Friend-Watch is a new Facebook application that stalks your friends list, watching for changes you might not otherwise notice. This includes things like people who change their name, add you as a friend, deactivate their account, restore their account, delete you, block you or unblock you. It also tracks general trends, like friend counts and gender breakdowns. In short, it’s like analytics… → Read More
Touchanote is a new Android application that ties together NFC technology with the popular note-taking and organizing software Evernote. Created by the Montreal-based startup Wiseleap, the app took home the $50,000 grand prize at Evernote’s recent developer conference in San Francisco. → Read More
Most power airfare searchers know that buying two one-way tickets on separate airlines can sometimes be cheaper than buying a roundtrip ticket on the same airline. But on most travel search portals you have to do a little digging to find these one way fares, and sites like Kayak wouldn’t pair two one-way fares from different airlines. Today, Kayak is integrating these fares, which the company has… → Read More
Last year, popular live video platform Ustream launched a mobile app development platform called Ustream Live Mobilizer that offered brands, celebrities, and bands a customizable iPhone application that featured Ustream’s live steaming capabilities. But today, Ustream is shutting down Live Mobilizer and announcing a partnership with Mobile Roadie, which allows anyone develop and create sleek… → Read More
Don’t listen to the masses. Buy the TouchPad (if you can find one) and enjoy webOS. It’s an amazing OS killed off by natural selection, like a beautiful peacock with a rare and debilitating reproductive problem. It has the swankiness of iOS, the multitasking of Android all built by the folks that started it all, Palm. The Internet is being overran by Android nerds. Don’t listen to them. → Read More
Exhausted from a couple weeks in the European litigation ring, Apple has tagged in Microsoft to pick up the fight against Android. And it would seem that the divide-and-conquer strategy is panning out quite nicely for the duo we never thought would be.
Microsoft today filed a suit accusing Google’s betrothed, Motorola Mobility, of infringing on seven of Microsoft’s patents that just so happen… → Read More
Nintendo’s recent 3DS price drop seems to have accomplished the goal of moving more units, but rumor has it that Nintendo’s higher-ups aren’t too pleased with the floundering portable as a whole. Among other things, Nintendo is supposedly considering a new hardware revision for the 3DS that downplays its 3D capabilities → Read More
Japanese accessory maker Elecom announced [JP] the kandenchi today, a wireless mouse that’s designed like a battery. The 2.4GHz device, developed in cooperation with Tokyo-based design company nendo, can be connected to your computer via USB. → Read More
The smart money is pouring into Moat, the ad tech startup founded by former Right Media CEO Mike Walrath and brothers Jonah and Noah Goodhart. Ron Conway’s SV Angel led a $1.5 million round, along with Founders Fund, Vast Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, and First Round Capital. Walrath and the Goodhart brothers previously seeded the company with $3 million from their funding… → Read More
Electric bike maker FlyKly is bringing its stylish, powerful and eco-friendly bikes to San Francisco after having a blowout launch in New York earlier this summer. The company, which opened up shop on June 20th, sold out its entire stock of bikes in July at a pop-up store in Soho. Now, the bikes are being made available in San Francisco. → Read More
Our parent company AOL is having a rough time making money from Patch, its rapidly expanding network of local news sites, and that’s not its only problem. Today, group buying website BuyWithMe announced that it has recruited Charlie Gray, formerly Executive Vice President at Patch, as its new ‘Chief People Officer’.
BuyWithMe, which rivals the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial in the United… → Read More
If you look carefully at why HP bailed on consumer electronics and PCs, there are a few clear and simple reasons. The primary one? HP was number one in sales but – at least by Amplicate’s arguably loose methodology – number seven in mindshare. In the end, it looks like it was better to let someone else flog the hardware while HP did what it always did best: tell businesses how to spend money in… → Read More
Engine Yard, a provider of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, this morning announced it has acquired Orchestra, developer of a platform for deploying, scaling and managing PHP applications.
Engine Yard, which is backed by investors like Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com, opted not to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. → Read More
Déjà vu, much? Like Apple’s original strategy for the aging iPhone 3GS, a new report states that Apple is working on an 8GB iPhone 4 to be sold at a discount while the iPhone 5 will sell at a higher price with contract.
According to Reuters’s sources, Apple has contracted a Korean firm to manufacture the discount iPhone’s flash drive. Samsung was previously one of Apple’s vendors of choice… → Read More
Lenovo’s ThinkPad Tablet is meant for business types, but it just might be the best Honeycomb tablet available right now. It was announced late last month alongside the consumer-oriented IdeaPad K1 and the Windows version, the P1. Well, Lenovo is finally ready to take your credit card in exchange for a place in the shipping line. The tablet starts out at $499 for the 16GB, WiFi-only model and… → Read More
AliveCor, developer of a low-budget electrocardiogram (ECG) recorder that works in conjunction with a variety of mobile platforms (including iPhone, iPad, and Android devices), has raised $3 million in Series A funding, the company announced this morning.
The financing round was led by Burrill & Company along with Qualcomm, acting through its venture investment arm, Qualcomm Ventures, and… → Read More
After adding online payments exec Bill Ready as an Executive-In-Residence, Accel Partners is shoring up another area of expertise with the addition of former Salesforce.com executive Chuck Ganapathi as the firm’s newest Entrepreneur-in-Residence. At Accel, Ganapathi, who was the creator of Salesforce’s “Facebook for the Enterprise” Chatter, will focus on developing a company in the social… → Read More
Tawkon, an Israeli startup that offers mobile apps capable of measuring cellular radiation, has secured seed funding to the tune of $1.5 million.
The capital injection comes from thetime, an investment company owned by Ilan Shiloah, chairman of McCann Erickson Israel and Nir Tarlovsky, and from Tzvika Barinboim. Other backers include management consulting company TASC, Don Perrin (one of… → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Nothing goes better with back-to-school clothes than a nice little point-and-shoot. Thus, Canon’s timing couldn’t be any better. Today the new PowerShot digital cameras are making their debut, and from the looks of it, Canon has its bases covered.
We have three new models: the PowerShot SX150 IS, PowerShot Elph 510 HS, and the PowerShot Elph 310 HS. Most impressive by a mile is the Elph 510… → Read More
Remember last year when it seemed like everyone was doing a location-based mobile app? One of the original players in that space, Brightkite, eventually got overshadowed by newer rivals. Now two of its founders are back with a new mobile startup, and once again they’re entering a space that is quickly getting crowded: food.
Specifically, Brady Becker and Martin May have just launched … → Read More
Back in the Summer of 2008, when there was still a glimmer of innocence and belief in the fundamental goodness of people in this young blogger’s mind, I decided that I wanted a touchscreen tablet. Something like the screen side of a Macbook Air, plus a touch screen. It would mostly be for “couch” computing, I said. although I also meant “bathroom” computing. Here’s that post, titled We Want A Dead… → Read More
Erply, a company that develops retail inventory management software, is taking on Square, Intuit and VeriFone today with a new mobile credit card reader for iOS devices. Erply’s credit card device connects to an iPad or iPhone and will transmit a customer’s encrypted credit card data to its own point of sale and inventory management software suite to process payments.
With the Erply’s… → Read More
Wanova, a turnkey desktop management cloud provider, has raised $10 million in series B funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures and Opus Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $23 million.
Wanova provides Distributed Desktop Virtualization solutions that centralize control of the desktop infrastructure while optimizing the user experience and providing full support for… → Read More
A week ago, Fox changed its licensing rules so that non-paying users of Hulu would be unable to watch new episodes of their shows until eight days after their air date. Put on your analyst hat and think about what effect this might have on, say, piracy of those shows. Did you determine that it would increase piracy? Congratulations, you are a better judge of consequences than Fox. Because piracy… → Read More
While $300 for a tablet might seem insanely high after this weekend’s $100 TouchPad frenzy, it’s still a decent buy. I still find it hard to recommend existing budget Honeycomb tablets over the iPad when I’m talking to people who aren’t into tech, and this makes its case even stronger. iPad or netbook? For some people the choice is obvious, for others not so much. But at $300 neither both are good… → Read More
Three days ago I wrote about Codecademy — a slick, fun way to teach yourself how to program. The app has done an excellent job minimizing the frustration often associated with writing your first lines of code, and it sports a good-looking and intuitive interface. Another plus: the initial signup flow doesn’t show up til you’ve completed your first few lessons, so you’re writing code within a… → Read More
Why isn’t Chrome a part of Android? It’s a question as old as time itself. Or at least a few years old. But given that the same company, Google, makes both products, it never made much sense. Now they’re finally taking steps to resolve this. A bit. Maybe.
As a group of Googlers have announced on the WebKit-Dev group today (relayed by Google’s Peter Beverloo), the Android team is now committed… → Read More
The upcoming iPhone 5 will almost certainly be a single phone that supports multiple networks, namely CDMA (such as the one used by Verizon or Sprint in the United States) as well as GSM (which is used by AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S.).
This has been rumored before, and even at one point half confirmed by a Verizon executive, but nothing like some good old evidence from the field to turn a… → Read More
Last fall, Google made its first attempt to take over your living room with the launch of Google TV — a platform that merged the web with television content to create an experience promising to usher in a new era of convenience and interactivity.
Unfortunately it’s been mostly a dud thus far. The platform’s overly-complex user interface and content issues (some major channels specifically… → Read More
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