Twilio, the company that’s on a mission to help developers bake telephony into their applications, is launching a new feature this morning that could well give rise to a slew of startups (or, at the very least, a bunch of new features in existing web and mobile applications).
In short, it’s letting developers integrate the flexible and cost-efficient power of VoIP — the sort of technology used by services like Skype and Google Voice — into their own applications. And it saves developers the hassles involved with building out the infrastructure typically required to handle a VoIP service. Meet Twilio Client.
At a high level, Twilio Client is probably best described as a platform that facilitates embedded VoIP communications, but that’s confusing and doesn’t really demonstrate what exactly it does. So let’s try a few examples. → Read More
On the heels of raising $19 million in new funding, personal finance site for women LearnVest is debuting a more feature-rich platform.
LearnVest, which launched at TechCrunch50 in 2009, has a simple goal: to help women organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like an online version of financial planner Suze Orman blended with personal finance site Mint.com. Founded by entrepreneur Alexa Von Tobel, the startup aims to fill a big hole in terms of providing an online destination that is catered towards educating women about finance. → Read More
Last April, one of the strongest startups from TechStars’s Demo Day in New York City was ThinkNear, which turns mobile ads into hyper-targeted daily deal offers for local merchants. The startup is officially launching later today to restaurants, spas, and hair salons in New York City.
It also raised $1.63 million in a series A, which was previously reported by Ben Popper at Betabeat. The round was led by Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, but also includes many previously undisclosed investors such as Google Ventures (now I know why Rich Miner was lurking in the TechStars NY offices), Qualcomm Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, and ff Venture Capital. David Tisch and David Cohen from TechStars invested personally, as did Matt Turck from Bloomberg Ventures.
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It’s generally accepted that, on the aggregate, Android device sales will far outpace iOS sales year after year. However, there’s a dirty little secret about Android devices that most manufacturers are facing: the return rate on some Android devices is between 30 and 40 percent, in comparison to the iPhone 4′s 1.7% return rate as of Antennagate in 2010.
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Huffington Post SVP of Sales Andy Wiedlin is moving on to BuzzFeed this week, joining the viral content-focused startup as Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to his position at HuffPost, Weidlin held down the fort as VP of East Coast Sales at Myspace and put in a five-year stint at Yahoo as VP of Sales for the Northwest.
In his hiring press release, Wiedlin emphasized that the fact that Buzzfeed’s was ideally positioned technology and content-wise to ride the current social shift happening in media factored largely in his decision to move to the small company. At BuzzFeed Wiedlin will be directly under Buzzfeed CEO (and HuffPost co-founder) Jonah Peretti.
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Yesterday’s “Everybody panic!” is today’s “Meh.” B&N, Amazon, and Google Books have all taken pains to make it abundantly clear that you can only buy their ebooks from the e-store “through the Safari browser on their device or any computer” (to quote B&N) and have removed direct links to those stores from their iPad apps. In this way, they bypass Apple’s 30% revenue request. Here are the chances folks have made, including Google Books’ return to the App Store with ebook sales disabled. → Read More
Enjoy a selection of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: → Read More
Assistly, a cloud-based customer support platform, raised $3 million in funding in January of this year from Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce, as well as several other angels and VCs.
Since launching in September of last year and taking on new capital, Assistly has brought on companies like Yelp, Etsy, 37signals, Pandora, Vimeo, and Spotify as paying customers, attracting them with a customer support platform that allows businesses to respond to its customers beyond traditional customer service paths like email and phone calls by tapping into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. It also helps that the startup counts Mark Cuban and David Liu as advisors. → Read More
If you’re anything like me, this scenario may be somewhat familiar: You’re standing in the aisle of your local supermarket, or Walgreens, and you’re looking to buy a particular type of product, be it peanut butter or shaving cream or shampoo, yet you don’t have any particular allegiance to one brand over another.
Confronted with the often overwhelming abundance of choice, you may hold the product up to the light or quickly read the back label, hoping some divine intervention will guide you to the right choice. In the end, you probably make a choice based on appearance, brand familiarity, or something you read somewhere once. (When, really, you have no idea what the difference is between Scope and Listerine, other than minty-ness.)
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Tonight, it looks like Netflix is singing the after-hours blues. At the time of this writing, the company’s stock has plummeted more than 28 points in after hours trading, a 10 percent overall drop. While Netflix posted another strong quarter this afternoon, with net income up to $68 million, a 55 percent year-over-year increase and $788.6 million in revenue, up 52 percent year-to-year, there were some caveats. As my colleague Erick Schonfeld wrote earlier this afternoon, “Wall Street still isn’t happy with the slowdown in store for the third quarter”. And why is that?
Netflix’s much-talked-about price change goes into effect in the third quarter, and should be fully rolled out, Netflix estimates, by September 15th. As a result, Netflix expects “domestic net additions in Q3 to be lower than the previous year’s Q3, and because of the timing of the price change, revenues will only grow slightly on a sequential basis”. That means: Investors, temper your expectations for the next few months. (Or, as we’ve seen from this afternoon’s activity, “sell it like it’s stolen”.) → Read More
Zynga is furthering its presence in China with a new partnership with Chinese internet giant Tencent. As part of the deal, Zynga is launching a beta version of Zynga City, a new localized Chinese version of CityVille. The game will launch in the next few days and features brand-new content and game-play inspired by both traditional and pop culture in China. As reported earlier this year, Zynga City beta will be operated by Tencent on its Pengyou platform and will soon launch on the company’s QZone platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by either company.
Zynga City beta will include brand-new decorations and architecture the Chinese audience can identify and connect with, in-game events and competitions linked to Chinese holidays and news, as well as culturally relevant game mechanics such as the chance for players to send street peddlers to their friend’s cities. Zynga City beta will also feature quest system, which Zynga says will “quench Chinese players’ thirst for rich storytelling within the games they love to play.”
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Another day, another startup security glitch.
This time the startup affected is Zaarly, the service that lets you buy or sell anything with people nearby.
A bug in a recent code push created a security hole that revealed phone numbers and private messages between buyers and sellers.
To exploit the bug, you’d need only access Zaarly’s listings.JSON file, specifying the lat and long coordinates for the area you wanted to view. The site would spit out its listings as usual (“Used iPhone 4″, “Mechanic to do a Saab engine swap”, and so on) along with relevant descriptions. → Read More
If you think European startups tend to lack the ambition of their US equivalents, guess again. Today, Qapa, a new Paris-based startup went live with €1.7 million in the bank and 1 not-so-simple goal: to decrease unemployment in France by 10% within the next year.
Yes, sounds a little far-fetched. In France alone there are 4 million unemployed. Then again, each year some 900,000 jobs are not filled. And this is where Qapa is hoping to come in. → Read More
One byproduct of computing almost everybody has had to deal with at some time or another is the heat. Whether it’s your Xbox overheating due to poor ventilation, your MacBook’s fan roaring like a jet engine, or some other manifestation, the inescapable truth is that computers these days get warm. Whether it’s a processor, hard drive, or video card, it produces waste heat as its processors and moving parts do their thing.
Microsoft Research asks: if these things are so hot, why aren’t we heating our homes with them? → Read More
It’s testament to the enthusiasm of the Uber fan base that we’ve gotten multiple tips this afternoon about the service being live in Seattle. Via a quick phone call with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, I’ve confirmed that Uber has soft launched in the Pacific Northwest’s largest city, with an initial three black cars in its test fleet.
Perhaps because of general cost of living is lower, Seattle Uber pricing is less than its counterparts in New York or San Francisco — At a $7.00 base fare with a $12 minimum versus an $8.00 base fare and a $15 minimum. Uber costs more than a cab obviously (the company is currently experimenting with pricing) but totally worth it if you need to get somewhere fast, safely or just want to impress someone with your uncanny ability to summon a black car at will. → Read More
Back in early April, Kent Walker, Google’s Senior Vice President & General Counsel, wrote a post on the Google blog titled “Patents and innovation“. The reason behind the post was clear: Google was feeling the pressure in the patent space after multiple attacks against them and their partners. And now they were going to do something about it.
In his post, Walker noted that Google had laid down the initial “stalking-horse” bid for over 6,000 patents that were up for sale due to the Nortel bankruptcy. “If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate,” Walker wrote.
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We heard about the Playstation Vita’s online capabilities long before we even knew its name, but the official details are just now solidifying. We knew it would have a net-connected staging area for each game, and a proximity-based social tool (LiveArea and Near respectively), and although some of the functions there are intact, they’ve been tweaked a bit and the features have changed. → Read More
We’ve all been there; You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google Plus or Yammer or what ever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever “gone to the bathroom” in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?
Remember when the critical mass of smokers used to leave the table or meeting in groups to go indulge their habit? I straight up open my laptop at bars and parties, and then feel more guilty about that than drinking. → Read More
In April, Paris-based social music games company MXP4 released a new app – Bopler Games – that could transform the tunes of singers like Lily Allen into gaming music. Now, the company is opening an office in Los Angeles, California to prepare for the commercial launch of the application.
While the musical element definitely differentiates MXP4 from many other social gaming companies, MXP4 is getting closer to Zynga HQ. But the decision to go to LA was largely fueled by MXP4′s need to be in close proximity to the music industry – and the app has already attracted EMI Music and the likes. → Read More
In its first quarterly earnings since it announced plans to hike prices for DVD subscribers who also stream videos, Netflix tried to put the best face on its new decision. In a shareholder letter (PDF) accompanying earnings, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells report that during “the quarter, the streaming only plan continued to gain in popularity, with nearly 75% of our new
subscribers signing up for it.”
Nevertheless, net domestic subscribers increased by only 1.8 million versus 3.8 million new subscribers last quarter. (Netflix now has a total of 24.6 million subscribers in the U.S. and about another 1 million abroad). The big impact of the price change, of course, will come next quarter, when the company expects total subscribers to stay at around 25 million, with 22 million getting streaming video in some fashion, 15 million still getting DVDs, and a overlap of about 12 million getting both.
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