Stealthy cloud startup Kenandy has raised $10.5 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with Salesforce.com, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati participating. As part of the transaction, Kleiner Perkins partner Ray Lane will join Kenandy’s board of directors.
Kenandy basically puts manufacturing management in the cloud. The startup which is led by Sandra… → Read More
Back in spring, we’ve spent a few posts covering the Medias N-04C from NEC Casio Mobile , an Android handset the company calls the “world’s slimmest smartphone”. Being just 7.7mm thin, it beats the Galaxy S II, for example, and at 105g, it’s very light, too.
Announced by NEC Casio in February this year, the handset was selling well when it hit the Japanese market a few weeks later (to date… → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Nokia has temporarily shut down its developer community website as a precaution, after a hacker gained access to a database table containing forum members’ email addresses and other information. The hacker last week exploited a vulnerability in the bulletin board software that allowed an SQL Injection attack that in turn enabled him (or her) to deface the forum website.
Nokia has now emailed… → Read More
Quixey, the Palo Alto-based startup that’s building a functional search engine for apps, today announced that it has closed a $3.8 million series A funding round. The investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group, with participation from Webb Investment Network alongside follow-on investment by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The series A round adds to the $400K Quixey… → Read More
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Leck bei Wikileaks“. The headline in German-language news weekly, Der Freitag, described the irony with Teutonic efficiency: “Leak at Wikileaks“.
In the story, published on Friday, editor Steffen Kraft claims to have… → Read More
One of Steve Jobs’ most devastating talents is in knowing when he is right. By he I mean he and his team of talented designers, engineers, supply chain wranglers, and technologists. Standing pat when the alternative is worse is a difficult move to make, but one Apple under Jobs has made a trademark.
Take the iPhone 4 and its famous dropped calls crisis. Jobs responded by delivering a software… → Read More
Get ready. This is one epic episode of OMG/JK.
It’s been a couple of weeks since our last show — and those weeks have been packed with news. Google announced that it’s in the process of acquiring Motorola, which will have major implications for the future of Android. Facebook made some changes to its Places product and privacy settings. And, in sad news, Steve Jobs announced that he’s… → Read More
Over the years, there’s been a radical change in the way we interact with our networks of friends online. It used to be that we had a few of our friends (online or offline friends) on a service, allowing us to connect to friends through the Internet and see what their activities were. Where the Internet used to be a somewhat scary world full of strangers, we suddenly had friendly anchors to… → Read More
Healthtech is an ever-growing sector, but from the $1 billion pool VCs poured into startups over the last year, health companies only received about 3 percent of that total. Not many healthtech startups have been able to secure those big venture rounds; however, last week, I highlighted one healthtech company that seems to be doing it right: Zocdoc, which raised a $50 million round from DST… → Read More
Bizness Apps, the startup that gives small businesses the tools to quickly and easily build mobile apps, launched in October 2010 and has been growing like gangbusters, reaching over 1,000 applications, 10 languages, and over 20 countries in less than 9 months. It also recently partnered with WuFoo to give SMBS the ability to create and seamlessly add contact forms, online surveys, and invitations… → Read More
When HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced that the company was seeking options for its consumer PC business and abandoning the hardware mobile business its stock dropped 20%. When Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, after a 12 hour pullback, the stock rose to go above the previous close within 48 hours.
These two stories of corporate change are widely discussed, often in terms that assume the men at… → Read More
This past Thursday, Google decided they had had enough of their Slide experiment. Even though it had only been a year since they spent $200 million+ on the social apps startup, they brought the hammer down, killing all but one Slide product (Prizes.org). The casualty list included Slide projects both new and old. And that sucks for apps like Photovine which just launched last week. But one Slide… → Read More
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can’t innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
These people will hate this post because it’s about a company called … → Read More
We’ve known that mobile ad network Millennial Media more than tripled revenue in 2010 from 2009 and achieved profitability. But we didn’t know how much the mobile ad network brought in, until now. In the recent 2011 Inc 500 list, Millennial revealed that it saw $47.8 million in 2010 revenue, up over 3,000 percent from 2007 revenue of $1.5 million. And while we don’t know what Millennial’s net… → Read More
“They have Internet in Europe?” my friend in the US joked via Facebook Messenger, as I checked into Foursquare from the Athens airport.
Yes Virginia, they do have Internet in Europe, or Greece specifically. In my case I had to buy an expensive worldwide data plan for my iPhone before I left the US, and then watch it like a hawk so I don’t go over my allotted 340 MB of data. $99 to stay… → Read More
A Year In The Life Of An Entrepeneur
1. July 2010: Ready: Set: Delaware, the state with the lowest highest point. David Argentar, a biochemist by training and bioinformaticist by trade, has launched a startup. Of sorts. Well – more of a hobby, he’d be the first to admit. He has no business plan, no investors, no employees. All he really has, in fact, is an idea and a pending patent. And as… → Read More
Who doesn’t get excited about the consumer web? Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare. Billions in revenue, Hollywood movies, overturning indistries, and curing boredom. So it is natural then as a startup entrepreneur that you’d first think about doing a consumer web product. But as someone who’s been a tech entrepreneur for a decade outside the Valley, the one thing we’re not told is… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — explored the legacy and impact of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. @dsearls called him the Beethoven of Business, and we spent the hour and 15 minutes matching that to what I called Jobs’ ability to listen to the future. In recent years, Jobs has turned his focus on perfecting the microcomputing experience… → Read More
We’re back with another episode of TechCrunched, a whirlwind recap of the week’s top tech news in 90 seconds (or so).
This week’s stories include HP’s TouchPad liquidation firesale, the latest tweaks to Facebook privacy, and, in sad news, Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO. Tune in for the details.
Here are some articles related to this week’s episode: → Read More
It’s hard to imagine anything more perfect than Slate’s decision to lay off its respected media critic Jack Shafer. Not perfect in a good way — I count myself amongst Shafer’s legions of fans — but perfect in the way that Alanis Morissette not understanding the meaning of ‘Ironic’ is perfect, or the way that a safety inspector falling out of a tenth story window would be perfect.
“I… → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
As far as Verizon devices are concerned, the Droid Bionic probably holds the crown for “Most Anticipated Handset,” but newly leaked shots of the HTC Vigor may steal a bit of that spotlight.
Rumored to be the newest addition to Verizon’s LTE line up, the Vigor sports a name that’s downright ancient in comparison: it was first spotted in a trademark application from 2009.
The Vigor made waves… → Read More
It was widely reported that Best Buy was sitting on over 200,000 TouchPads before HP enacted their drastic price cut, but the fire sale has come and gone, and that would normally be that. Instead, a notice in Best Buy’s Employee Toolkit system shows that their contentious relationship with the TouchPad may not be over just yet. → Read More
About a month ago, Tom Anderson (or Myspace Tom, if you prefer) wrote a post on his new favorite social network, Google+, offering a few bits of advice for Twitter. While many of us enjoy a good Twittering now and again, Anderson pointed out that there are a few simple features Twitter might consider if it wants to boost the overall quality of its user experience. The main thrust being that the… → Read More
The web’s most popular photo sharing site is getting another update.
In a blog post this evening, Facebook — which is by far the biggest photo site on the web — has announced that it’s launching a new photo viewer that presents images that are 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the 720 pixels they’ve been since March 2010 (they were 620 pixels before that). The viewer itself is also getting… → Read More
The recording industry doesn’t have the most respectable history when it comes to lawsuits. Between asking for millions for trivial acts of piracy, and asking potentially for trillions in more serious cases, they’ve shown that they’re not only completely disconnected from reality, but totally unheeding of the actual effects of their litigation. So it’s not surprising to see them tilting at yet… → Read More
There’s a simple fundamental reason why Grand Theft Auto exploded into a phenomenon. Everyone has criminal tendencies sometimes. And virtually indulging them is a hell of a lot better then actually indulging them and dealing with the moral consequences — or the physical consequences. Like prison.
But what if you could make the Grand Theft Auto concept even more immersive by tying it to the… → Read More
After quietly announcing they were killing off their nascent Deals product this afternoon, Facebook caused some confusion. You see, with the decision to kill off Facebook Places earlier in the week, everyone wondered what it meant for the location-based deals they launched alongside it? Those would remain alive, Facebook said at the time. But does today’s execution change anything?
No, says… → Read More
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