How do you make a digital textbook more than just a glorified PDF on a tablet? Kno, the tablet textbook company started by Chegg co-founder Osman Rashid, is rolling out a variety of features to try to bring textbooks to life, including Facebook integration, automated quizes, an activity stream of notes. But an update to its iPad app today points to how digital textbooks can create entirely new… → Read More
6fusion, a provider of cloud infrastructure management software and services, this morning announced that it has raised $7 million in a Series B round of funding led by Grotech Ventures.
Previous backer Intersouth Partners also participated in the round. The company provides an end-to-end cloud management platform that enables global workload distribution by turning companies’ public and… → Read More
Tokyo-based robot venture ZMP has churned out yet another robot car: this time, it’s the so-called RoboCar MEV-C, which is based on COMS, a vehicle Toyota started developing back in 2000. Just as COMS, the MEV-C is a single-person, 4-wheeled electric mini car – just with a robotic twist. → Read More
The Fujufilm X100 (pictured) is quietly becoming a favorite among the photography nerds thanks to its capable sensor, fair price and oh-so-hawt retro digs. But even though the price is fully justified by its performance, it’s out of reach of some aspiring shooters. No worries. The Fujifilm X10 is set to be announced within the coming weeks and should hit at a lot lower price point. → Read More
The Japanese version of iOS 5 will have a special notifications widget: a setting to turn on instant messages from Japan’s earthquake early warning system. The system is so sensitive that it could reduce your battery life as it polls the warning servers constantly. → Read More
Stipple, a technology that allows you to tag people in images no matter where they reside on the web, has launched a platform today that serves as an ‘AdWords for Images.’
For background, Stipple’s technology allows publishers to tag a person in a photo on the web, enter contextual information such as a Twitter name or Facebook name and then anyone can see their most recent social updates as… → Read More
Hopper, a Montreal, Canada-based startup, has raised $8 million in fresh funding from Atlas Venture and previous backer Brightspark Ventures to try and ‘reinvent travel search’.
Hopper is still in stealth mode, but if you’d like to learn more about what they’re cooking, check out this Boston.com profile or this article from Xconomy Boston. → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Cisco this morning announced its intent to purchase service fulfillment software assets and associated employees from the UK subsidiary of partner company Comptel, for 21.3 million euros or roughly $31 million in cash.
With the acquisition, Cisco hopes to extend network and service management technologies across its IP-based network platforms and enable service providers to more quickly launch… → Read More
Every five or so years for the past two decades the introduction of an Internet connection to a new device type has created a boom in disruptive businesses. Most of these booms—computers, followed by mobile phones, gaming consoles and now tablets—have been clearly successful. Others (remember the Network Computer?) have been ill-timed.
Now manufacturers, and a growing ecosystem of partners… → Read More
A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship among inner city kids. My immediate answer was teach coding– even basic app building skills– along with English and Math in every public school.
I was surprised that my brother– an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating… → Read More
Skype will acquire group messaging service GroupMe, a service that was born at a hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in 2010. GroupMe was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci.
The terms of the deal, including price, aren’t being disclosed.
Just a couple of months after TechCrunch Disrupt the company closed a $850,000 round of financing from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round… → Read More
Zynga has snagged another EA exec today. The social gaming giant is announcing today that former EA Executive Vice President Jeff Karp is joining as Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer. This is actually a new role for the company, and one that should help Zynga as it expands as a public company, following an IPO this fall. The move was originally reported a few weeks ago, but Zynga has confirmed… → Read More
Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from everyone here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone.
“Free software is a fundamentally… → Read More
Leveraging the success of Rent The Runway’s model, Luxemi is launching as an e-commerce site where customers can both borrow or buy Indian apparel and accessories. The site is targeted at a niche audience of South Asian American women who don’t want to spend the money on an expensive Indian outfit, or that don’t live near a shop that sells traditional Indian wear.
Instead of just offering… → Read More
Apparently we are now in the endgame, the victims of information overload ready for the triumph of socially curated automation flows. You’d think people might be wary of placing big bets on impossible goals (what were they thinking at HP?) but that’s not what keeps happening. In retrospect, it seems stunningly obvious: TouchPad? Why Pad? Why Touch? Why not make it HunchPad as in HP, as in I’ve got… → Read More
When it comes to renewable energy solutions, sometimes nature has the best ideas. That was 13-year-old Aidan Dwyer’s conclusion after a wintry hike in New York’s Catskill Mountains, a trip that inspired him to build a unique and effective solar array design.
Dwyer observed patterns in the trees and, after further research and contemplation, realized the branches matched up with the Fibonacci… → Read More
The newest addition to the local discovery app space, iPhone app Urbandig aims to help you find novel local experiences. In order to do this the team, which consists of former Myspacers Mike Macadaan, Danielle Lehman and others, has pulled in the domain expertise of local bloggers like LA Weekly assistant music editor Rebecca Haithcoat and Bay Area foodie Darya Pino of Summer Tomato in order to… → Read More
Last week, daily deals giant Groupon registered a bunch of domain names with ‘groupongoods’ in them (.com, .net, .us, .info, .biz and interestingly, .fr). Evidently, securing those domain names doesn’t necessarily mean the company is going to debut a service by the name ‘Groupon Goods’ soon or even in the distant future, but let’s hypothesize for a moment that this is exactly what they’re planning… → Read More
comScore’s July traffic numbers are out and similar to June’s findings, Facebook and Twitter both saw record traffic in terms of U.S. unique visitors in the month. In July, Facebook saw a whopping 162 million unique visitors, compared to 160.8 million unique vistors in June, and 157.2 million uniques in May.
Twitter also posted record traffic in its five year history; with 32.8 million unique… → Read More
Hey, Kids! Can you find four things wrong with this advertisement in a 6th Ave Electronics flyer? Turn your screen over for answers! → Read More
There are a number of online apps that let you create a timer that counts down to a given date and time, but frankly, most of them suck. Enter itsalmo.st, an appropriately named Web-based tool that lets you quickly and easily create a countdown for essentially anything (e.g. Doomsday) and provides you with you a custom URL to share with your friends.
The app, which was hacked together last week… → Read More
All year, I’ve heard some variation of this phrase: “A big shift, from search to discovery, is underway online.” I’m still figuring out what this means. I’d like to share my thoughts on it, and I’d like to hear what “discovery” on the web means to you.
First, I do not believe that there is a “shift” from search to discovery. “Shift” isn’t the right word, because people will continue to search… → Read More
Short Version: Energizer’s Inductive Charging pad gets rid of the wires, looks nice, and just makes getting your charge on easier. Unfortunately, the accessories needed to use the charging pad make your phone fat and ugly. → Read More
They’re out there. Be afraid. They could be anywhere, everywhere, anyone. They are shadowy, deadly, mysterious, guided by intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. Security consultants and antivirus firms whisper legends of them to their clients to scare them straight. They’re the Voldemort of online security, except that everyone is all too eager to say their name: the Advanced Persistent… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Seth Goldstein, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — sat in awe of Apple’s massive hammerlock on the tablet market. What the New York Times called 97% of the purchased category became crystal clear as HP folded its cards and went home to an uncertain future. @seth, founder of the viral music startup turntable.fm, seemed as thrilled with Spotify as he… → Read More
Editor’s note: Jules Maltz is a General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), a late-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park. You can follow him on Twitter @julesmaltz.
Whenever I’m about to make a new investment, I always think about the 2×2 matrix I learned from Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital.
The idea is that if you make a new venture investment… → Read More
Is Silverlight really dead, or is it the future of Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone? This is a question weighing on the minds of legions of Microsoft developers right now – developers who were once promised that Silverlight was the answer to their cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility woes, only to be later informed that JavaScript and HTML5 will be the tools used to build Windows 8… → Read More
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