Groups are all the rage right now. Facebook is focusing on them. Google is thought to be focusing on them. GroupMe, Beluga, etc. The fact that so many companies are focusing on them shows a common belief that they’re extremely important. Kohort, a new service launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, believes this as well. They just believe that everyone else has failed at them so far.
One reason is that Kohort believes the grouping features for most of these services are tacked-on. With Kohort, it’s the central feature. And it goes deep. → Read More
In 1969 a young inventor patented a unique heart-attack-sensing watch that used the wearer’s pulse to regulate the time. That’s right: there are no quartz crystals or tuning forks in here. The system senses your pulse and shows information on two registers – the standard, optimal time and a dial that runs faster or slower depending on the user’s current heart-rate. You’d then be able to tell if your heart rate was too wild or unsustainable and could help you avoid heart attacks.
There is also a unique alarm that goes off when you’re experiencing arrhythmia. In short, it will tell you when you’re having a heart attack. → Read More
Apple has a habit of setting up retail stores in iconic locations all over the world, much like the ones at the Louvre in Paris, under the Pearl Tower in Shanghai, and in London’s Covent Garden. Even though the Big Apple already enjoys three Apple stores, Apple’s location-based habit has yet to be satisfied as the tech giant is rumored to be setting up shop in New York City’s landmark Grand Central Station. → Read More
CatchFree is making its formal debut at Disrupt today with the unveiling of a social platform that allows people to discover and sharing the best free(mium) software and services online. The startup just raised $5.5 million in funding from top notch investors such as Index Ventures, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Polaris and 500 Startups.
Combining the power of social networking with freemium, the CatchFree platform wants to make it easier for people to find and share great freemium services by linking them together, enabling each service to draw off the growth experienced by other freemium products. → Read More
Meporter is a location-based news app that enables you to write, photograph, and record video of your local news as it breaks, and then to share those stories with anyone who owns a mobile phone or has an Internet connection. Using the Meporter app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can take a picture, make, a video, or write your own story, and post it for the world to see — all in a matter of minutes.
You can post about items for sale, new styles and trends, local politics, area businesses, yard sales in progress, traffic conditions – anything that’s happening in your neck of the woods. Readers will see a user’s location, can comment on stories, and check in as eyewitnesses. → Read More
At this point, it would probably be safe to say that just about everyone opposes the AT&T/T-Mobile deal (besides, you know, AT&T and T-Mobile.) We’ve heard senators, CEOs, and FCC members openly object to AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA, and this time Leap Wireless (the parent company behind the 8th largest carrier in the US, Cricket) is jumping on the hater bandwagon. → Read More
Despite the fact that Dell failed to appear on Microsoft’s list of manufacturers for Windows Phone Mango devices, the tech giant did make news of its own this morning, with the introduction of the XPS 15z laptop. Dell calls this the “thinnest 15-inch PC on the planet,” at just .97 inches thick. → Read More
The pitch behind Madbrook Publishing’s first product is pretty amazing. It seems like it should for sure be a joke. But it’s not. It’s Everything Butt Art.
No, that’s not a typo. The product is not “Everything But Art”, it’s “Everything Butt Art” — two “t’s”. Butt. As in, the thing you sit on. That’s the basis for the product. And it’s launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. → Read More
InvoiceASAP, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is a cloud-based invoice app that allows you to easily create and send professional invoices, estimates, sales orders and receipts. The app provides easy-to-use menus on your mobile phone, and swiftly guides the user through the setup and invoicing process, making your device a powerful tool for business management.
InvoiceASAP is all about taking its service mobile, but offering the full suite of services a Web app would provide as well. So, the startup provides invoicing that integrates with accounting software, so that a user’s invoices, estimates, sales orders and receipts can all sync with accounting. You or your sales team can add new accounts from the field that are simultaneously created in accounting as well. → Read More
Carnegie Mellon student and a future Google intern Sohail Prasad built a working torrent streamer at this weekend’s TC Hackaton and demoed it to us today after tweaking a few things. The product will be available soon at Nowstrea.am and Sohail is trying to figure out a more, shall we say “legal,” use case for the product.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/05/24/hackathon-hacker-builds-working-iphone-based-torrent-streamer/ → Read More
If you’re looking to give Windows a facelift with some interesting UI tweaks, you may be interested in Lumier, a new startup that just presented at TechCrunch Disrupt. The company quietly raised a seed round from some top-tier angels like SV Angel and Founders Fund without sharing much about its future plans — now we have a better idea of what they do.
Founder Cullen Dudas, who has been very involved in the Windows community, says that the project is designed to tailor your Windows experience toward what you want, versus what billions of other users want. → Read More
Tracking the success and productivity for sales reps can be a challenge for any organization. Foretuit, which launches today at TechCrunch Disrupt, maps sales employees’ business behavior and determines patterns in order to provide predictive outcomes for sales operations.
Foretuit says that the sales process is inefficient because of compliance (sales reps don’t actually put data in CRM applications) and reps don’t leep data current. Fortuit’s application for the Salesforce CRM helps solve this problem. → Read More
A little “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours” seems to be going down between handset makers Samsung and Apple during their ongoing patent battle, only Apple has become that kid that never ends up showing theirs. → Read More
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington recently wrote a post praising the fighting spirit of a little startup called Octopart. The New York City-based startup is a search engine for electronic parts that enables users to find esoteric doodads and doohickeys through categorical or keyword searches. Once you’ve found your item, Octopart shows you which distributors sell the part and provides you with a link to buy it. Octopart was financed by Y Combinator back in 2007, and today the Octopart team is launching a new platform live at Disrupt called ThriftDB.
ThriftDB, also backed by Paul Graham, and several other angels, is being referred to as “the Amazon Web Services of search”. In the process of building Octopart search, the team says, they were forced to solve various scaling and performance issues related to implementing their search; they were unhappy with existing solutions, so they built their own. → Read More
Launching in public beta today at Disrupt is ccLoop, a previously stealth startup founded by serial entrepreneur Michael Wolfe that aims to tackle one of the biggest problems with modern communication: the disaster that is email.
We heard the company had raised $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital, SV Angel and other investors earlier this year, but not how they were planning to solve that particular problem. → Read More
Round three from day one focused on “Disrupting Commerce.” These are companies that hope to displace giants like Amazon, eBay, and so on. Not exactly easy prey, but these guys think they’ve got a unique take on shopping and money management. The companies in this batch are SneakPeeq, StyleSeat, Spenz, and BillGuard. Plus, a wild startup alley company appears! Happy Toy Machine is our wildcard for Monday.
Check out the videos inside. → Read More
Launching today at the Disrupt conference, Thinkfuse is all about TPS status reports, more specifically making it easier to share and manage weekly status reports in order to assist organizations in achieving their goals.
Thinkfuse is armed with $500,000 in seed funding from Founders Coop, Ali & Hadi Partovi, Scott Banister, SV Angel, Todd Warren, Emil Michael, Travis Bogard and other angel investors. → Read More
A couple of days ago, we got a tip pointing us to a YouTube page with a bit of interesting information. On Google’s official account there was a placeholder page for a “Google Press Conference”. We we reached out to Google about this, they said they were checking into it, and the page immediately was taken down (but not before we snagged a screenshot, naturally). Weird.
Well, weird until the news broke on Bloomberg today that Google is planning to unveil a mobile payment service on Thursday. The announcement is expected to involve the NFC chips built into the Nexus S. → Read More
Bloomberg reports that Google plans to dip its far-reaching toes into the mobile payment space starting May 26 on phones from Sprint, according to statements made by three unnamed people close to the situation. The service will give owners of select Android phones (like the Nexus S), the ability to perform transactions and redeem coupons with their smartphone, said the sources. → Read More
In the collaborative consumption space with startups like AirBnb and TaskRabbit, Getaround is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share any where. → Read More
