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
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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![Term Sheet Gavel_thumb[3]](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/term-sheet-gavel_thumb3.jpg?w=288 "Term Sheet Gavel_thumb[3]")
At some point in the game, every entrepreneur and startup founder becomes familiar with the term sheet. But “familiarity” can be a tricky qualifier. Even by one’s third startup, entrepreneurs are not always fully aware of the ins and outs of every term on a term sheet, or how to properly value their company. Just ask GRP Partner Mark Suster.
What’s more, there’s the legalese and the anxiety that VCs might sneak in some tricky terms — which all work towards making the process a confusing pain in the ass. No one wants to get duped, and entrepreneurs are always looking for better ways to compare term sheets with others in the space to get a sense of how founder-friendly terms are, what language should be agreed to, which should be negotiated, etc. → Read More
In case you’re still using Google+ (I kid, I kid, the other social network is doing well, apparently), the Google+ team has made it easy to “share” your Circles with friends today, by enabling an option to send other users a list of Circle members on your Google+ Circles page.
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Since we first caught wind of the HTC Vigor, things have been blurry. And I don’t just mean leaked photos — we’ve been back and forth on a few different features like display resolution, or whether or not it’ll be a Droid-branded handset.
But for a handset with such an air of mystery, our latest leak has really spilled the beans. → Read More
Last Friday, Amazon sent out invites to a press conference being held this coming Wednesday. They didn’t give away any details in the invite, but given our scoop earlier this month, everyone assumed it was to unveil the new Kindle tablet. We can now confirm this is correct. And we know a bit more.
On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. Yes, this is the name Amazon has settled on, to help differentiate the product from the e-ink Kindles, which will still be very much alive and for sale. And while Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will show off the Fire on stage, it won’t be ready to ship until the second week of November, we’ve learned. → Read More
This week the lads show off some of the latest gear in their collections including the new Logitech Harmony remote that allows you to surf TV on your iPad. We also talk about the new Kindle coming on Wednesday, Devin’s monastic cell, and the strange jumping muscle spasms that John has been experiencing lately.
We also marvel that we’ve been able to do three whole podcasts in as many weeks.
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You can call T-Mobile a lot of things, but “awesome at keeping secrets” probably wouldn’t be one of them.
This morning at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference, T-Mobile announced details surrounding two phones: the HTC Amaze 4G (which was exhaustively leaked a few weeks back), and their version of the Samsung Galaxy S2 (which was announced, but not fully detailed, last month.) → Read More
Launching this week at Health 2.0 is a startup called, WellnessFX, which offers a simple value proposition: It wants to help average people take charge of their health. As the medical industry expands daily and more and more health and wellness data is driven online, it’s become increasingly difficult for people to collect, organize, manage, and interpret their own medical data — to both make decisions regarding their health and see actual results.
WellnessFX was founded in April 2010 and raised $1.85 million in seed funding from Voyager Capital and FLOODGATE (as well as a handful of other angels) the following November. Since then, the startup has been in stealth, flying under the radar, iterating, testing, and becoming HIPAA compliant. → Read More
You may recall that two months ago, we found and leaked Facebook’s iPad app. What was especially awesome is that the entire app was buried in the code for Facebook’s iPhone app, you just had to do a few tricks to enable it. Once Facebook realized what we found, they took moves to try and shut it down. But it was too late. The app was out there, and looked pretty close to complete. In fact, it turns out it was feature complete at that point.
On his personal blog today, developer Jeff Verkoeyen reveals that Facebook’s iPad app has been feature complete since May. How does he know? He built it. He was the lead engineer on the project. He had been working on it for 8 solid months — sometimes as much as 80 hours a week, he says, to get it done in time. But Facebook’s definition of “in time” kept shifting, Verkoeyen says. And that led him to quit the social network, and join rival Google. → Read More
At Disrupt NYC in May, a startup called Meporter launched its location-based news app that enables every man, woman, and child to write, photograph, and record their own video of local news — as it breaks. Of course, recording will only take you so far. Meporter also allows users to share those very stories they cover with any Internet-connected and mobile-device-carrying person on the planet. Using Meporter, all those with iOS devices could easily use them to take a picture, make a video, and write their own story — becoming their own one-man or one-woman New York Times or TechCrunch — in a matter of minutes. Of course, we can’t recommend trying to become your own TechCrunch, but it’s theoretically possible. → Read More
“Remind me to watch the Doctor Who season finale this Saturday.”
If new reports are to be believed, then the iPhone 5′s new Assistant functionality can take voice input like that and automagically convert it into an entry in iOS 5′s Reminders app. 9to5Mac’s sources have come forward with boatloads of new details about Apple’s attempts to shoehorn voice commands into iOS, and if true, they paint quite the compelling picture. → Read More
U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a stop with professional social network LinkedIn, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today to chat about job creation and the economy from LinkedIn members. The meeting will feature questions from a live audience, as well as questions from thousands contributed by LinkedIn members over the past week. For the past year or so, LinkedIn has taken a number of deep data dives on the profile information of its 120 million members to highlight trends. Today, the network has developed an infographic that examines the economic opportunity and growth in industries from LinkedIn’s members over the past two years.
For example, LinkedIn says that there have been 7.4 million job changes or starts of its members since 2009. The top industries for these changes are higher education, healthcare, information technology, and marketing and advertising.
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At last week’s Facebook developers conference, f8, the company introduced the radically redesigned profile page now called the Facebook Timeline. Instead of a single column stream of status updates, shares and photo uploads, the new Timeline provides a deeper look into your past.
You navigate your Timeline through right-side navigation that lets you click into the months and years all the way back to the day of your birth. And with the new “life events” menu next to the revamped status update box, you can fill in the missing pieces of your life’s history, including marriage(s), divorce, births and deaths, job changes, moves, medical events, achievements, travels and anything else you want to record. (The latter thanks to the “other life event” option for anything that’s not already listed in Facebook’s provided drop-downs).
The end result, for those who take the time to go back and carefully document their past, is an online digital scrapbook reflecting the major moments of your life. It’s easy to do, and the results are compelling. But will you ever be able to pull that data back out of Facebook? Or will it be trapped in there forever? → Read More
