Frooly launches out of beta today as a market place for local boutique and independent stores from the UK who want to set-up shop online.
It’s similar in some ways to Etsy with its focus on “luxury, handcrafted and unique sellers” but in this case certainly aimed at merchants who already operate off-line but need a low barrier to entry to entering the world of e-commerce. The service isn’t restricted to arts and crafts either but includes food and other local produce. Naturally, the site also offers social media tie-ins, helping these independent and local stores gain greater word-of-mouth exposure. → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, the winner of the audience award was CodeGuard. The idea can be summed up simply: “We are a time machine for your website,” notes their founders.
Essentially, they allow you to automatically and simply backup your FTP data so that if you need to revert your website to some earlier version. CodeGuard does this by taking a snapshot of your FTP data over and over again. Then if you need to go back, you easily can. → Read More
I’m a big fan of my Kindle DX. It’s literally my favorite gadget. I love the form factor, the large screen, the relatively good battery life and the keyboard. Amazon could eliminate any of those items and my love would still be just as strong. The Kindle DX is perfect in my eyes. It’s so perfect that just the thought of Amazon ditching the buttons in favor of a touchscreen pains me as deeply as The Road.
That’s the trend now: touchscreen e-ink screens. Within the last 24 hours, Kobo and Barnes & Noble introduced models with new touchscreen e-ink displays. It’s a fantastic step in low-power consuming displays with really quick page refreshes and battery life. The new Nook has a 2-month battery. All good. Even the touchscreen is great technology with good-enough sensitivity. But I don’t want it in my next Kindle. → Read More
Of all the things written about the heavily funded Color, there is no denying that it’s confusing to a lot of people, at least at first. Updates have helped this a bit, but the app relies so much on technology in the background, that it almost seems as if you’re doing something wrong when you’re using it. Tracks, a new app launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, offers similar photo clusters done on the fly. But it’s much, much easier to understand.
The examples the team gives for uses range from a pub crawl with friends to a family vacation. You and the people with you (who have to be explicitly invited into a group, rather than Color’s automatic method) create picture albums on the fly. These are called Tracks. And these tracks are then viewable both in the app and on the web in a beautiful, optimized experience. → Read More
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
We’re in the middle of a new industrial revolution. Over 2 bilion people are connected to the Internet – a third of the world’s population and three billion have cell phones. Internet and mobile use is exploding in emerging economies, even contributing to the Arab Spring this year. Meanwhile the worlds developed economies are dealing with the breakdown of copyright and IP because of the Web, and the radical transparency brought by things like Wikileaks and the subsequent amplification of news via social media. So it’s almost amazing that it’s taken this long to have a special “e-G8″ conference to address the rise of technology as a new force in globalisation before the ‘real G8′ meeting.
Hopes are high. Some 1,500 people – tech gurus, entrepreneurs, VCs, big brand tech companies – are attending the event, which is in several huge tents in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Attendees include Eric E. Schmidt of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp.
And the agenda, at least on the face of it, looks high minded enough.
But there is also the political aspect. President Nicolas Sarkozy has no doubt timed this to amplify his prestige prior to the G8, and to kick his political opponents while they are down – namely former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who languishes in New York. And chairman of Publicis, Mauarice Levy, said Sarkozy wanted the conference to be like the Internet: “Open Participative and, in a word, free.”
But is it? → 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
You know what’s hipper than Hipster? Actually launching.
OK, that’s not quite what the three-person team behind new local Q&A site Gootip said but it’s true that this tiny French startup launched this week has got their product out in the wild in full before their US-based rival.
Ignoring the host of other location-based Q&A offerings, Gootip is also keen to point out that it isn’t a Hipster clone and that the company started work on their product before the Hipster buzz. Unlike Hipster, Gootip hasn’t taken funding either. → Read More
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