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
Mancx, the “transactional knowledge market” where users trade business intelligence (or answers to any question posted to the site), has closed a second round of funding: $1.1m from the startup’s founders and new backers that include Bo Axel Ax:son Johnson (of the well-known Swedish conglomerate Ax:son Johnson) and Nils-Robert Persson.
Per-Arne Nordlander, the Swedish angel investor, remains as an investor and chairman of Mancx, while the company says that the new funds will be used to support further development of its knowledge marketplace and to “drive an aggressive marketing push.” → 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
As reported on TechCrunch, Google shut down its medical records and health data platform. Since then, there’s been a lot of bits spilled offering explanations, but they all missed the most critical item. Money. Or in the language of healthcare – Reimbursement. I explain more below regarding why Google Health was doomed to fail in light of the legacy reimbursement model.
First, let’s recap some of the explanations offered up so far. These are all valid but miss the biggest point.
Adam Bosworth, who originally ran Google Health gave one reason - It’s Not Social. That’s true if one wants to create a weight management program or is simply interested in fitness-minded folks. Clearly that is important given the obesity epidemic, however there’s vast swaths of healthcare where being “social” isn’t appropriate or applicable in a doctor-patient relationship. In other words, being social is necessary but not sufficient to transform healthcare. → Read More
I almost miss the bad old days. When I first started wandering around some of the more obscure nooks and crannies of this planet, lo these many years ago, Internet connections were rare and wonderful discoveries; now I just get annoyed when I can’t get online. The last decade-and-a-half of innovation has completely transformed the experience of travel. Right now I’m in the middle of a four-continents-in-six-weeks jaunt, from Canada to East Africa to Europe to India, and thanks to all my tech gear, life on the road is almost unrecognizably different from that of fifteen years ago.
The biggest change this trip has been my ebook reader. I have a Kobo. There is much about my Kobo that I really don’t like: its interface is clumsy and confusing; anything other than straight front-to-back reading is intensely frustrating; it can only use completely open wireless connections, so any wi-fi network with a login or click-to-agree-terms button is completely useless to me; and when I do connect, attempts to download new books fail approximately 50% of the time. But they do succeed the other 50%, meaning I’ve read nine books in the last month, and was able to buy and download books via ambient wi-fi in Kenya and Djibouti, which did feel like living in the future.
There are also subtler and more negative repercussions. → Read More
Skype is being criticized for terminating employees immediately prior to the closing of the Microsoft acquisition, and people are assuming they’re doing this to keep the value of those employees stock options. Skype’s response boils down to saying that the employees were fired because they weren’t good employees, and that the value of the stock is negligible and didn’t affect the decision making process.
Ok. But it gets worse.
Employees aren’t even able to keep the vested portion of their stock options. The vast majority of stock options granted to startups have a vesting period, typically four years, with chunks of those options becoming vested during that four year (or whatever) period. If options are vested you can exercise them, pay for the stock and own that stock. At least that’s the way things have been done over the decades. → Read More
Hacker group LulzSec has announced that after 50 days of hacking companies and organizations, it is finally done. Check out the message from LulzSec below, which was posted on Pastebin. Check out the video as well (embedded below).
LulzSec most recently released a torrent of data from Arizona law enforcement which included hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers. → Read More
Ever since Color launched its photo sharing app, the $41 million startup has been having a rough time. John Biggs and I reviewed it on Fly or Die back in March, when CEO Bill Nguyen joined us to defend the app ( you can watch that episode below, we both gave it a “die”). The company continues to struggle, so we decided to revisit our assessment in the new episode above.
Things don’t seem to be getting much better for the company. Nobody is using the app. Co-founder Peter Pham left, or was fired, according to CEO Bill Nguyen, who also told the New York Times that the company is going back to the drawing board. It might scrap its photo app altogether in favor of, well, something big and vague. → Read More
“I’m CEO, Bitch.”
While the story of this title appearing on Mark Zuckerberg’s early Facebook business cards has been around outside the company since at least 2009, when Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires was released, it really exploded into legendary status last year. That’s when the Acadmey Award-winning film, The Social Network (based on Mezrich’s book), launched the phrase into pop culture by having Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker utter it as the exclamation point at the end of a key speech meant to inspire Jesse Einsenberg’s Zuckerberg.
“This time you’re gonna hand them a business card that says, ‘I’m CEO, bitch!’ — that’s what I want for you,” Parker says. Later in the film, Zuckerberg opens a box of business cards that have the title on them. → Read More
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