Usabilla, which creates site usability tools, has raised $1 million in a round led by Dutch venture fund Boralis and five undisclosed investors in Europe and the U.S. Customers include Disney, Levi’s and Electronic Arts> The funding will be used to expand customers and to test new platforms like mobile, tablets and TV.
Usabilla is a web-based usability testing tool that allows marketers, analysts, designers and usability experts to collect visual, quantitative user feedback on their website in, they claim “a fun, quick and easy way”: → Read More
Today at their offices in Menlo Park, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is celebrating the third anniversary of the iFund. Technically, the fund started in March of 2008 alongside the first iPhone SDK, when the firm announced that it would be investing $100 million in iPhone applications made by third-party developers. That initial fund went so well that just two years later, they decided to double-down, pouring another $200 million in as the iPad was just about to launch. So where does the fund stand now?
Three years in, Kleiner Perkins has whittled down the 5,000 business plans they’ve received to 25 companies they’ve actually funded. Of those, seven are still in stealth mode, and two have had exits: ngmoco and Pelago. The apps in the fund saw some 100 million downloads in 2010, and they anticipate seeing over 300 million downloads by the end of this year. More importantly, the apps will generate over $250 million in mobile revenue this year, Kleiner says. And they’ll have more than 150 million active monthly users. → Read More
Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, has added Soundcloud integration to make it easy to add the Flattr button (and start receiving payments) to any SoundCloud player, including those embedded anywhere across the web. Interestingly, SoundCloud already has an existing arrangement with Flattr competitor BuySimple.
Flattr’s support for SoundCloud follows a similar recently announced tie-in to Twitter, which makes it easy to tip somebody’s Twitter account with real money, although who on earth would pay for my nonsensical tweets, I’m not so sure. But it does bring into focus the company’s strategy to become a sort of ‘Like’ button but with real money, even if post-launch Flattr has slowly and perhaps stealthily begun to deviate from its more altruistic and slightly idiosyncratic payment model into something more mainstream. → Read More
Grey Area, a Finnish smartphone games developer, has now launched its alternative reality game Shadow Cities across thirteen additional European countries, after its North American launch last month. The game can be downloaded for free in the local Apple iTunes App stores in Italy, France, Germany, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway (iTunes link).
The startup recently raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, London Venture Partners and Initial Capital. → Read More
Hacker collective of the moment LulzSec has just released a torrent of data it claims to belong to Arizona law enforcement, in what it calls “Operation Chinga La Migra” (or literally translated ”Fuck the border patrol”).
They claim that the information, widely available via BitTorrent, includes hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers. I’ve confirmed by phone that at least one of the addresses posted in the initial release belongs to someone who works in the Arizona police department. → Read More
Yesterday Shazam, the company that lets users identify recorded music simply by holding their phones up toward a speaker, announced that it had raised a whopping $32 million. The company’s goal: to apply the powerful technology it’s developed over the last decade to television shows and commercials. So how will they do that?
I had a chance to sit down with Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher, who discussed in detail how this leap to television will work. And we also touched on quite a few other topics, including the fact that Shazam is now ten years old (it actually powered the song recognition features that were offered by mobile phone carriers before the rise of the iPhone and Android). You can watch the whole interview in the video above. → Read More
These speakers from Audyssey purport to be “inspired by the sights and sounds of New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood,” though I don’t see a lot of the LES in them myself. Not enough sandwiches, for one thing. But they’re more than a New York shout-out: they claim these speakers are powerful, well-balanced, and more than sufficient for your music and movies. No subwoofer required. Only one way to find out! $200 for you, my friend, shipping later this year. → Read More
History has shown time and time again that progress cannot be stopped. Nevada legislators clearly knew that as they pass a law authorizing driverless cars. Assembly Bill No. 511 gives the Nevada Department of Transportation the authority to develop rules and regulations of driverless cars. “shall adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada.” is the exact wording and is a big door to the future. → Read More
For those of you who own the Motorola Atrix 4G, you know that it does all kinds of cool things. For one, it turns into a little laptop when you clip it into its corresponding laptop dock. It’s also the first dual-core smartphone to launch in the U.S., so it was the trend-setter of snappiness, if you will.
One thing the Atrix 4G doesn’t do, however, is run Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread, at least not until next month. That’s right Atrix owners, you’re in for a real Gingerbread treat. → Read More
“This is the next Macintosh-level of disruption.”
Over the past several years, I’ve followed pretty much every new thing in the technology space, and written about many of them. But it’s hard not to get cynical when so much of what’s out there is not only not revolutionary, it’s often not even evolutionary. Instead, much of what I see is simply derivative and quite frankly, boring. But every once in a while something crops up that is truly game-changing. And it restores my faith in technology. That’s the best way to describe what I saw when I met with Oblong Industries this week.
The technologies that Oblong is working on are anything but derivative or boring — they are absolutely revolutionary. And they will shape the future of computing.
I understand that such statements sound like absolute hyperbole — especially from a guy who has written about the death of the mouse a number of times. But I would encourage you to skip to the bottom of this post and check out the videos. I’m going to attempt to explain what I saw and talked with Oblong CEO Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Chief Scientist John Underkoffler about. But the only way to truly do the technology justice (beyond using it) is to see it in action. → Read More
It’s not often that you see technologies that can legitimately be described as revolutionary, though seemingly every press release describes every gadget as such. But this D-Dalus flying vehicle, presented at the Paris Air Show, appears to be an actually revolutionary technology within aviation, as it uses a completely unique form of propulsion. So unique, in fact, that I’m having trouble picturing exactly what it is. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Soluto has raised $10.2 million in Series B funding. Index Ventures led the round, with Saul Klein taking a board seat. Previous investors including Bessemer, Giza Venture Capital, and Proxima Ventures also participated. This brings the company’s total funding to $18 million.
Soluto helps bring an end to PC user frustration from printing problems, annoying add-ons, apps that crash, resource hogs, and those frustrating applications that randomly cause your mouse to become useless for a few seconds at a time. → Read More
Apple introduced Final Cut Pro X earlier this week with the tag line “Everything just changed in post.” I guess it depends on what you mean by the word ‘changed’. Apple said they showed the pre-release version to professional editors and their jaws dropped. One Academy Award-winning editor said he was “blown away” by the modern and fast software that let’s you focus on telling your story without worrying about the technical details. Now that it’s released, many critics and early Final Cut Pro X downloaders are telling a different story. Some are even suggesting they will jump ship from what many are calling iMovie Pro or much worse.
Out of 742 customer ratings on the Apple Store right now, 45% are giving the software one star, the lowest rating possible. → Read More
Facebook’s incredible worldwide growth has reached another major milestone: the service now has 750 million monthly active users, according to a source close to the company.
We reached out to Facebook for confirmation, and a company spokesperson responded that they don’t have anything to announce at this time. That isn’t surprising: the company hasn’t officially released an updated user count since it reached 500 million users nearly a year ago. Facebook has obviously been growing since then — we believe the company may be waiting until it hits the 1 billion mark before officially updating the stat again.
The last semi-official update came from a leaked Goldman Sachs report for potential Facebook investors that pegged the number at 600 million in January. → Read More
Even though Apple has let Google answer life’s navigational questions for us thus far, it doesn’t mean that Apple wants one of its biggest competitors cashing in on the iPhone and iPad forever.
Speculation surrounding Google Maps getting replaced in iOS has been around for years. In 2009, Apple bought a couple mapping companies. In mid-2010, the iPhone maker scrapped Google and Skyhook‘s location databases in favor of its own, and a couple months later started hiring iOS engineers with mapping experience. That’s more than enough to keep the rumor mill spinning, but things got a bit juicier today. The legal disclaimer section of the iOS 5 included references to a number of different mapping companies that aren’t Google, most notably TomTom. → Read More
In the quest for a unified database of places, geo-location startup Factual is making big strides. Today it is announcing a major partnership with SimpleGeo to maintain and power its places database, which up until now has offered a competing database of places in the eyes of developers.
The merged database will have 30 million places, and be maintained and updated by Factual. Developers will be able to access the database either through SimpleGeo or Factual. “It’s Factual’s dataset, our interface,” says SimpleGoo CEO Jay Adelson. → Read More
The Cloudbox by Lacie is a little weird. It’s basically a $199 100GB drive with 100GB of cloud storage on Lacie’s own service. The backups are AES encrypted on the drive itself and then sent over en masse when you update your local copy.
It’s an interesting, if slightly odd, solution and the small size may put some folks off the solution. However, the drive is compelling enough for a SOHO user who is interested in backing up documents and a text rather than photos and video. → Read More
Keep an eye on yet-to-be launched Picadee, a new Seattle startup getting some buzz. The company was founded by former iLike employees Marcus Womack, Mike Bohlander, Ray Fortna and Josh Hepfer, and has taken a seed round of funding from iLike founders Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi.
The company isn’t saying what it’s doing yet, but this is a team that has performed well together before. They built iLike (see our first coverage), which was eventually acquired by MySpace. iLike was the original “Facebook Music” app. – for a time it was by far the most popular third party application on Facebook. → Read More
Earlier this month, eBay acquired Magento, developer of an open-source e-commerce platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we’ve heard from multiple sources that the ecommerce and digital payments giant paid north of $180 million for the company, which will become one of the pillars of eBay’s new X.commerce group (alongside PayPal, Milo and RedLaser).
Apart from the purchase price, we’ve also learned that there is more to this deal than meets the eye, so we dug a little to find out what’s going on behind the scenes. → Read More
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