It may be a while before Congress & Friends get this whole Net Neutrality debate squared away. But that’s no biggie, since Dan Kaminsky has cooked up his own little solution to figure out if your ISP is throttling service.
It’s called N00ter, short for neutral rooter, and Kaminsky showed it off for the first time at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, reports Forbes. → Read More
Everyone is curious to see how they rank against others, which is the fundamental appeal of Klout. It gives you a social media ranking based on your influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Foursquare, which Klout today is adding as the fourth social network that can help boost your score. While looking at how many people follow you or retweet you on Twitter might give a sense of how far… → Read More
Zipadi, which offers a publishing and e-commerce platform that lets designers create digital magazines, product catalogs and other publications for iOS devices and the Web, has been acquired by Elevate, a publicly-listed subsidiary of digital services company Highland Business Services.
The combined entity will offer solutions for the creation and distribution of content and apps across… → Read More
Gild, a TechCrunch Disrupt startup that combines social gaming with career advancement for developers, has raised $2.4 million in new funding led by Globespan Capital Partners.
Founder Sheeroy Desai says that the company pivoted to focusing on developers after seeing how many engineers were joining Gild. Essentially, Gild is a place for developers to share their skills. → Read More
Monetate, the platform that provides marketers with testing and targeting services for their websites, announced today that it has closed a $15 million series B funding round. The round was led by OpenView Venture Partners and adds to the $5.1 million series A round the company raised back in December from First Round Capital and FLOODGATE. The latest infusion of capital brings total investment to… → Read More
Rentcycle, a San Francisco-based startup that has been dubbed the “OpenTable for product rentals”, announced today that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Collaborative Fund, a young seed fund founded by Craig Shapiro that invests in startups focusing on peer-to-peer sharing of resources and creative innovations in business.
A host of other notable VCs and angels… → Read More
Microsoft has announced the .NET Gadgeteer, a small, Arduiono-like toolkit that allows hackers to build unique hardware and software solutions using a set of pre-assembled parts.
The kid includes a framework for hardware programming that works with Microsoft’s own Visual Studio. For example, you can add camera widgets, heat sensors, and screens to your software project, program it from a PC… → Read More
Multi-device social gaming platform Sibblingz has raised $1 million from incubator YouWeb. YouWeb previously invested a $500,000 seed round in Sibblingz in 2008.
Sibblingz allows developers to simultaneously create games on Facebook as well as iOS and Android devices, allowing players to continue the same social game as they switch between devices. The platform also offers the developers the… → Read More
Good news for those of you who are averse to agonizing plane trips and high ticket prices: hot travel search startup Hipmunk has just launched a new feature that makes it easier to cut back on both.
The new feature, which is called FlexCal flight search, is designed for users who have flexible travel dates. Give the site a ballpark range of when you want to depart, and it will present visual… → Read More
I hope you didn’t have the PS Vita on your Christmas list this year. Sony’s next-gen portable is going to reach the States or Europe until next year per an AP interview with Sony Corp. Executive Deputy President Kazuo Hirai. The executive acknowledged that missing the holiday season is going to be costly, “That’s when you do half your year’s sales,” he said. “This is going to prove painful for… → Read More
T-Mobile’s customer base has been dwindling for a while now, but the migration from pink seems to be slowing with just 50,000 customers bouncing out of there in the second quarter. That’s compared to the 90,000 T-Mo customers that jumped ship last year.
With this past quarter’s losses, T-Mobile’s current subscriber base comprises 33.6 million people — quite a bit less than … → Read More
If at first you don’t succeed, keep reducing the price until something sticks. HP is reducing the price of the 16GB HP TouchPad to $399 – $100 off the original price.
This comes after HP’s move to reduce the price $50 a few days ago. These swift price changes are pretty odd, to be sure, and if things go any lower I’d suspect HP was telegraphing slow sales. → Read More
Local.com this morning announced that it has secured a $12 million revolving credit facility from Square 1 Bank to fund future acquisitions and other “strategic growth initiatives”.
In connection with the new Square 1 Bank credit facility, the local online media company terminated its debt facility with Silicon Valley Bank. → Read More
IR extenders have long allowed homeowners to neatly hide A/V equipment and cable boxes in linen closest and other rooms. The results are awesome as you get all the functionality of the boxes without looking at the ugly things. (and it keeps them away from the kiddos) But IR extenders are traditionally clunky devices, requiring their own special wiring and large receiver units. Enter Sewell… → Read More
Mobile marketing service, Augme Technologies, today announced that it will be acquiring Hipcricket, a mobile marketing and advertising platform for $44.5 million — $6 million of which is in cash and $38.5 million in common stock. Hipcricket’s shareholders must approve the acquisition before it can be finalized, yet with the transaction also calling for a 12-month earn-out payment of an additional… → Read More
Social media monitoring company Meltwater Group has acquired IceRocket, a realtime social search engine. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
IceRocket is a real-time search engine that crawls over 200 million blogs, as well as Tweets, news, and videos that are each profiled, categorized and ranked for results. The company also operates a blog search engine that identifies trends… → Read More
Danny Choo, culture hound based in Tokyo, visited a service called CloneFactory where he had his head scanned, printed, and stuck onto the body of a Storm Trooper.
The service uses multiple DSLRs to take snapshots of your head, render it in 3D, and then print it out in plaster using a 3D printer. Hair, make-up, and coloring are added and then your head is stuck on a little plastic doll. You can… → Read More
Local Response, a recently launched social advertising platform that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” with marketing campaigns, is making its first acquisition today. The startup (formerly Buzzd) is acquiring Philo, a social TV check-in and advertising platform backed by North Bridge Venture Partners, DFJ Gotham, Eniac Ventures, and others. Exact terms of the deal were not… → Read More
Riga, Latvia-based Reach.ly is today launching its first product, coinciding with the announcement that it has raised an initial round of seed funding to jump-start the business.
The service that the fledgling company is debuting today is a Web-based platform that provides hotels with a curated Twitter stream and direct conversation tool so they can touch base with potential guests in real… → Read More
Back in April, game developer The Casual Collective rebranded as Kixeye and launched a new realtime strategy game called Battle Pirates. Since then, the startup has been hard at work on raising some new capital to expand its team and roll out additional titles. This officially came to pass this morning, as the company announced that it has closed an $18 million series C funding round, bringing… → Read More
At the end of June 2011, Skype added the ability to make one-to-one video calls over both WiFi and 3G connections to its Android application.
However, very few handsets were supported at the time, but now the company has released an update that brings two-way video calling to 17 more smartphones, including the HTC Desire and Desire HD, the Samsung Galaxy S and S II and Sony Ericsson Xperia… → Read More
Today, seed fund and accelerator, TechStars, will be hosting its “Demo Day” in Boulder, where it will showcase its 12 newest startups. The accelerator expects over 500 people to be on hand, including investors and venture funds, who will be on hand to vet the young founding teams and potentially take out those checkbooks.
Founded in 2006 in Boulder, TechStars has expanded its operations to… → Read More
While I haven’t heard any popular outcry regarding the Nintendo 3DS price drop – a quiet that, is, in a way, the most interesting part of the entire affair – Nintendo has decided that it’s time to explain itself to the early adopters. Satoru Iwata, CEO of the company, stated that the move was, in fact, unprecedented, but Nintendo had some very good reasons for cutting the 3DS price: → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories from TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
As you’ve undoubtedly seen by now, Google decided to go on the offensive today with regard to patents. No, they didn’t go after any company for violating their patents. Nor did they spend billions acquiring new ones. Instead, David Drummond, Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer, took to the Google Blog to lash out at Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and others for using “bogus patents” to attack their… → Read More
As the fruits of Google’s rush to build a social network are now achingly public, someone has asked a pretty apropos question on Quora, “How long would it take to build Facebook as of July 2011?”
Former Facebook CTO and Quora founder Adam D’Angelo provides an informed answer, arguing that if we were just talking about the software and systems and not the company’s user acquisition… → Read More
Some readers may be upset by the content herein, as this doesn’t exactly involve APIs, Android, or SDKs, but it was just too good not to share. The international media has been abuzz today with some unusual news from Sweden. The “Ocean Explorer Team”, a Swedish expedition plumbing the Baltic Sea for underwater treasure, has discovered what looks to be the Millennium Falcon on the seafloor between… → Read More
Earlier today, Google came out swinging. Seemingly sick of being continuously slapped in the face by the patent issue, Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, wrote a blog post calling out several of Google’s rivals for attempting to use “bogus patents” to destroy Android. Chief among the rivals called out was Microsoft. Drummond noted that the software giant had been getting in bed… → Read More
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