The folks who lambasted me so roundly last year about the Notion Ink Adam are now nowhere to be found. The “fans,” Greg at NotionInkFan most notably, are quiet. NotionInkHacks is now TabletROMs, a decidedly more catholic site dedicated to general hacks. To quote Auden: Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. → Read More
As the launch of any new platform tends to do, MeeGo’s debut on the Nokia N9 last week sparked a glimmer of hope. Nokia has never been the best at making software that’s as pretty as it is powerful — but with MeeGo’s fancy animations and surprisingly well thought out UI, we walked away pleasantly surprised on almost all fronts. Maybe, just maybe, we figured, Nokia might find a way to keep MeeGo around, even as they fleshed out their new-found allegiance to Windows Phone 7. Maybe if it proved popular enough? Not gonna happen, says CEO Stephen Elop. → Read More
Everyone is trying to get pre-IPO Facebook shares any way they can. Some investors purchase shares on secondary markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost. Others broker private sales. Today, GSV Capital, a publicly traded investment management company, announced that it has purchased a small number of shares (225,000) at a price ($29.28) which would give Facebook an implied $70 billion valuation.
Although GSV Capital doesn’t say, this most likely was a private sale. Facebook passed $70 billion on the secondary markets in January, and hit $85 billion in March.
It’s such a small number of shares and a single trade, so you can’t make any generalizations about the implied market valuation of Facebook. What’s more interesting is what the trade did for GSV’s stock. It is trading up 21 percent this morning at $12.45. → Read More
A new start-up has popped up out of Tel Aviv called SearchBBM, and it could save BlackBerry users a few bucks on their SMS bill each month. Basically, SearchBBM lets you find other BBM users through Facebook, Twitter, or through their username. → Read More
AFCV Holdings, a portfolio company of growth equity investor Summit Partners, is axing the majority of people working for Q&A site Answers.com parent company Answers Corporation, which it acquired earlier this year for $127 million in cash.
According to Israeli business paper Calcalist, 45 out of 65 employees in the company’s offices in Israel were fired, including founder and CEO Bob Rosenschein and CTO Jeff Schneiderman. Another 25 employees or so work out of the United States, but it remains unclear if all of them have also been given a pink slip. → Read More
Boingo Wireless is expanding its reach to the skies today with a new partnership with Gogo, a company that powers wireless internet connectivity on airplanes. With the new partnership, Boingo customers can now log in to Gogo using their existing Boingo account (as opposed to using or creating a Gogo account).
Boingo says that this Gogo internet access includes more than 1,100 planes. No on the Gogo home pages, users will be able to choose Boingo as their provider and log in with their existing Boingo username and password. Users who have Boingo’s Wi-Finder app can also log-in to Gogo as well by accepting the flight segment charge and entering a CAPTCHA validation phrase. → Read More
Glasses-free 3D should be like water, or air: everyone should have access to it. For a couple days, we in the U.S. have been exclusively lucky in that one of the best (if not the best) Android phones of this year launched with us first. If you haven’t guessed yet, I’m talking about the HTC Evo 3D. Fortunately for those in Europe who have suddenly turned green with envy, the wait is coming to a close. HTC announced this morning plans to launch its power-packing HTC EVO 3D across Europe in July. → Read More
ViVOtech, the near field communication (NFC) software and systems company, has raised $24 million in Series C funding from Singapore’s EDBI, SingTel Innov8, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, Alloy Ventures, Citi Ventures (the venture arm of Citigroup), Draper Fisher Jurveston, DFJ Gotham, First Data Corporation, Miven Ventures, Motorola Mobility, Nokia Growth Partners and NCR. This brings ViVOtech’s total funding to $80 million.
Founded in 2001, ViVOtech develops payment software, NFC smart posters, contactless readers/writers, and over the air card provisioning, and transaction management infrastructure software. ViVOtech has installed more than 800,000 NFC systems in 35 countries. The company’s readers are found in big-name retailers and stores such as McDonalds, Home Depot and Whole Foods as well is in taxi cabs. → Read More
Publisher Meredith is expanding its food media business with the launch of Recipe.com, a site that pairs – you guessed it – recipes with digital coupons and the acquisition of EatingWell, a multichannel brand focused on – you guessed it – healthy eating. Terms of the EatingWell purchase were not disclosed. → Read More
Looks like LivingSocial is employing the same strategy for international expansion as its rival Groupon: by acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale.
According to DailySocial, the company has moved to purchase DealKeren (operational in Indonesia), its parent company Ensogo (which offers daily deals in Thailand and the Philippines) as well as GoNabit (which operates in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait). → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear: Strange Video: Happinet Lets You Play Table Tennis Against Invisible Opponents Sweet DIY Book Light The Infinite Loop Tablet Holder: Actually A Cool Idea Day 1: My Week In The Nissan Leaf Weekend Giveaway: A Kobo eReader Touch (And Some Gift Cards) → Read More
Justin Kan is the founder of Justin.tv and Socialcam. You can follow him on Twitter here and read his blog here.
Startups die in many ways, but in the past couple of years I’ve noticed that the most common cause of death is what I call “Startup Suicide”, a phenomenon in which a startup’s founders and its management kill the company while it’s still very much breathing.
Long before startups get to the point of delinquent electricity bills or serious payroll cuts, they implode. The people in them give up and move on to do other things, or they realize that startups are hard and can cause a massive amount of mental and physical exhaustion — or the founders get jobs at other companies, go back to school, or simply move out of the valley and disappear. → Read More
As popular as sports are, and as popular as the Internet is, it’s always been a bit odd to me that the two haven’t intertwined in a completely successful way just yet. That’s why it’s always nice to hear about mergers between the two sides. And that’s exactly what beRecruited and Fanvibe have apparently just completed.
As of tomorrow, beRecruited will officially acquire Fanvibe, we’ve learned. With the deal, Fanvibe’s Vishwas Prabhakara will become the new CEO of beRecruited, and Art Chang and Joe Pestro will come over in the deal, we’re told. Prior to their current roles, Prabhakara was at ESPN and Digg, while both Chang and Pestro were at Yardbarker. → Read More
Earlier this week Turntable.fm crossed a milestone. No, it wasn’t hitting a reported 140K users one month after launching, nor was it being added to the list of portfolio companies for First Round Capital (granted it was just a logo refresh from the company’s previous product incarnation, StickyBits).
In fact, the ultimate sign that the crowdsourced music service had arrived was more subtle than a milestone metric and ran under the radar for anyone who isn’t finely attuned to these things; on Tuesday the artist Sir Mix A Lot (of “Baby’s Got Back” fame) DJ’d a set on Turntable.fm replete with a custom hacked avatar that differentiated him from the available cookie cutter options. → Read More
You may have heard about the social graph and the interest graph, but what about the health graph? Thanks to RunKeeper, this term may soon become an oft-used part of your vocabulary. RunKeeper, for those unfamiliar, was founded three years ago as a simple iPhone app and a small online fitness community designed to help runners and other fitness enthusiasts employ smartphone technology to better track, measure, and improve their fitness. Since then, RunKeeper has expanded across mobile platforms, growing into a community of 6 million strong. → Read More
Editor’s note: Previously, in “The Math of TechCrunch, Part I: Is TechCrunch Still About Startups?” guest author Mark Goldenson analyzed more than 20,000 TechCrunch stories to find out how much we actually cover startups versus big companies. In this post, he drills down by investors, authors, and market segments. Goldenson is CEO of Breakthrough.com, a startup that helps people find a therapist and get online counseling. His email is mark@breakthrough.com.
In my last post, we learned that TechCrunch now covers ten times more startups than in its first year, but over half its coverage is now on large companies. In this post, I look at how the coverage breaks down by investors, authors, and markets.
These findings are based on the CrunchBase API and TechCrunch’s 23,547 stories on 6,308 companies from June 11th, 2005 to May 11th, 2011. Here is what I found. → Read More
This week’s episode of OMG/JK is a long one — the longest yet, in fact, at 30 minutes. Jason and I apologize for going on and on but we had a lot to talk about. It’s been roughly three weeks since we last recorded an episode and a ton of stuff has happened.
And while we don’t even come close to getting through all of it, we do go pretty in-depth on some of the major things: iPhone vs. Android sales, WWDC, iOS 5, iCloud, Galaxy Tab 10.1, Google Music Beta, Facebook’s Project Spartan, dining in hell with Facebook’s PR team, Facebook’s new Photos app, Twitter/iOS, and Chromebooks. → Read More
When an employee cries foul against a big tech company or its greed-driven investors, it’s easy to take the side of the employee, especially when an employee comes forward on the record to state his or her case.
A wronged employee is inherently more sympathetic than a big, greedy private equity firm or a faceless corporation, and it’s rare that an employee will actually publicly take a stand. In the cozy, relationship-driven world of Silicon Valley no one wants to make a public stink about a perceived or even real injustice. The temptation is to just suck it up and move on.
But as this Skype story has continued to dominate another weekend of headlines many bloggers and tweeters are missing important facts in our zeal to defend wronged employees and demand that private equity firms– especially ones profiting off of an $8 billion deal– just do the right thing. → Read More
“There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil ” – Walter Lippmann
So, that’s it. The hacking group known as LulzSec has called off its vandalism spree, three days after releasing its one meaningful “payload”: a batch of documents from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Bold promises of similar data dumps, including “five gigabytes of government and law enforcement data from across the world“, were apparently just that; promises.
Still the Arizona release was serious enough on its own, comprising details of police use of informants and the names and home addresses of police officers and their families. The hack, we’re told, was in retaliation for SB1070, the Arizona immigration law which many have (rightly) argued encourages racial profiling. This despite the fact that blaming individual Arizona officers (and their families) for a state senate law is as wrong-headed as holding a single US army private accountable for the entire Iraq war. → Read More
The two houses of Congress straddle the central rotunda, where JFK lay in state before making the trip across the Potomac to Arlington. From his gravesite and the Eternal Flame, you turn around and notice how the site lines up perfectly with the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Just as the White House and the Capitol dome are bisected by the Monument. The symmetry defines the power relationships.
At the Lincoln Memorial he sits like some grand couch potato watching Netflix, ringed by his words on flanking walls. The Gettysburg Address feels somehow modern in its 140 character-like brevity. The reflecting pool was empty, as a Martin Luther King memorial rises in the dusk. For the people, by the people, retweeted throughout the land. → Read More
