Tokyo-based human translation service myGengo (“Mechanical Turk for translations”) has raised a Series A Round of funding. The US$5.25 million round was led by Atomico, the London-based VC firm headed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, and existing investor 500 Startups. Atomico partner Hiro Tamura will join myGengo’s board of directors.
This capital injection follows the US$1.75 million in seed funding the company raised from a group of investors so far (myGengo’s other backers include Mitch Kapor, Team Europe Ventures, Point Nine, and more). myGengo says the fresh money will serve to bolster sales/marketing/engineering, to expand its API business, and to grow its global native translator network. → Read More
Million dollar question is not: will you use the revamped social bookmarking service? But rather, will your mom, sister, and that dorky teenage kid from across the street use it?
As you may have heard, Delicious was saved from Yahoo’s incompetent hands by AVOS, the new startup created by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, in April 2011.
Today, AVOS is relaunching Delicious, which they say was “rebuilt from the ground up”. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: → Read More
For baseball fans, that magical month is almost afoot. October: The time in which we look on, annoyed, as our favorite team heads to Florida to play golf, or stumbles, gets injured, and whimpers quietly out of the playoffs. It’s a testy time for most, but still one most of us would never miss.
Another thing baseball fans have likely noticed: Moneyball — a book written about the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and his use of sabermetrics and other newfangled ways of keeping tabs on which players are undervalued, etc. — has been made into a film and is being shown in theaters nationwide. For those unfamiliar with any of the above, the reason this is of interest to baseball fans? Moneyball highlighted a then ongoing re-conception of what metrics and methods teams and organizations use to evaluate players. Thanks to Moneyball and the ascendancy of Bill James and his sabermetrics, geeks were finally able to secure a place in the clubhouse.
I haven’t yet seen Moneyball, but it’s on my towering list of things to do this week, to be sure. So, in the spirit of a close wild card race, the encroaching playoffs, and the release of Moneyball, here’s a cool new app for iOS called Baseball Mobile that is, simply put, a fast and easy way to get baseball stats on your iOS devices. Not stats geeks can go mobile. With authority. → Read More
Realtime car traffic data company Inrix has been selected by Google to provide traffic data to help power the search giant’s navigation and mapping applications.
Inrix, which just raised $37 million from Kleiner Perkins and August Capital, aggregates and crowdsources real-time traffic information from more than 30 million sources including cars, taxis, delivery vehicles, trucks and other channels, Inrix’s data software aggregates and enhances traffic-related information from hundreds of public and private sources and then sells this data to mobile app developers and websites.
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Apparently my former colleague and fellow Diet Coke fiend Paul Carr is founding a startup post-TechCrunch, instead of heading back to professional blog jockeying like the rest of us pixel-stained wretches. Yay Paul.
So what on earth is it already? Well Carr himself told me that the startup is a media-play, traversing the intersection between old media and new media — “the third way,” as he puts it. Okay. → Read More
In honor of President Obama’s LinkedIn town hall meeting today — and the impending campaign — we bring you a political startup. Before you gag, give it a chance; I think this is a political startup that might just get your vote. Launching today is Ruck.us: A social and political engagement platform that allows like-minded individuals to find each other, connect, and to take collective action based on issues, not political affiliations.
On the surface, that doesn’t sound particularly earth-shattering. We’re pretty sure both Facebook and Twitter enable this kind of grouping — as does Fox News and MSNBC (and No Labels and Americans Elect). But it does help that the Ruck.us co-founders both have politics in their blood: Ray Glendening is the son of former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and Nathan Daschle is the son of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Naturally, both guys have been involved with the democratic party professionally, having recently worked for the Democratic Governors Association. → Read More
Q&A site Quora has just unveiled a revamp of its commenting system, the most notable change being the implementation of a threaded commenting feature for the discussions under a question and its subsequent answers. The new threaded comments allow users to reply to specific comments in an answer thread, intuitively by entering text into the Reply box under each comment. → Read More
You might be familiar with Walk Score, a site that crunches mapping data into a simple “walkability” score for a neighborhood or region. You know, whether food and entertainment are nearby, whether transit is available, and so on. It’s being used by more than 10,000 sites that list apartments and real estate now, providing an at-a-glance impression of how much you can expect to need your car.
They’re sitting on a ton of data from transit authorities, OpenStreetMap, and user input, and have decided to leverage that into a more user-centric tool, Apartment Search. It basically turns the telescope around; instead of taking a place you like and providing a commute and walkability score, you put in your workplace and desired commute, and it finds places for you within that trip time. And it looks really cool while doing it. → Read More
Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. is today emerging from stealth and introducing its new enterprise-ready cloud operating system for private clouds called pentOS. The new OS is built on OpenStack, the open source IaaS cloud computing project that now has over 1,450 contributors and 110 participating companies, including NASA, Rackspace, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks, Microsoft and Dell. → Read More
The news that Amazon’s tablet was real was a great scoop, but not quite a shock to the industry. Bezos all but confirmed it months ago, and supply-line leaks had it coming in late summer, which was optimistic but not far off; the Fire will be arriving on Wednesday.
One question I always had, though, was how Amazon would justify putting out this device when they’ve spent so long slagging the iPad as an e-reading platform? Simple: the Fire isn’t an e-reader. Sure, you can read books on it, but its main function is acting as a wedge for all those sadly-overlooked Amazon services. Apple sells you on one platform then keeps on nudging you until you accept the rest. iTunes, iPhone, iPad, OS X, it doesn’t matter which you do first, the point of the ecosystem is to make you use all of them. Amazon is trying for a similarly lateral play. → Read More
In took them a few years, but Y Combinator has finally stormed Manhattan. Albeit — much to the chagrin for some of the people reading this — for one night only.
No, despite some of the rumors that had circulated around tonight’s YC NYC event, Y Combinator is not opening a branch in NYC. But the YC crew in attendance, which included nearly all of the firm’s partners and a dozen YC alumni, did share plenty of anecdotes and advice with a massive crowd of 800+ New York-based entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs-to-be, and an array of other people interested in the world of startups.
The keynote of the evening featured a talk by Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham, who tackled an issue that’s been pervasive in the NYC vs Silicon Valley debate: what are the key ingredients needed to foster a startup community, and does NYC have what it takes? → Read More
Last week, Morgenthaler Ventures, the 40-year-old Sand Hill Road VC firm wrapped up its “DC to VC Startup Showcase”, a nationwide contest geared towards finding the most promising young health tech startups. From nearly 200 applicants, the pool was whittled down to eleven finalists, which presented to an invite-only crowd of VCs, angel investors and entrepreneurs. The companies were then categorized according to whether they were seeking seed funding or looking to raise their series A.
The live audience of over 350 health tech enthusiasts, as well as those watching on live stream, put the finishing touch on the months-long competition, selecting the winners (after commentary from a panel of VC and entrepreneurial judges). The winner of the seed round contest was EyeNetra, an affordable, mobile diagnostic tool for our eyes, and Jiff Inc. (a recent TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) took top prize in the series A flight with its HIPAA-compliant iPad platform for patient communication and education. → Read More
I’ve always hated the notion of ratings based on five stars. It makes no sense. Sure, something that sucks is “1 star” and something awesome is “5 stars”, but what determines a “2 star” rating? What about a “4 stars”? It’s totally arbitrary. Why not just say something is “bad”, “okay”, “good”, or “great”? Or better yet, why not say nothing unless something is great? That’s the basic idea behind Stamped, a new startup currently in stealth mode.
The startup has deep Google ties — 2 of the 3 co-founders are ex-Google, while 4 of the 7 total team members are — but it’s iPhone-only for now. They’re taking the Instagram-approach to launching in that regard. And they’re taking cues from Instagram in another key regard: simplicity. → Read More
It seems premium streaming music service Spotify just inexorably linked its future to Facebook. Fresh from integrating so deeply with Facebook’s OpenGraph that users’ Ticker stream are teaming with their friends’ listening tastes, it is now requiring new users to have a Facebook account first in order to sign-up for the service.
Visitors to the sign-up page are now greeted with “You need a Facebook account to register for Spotify. If you have an account, just log in below to register. If you don’t have a Facebook account, get one by clicking the ‘create an account’ link below.”
The issue has ignited savage debate on Twitter, with one artist management company saying Spotify has “sold its soul to the Devil”. → Read More
Though its had some legal ups and downs of late, Samsung is still pumping out products.
Today, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 has been made available for pre-order, with shipments to begin October 2. And rather than waste paper, Samsung included availability information on its Galaxy Player 5.0 and 4.0 within the release, as well. → Read More
Chinese social network Renren has purchased China-based video and photo sharing site 56.com.The deal size is around $80 million, according to a release.
Founded in 2005, 56.com is a Chinese video sharing site where users can upload, view and share videos, similar to YouTube. The majority of the videos on the site are user-generated, consisting of content mix from performing artists, amateur groups, and video enthusiasts.
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The video below shows TAG Heuer’s Mikrotimer Flying 1000 Concept watch in action. This mechanical watch times things to 1/1000th of a second – 300 times faster than a human blink. As the watch spins maniacally, it’s actually meting out 1/1000ths of a second at 500 Hz. That means the small balance wheel inside pops back and forth 3.6 million times an hour – a speed that would shatter many mechanical systems.
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Facebook has filed to establish FB PAC, a political action committee intended to “give [Facebook's] employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process,” presumably over and above voting and contributing independently to campaigns and other PACs.
The company has spent about a million dollars lobbying over the last three years, according to Senate records and documented by OpenSecrets, with the sum spent increasing every year. For comparison, Microsoft spent around $9m per year through its own PAC at its peak, though that number has gone down to about a third of that now. Establishing a PAC will enable Facebook to make direct contributions to candidates and parties, and if it chooses, spend unlimited sums bankrolling secondary efforts like independent ad campaigns. → Read More
Last week at its f8 developer conference, after months (years, even) of rumors and speculation, Facebook finally got its music service. Well, it got a bunch of them: Spotify, Rdio, MOG, and others are now deeply integrated with the social network, and, for better or for worse, your friends’ song choices are streaming through your Facebook Ticker as we speak.
To coincide with these integrations, Facebook also launched a Music dashboard, which is now featured in the left navigation sidebar (it’s automatically installed, just like Events, Photos, and the other default Facebook apps). It’s a nifty feature: click the link, and you’ll see a structured listing of some of the songs your friends have recently listened to, as well as some of the most popular artists and albums trending across all of your friends.
There’s another interesting thing about the app: it has a nice little blue music note icon; one that long-time TechCrunch readers may recognize. Bueller?
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