RIM’s had a rough go of it in the past few months. But there’s a shiny, glittering ray of hope peeking out from the collecting rubble, and it’s called QNX.
The Waterloo-based phone maker has been working for quite a while now on a replacement for its BlackBerry OS, and according to a report from BGR, the first QNX-powered handset (codenamed the BlackBerry Colt) will arrive in the first… → Read More
According to audience measurement and tracking firm comScore, U.S. retail e-commerce spending went up 14 percent in the second quarter of this year, compared to the same period a year ago. Online retail spending reached $37.5 billion for the quarter, primarily due to an increase in the number of buyers (up 16 percent), with 70 percent of all Internet users making at least one online purchase in… → Read More
Twitter has acquired Bagcheck, a sharing and discovery platform. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and co-founder Sam Pullara will be joining the Twitter engineering team. We’ve embedded the announcement below.
Bagcheck allows people to share and discover what’s inside your “bags”. People can comment on and share lists of the stuff they use and why. By ‘bags’, the startup refers to… → Read More
Location-based Q&A service Localmind is arriving on Android today, after closing a round of $600,000 in angel funding back in July. The company is also working on several developments to appeal to business owners, who will soon be able to use Localmind to connect directly with their customers, or their potential customers, in real time.
In case you don’t remember Localmind, it launched at… → Read More
Apple has been planning to launch a new cloud-based movie streaming service, which would allow you to re-download your movie purchases to other devices for no extra charge. The service, a part of “iTunes Replay,” was originally planned to launch within “the coming weeks,” according to multiple reports.
But now it seems that will not be the case. → Read More
Sometimes, when faced with an important decision, flipping a coin to let chance determine the outcome just won’t do. Instead, when life brings us to a crossroads, where two paths diverge and both seem equally walkable, we most often turn to family, friends, and trusted advisors to help us face facts and make the best choice. Or some more cavalier among us might opt for the “Magic 8-ball” approach. → Read More
Enterprise cloud app management company Okta has raised $16.5 million in Series B funding from Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and FLOODGATE. This brings the company’s total funding to $28 million.
Okta is a cloud application management service. Okta’s platform allows companies to have control of their users, applications, and data both in the cloud and behind the… → Read More
The developer who previously brought us the Facebook Friend Exporter, Mohamed Mansour, has created a new, experimental Google Chrome extension which adds text-based document collaboration capabilities to Google+ Hangouts. For those of you not yet versed in all the G+ terminology, Hangouts are the multi-person video chat feature in Google’s social networking service, supporting up to 10 people at a… → Read More
There’s been some question over whether or not the Samsung Hercules for T-Mobile is in fact a variation of the drool-inducing Galaxy S II. From the words written across the back panel of that pictured phone, I’d be willing to say the evidence is conclusive — The Samsung Hercules is actually the Galaxy S II dressed up as a demigod. → Read More
A hacker has managed to get an HTML5-based game working on the Apple TV (2G), after having first jailbroken the device and installed the Couch Surfer application. (Couch Surfer provides a Web browser for jailbroken Apple TVs.)
The game is a simple BlackJack card game, and frankly, it’s not much to look at. But the addition is notable as it demonstrates that the Apple TV is a functional platform… → Read More
As you may know, content curation platform Storify, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last fall, brings together Tweets, Facebook Status Updates, videos and more from social networking sites to create a realtime view into a story or issue. Today, the startup is announcing a first of its kind partnership with Breaking News, an MSNBC-owned Twitter handle and web site for realtime updates on news… → Read More
Plimus, a company that provides a SaaS to power e-commerce for retailers, has been acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners For $115 million. Plimus has previously raised $18 million from Susquehanna Growth Equity.
Plimus builds and manages online businesses for thousands of software publishers, Web hosting companies and online retailers. A business can choose Plimus hosted… → Read More
BigTime Software, which offers cloud-based productivity software tools to professional services firms, this morning announced that it has raised $2 million in Series A funding in a round from LTC Partners, Geneva Venture Investment Management, Hickory Grove and Howell Capital.
The company delivers time, billing and practice management software-as-a-service that integrates with Intuit… → Read More
Walmart is planning to launch several new projects this holiday season based on the technology it acquired from the social media startup Kosmix back in April. Kosmix’s platform previously powered multiple services, including a Twitter search site called TweetBeat, a health vertical called RightHealth and a homepage where users could search the Web by topic.
But the core of what Kosmix was… → Read More
Mobile and Web analytics firm Webtrends this morning announced that it has acquired real-time analytics company Reinvigorate, a portfolio company of Media Temple‘s investment arm.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. → Read More
Inspired by MG Siegler’s “I’m Quitting Email” diatribe, although this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while. I was going to save it for my personal blog, but hey, if MG’s allowed to rant about his ongoing struggles with his email inbox here on TechCrunch, I should be allowed to inform you of my loathing of phone calls as well.
And as an added bonus, I can now easily point back… → Read More
Last month, Nick Paumgarten penned a lengthy article for The New Yorker detailing the rise of online dating and the effect it’s had on web culture. Among other things, Paumgarten alludes to some eye-opening statistics about the industry, including the fact that fee-based dating sites have become, collectively, a billion-dollar industry, that “one in six new marriages is the result of meetings on… → Read More
Over the weekend parts of London descended into chaos as riots and looting spread after a protest organised around the yet unexplained shooting of a man by Police. Of course, there was huge amounts of chatter on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, with the latter coming under enormous amounts of criticism from the UK press for fuelling the fire. But while Twitter has largely been the venue… → Read More
Apple and education have always gone hand in hand, from the first Apple IIs gracing libraries across the nation to the countless aging machines now in place at schools everywhere. Now, however, a new version of the iMac (not shown here) may allow schools to upgrade on the cheap. → Read More
Jonathan’s Starbucks card lives in Jonathan Stark’s wallet. You can download a copy of the card (shown here) and, when there is money on it, scan it at any Starbucks to buy coffee and, as far as anyone can tell, Jonathan doesn’t care. Crazy, you say? Sure, it’s crazy… like a fox.
Jonathan Stark is a programmer and writer and has been experimenting with “social sharing of physical goods using… → Read More
For the outdoor inclined, there are hundreds of places to do some online shopping for gear and apparel. Outdoorsmen and women can simply visit their favorite brand’s site, whether it be REI, Backcountry, Moosejaw, or Patagonia, but there’s really not much in the way of aggregation in outdoor retail. (Though there are European sites like GearZone.) As comparison shopping, loyalty, rebate and coupon… → Read More
While I found the I’m Watch ridiculous and feel that wearable tech isn’t nearly as close to being viable as we’ve been led to expect, the watch is actually shipping and will cost $350 when Blue Sky begins selling their pre-orders. → Read More
Like Kramer and Newman driving the mail truck into Michigan to make a profit on bottle can returns, Chinese smugglers shot an arrow over the border between the mainland and Hong Kong connected to a rope. They then zipped down a collection of iPads and iPhones, hoping to make a profit on the tax differences between the two areas. → Read More
While Evan Priestley says his greatest accomplishment is launching photo faxing to TechCrunch in 2009, many in the startup community hold that it’s Phabricator – a set of open source developer applications that Priestley and others built while inside Facebook and that he intended to take on as a hobby while he looked for something else to do, after leaving the social network earlier this… → Read More
Watch me ruin your Sunday afternoon with one word. Ready? Here we go.
Patents.
This week on NBC’s Press:Here we talked about this topic most of our readers equate with a long, slow, painful root canal. Or worse. Laura Sydell of NPR was also on the show, and if you haven’t listened to her episode on This American Life called “When Patents Attack,” go do it now. We’ll wait. → Read More
If it’s not obvious yet, Google+ is going to be able to “undercut” Facebook when it comes to game developers and platform transactions. Instead of taking a 30% cut of all Farmville seeds (or whatever people are buying), Google will be able to take a smaller percentage for themselves. They may even take nothing. And when it comes to “monetization” on the G+ “website,” Google’s trump card against… → Read More
The neat thing about the Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie is that starting about a third of the way through and definitely for the last third you’re rooting for the apes. In the tipsy turvy world of Streaming, once you get over the first $10, everything else feels like it’s free. It’s a marketing mirage but then again the Walrus wasn’t Paul. The perception is everything, even when the… → Read More
It’s no secret that credit card companies are shelling out big bucks and aggressively forming partnerships and deals to start cashing in on the mobile and digital payments innovations currently taking place. American Express, which recently debuted its own digital payments product Serve, has been particularly aggressive on the partnerships front, striking recent deals with both Foursquare and … → Read More
“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.”
I’m reminded of Daniel Plainview’s admission in There Will Be Blood when thinking about Google.
While the company is still largely beloved by the public, sentiment seems to have turned against them amongst their peers, and even amongst many of the startups around Silicon Valley. While these tensions have been building for months… → Read More
During conversation with friend yesterday (in which he was trying to figure out how he would hypothetically accept payments for a pizza he delivered via mini-drone helicopter) I realized how dinky our current mobile payment options are; Should he attach a iPhone and Square dongle to the delivery box? Make customers sign up for Venmo? Set up a PayPal account and/or only deliver to people who have… → Read More
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