are interesting, not people who can pay the most money. → Read More
Late last year we first mentioned Y Combinator startup Greplin – it’s a startup that indexes your social stuff in the cloud, making all your Facebook, Gmail. LinkedIn, Google Calendar, Evernote, Twitter, Dropbox and just about everything else searchable. The easiest way to describe it is “the other half of search.”
They opened their doors to customers in February. The company won’t talk about total user numbers yet, which isn’t surprising. But we have dug one interesting data point out of founder Daniel Gross – They’ve now indexed some 1.5 billion documents. And they’re indexing about 30 million new documents per day.
What this means – when you join Greplin you authorize it to index various social apps and services. A typical user may sign up and start off by authorizing Greplin to index Facebook, Twitter and Gmail, for example. Greplin then grabs everything in those services – all your Facebook messages and updates, all your Twitter updates and DMs, all your Gmail messages back and forth, etc. , and lets you search them. When you add up all those documents for all users, you get to that big number, 1.5 billion. → Read More
If you’ve picked up one of the sweet little compacts out there (like the Canon S95 or Olympus XZ-1), but find it a bit petite for your mitts to hold onto securely, you might want to check out these little things from Flipbac. They’re exactly what they look like: stick-on grips that add a little love handle to your point and shoot. [via PetaPixel] → Read More
Recent bug reports within the Chromium testing community have turned up a couple new devices running Chrome OS. There’s the expected netbook from Acer, different from the ZGA we saw a while back, and a mystery device referred to as Seaboard that may or may not be a Chrome OS tablet. → Read More
Yesterday Sony revealed that some 77 million members of its Playstation Network had their personal information harvested by hackers, including name, address, and possibly credit card numbers in a massive security breach. Sony pulled down PSN as soon as it detected the breach, (we’ve been following the story since it first began last week), and it’s now regularly sharing more details to provide clarity to the situation.
This evening Sony posted a lengthy Q&A discussing the security measures it had taken to keep user data in the first place. Among the answers: → Read More
There are definitely some slick-looking electric motorcycles and bikes out there — but this ain’t one of ‘em. On the other hand, it does look like something you could keep working in a Mad Max type environment. And in the end, isn’t that really what it’s all about? → Read More
Home of the “DARPA” hoodie, the “Bike To Work” pants, the “Disco” shorts, the “Cornucopia” backpack, the “Vagisoft (yes)” blanket and the TSA-proof “Privates” underwear, Betabrand is an online-only marketplace for unconventional clothes in the same eclectic e-commerce space as Modcloth and Threadless.
The company’s emphasis on original in-house designs, in addition to its 100K-200K in monthly revenue, certainly piqued the interest of O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures which led Betabrand’s $1.3 million Series A round followed by Morado Ventures this week. Along with the recent financing, OATV’s Mark Jacobsen will be joining the Betabrand board. → Read More
There’s just no way around it. Sony really screwed up. And not just in the way they consistently have in the past. I mean big time. The outage that started last week and was finally addressed yesterday is worse than anyone expected, and naturally, someone has already sued. The lawsuit alleges that Sony was both remiss in its security responsibilities and its duty to inform its customers of the problem. I think it’s got legs. → Read More
It’s a sad fact that a few of the most classic franchises of golden-age PC gaming (i.e. after the heyday of early consoles and before the 360 and PS3 ate its lunch) have been neglected and even abused. Thief is one of them — after the first two critically-acclaimed games, a lukewarm third was released alongside a similarly watered-down Deus Ex 2.
But now both these great games appear to be getting the attention they deserve: with Deus Ex: Human Revolution finishing production (and looking great), it’s time for the team at Eidos Montreal to turn their efforts toward Thief 4. → Read More
Last week, I was on vacation and I promised myself that I wouldn’t do any work. I was still lightly browsing tech news just because I really enjoy reading tech news — yes, even on vacations. I came across the Apple location story and started to read some of the commentary about the situation. Most of it was idiotic. Pure FUD. It was really hard not to open my laptop and start typing — so I tweeted some snark instead. But now I’m back. And now Apple has officially weighed in. It’s time to start typing.
The situation is a joke.
That’s not to say the actual issue at hand is a joke, but rather the coverage of the issue is. In that regard, it reminds me a lot of “Antennagate” last year. It was the biggest deal ever. It was the death of the iPhone. It was the end of Apple. …in the press. The reality of the situation was the vast majority of actual consumers didn’t give a shit — and rightly so. Apple sold more iPhones than ever last year — by a wide margin. The device is now the source of the majority of revenues for the company.
But it’s a broken device, remember? → Read More
Sad that Twitter Developer conference Chirp did not celebrate its first birthday this year? Well Twitter developer relations manager Jason Costa has just given those anticipating the gathering a slight ray of hope by announcing an official smaller #Devnest event to take place at Twitter HQ San Francisco on May 12th.
For those of you unaware, Devnest was an event started by British Twitter developer Jonathan Markwell and organized by Angus Fox. Looks like Twitter has appropriated the event as it’s own, planning a “string of dates in several cities around the US.” → Read More
http://www.movieweb.com/v/VIO7uVPNtpb1SP This should do it for you if the first trailer disappointed. Yep, X-Men is back, baby. → Read More
Are you a proud, strong Xoom owner? Good for you! But one thing iPads have that you don’t is a case with a Buetooth keyboard baked right on in. You won’t be waiting long, though: Droid-Life has discovered a Verizon advertisement for an official keyboard case — price and date to be determined, but it’s on the way. Incidentally, I almost wrote “Keyboard Cat” in the headline. The internet is destroying my mind! → Read More
