Following Docomo yesterday, Japan’s second biggest mobile carrier KDDI au has unveiled [JP] a total of 12 new cell phones today. Their line-up consists of six smartphones (all Android) and six feature phones (well, what the Japanese call feature phones), all of which are listed up below. → Read More
Blip.tv started five years ago with a focus on helping budding video producers manage and distribute their shows across the Web. Slowly but surely, though, it’s become a video destination in its own right with 3 billion cumulative video views—currently closing in on one billion a quarter. In light of that growth, it is now fully embracing its destiny as a video destination with a redesign… → Read More
It’s been two years almost to the day when Israeli startup BeeTV raised $8 million in funding for a – really impressive – personal TV suggestion engine they’d been building.
Fast forward to today, and the company has shifted its focus squarely on offering social tools for sharing the TV viewing experience with online friends.
The company’s co-founder and former CTO, Yaniv Solnik, is leading the… → Read More
9flats, the peer to peer apartment rentals site (or Airbnb-clone), has secured a “major investment round” led by Silicon Valley VC firm Redpoint Ventures. European-based eVenture Capital Partners also participated.
Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed although 9flats says this brings its total funding to $10m just six months after the startup was founded. The new round will be used to expand… → Read More
Wow. According to this filing, professional social network LinkedIn has just upped the pricing of its IPO from between $32 and $35 per share to $42 to $45 per share. This latest pricing, which marks a 30 percent increase, values the company at over $4 billion (from a $3 billion plus valuation at the previous price).
LinkedIn is still offering a total of 7,840,000 shares and is looking to raise as… → Read More
Vienna, Austria-based semantic web technology company uma has raised $1.1 million in funding from TheMerger.com and multiple private European investors.
The company has also appointed new board members, including Heinrich Schuster, former founder and now retired chairman of EPAMEDIA, and Oliver Holle, CEO of TheMerger.com and occasional TC guest blogger. → Read More
The socialization of the Web has brought about changes to how, when and where we communicate with each other over the Internet. The same goes for companies who now look for and hire new staff by using online software, social networks and whatnot, although that shift – to what is often referred to as ‘social recruiting’ – is perhaps far less visible.
Jobvite, a developer of software that enables… → Read More
ioSafe Releases 3TB Everythingproof Drive Hands-On With The Seagate GoFlex Satellite Hard Drive Initial Thoughts On The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook Fake USB Cable? Check. Hilarity? Guaranteed! Lenovo ThinkPad X1: Hands-On → Read More
Publicis Groupe, the French advertising colossus, announced today that it will acquire Princeton-based interactive marketing agency Rosetta for $525 million in cash, plus later milestone payments.
As one of the “big four” advertising holding companies, Publicis competes with Interpublic, Omnicom, and WPP, which each generated at least $6 billion in revenue in 2010 and employ at least 40K people. → Read More
Reading the news in recent weeks, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there are the early signs of a new war brewing in the mobile computing space. And it’s a war that promises to be the most fascinating one yet. It doesn’t involve Microsoft or Nokia or RIM or HP or Palm. It doesn’t even include Apple. It’s all about Android.
Whereas right now, it’s all Google/Android vs. Apple/iOS, what… → Read More
ioSafe makes water, fire, and bomb-proof hard drives and they’ve just upgraded their SoloPRO device to support up to 3 terabytes of storage – enough for just about everything you could ever want to store. The drive is $499.99 and includes 12 months of data recovery service as well as eSATA and USB 3.0 connections.
The drive can withstand 1550° F for 30 minutes and live underwater at 10 feet for… → Read More
For as long as I can remember, there has been one constant in tech news: Google News sucks at it.
Now, that’s not entirely fair since Google News doesn’t actually provide any of their own content. Instead, they use the supposedly magical Google algorithms to curate others’ content from around the web. Still, there’s just no way around it — the product, at least for tech news, sucks.
Again… → Read More
This $5 fake USB cable connects to almost anything (bananas included) and lets you pretend you have some of the coolest gadgets in the office. Want to make a Bananaputer? It’s only a click away. → Read More
If you’re like me Instagram has become a service you check the first thing you wake up in the morning, alongside Twitter and Facebook. My addiction has seriously gotten to the point where I anticipate the app’s bi-monthly updates (Tilt Shift is the best thing to happen to photo sharing addicts since sliced bread).
So what’s new in Version 1.7 (which just got dropped into the App Store?) The most… → Read More
While, arguably, HEX was first to market with their rubber sports band for the iPod Nano, they are now inexplicably creating more iPod watch bands for the millions of people out there who want to reduce the overall functionality of both their watch and their iPod in one fell swoop. The bands come in metal and leather and top out at $69 for a stainless-steel model. → Read More
Last week, just prior to day one of Google I/O, we noted that some updates in the Chrome OS code and forums indicated that a formal unveiling was likely very close. Sure enough, on day two of I/O, Google unveiled the first Chromebooks, the first shipping products running Chrome OS. But Google also noted that the first orders wouldn’t start until June 15, about a month away. One reason: Chrome OS… → Read More
The automotive industry is the final frontier for many consumer A/V companies and Harman — you know, H/K, JBL, Mark Levinson — just made public the ongoing realationship that’s producing some leading infotainment systems. Luxoft and Harman employs more than 300 “development experts” mainly in a Ukraine dev center where they conjurer up systems at least in part for BMW and Daimler. It’s this now… → Read More
Despite the fact that some specs have already been leaked, we got a chance to get hands-on with the latest Think product from Lenovo and thought it was only fair that you get the complete story, too. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 was officially announced today, and if you’ve seen the “Perfect Marriage of Form and Function” commercial, I can honestly tell you that it’s no exaggeration of the… → Read More
Local Q&A startup Hipster has raised $1 million in seed funding from some prominent angel Valley investors including Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Lightbank, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Max Ventilla, TechStars David Cohen and David Tisch, Google’s Don Dodge, Paige Craig, Ludlow Ventures, Lerer Ventures and others.
Many of you best know Hipster as the startup that… → Read More
For a group of developers on Facebook’s platform, the clock is ticking.
Last night and into today, Facebook has been sending out notices to developers they believe have apps in violation of their policy against sending authentication data to third parties. Those developers have 48 hours to fix their apps or they risk being “subject to one of the enforcement actions” — read: being booted.
You… → Read More
Ashton Kutcher will be on stage next week at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. The actor, entrepreneur and investor will talk with Charlie Rose on Tuesday morning, and joins what is clearly our most impressive list of speakers at any TechCrunch event to date.
His talk with Rose will be entirely focused on his new job starring in CBS’s Two and a half Men.
Ok, hopefully not really. → Read More
Up until now, when Twitter has struck deals overseas with carriers, it has mainly been for SMS deals so that users can send/receive tweets for free and/or cheap. Today, Twitter has announced a new type of deal with NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest carrier: a content deal.
As they’ve announced in Japanese on their blog (with English translation below), “Tweets and other Twitter content will be included… → Read More
Chinese internet giant Tencent and U.S. travel bookings company Expedia have invested in Chinese travel site eLong, totaling $126 million. Tencent has acquired approximately 16% of the outstanding shares for a total purchase price of $84.4 million and becomes the second largest shareholder of eLong.
Expedia has acquired approximately 8% of the outstanding shares for $41.2 million, holds 56% of… → Read More
Former Foursquare Head of Operations and current Facebooker Nathan Folkman will be joining photo-sharing startup Path as an engineer, Path CEO Dave Morin tells me.
Prior to Facebook and Foursquare, Folkman was an engineer at bit.ly, AOL and Betaworks. He also holds the honor of being the only employee to have ever left Foursquare (for Facebook last November), Foursquare has verified with… → Read More
We’ve learned some pretty amazing (and incredibly arbitrary) things from the Guinness Book of World Records. Did you know that the record for most people dressed as Smurfs was set on July 18, 2008 by 1,253 attendants of Ireland’s Muckno Mania Festival? Now you do. Or did you know that Jean-Francois Vernetti of Switzerland set the record for the largest “Do Not Disturb” door-hanger collection… → Read More
Tradeshift, the free invoicing platform and wider play to become the de facto social network for “B2B communications and processes”, has raised a $7m round from Notion Capital.
As we’ve previously reported, the Denmark and London, UK-based startup was rumoured to be courting VC funding at an $80-100 million valuation after scoring angel investment from former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos and founding… → Read More
Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, has made a key hire today—a VP of Engineering. And the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup nabbed a seasoned analytics exec from Yahoo, David Mariani.
Mariani was most recently was the Vice President of User Data and Analytics at Yahoo. While at Yahoo Dave managed engineering for all of Yahoo’s audience and advertising… → Read More
Tradeshift, the free invoicing platform and wider play to become the de facto social network for “B2B communications and processes”, has raised a $7m round from Notion Capital.
As we’ve previously reported, the Denmark and London, UK-based startup was rumoured to be courting VC funding at an $80-100 million valuation after scoring angel investment from former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos and founding… → Read More
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