When Omar Hamoui left Google a few months after selling AdMob to the search giant for $750 million, he set up shop with mobile engineer Mike Rowehl as Churn Labs. Today at Disrupt NYC, we get to see the first product churned out by the labs: Gnonstop Gnomes.
Gnonstop Gnomes is part social game, part mobile photo app. You take pictures with your iPhone or Android camera and insert an image of a gnome into the picture. The app marks the location of each picture and you can follow where the gnome has been. “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a gnome in your pocket,” asks engineer Haider Sabri, “all the while you are getting updates on who your gnome is, where he is and what he is doing? → Read More
Masterbranch, which helps employers find good developers by putting open-source code contributions at the centre of a job seeker’s résumé, has raised €470k in a second round of funding, adding to the €110k secured in 2010.
The new funding comes from a group of recognized business angels out of Spain, including Marek Fodor, Carlos Domingo, Iñaki Arrola, Iñaki Ecenarro, Jesús Monleón, Albert Armengol, Eneko Knörr and Hugo Bloch, along with €350k of public funding from NEOTEC. → Read More
It’s no secret that e-commerce is growing like gangbusters. Last year alone, consumers spent a $142 billion on online retail spending. SneakPeeq, a startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, aims to capitalize on this booming market, but adds a social twist.
SneakPeeq gets high end fashion brands to sell in season or upcoming items on the site, and somewhat aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store. So similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, SneakPeeq doesn’t tell you the price instantly when you visit a product’s landing page. You click a “Peeq” button to find the price, and every time you “Peeq” at the price it goes down, but once somebody buys the item, the offer goes away. → Read More
Where ever Obama goes, so goes a fleet of vehicles including several identical armored limos. One of those recently breached itself on a parking ramp during the President’s trip to Dublin proving that while it can withstand most every attack save a nuclear bomb, it’s not unstoppable. Point of interest, this limo isn’t the new super limo creatively named The Beast. Judging by the Cadillac’s front fascia, it appears to be one from the Bush era. Click through for the fun video. → Read More
Using your publicly available profiles on Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, etc, mobile app Sonar, shows you who, how many, and why particular people are relevant to you in a room.
Says founder Brett Martin, “It’s simple- you open up sonar and we tell you that the guy sitting across from you is facebook friends with your college roommate, the dude by the jukebox is a VC that you follow on twitter, and the cute girl by the bar also likes the Arcade Fire and Hemingway.” → Read More
Like a combination Tango, Skype and Facebook and Chatroulette (or a Chatroulette for Facetime), Karizma is a location based video chat messenger that banks on the theory that people want to video chat with people who are geographically close to them. Karizma allows you to call people who are in your proximity, not just your current contacts. → Read More
Google has made an acquisition today—Sparkbuy, a ‘kayak for electronics.’
Sparkbuy, which has raised $1 million in funding, is a high-powered product search engine and comparison shopping site. You enter which criteria are important to you, and the site will give a listing of laptops that it thinks you’ll like best. You could also use in-depth filtering options to break down results. At launch last year, the startup was only focusing on laptops. → Read More
Need to find an amazing Hatha Yoga class in the West Village? Want a press friendly restaurant in Soma. New app SpotOn takes into account existing data like Foursquare checkins, Facebook Likes and more in order to provide choices that are tailored to you and your friends (whether they download the SpotOn app or not). → Read More
There’s little question that the iPad is one of the best media consumption devices ever. It’s also been a hotbed for innovation around content recommendation, with apps like Flipboard giving you a visual way to browse an array of articles you might be interested in, using Facebook and Twitter as data sources.
Today, the iPad is getting another great way to consume content, and this time it’s all about video. Meet Deja, a very nice looking application launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt. The app will go live later today on the iTunes App Store (link). → Read More
While there is still some back-and-forth over when the HTC EVO 3D will finally grace us with its presence, an ad from RadioShack has clarified to what scale this highly-anticipated smartphone will lighten your wallet. On a new or upgraded two-year contract, the 3D-capable handset will cost $199.99, as opposed to $499.99 off-contract. → Read More
Remember lonelygirl15? But of course you do (and if not, Wikipedia and YouTube search are your friends).
Either way, it looks like some of the creators behind the interactive Web-based video series, which attracted worldwide attention, are raising $3.5 million in funding for their production and software company EQAL – at least according to this SEC filing. → Read More
It’s been over 3.5 years since Seedcamp was launched to help establish Europe as a great place for startups, and how things have changed since then.
From where I’m standing, the European startup scene appears to be alive and kicking, and although we’re still very, very far from Europe being a perfect place to launch a business in many regards, I remain hopeful about the chances of major technology companies booting up around here in the next decade and beyond.
Anyway, Seedcamp is one of the ‘local’ projects I most admire, and today they’re sharing some numbers and facts – long overdue if you ask me – that underline just how important a role they play in the European startup ecosystem. → Read More
There has been a flurry of photo sharing apps released over the last year, with notables including Instagram, Picplz, and Path. These apps tend to focus on the photos that have been shared by your friends and people you know online — which aren’t always snapshots of things you’re actually interested in.
But what would happen if you had a service that took the opposite approach, allowing you to see photos of things you are interested in, even if they weren’t necessarily captured by people you know? Enter Skylin.es, a new startup that’s launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, that presents you with a personalized stream of photos that it thinks you’ll like, regardless of who took them. → Read More
We had high hopes for the Edge dual-screen ebook reader last year but it looks like said ereader is now dead. We were actually quite excited. After all, our own Scott Merrill wrote:
The enTourage eDGe is a functional, easy-to-use device that currently defies formal classification. It’s primarily going to be useful to academics and people who spend a lot of time in books, but need more convenience than that offered by separate e-book reader and laptop. It has some warts, but offers surprising value in a first-generation device.
Looking for something to do this weekend without having to sift through your newspaper or scour the web for a fun event? Weotta, a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, is looking to help (say the name out loud).
The service offers a very easy 3-step process for making a plan: first, tell it what kind of outing you’re embarking on (Business, Dating, Family, Friends, or Solo). Next, pick the mood. Finally, hit the generate button, and you’re good to go.
Once you’ve hit ‘Generate’, the service will present you with a handful of itineraries, each of which provides an at-a-glance overview of the event, with pins marking the venues and small icons depicting the atmosphere, time of day, and more (the icons are reminiscent of the ones you’d find in a hotel guide). → Read More
Ah, the power of choice. Browse through your Facebook News Feed or Twitter stream and you’re going to be assaulted with an endless array of links, shared songs, videos, and products. Add a few more topic-specific services, like iTunes Ping to the mix, and you have even more recommended pieces of content to choose from. And then you get a headache.
The latest startup to take the stage at TC Disrupt is Rexly, a service that’s looking to give you the power of content recommendations, minus the overwhelming amount of choice that makes many recommendation engines and social sites so confusing. You can sign up for the site right here. → Read More
Livescribe smartpens allow you to record and send the ink you draw or write on paper. They also record the surrounding audio so you can sync the audio with the drawings, something that’s great for students, reporters, and anyone who goes to meetings regularly. For a while, they had little apps that could run on the pen including a very cool piano app that allowed you to draw a piano and then play it on the page. Now, however, they’ve added an interesting new feature: Livescribe Connect, a system that allows you to send entire pages to multiple recipients including Twitter users, Facebook, Google Docs, and various other cloud services. We got a quick hands on and were able to talk to the company about future plans. → Read More
A couple years ago, Steve Jobs drew a line in the sand between mobile apps and search. “On a mobile device,” he declared, “search hasn’t happened. Search is not where it’s at. People aren’t searching on a mobile device like they do on the desktop. What is happening is they are spending all of their time in apps.” Up until now, the divide has remained. You can either search the mobile web or you can search inside narrow apps. But today with the launch of Do@ at Disrupt NYC, you can do both.
Do@, which is an iPhone app available today, is a new kind of mobile search engine. It doesn’t search the web. It searches apps. Lots of them. Instead of search results presented as ten blue links, they are presented as fully-functioning, relevant screens from iPhone apps. So if you search for the movie The Godfather, Do@ will allow you to swipe through screens from Flixster, IMDB, Netflix, and Fandango, all showing their results for when somebody searches for that movie in those iPhone apps. A search for “sushi” will turn up results from Yelp, Foodspotting, and Foursquare. A shopping search might turn up Amazon, eBay, and Shopping.com. → Read More
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington took the stage today to interview AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. It was actually at TechCrunch Disrupt New York last year where Armstrong first approached Arrington about buying TechCrunch. We all know how that worked out.
Armstrong and Arrington touched on a variety of subjects, including AOL’s agressive content strategy. While AOL’s content has remained free, Armstrong does seem to think that a paid content model can work. “It’s a matter of how you do it…but I’m a long term believer in paid content as a strategy.” As he cautions, AOL’s news content doesn’t have a price right now, and Armstrong didn’t reveal any future plans for a paywall but it’s certainly interesting to see that he isn’t totally against the strategy. → Read More
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