PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $10 million in new funding led by Four Rivers Group, with Woodside Fund, Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital participating in the round. This investment brings PowerReview’s total venture funding to $37 million.
PowerReviews, which launched in 2007, provides retailers and brands with the… → Read More
Chatroulette is plotting another comeback!
The Russian website that allows complete strangers to jump from one awkward random video chat to the next was all the rage among the Web’s tastemakers in the first half of last year, but it seems like everyone’s now pretty much moved on. The fact that the site was – and is still – frequently used by creeps who couldn’t seem to keep their pants on… → Read More
The itsy bitsy HP Veer, or rather, HP Veer 4G as it’s now officially called, will sneak into AT&T stores on May 15th. Nothing has changed since the last time the Veer made an appearance — well, besides the somewhat deceptive 4G label. The Veer is still a basic HSPA slider with a 2.6-inch 320 x 400 screen, 5MP camera, 8GB of storage and a 800MHz Snapdragon CPU running webOS 2.1. → Read More
It looks like the iPad 2 is selling well in South Korea, too. According to a Reuters article from today, the device is actually flying off the shelves in the country (where it went on sale on April 29). Major Korean telcos SK Telecom and Korea Telecom at least had to suspend sales today even though they started offering the iPad 2 online less than a week ago. → Read More
Chinese social network Renren has priced its its initial public offering of shares at $14 per share, with a total offering size of $743.4 million. The price per share falls into the high range that the Street expected, which was $12 to $14 per share. The shares will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange today under the symbol “RENN.”
Of the 53,100,000 ADSs being offered, 42,898,711 ADSs… → Read More
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has acquired social movie discovery site Flixster. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site Flixster acquired from News Corp. last year. Under the terms of the deal, Flixster will continue to operate independently and will expand its services beyond movie discovery. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Warner’s… → Read More
What would you do if you were Nintendo, sat on a 5-year old console and were about to announce its successor? You would probably lower the price to boost sales, and that’s exactly what Nintendo in the US today did with the Wii. → Read More
Startup Scrible is launching its rich web annotation tool to the public today. Scrible is also announcing that it has received a $500,000 grant from the National
Science Foundation (NSF).
The service’s bookmarklet allows users to save and organize web pages and richly annotate articles with highlighters and sticky notes. You can also share annotated web pages with others. All of your saved web… → Read More
Topix, the largely under-the-radar platform for local news, information, and influence, has been aggregating local news and community discussions for nearly 7 years. Over this time, the platform has quietly grown to over 13 million monthly visitors, according to Quantcast. It’s now aggregating local content from more than 50K sources and offers more than 360K edited news pages.
Topix has become a… → Read More
Task management service TaskRabbit is announcing a raise of $5 million in Series A this morning, in addition to its already existing $1.8 million in seed and angel funding. The financing was lead by Shasta Ventures and followed on by First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, FLOODGATE, Collaborative Fund, 500 Startups and The Mesh author Lisa Gansky. In addition to the financing, Shasta Ventures’… → Read More
SoundCloud, the audio platform, has unveiled SoundCloud Labs, a new site to house experimental projects and features developed in-house, including via its open API.
The idea of creating a separate space for cutting-edge development branded as Labs isn’t a new one, of course, mostly notably employed by Google. But in SoundCloud’s case it perhaps makes even greater sense since the service was… → Read More
Our parent company AOL has just released its quarterly earnings for Q1 2011, and it’s a mixed bag (again).
Revenue came in at $551.4 million, which is better than most analysts had anticipated – the company was expected to earn $0.17 per share on revenues of $536.35 million. Actual earnings came in at $0.04 per share, down 86 percent. → Read More
Today, electric motorcycle makers Brammo revealed that the company will add new electronic transmission technology, and a redesigned motor, clutch and gear shift to its lineup, that will make its motorcycles perform more like their gas-powered predecessors.
The first incorporation of this technology into the company’s product lines will be into Brammo’s new, not-yet-in-production Engage and… → Read More
In the 1990s, peer-to-peer networks were a revelation. They allowed people to pool together tiny parts of their computers, and those pooled together parts could do far more together than the average computer or connection could do on its own. It enabled everything from swapping pirated music to making cheap transcontinental calls via Skype.
But what if you could do the same thing with tiny parts… → Read More
TransferWise, the peer-to-peer online currency exchange that aims to give banks a run for their money with its flat-fee exchange rate, has announced that it’s seen $1m worth of transactions in three months since launch.
These have come from consumers-only since until now TransferWise wasn’t available to business customers. Today that changes after the company responds to the fact that… → Read More
I’m a huge fan of Viber‘s iPhone app, which lets me call, and since recently, send messages to many of my contacts, free of charge. Needless to say, it’s imperative for Viber to go cross-platform as quickly as possible, because evidently not everyone has an iPhone.
We knew the startup was cooking up an Android application, but not when it would hit. Now we do: expect the Android app to become… → Read More
Be A Sky Pirate At Last With This Sweet Kite The Five (Minor) Differences Between The Motorola Xoom And Acer Iconia Tab Conan On The World’s Most Expensive Toilet By Kohler The Finger-nose Stylus Is, As Far As We Can Tell, Not A Joke Colorware Now Doing Its Thing On The iPad 2 → Read More
This morning’s upgrades to Apple’s iMac line of computers brought a range of nice features. But most were just spec bumps. The big new addition is Thunderbolt. Following the initial roll-out to the MacBook Pros, the new super high-speed ports are clearly destined to be a key component across Apple’s product lines. But what about Apple’s two key newer products: the iPhone and iPad? Apple hasn’t… → Read More
In 2005 Kyle MacDonald made a series of fourteen trades, beginning with a red paperclip and ending with a house. It took him less than a year. You all know the story. The Office did even an episode this year about the idea as well.
Well, Malaysia’s MOL Global now has somewhere around over $100 million in Facebook stock at the current secondary market valuation of around $31 per share. Until now… → Read More
If you ever wanted a glimpse of what the Spiderman “With great power comes great responsibility” quote looks like actualized, take a second to digest the above photo of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and various others in the White House Situation room, captured as they “receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden.”… → Read More
Spotify, the music service Americans don’t get to enjoy, announced several very cool new features today. The European music service is rolling out new versions of its desktop and mobile apps today, which will allow all users (even those pesky ad-supported freeloaders) to sync Spotify desktop tracks with mobile devices, be they iPods, iPhones or Androids.
And just in case it wasn’t clear whether… → Read More
Some kids wanted to be firefighters, doctors, and movie stars. I wanted to grow up to be either Boba Fett or a sky pirate. Final Fantasy III and Skies of Arcadia helped nurture this ambition, and while I’m no closer to it now than I was then, at least there are kites like this that remind me that the sky will one day be mine. This awesome denim kite is sold by Grey Label and handmade… → Read More
Variety reports that French developer Ubisoft (Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Vin Diesel – Wheelman) has established a sub-company, Ubisoft Motion Pictures, that will be in charge of adapting its games into movies. I’m guessing Ubi isn’t investing hundreds of millions in sets, property, cameras, and such, and this is really more of an administrative thing. Its major… → Read More
The Wii successor/Project Café rumors have died down since Nintendo’s official announcement a week ago, but there’s still a little info leaking out (allegedly) here and here. Today has brought a few more nuggets to the web, so let’s take a look. → Read More
AppDirect, a platform that allows businesses to find, buy and manage web-based applications, has announced that it has closed a $3.25 million round of seed funding to hire engineering talent and expand its network overseas. The round was led by iNovia Capital with Stingray Digital contributing.
You probably haven’t heard of AppDirect yet, but it’s an interesting business. AppDirect is creating a… → Read More
A couple months ago, we noted that a company called 955 Dreams was playing the iPad like jazz with their hot app, The History of Jazz. Now they’re back again with another musically-themed iPad app. And it’s far out, man.
On The Way To Woodstock takes everything that 955 Dreams learned from the jazz app and expands upon it. I had a chance to sit down with the team a few days ago and play around… → Read More
Most of this “inside information” on Dell’s next Adamo series isn’t really news, but one good sign is that the company appears to be looking at serious performance as well as good design. That’s nice, but of course the result will be an extremely high price. Problem? Nah, sounds good to me.We need more of that in PC laptops. I’ve had enough of five-million-run… → Read More
Sure, everyone’s talking about Honeycomb (well, some people are), but if you just want a little hackable tablet on which to do whatever it is you do with a 7″ tablet, this Archos 7 is going for a bargain-bin price right now. It was $200 at launch last year, but as you can imagine, there is a bit of stock left over, and it’s available on eBay for $125 with free shipping. → Read More
Boingo Wireless, a nationwide WiFi provider, has just issued a release stating that it is pricing its IPO tomorrow morning at $13.50 per share, which falls into the expected range. The shares will begin trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol “WIFI.”
Boingo is looking to raise $75 million in its public offering. Boingo claims that it is one of the largest commercial Wi-Fi networks in the world… → Read More
Not too much to say here except that Apple is assiduous in its pursuit of patent lockdown. iDevices are eminently imitable, and in China there’s a whole sub-industry of fake gadgets — one might even say that is the industry, and the legit gadgets are the sub-industry. These just-granted design patents don’t signal the end of fake iPods or anything like that, but if Apple wants to… → Read More
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