Xobni always was a clever name (it’s Inbox backwards), but perhaps it was too clever. Today, the startup that tries to make your email smarter is rebranding its newer products Smartr and launching them out of private beta for Android and Gmail.
These products have been in private beta for several months. The Android app takes over your address book on your phone. It ranks contacts by importance and how often you communicate with them instead of alphabetically. Since it is all managed in the cloud, it can handle thousands of contacts. Different tabs show you contact details, that contact’s recent social feeds, your relationship history, and other contacts you share in common. → Read More
Sprint is clearly in a tough spot. It’s been a step behind in getting the iPhone which should be remedied soon, but the yellow carrier is also facing a mega-merger between AT&T and T-Mobile that would drop it way below the competition.
The good news, however, is that it looks like Sprint has a plan, a piece of which involves the deployment of its 4G LTE network in early 2012. → Read More
It’s finally confirmed: Apple’s next event will be held on October 4. And they’re not even being coy about the topic — the invite says, “Let’s talk iPhone”.
In typical Apple fashion the invite is cleverly presented: The date is indicated as part of the iOS calendar app, the time by the clock, and the location (it’s being held at Apple’s campus) by the Maps icon.
Rumors have been swirling about the launch date of the next iPhone, with plenty of speculation that it might be released in September, or maybe announced in September and then released in October, or perhaps that it would be an all-October deal (never before have I seen such earnest debate over calendar dates). The October 4 date was first reported by AllThingsD last week. → Read More
I wasn’t much for playing with toy cars as a kid — you’d have found me parked in front of a Sega Genesis, if anything — but I suspect Disney Mobile’s new line of Appmate iPad peripherals would have been just the thing to change my mind. → Read More
Yesware, a startup that helps track email and improve productivity for salespeople, has raised $1 million in funding from Google Ventures, Foundry Group and other investors.
Yesware is a suite of productivity services that work where salespeople do – in their email and on their phones. The application is available for Gmail and smartphones and provides email analytics, customizable templates and CRM integration to help salespeople close more deals faster. Yesware works in conjunction with a number of popular CRM platforms including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle CRM, Highrise and others.
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When social music startup Rexly launched at Disrupt NYC last May, we called it the social music discovery app that Ping should have been. It shows you what your friends are listening to on iTunes, but filters the stream in an attempt to surface the best stuff. Up until now, you had to log into Rexly’s site to experience it. But today it is releasing its iPhone app, Music With Friends, which takes over your iPod player and incorporates all sorts of social features.
As you listen to the songs and playlists on your iPhone, Rexly scrobbles them and they show up in a feed that your friends can see. Similarly, you can see a feed of all the songs your friends are listening to who use Rexly, or the most popular songs overall. But instead of just spitting out an unfiltered stream of the ost recent songs in your feed (although you can see that too), the default filter is Rexly’s “magic” stream. It shows you songs from friends or other people you are following you’ve designated as super trustworthy in regards to their musical taste. → Read More
Peak Games, a social gaming company that designs titles that target emerging markets in Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, and South America, is making some significant announcements today, including acquisitions, partnerships, funding, and snapshot of the company’s continuing growth.
For starters, the company announced today that it has closed an $11.5 million series B round of funding, led by existing European venture investors Earlybird Venture Capital and Hummingbird Ventures. This latest infusion of capital brings the startup’s total investment to $19 million. According to the Peak Games team, the round will be used to continue expanding into emerging markets, to complete game studio acquisitions, and ramp up hiring and user acquisition. → Read More
Pandora, LinkedIn, Box.net and many others are moving to HTML5 to give users a cross-platform, rich media experience. The latest to participate in this tend is SlideShare, a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations.
SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and others use the platform to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page. → Read More
Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is today announcing support for its mobile wallet system from the majority of leading device makers, including HTC, LG, Motorola, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, as well as from NFC hardware provider Device Fidelity.
All of the handset makers are now committed to introducing handsets that will include Isis’ NFC and related technology standards. → Read More
Tykoon, a sites that helps families engage children in becoming fiscally responsible, has raised $1.35 million in funding from Doug Lebda, RRE Ventures, Rick Thompson, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Bach, and G.Kennedy Thompson.
Tykoon (currently in private beta) is a new social, personalized financial services platform for families where kids can earn, save, give and spend real money. With Tykoon, parents can implement money management via chores, jobs, allowance, spending and giving. Kids can earn money through jobs, chores, and gifts, save based on goals, spend in a kid safe environment powered by Amazon.com and give to charities via the platform. → Read More
Huawei has a history of partnering up with brands to build highly targeted phones, a good example being the Red Bull-branded RBM HD rugged phone (otherwise known as the Impulse for AT&T).
This time, the company is taking the less caffeine-fueled route, opting for some added credibility with its next rugged handset: the Huawei-Discovery Expedition phone. → Read More
I could swear that I’ve had a dream about this before, or at least written about it*, but it looks like Microsoft beat me to the patent office.
On September 22, Microsoft filed the “Mobile Communication Device Having Multiple, Interchangeable Second Devices” patent, which basically describes a slider-style phone that has replacement components to swap in for the slider keyboard. → Read More
Today, Formspring is adding support for photos to its Q&A service in an update the company is touting as the biggest in the nearly two years since its launch. With the addition, Formspring users will be able to post a photo both when asking a question or when providing a response. → Read More
All the way back in May, Microsoft revealed that they were hard at work developing a web version of the Windows Phone marketplace. Now that the new Mango update is nearly upon us, Microsoft has officially flipped the switch on their web marketplace for markets across the world. → Read More
Yammer, an enterprise social network and communications platform, has raised $17 million in new funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Previous investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners also participated in the round. Palihapitiya will have an observer’s seat on Yammer’s board of directors. This brings Yammer’s total financing to $57 million.
For background, Yammer launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008. But over the past year, the startup has expanded to become a more comprehensive platform for social networking within the enterprise.
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If you told me two-and-a-half decades ago that this tow-headed youngster from Columbus, Ohio who spent his evenings looking up at the stars, engrossed in endless wonder at the boundless horizon of the invisible universe, would one day be able to print on toilet paper in his lifetime, he would have spit at you and then kicked your dog. He was a pretty crappy kid. But it has happened: we can now use off-the-shelf components to print on toilet paper. This is the end of history. → Read More
Put one big, fat candle on the cake. One year ago today, a startup named CloudFlare launched on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, where the startup placed second to Qwiki. (You can read our initial coverage here.) For those unfamiliar with CloudFlare, the startup offers a free service designed to not only boost the speed of your company’s website but also protect it from those nefarious web-born threats that hamper load times and just generally make IT guys grumble. Not a sexy product, but one that’s necessary and integral to the success of web businesses.
To give a quick snapshot of how appealing this service is to eBusinesses: 365 days after launch, CloudFlare is now powering over 100,000 websites, with more than 5 percent of those seeing over 1.5 million monthly page views. From zero traffic to today powering a host of websites that see a collective 15 billion page views per month and more than 350 million unique visitors, CloudFlare apparently has a fairly significant silver lining. → Read More
Glitch, the storied massively multi-player online game we’ve been chronicling for 23 months now, opens to the public today at 10 am PST. In case you were wondering, Glitch has been garnering so much attention and press time because the company behind it, Tiny Speck, is the brainchild of some core members of the original Flickr team including co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson, Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov. → Read More
Exclusive – Social Q&A site Sharecare.com, created by WebMD founder Jeff Arnold and TV’s Dr. Mehmet Oz, is partnering with Healthline Networks, a provider of intelligent health information services. Healthline currently powers the health platforms at Yahoo Health, AARP, Aetna, United Health Group and others. Going forward, it will power Sharecare’s search services too.
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MOG is following the tried and true method of expanding its appeal by expanding onto new hardware and just announced that the music streaming service is now streaming on select Samsung Smart TVs and Blu-ray players. This gives owners of 2010 and 2011 Sammy TVs and Blu-ray players access to MOG’s impressive 12 million song library streamed at 320kbps.
This latest move follows other streaming service’s quick adoption of multiple hardware platforms. MOG is now accessible on iOS devices, Android phones, LG TVs and streamers such as Boxee, Roku, and Sonos. And they’re not done. → Read More
