The second round of presentations from our Startup Battlefield is here for you to enjoy, in case you missed them yesterday. This round focused on “Disrupting Location, Location, Location.” To be honest, we expected more Foursquare clones, but were disappointed, if that’s the right word. The companies in this round were SpotOn, Karizma, Sonar, Arrived, and Churn Labs’ Gnonstop Gnome.
Check out the videos inside, or follow the links for more in-depth descriptions and judges’ comments. → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha took the stage for an interview with Michael Arrington, where they discussed everything from startup valuations to Sequoia’s biggest misses.
Early on in the conversation, Arrington asked Botha if Sequoia partners have a lot of internal pressure to perform, or if the firm is patient with investments. Botha says that the firm is indeed patient, but that there’s an internal motto: “you’re only as good as your next investment”, and that partners are always staying hungry.
Next, the conversation turned toward the broad array of companies that Botha is involved in — he’s on the board of Square, Tumblr, Evernote, Meebo, Eventbrite, Unity and other consumer-facing companies. But he’s also involved in bioinformatics companies like Gene Security Network (GSN) and AssureRx. → Read More
Parents worry about their kids. It’s what they do. Sometimes with reason, sometimes not. But now, thanks to MotherKnows, parents will be able to verify whether there is medical justification for their worrying. The California-based startup has created a full-service platform, available on mobile and the Web, that is designed specifically to allow parents to have 24-hour access their children’s health records. The platform offers a full set of health data, from immunizations and allergies to doctor visits and growth charts, all of which can be accessed directly by doctors and caregivers once authorized by the parental units. → Read More
Given the bevy of issues that the first builds of iOS 4 brought to the iPhone 3GS (poor performance, decreased battery life, random mid-call reboots), it was pretty clear that the 3GS was reaching the end of its update life cycle. According to the partially-notorious Eldar Murtazin (who, while not always right, regularly nails some massive scoops), the iPhone 3GS won’t be seeing iOS 5 come its way by any official means. On one hand, this isn’t too surprising: the 3GS is nearly two years old, afterall; on the other, Apple is still selling this one alongside the iPhone 4, so even fairly recent customers may end up feeling left out in the cold. [Via Twitter] → Read More
Healthcare is expensive, and it’s increasingly suffering from overinflation. It seems that, while what we pay for consumer goods has tended to increase at a normal rate, healthcare costs have sky-rocketed in comparison. Quite a few startups have popped up of late that are attempting to bring disruptive vision to healthcare costs in the U.S., like the National Surgery Network, a sort of Hotwire for access to top surgical facilities, and MedLion , a group of doctors in Silicon Valley providing cheap primary to uninsured and insured patients alike, to name a few.
Avado, a startup launching at Disrupt NYC today, is partnering with healthcare businesses like the two mentioned above to provide a “Patient Relationship Management” platform, in an attempt to create a more communicative relationship between patient and doctor by way of “Connected Health Records”. → Read More
Evernote, once described to me as “my remote brain”, is releasing a new Google Chrome extension today to make clipping and saving webpages easier than ever. It’s optimized to grab the body of any blog post on any site. It automatically recognizes the structure of any post, and “captures it beautifully without any need for the user to select anything.” → Read More
Lark, a silent waking system that wakes you silently and naturally, is announcing big news today. After launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last Fall, the company is announcing the public availability of its product and a retail deal with Apple stores in North America.
Lark’s system involves an iPhone app and a small band that you wear across your wrist while sleeping. You set the iPhone app to the time you need to wake up and the app will transform your phone into a night time alarm clock. The band includes a small device and sensor with bluetooth technology that will vibrate at the time you are supposed to wake up. Plus there’s no more jarring, loud alarms; so your boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, or husband won’t be woken up by your alarm. → Read More
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. As this is the case, there are many of us in the U.S. — and across the globe — who have had heart disease or cardiac illnesses affect our lives in many unpleasant ways. Today, thanks to advances in modern technology, we are beginning to see services, devices, and applications that may one day prevent heart attacks and heart-related conditions (currently, 1 American has a heart attack every 34 seconds). SHL Telemedicine, which is bringing personalized health care to mobile, announced today at Disrupt NYC a new medical gadget called “smartheart”. Smartheart is a lightweight personal electrocardiogram (or ECG) that allows you to monitor your heart in realtime. → Read More
One of Seiko’s new “nicer” mainstream watches for 2011 is this really attractive Sportura Alarm Chronograph watches. The Sportura range has always captured my attention pleasantly – for offering attractive designs, logical functions, easy to read dials, as well as competitive pricing. This model is really a treat, coming in a few versions that borrow design cues from the higher-end Ananta collection. → Read More
From kindergarten through college, today classrooms are more wired than ever before. Touchscreen devices and next generation projectors are becoming the norm, WiFi proliferates, and seemingly every other student has more facility with a laptop than I do. Next, it will be tablets. Of course, while technology continues to press forward in opening educational doors, each piece of hardware comes installed with different programs and file formats; while applications like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint have become ubiquitous and are generally all-compatible, the same can’t be said of interactive content in the classroom. Most interactive educational content — lessons, demos, and assignments, for example — suffer from platform lock-in.
Desmos, a startup launching in beta today at Disrupt, hopes to fix educational fragmentation by offering platform-agnostic software that enables users to build and share rich educational content. Desmos is currently offering two versions of its software, one that’s collaborative and takes advantage of the synchronicity of the Web, while the other is “published”, or a standalone version of the content that offers the same interactive features but can be used offline. Desmos enables users to quickly switch between online and offline versions, allowing multiple people to collaboratively build a lesson, then publish it and embed it. → Read More
Aside from being a partner at Kaulfield Perkins and Byers, Bing Gordon writes poetry. When our very own Mike Arrington asked him to write one up on the fly about 45 minutes before he went on stage. This is what he came up with (disclosure: it’s pretty good).
“Chris Dixon apparently has a hunch
That it’s only Internet news if it’s in TechCrunch –
And you can verify this on Wikipedia:
Ashton Kutcher is the Charlie Rose of social media.” → Read More
We’re coming at you live from the Barnes & Noble superstore/cafe/public bathroom on Union Square where we hope to see an update to the Nook line. It’s my understanding that we’ll be seeing a new Nook Color Device with priced at about $140. Update this page as we live blog the event with bated breath. → Read More
PCH International is one of those quirky, successful mid-size companies you’ve probably never heard of. For starters, PCH is a Chinese manufacturing company named after a California highway that has headquarters located in Ireland. If you have a lot of gadgets lying around, you’ve probably used one and you may not even know it. PCH designs and produces electronics and gadgets in partnership with major PC manufacturers and consumer electronics brands. The company was raking in $400 million in revenue last year, on top of $41 million in funding raised to date (about half of which was closed in February).
Today, PCH Founder Liam Casey took to the Disrupt NYC stage following Lark Founder Julia Hu to announce that PCH is launching its own business accelerator called, appropriately, “PCH Accelerator” — and that Lark (a Disrupt SF alumni) will be the accelerator’s inaugural startup. → Read More
In a world where second-gen devices launch mere months after their predecessors, I guess it’s not too much of a surprise that large-scale upgrades are already being implemented to 4G networks. T-Mobile, specifically, has announced that it will double the speed of its 4G LTE network in 55 different markets. → Read More
Harvest Power, a company that makes energy and fertilizer products from organic waste, added $6 million to its series B, $51.7 million round, with Rabobank’s SAM Private Equity group, which focuses on sustainability investing and is based in Zurich, Switzerland, joined the company’s other backers: Generation Investment Management, DAG Ventures, Keating Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Waste Management (NYSE: WM), Munich Venture Partners, and TriplePoint Capital.
As Harvest Power CEO Paul Sellew told TechCrunch in March, the company will put the capital into building two, large biomass renewable energy projects… → Read More
Here at TechCrunch Disrupt Kevin Systrom has just announced a new milestone for photo service instagram, at 10 photos per second, up 6 photos per second a couple of months ago. “That growth we saw last month was really large, until we saw today,” said Systrom. When asked whether David Karp had any advice for Kevin, “Kevin seems to be a few steps ahead of me.” → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, gaming industry vet and KPCB partner Bing Gordon took the stage with our own Michael Arrington for a special fireside chat that covered a broad range of topics, including Gordon’s investment strategy and ngmoco, which was his first exit as a Partner. And the conversation got particularly interesting when it steered toward a company that’s very near to Gordon’s heart: Zynga.
Gordon, who aside from leading KPCB investments in Zynga is also a major fan (he’s reached the top level in CityVille), recounted some of the drama that went on last spring, when the gaming company came very close to breaking away from Facebook entirely over a dispute involving Facebook’s Credits system. In fact, when Arrington suggested that it was a sort of Cuban Missile Crisis of tech, Gordon agreed. → Read More
Lark, a silent waking system that wakes you silently and naturally, is announcing big news today. After launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last Fall, the company is announcing the public availability of its product and a retail deal with Apple stores in North America.
Lark’s system involves an iPhone app and a small band that you wear across your wrist while sleeping. You set the iPhone app to the time you need to wake up and the app will transform your phone into a night time alarm clock. The band includes a small device and sensor with bluetooth technology that will vibrate at the time you are supposed to wake up. Plus there’s no more jarring, loud alarms; so your boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, or husband won’t be woken up by your alarm. → Read More
Today at Microsoft’s Windows Phone VIP Reception, president of mobile communications Andy Lees and senior Windows Phone product manager Derek Snyder gave us a quick rundown of what to expect out of the newest version of the Windows Phone platform, WP7.1 or “Mango.”
Though he didn’t have time to cover all 500 new features, the focus will certainly center around communication, applications, and the way we use mobile internet. Along with the current service offerings in People Hub such as Facebook, Hotmail, and Gmail, Microsoft has gone ahead and added LinkedIn and Twitter. → Read More
