The scrappy apartment sharing startup Airbnb has just raised $112 million at a one billion plus valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. We’re hearing that the split is around $60 million from Andreessen, $40 million from DST and $5 million from General Catalyst — the rest coming from previous investors and newcomer Jeff Bezos.
We previously reported that the startup was raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
→ Read More
Realtime car traffic data company Inrix has raised $37 million in series D funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Green Growth Fund and August Capital. This brings Inrix’s funding to nearly $70 million. Post-funding, Inrix’s valuation is just shy of $500 million.
Inrix aggregates and crowdsources real-time traffic information from more than 10 million spurces including cars, taxis, delivery vehicles, trucks and other channels, Inrix’s data software aggregates and enhances traffic-related information from hundreds of public and private sources and then sells this data to mobile app developers and websites. → Read More
You may have heard of LegalZoom, which is basically an online service that helps people create their own legal documents. The site makes its relatively easy to do simple legal functions such as writing a last will, incorporating a business, trademark a name or creating a real estate lease. The fact is that paying a lawyer to draw up these documents can be expensive and LegalZoom wants to democratize legal document creation.
Investors are betting big on the service as well. A few months ago, LegalZoom announced that it had raised funding from Kleiner Perkins and Institutional Venture Partners. At the time, the company declined to reveal how much it has raised. And now the company is willing to talk numbers—Kleiner and IVP put a whopping $66 million into LegalZoom. That brings the company’s total funding to over $100 million. → Read More
Just like it told us it would back in February, Facebook has started to move its first group of employees into Building 10 of its new Menlo Park campus in the old Sun Building on the Bayfront Expressway. CLICK THROUGH FOR A SLIDESHOW OF THE NEW DIGS … → Read More
This weekend, TechCrunch ran a piece by Bindu Reddy bemoaning the fact that when raising money as a CEO of a start-up, someone wanted to invest in her in part because she’s a woman.
Bindu stated: “However, they don’t realize that by calling out someone’s gender they make the system less meritocratic.” She quickly went from this point to critiquing quotas, a non-sequitur that often confuses these conversations. Bindu’s post and the accompanying comments illustrate that the topic of diversity these days ignites passion and therefore is often full of muddled thinking and overloaded with accusations.
Sadly, the points in her post could have been written 30 years ago. So why do we have so much trouble agreeing on whether there’s a problem and what are appropriate steps to take? → Read More
Facebook’s labyrinthine privacy controls have sprung another leak.
This time it’s their Videos feature, which lets users share brief clips with their friends and family (Videos launched back in 2007 and Facebook now serves billions of views each month). Of course, videos are often sensitive — even more so than photos — but Facebook’s privacy controls let you restrict who has access to each clip that you’ve uploaded.
Unfortunately, those controls haven’t been working as they should: for the last week it’s been possible to see a full listing of your friends’ Facebook videos, including the name, thumbnail, description, and people tagged in each clip — regardless of whether or not you were supposed to have access to the videos.
→ Read More
Unveiled today, “We Will Always,” the third iPad 2 commercial by TBWA takes the first two iPad 2 ads — which emphasized device functionality over hardware specs — one step further. Appealing directly to a mainstream vs. early adopter audience, the new ad emphasizes the iPad 2′s ability to perform functions we’d normally complete analog (or on a PC) like the creation of photo albums, reading a book, following recipes, watching sports, going to meetings, making home movings or teaching our kids handwriting (note the shout out to OS X Lion).
→ Read More
Google Plus is terrific. I don’t think it will ever be more than the Pepsi to Facebook’s Coke, alas, but it’s much slicker and better designed. It’s too bad that the service has sacrificed a pile of goodwill over the last week by repeatedly publicly shooting themselves in the foot.
First there was the brands mistake. Now it’s gotten much worse: it seems they’re deleting profiles wholesale because they suspect that Plus users may be using handles other than their legal names. On the Internet! Oh, the horror! Worse yet, the blandly passive-aggressive language Google’s engineers are using to explain/defend this is redolent of the usual brain-dead corporate-speak you see elsewhere: Our Stupid Policy Must Be Defended, Because It’s Policy, Don’t You Understand? Even Though It’s Stupid. Oh, Google. We all thought you were better than this. → Read More
Waking up, the news of Amy Winehouse chimed from Twitter and tormented the G+ newbies. Last night on the iPhone, I couldn’t figure out how to keep Spotify playing when I switched apps. But unlike G+ which is blocked on the iPad, I could run the iPhone version of Spotify and lo and behold it worked. I surfed the sad news and the glib commentary as she sang in the background. I’d never listened much before, but now that she was gone the tracks shimmered in the luck we have left of her talent.
It’s times like these I feel lucky to be born in this age of discovery. In the rush to codify the battles of the day, we miss the triumph of ingenuity of the lurker, the loser, the strip mining of the user if those notions are to be believed. Even in the most secure of streams, there is no post, comment, like, @mention, or citation that doesn’t represent a gift rather than a proffer to the customer. We learn by watching the river flow, missing the boat, daydreaming, shutting down for the night, slapping cold water on the needy. The revolution will not be televised. No, no, no. → Read More
Google’s stock is reaching its highest value over the past six months, trading as high as $619.50 share On Friday, putting search giant just shy of a $200 billion market cap. In fact, Google’s stock closed at $618.23 on Friday, giving the company a $199.23 market cap. The last time Google traded above $600 was in the first week of March. Of course, at that time the company had a different CEO (now chairman Eric Schmidt), and no meaningful social products on the market.
While Google’s stock was skyrocketing earlier this year, in April the company, under the new regime of Larry Page, reported slightly lower than expected earnings, and the company’s stock price fell to $519 per share. → Read More
Part of Google’s new social platform Google+ includes a group video chat feature called Google Hangouts, which is great for group video chat and sharing. As my colleague MG Siegler wrote in his initial review of Google+, Google Hangouts attempts to solve the social problem of video chat by making it easy for you to let others know that you’re interested in chatting. You can share a piece of content, like a YouTube clip, and everyone in the Hangout can watch it together while talking about it.
→ Read More
When it comes to local commerce, the ultimate prize everyone is going after right now is how to close the redemption loop. The redemption loop starts when a consumer sees an ad or an offer for a local merchant, and is completed when the consumer makes a purchase and that purchase can be tracked back to the offer. If you know who is actually redeeming offers and how much they are spending, you can be much smarter about tweaking and targeting those offers.
Groupon, LivingSocial, and other daily deal sites have created enormous value by pushing the redemption loop the furthest. When someone buys a daily deal, for instance, that translates into cash for the merchant. But for the vast majority of their deals Groupon and LivingSocial do not track whether or not they are ever redeemed, much less the amount each consumer actually spends at the store or restaurant once they show up.
In order to complete the circle and track offers all the way through redemptions, it is necessary to either tap into the payment system or create an alternative way to track redemptions. Different companies are tackling this problem in different ways, but they almost all rely on a shift from emailed coupons to offers delivered through mobile apps. → Read More
The Winklevoss twins had their original case against Facebook dismissed yesterday, causing tech media to write another slew of “The Winklevosses’ Case Against Facebook Is Over But Wait Actually It Isn’t” headlines. The seven-year battle is indeed not over, as the Winklevosses intend to file a motion under Rule 60b, which alleges that the Facebook withheld evidence during the first trial and hopes for a resettlement. The value of the Winklevoss Facebook shares is currently around $200 million (which is about $200 million more than I or probably any of you have).
→ Read More
For many people, building with Legos brings back fond memories. For Mike Schropp, the memories are still being built. Schropp loves Legos, often incorporating them into technology. For his latest project, Schropp built a 12-core PC tucked into a custom made case he designed using some 2,000 black Lego bricks. The finished product is not only awesome looking, but also energy efficient.
→ Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a health technology company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
Healthcare’s hyperinflation is driving the transformation of how care gets reimbursed resulting in a massive disruption in healthcare. For example, pharma companies will succeed or fail based not on how much drug they sell, but on how well their market offerings improve outcomes.
→ Read More
Microsoft had one hell of a year. Their best ever, in fact, from a revenue perspective. They’re no Apple, but hey, who is? Nearly $70 billion in revenue for what is primarily a software company is amazing. But the great numbers continue to mask one thing: the gaping, blood-soaked wound that is the Online Services Division.
Reading Microsoft’s press release on their earnings, you’d think everything is fantastic in the division. “Online Services Division revenue grew 17% for the fourth quarter and 15% for the full year, primarily driven by increases in search revenue.” Big growth! Awesome!
Wait a minute… → Read More
Rick: “How can you close me up? On what grounds?”
Captain Renault: “I’m shocked – shocked! – to find that gambling is going on in here!”
Croupier: “Your winnings, sir.”
Captain Renault: “Oh, thank you very much.”
One has to mourn such a collective loss of innocence. The innocence of the British parliament tearfully quizzing News Corp executives over revelations that phone hacking was used in the pursuit of tabloid scoops. The innocence of those same executives who were “shocked, appalled and ashamed” at the means used by their staff to keep delivering front page gold. The innocence of senior Metropolitan Police officers on learning that underpaid colleagues routinely sold information to tabloid reporters.
And most of all the innocence of the Great British Public — the same public who made books like Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Scoop‘ into a 1938 best-seller, and did the same to Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade two generations later. How shocked — shocked! — they all are to learn that tabloid journalists are, at heart, scumbags. → Read More
No, the heat isn’t playing tricks on you: it’s time for another new episode of OMG/JK!
In this episode we take a look at Mac OS X Lion, the latest release of Apple’s operating system that introduces some key new features: Mission Control, Launchpad, and inverted scrolling. Tune in to hear how often MG attempts to touch the screen of his Macbook because he’s so used to the iPad. Yup.
Next, we turn to Spotify, the all-you-can-eat music streaming startup that finally launched in the United States after scoring record deals with the major US labels (there had been rumors about an impending US launch for well over a year). Was it worth the wait?
We also revisit Google+, Google’s promising social network that keeps making headlines (both good and bad). → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Andrew Keen, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened for yet another G+ conversation. This one, however, was noted for its evenhandedness as @ajkeen and @scobleizer traded social blows over the new Google service. As someone in the Friendfeed chat on the livecast noted, @stevegillmor seems surprisingly positive about the new service. As Keen observed, that’s because I think the new service is Friendfeed revisited.
Of course, it is. But it’s also Twitter without the 140 character limit, Facebook without the unseen authority algorithm, and the Gillmor Gang without a human director (Hangouts). @kevinmarks says it a little differently, seeing G+ growth gaining on Club Penguin. And that’s the fundamental reason Google has a winner, by underlining the best parts of each of these services and floating all boats on a rising tide. → Read More
While it is difficult to say no to money, especially when someone is giving it to you without even listening to what it is that you are doing, I felt insulted and unhappy. I felt that I was competent enough to raise money and build a successful business regardless of my gender, not because of it.
In all fairness, this angel and many other supporters of women in technology have good intentions. However, they don’t realize that by calling out someone’s gender they make the system less meritocratic.
