It’s been exactly one year since mobile ad network AdMob was officially acquired by Google for $750 million, after intense scrutiny of the deal by the FTC. Over the past year, Google has been working to integrate AdMob into the company, and clearly there have been some highs and lows. Today, As AdMob-Google turns one the search giant is announcing a number of new features and milestones for the ad network.
Overall, AdMob traffic (Ad Requests) have grown more than 3.5 times in the last year. In April, AdMob saw over 2.7 billion ad requests a day globally, up from over 2 billion announced in January. There are over 80,000 mobile websites and apps in the AdMob network, up from over 50,000 in January. And 11 countries in the AdMob network generated more than a billion monthly ad requests in April 2011, up from just three countries a year ago. → Read More
We’ve written previously about NearVerse’s mobile app LoKast, a proximity based mobile social network. Today, the company is debuting a new version of its iOS app, which combines group messaging with location proximity and media sharing.
On the app you can create spaces, which are visible by others within the app in the same physical place. These spaces essentially serve as min-social networks of sorts, where people can chat and share links, videos, images, music and more. Users can also make networks completely private. → Read More
There isn’t a better way to catch my attention than using a Star Trek analogy. Well, done UPS. It’s kinda like how in Star Trek III, Scotty sees a lot of unexplored potential in the ol’ Enterprise, but the brass are telling him she’s scrap because the new Excelsior’s “transwarp” engine is the only future worth having. Then we learn the Enterprise is still the only hope for their mission, while the Excelsior can’t cut it. Granted, there was some sabotage in there somewhere… but the underlying message is the same! UPS is constantly trying to counter increasing fuel prices. This is likely true with every company in transportation, but UPS recently announced and demo’d its mostly plastic delivery truck that’s 40% more fuel efficient than the current. By ditching the sheet metal for plastic, these trucks are said to be 1,000 lbs lighter. This allows for a smaller diesel engine, which lends greatly to the lower fuel consumption. But back to that Star Trek line. → Read More
Exclusive - Open Ocean, a recently established venture capital firm co-founded by the investors who closed the $1 billion sale of MySQL to Sun Microsystems, has just finalized its Fund Three with approximately $60 million (40 million euros) in capital in the first closing, TechCrunch has learned.
The fund kicks off the first widespread outreach from the former MySQL and Nokia team members to founders and startups primarily based in Europe; the focus of the new fund will be squarely on community and open source software ventures. → Read More
In four months simple Mac mail client Sparrow has been downloaded over 300K times, has raised $250K in funding from luminaries like Dave Morin and from Tweetie creator Loren Brichter.
“We’re not adding social layers mail for the sake of it,” says CEO Dom Leca. The basic idea is pulling contextual information from your social network that is relevant to the users, and Leca is working on pulling in data for LinkedIn and Twitter. → Read More
Square COO and angel investor Keith Rabois took the stage today with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss the mobile payments product, his investment strategy and more. As you may know, Square just launched a new version of its disruptive mobile payments platform this week. The company also reached some important milestones—500,000 card readers shipped, one million Square transactions in May, and the company is now on track to process $1 billion in payment volume within a year.
When Michael asked if Square will do better financially than PayPal, Rabois said there’s a 95 percent chance that Square will be worth more financially and be more valuable in the greater payments space. He explains, “we are not limited to just e-commerce, we actually enable real world payments, which is a much bigger market and is more valuable.” → Read More
Viral indie hit Minecraft has landed a mobile partner in Sony-Ericsson, whose Xperia Play (AKA the Playstation Phone) will the first device to have the game customized to a handset. Mojang, who makes the game, confirmed that they were working with S-E to fit the game to the screen and hardware. There’s no information on pricing or other platforms, but an E3 event points to a June 7 release. I’d guess it will have a period of exclusivity on the Play or maybe a reduced, bundle price. We’ll be at E3 to find out, so stay tuned. → Read More
AT&T has gotten off to an incredibly late start rolling out its LTE network coverage, planning to compete with Verizon’s 55 markets by deploying its own LTE coverage in five markets starting this summer. The Texas-based company isn’t making any effort to hide its homestate favoritism, with three of its first five LTE-supported markets located in the Lone Star state. → Read More
Sony has always been in the business of making sleek and powerful notebooks and the S Series just got a little more awesome. The 13.3-inch Windows 7 notebook line now starts out at a modest $999 with a Core i5-2410M CPU, 512MB AMD graphics, 500GB HDD, 4GB of RAM and a CD/DVD burner. But the sky is the limit here. You can spec this little guy out with a mobile Core i7, 1GB AMD mobile GPU, 1TB SSD, 8GB of RAM, Blu-ray burner, Verizon or Spring mobile broadband, and a slim sheet battery that bumps the battery life from 7.5 hours to 15 hours. Of course these options aren’t cheap and a fully loaded S Series runs north of $5300. The super battery however only costs an extra $149 for any configuration.
The S Series just hit the pre-ordering stage of its life and is expected to ship late next month. Oh, and yeah, 13-inch MacBook Pro what? → Read More
We are live in New York for the last day of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. We have heard from amazing speakers, seen some unbelievable startups, and have given away many prizes. Since we know many of you were not able to attend, we wanted to do something nice for our readers and viewers at home. Thanks to DailySteals.com, we have one white iPad 2 and one Nook Color to give away. The lucky winner of this giveaway will win both. If you want them, just follow the steps below! → Read More
Boom. After about a thousand blog posts, Twitter has officially announced that it has bought TweetDeck.
We first reported that the total price of the sale was around $40 million, CNN later confirmed this.
Twitter emphasized in their blog post that the acquisition was about the segment of Twitter users who were heavily active: → Read More
At the “Disrupting Publishing from Tablets to Links” panel at TechCrunch Disrupt, ‘The Daily’ Publisher Greg Clayman revealed an interesting milestone about Rupert Murdoch’s foray into tablet publishing. When asked by editor Erick Schonfeld whether or not the iPad app was doing well, Clayman revealed that it has been downloaded close to a million times, in the sixty days since its launch on February 2nd. “This puts us in the large pantheon of large news apps … We are consistently now in the top grossing apps, in the top ten or top twelve. Today we’re number three” Clayman said. → Read More
Speed and security are essential for the success of any website, so a free service that supercharges your site and pr Speed and security are essential for the success of any website, so a free service that supercharges your site and protects it from those many web-born threats? Priceless. This is why CloudFlare was a runner-up at Disrupt SF last year, because it is attempting to bring speedy load times to the average site owner.
Though CloudFlare may not be the sexiest business in the world, it’s a service confronting a real problem, and for that very reason, nearly 12 percent of the Internet’s users (approximately 125 million unique monthly visitors) passed through CloudFlare’s network since its launch in September, according to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince. CloudFlare, he continued, has been providing a 40 percent performance boost on average, and has stopped nearly 1 billion attacks launched against its users’ websites. Though the CEO did not specify what kind of attacks these are, the statistics (including 3.5 billion page views per month) are impressive nonetheless. → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky had some news to share on stage when talking to our own Erick Schonfeld. Apparently, Airbnb will be launching a new option, sublets, in the next few days.
Chesky didn’t dive into many details, but people will now be able to lease out their apartments for longer periods of time on the site (around 30 days). Airbnb has risen to prominence by allowing users to rent out their homes/apartments for short periods of time. Now they’re apparently expanding on that model, leveraging the popular site they’ve created. → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky took the stage with our own Erick Schonfeld to talk about the disruption they’re offering up in their markets. Notably, both have products that are so disruptive that they have legal challenges from not just other companies, but governments (on the city and state level).
“I think I’ve got 20,000 years of jail time in front of me,” Kalanick half-joked when Schonfeld asked him about Uber’s highly publicized legal challenges (which actually made them change their name from UberCab). Kalanick came to that number because the city of San Francisco is threatening Uber with 90 days of jail time for every ride they offer. Oh, and there’s a several thousand dollar fine for each ride as well. → Read More
An early morning press release confirmed our previous suspicions: the LG Revolution will launch tomorrow, May 26, for Verizon. And even better, the Android 2.2 Froyo-powered smartphone will cost just $250 with a new, two-year contract. That’s a pretty sizable difference from the $700 off-contract price tag you’ll find on the Revolution at Best Buy. Nationwide Talk plans begin at $39.99, and unlimited data costs $29.99 per month, while Mobile Hotspot is offered for free for a limited time. → Read More
Mobile ad network Millennial Media is making a purchase today— mobile data startup Condaptive. Condaptive’s technology focuses on audience formation and development through the innovative analysis of location and data. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Condaptive takes a deep data dive on location-based, mobile data. It’s focus is not just on where their customers are, but also on who they are and what they need. The startup’s platform allows developers to build build location and context aware applications. → Read More
On the heels of its recent acquisition of DealADayOnline in Chicago, BuyWithMe today announced that it has acquired Groop Swoop, a social commerce company focused on San Francisco.
BuyWithMe rivals Groupon and LivingSocial in the United States, and currently offers daily deals in 13 cities nationwide. → Read More
Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, editor Erick Schonfeld took the stage to interview Alex Rampell, TrialPay; Stephanie Tilenius, VP of Google Commerce and Payments, and Lewis Gersh, Metamorphic Partners; addressing online to offline mobile commerce. The panel was particularly interesting considering Google’s reported announcement regarding its near field communications and mobile payments service announcement this Thursday. → Read More
Any seasoned investor knows that past performance is not indicative of future returns. That is as true with public stocks as it is with venture capital firms. But if someone were to ask you to rank the top VC firms today based on their probability of success, how would you do it? Remember, looking at past returns won’t help you.
Chris Farmer, a VC at General Catalyst Partners, has come up with a method which he calls InvestorRank. Just as Google’s PageRank orders search results based on how many links each page gets from other sites, InvestorRank looks at the connections between VC firms. Whenever two VC firms co-invest in the same deal, that creates a bond between them. If one VC firm follows another one in a later round, that boosts the rank of the earlier investor. → Read More
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