AT&T is buying Superclick, an internet provider for the hospitality industry, in a cash transaction valued at approximately $15 million.
Superclick provides network design, deployment and infrastructure management for the hospitality, healthcare and MDU markets. The company serves a number of major hospitality brands such as Fairmont & Raffles Hotels, Four Seasons Hotels, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Jumeirah, Kimpton Hotels, Mandarin Oriental Hotels, Marriott Hotels International, Shangri-La Hotels and Starwood in Canada, North America, the Middle East and Asia.
→ Read More
Amazon quietly announced a huge deal with Fox Broadcasting Company over the weekend. Posting directly on Amazon.com, CEO Jeff Bezos brought the big news to Prime subscribers who will now have unlimited access to an additional 11,000 movies and TV shows. These are huge titles, too: The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Arrested Development, and The Wonder Years. Yep, you can now stream the adventurers of Kevin Arnold through Amazon’s Prime Instant Video. → Read More
Today Huawei has announced its latest Android smartphone: The Huawei Honor. Unlike some recent mid-range offerings, this thing is quite the little powerhouse. The company has been focused on wallet-friendly Android devices for some time now, but the Honor certainly makes a transition into high-end turf. → Read More
Blogging community operator Tumblr has raised $85 million in new funding from Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Richard Branson also participated in the round.
The news was broken moments ago by the NYT’s Jenna Wortham, who writes that the company will announce the financing later today. → Read More
Realtime semantic startup Evri is debuting its brand-new iPad application today, where it joins the crowded “iPad news magazine” space filled with the likes of Flipboard, The Daily, Zite, Pulse, NewsMix, AOL Editions, News360 and others. To differentiate itself from the pack, Evri’s app employs a combination of social news and topical streams, allowing readers to follow their interests as opposed to just following sources. → Read More
TechMediaNetwork (TMN), a publisher of technology and science media, this morning announced that it has raised $33 million in funding in a Series B round led by ABS Capital Partners, with earlier backers Village Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures also participating.
TechMediaNetwork publishes news and reviews across a website network that it says reaches more than 24 million visitors on a monthly basis. Its network includes websites like Space.com, LAPTOP, Newsarama, TechNewsDaily, TopTenREVIEWS, iPadNewsDaily, SecurityNewsDaily and many more. → Read More
Japan’s second biggest carrier KDDI took the wraps off [JP] a total of eight new cell phones for the domestic market today. To be more concrete, the telco (which is likely to become the second in Japan to provide the iPhone 5) showed six Android handsets (the Arrows Z is the most impressive) and two feature phones.
Here are all models that KDDI showed today: → Read More
Microsoft has filed for a trademark on “Put People First”, the tagline it has recently attached to the imminent Windows Phone 7.5 update (often referred to as ‘Mango’), which is expected to roll out this or next week.
The tagline has thus far appeared on Microsoft’s Windows Phone Facebook page and in promotional YouTube videos (see below). By filing for a trademark on the slogan, Microsoft aims to demonstrate its commitment to making the next version of the Windows Phone operating system people-centric. → Read More
We’re not exactly surprised. As we predicted in May, Twitter is setting up its European HQ in Dublin (in fact this is its third international office outside the Valley). The reasons are simple: money.
Following the long- tradition of US companies in Europe (joining Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, PayPal, LinkedIn, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Apple, HP and Zynga) Ireland’s 12% corporation tax, and 45 minute flight from London (where corporation tax is 28%) is just too tempting not to take advantage of. One annual board meeting later and you can be back at you Mayfair pad in one day.
→ Read More
Back in May, a sort of revolution started in the London tech scene. You see, London is a special place. It has massive industries in the shape of the financial sector and the media industry (like the BBC) right on its doorstep, so any fresh new talent is often attracted to these established industries and their nice cozy salaries. But in May a leading startup of the area Songkick brought together 45 startups the first “Silicon Milkroundabout”, a job fair organized by the startup community in East London. The event was a great success. And now it’s back.
→ Read More
It will probably take a few more months until Japan’s five major cell phone makers really start shipping smartphones to the US and other regions, but in their home market, all signs point to an Android future.
Japan’s second biggest carrier KDDI au, for example, unveiled [JP] a total of six new Android phones for its winter line-up today, and Fujitsu-Toshiba Mobile’s ARROWS Z ISW11F is probably the most interesting model. → Read More
“What’s happening?” The text entry box on the Twitter homepage innocently asks us constantly, compelling us to type in a <140 character window into what we’re doing RIGHT NOW. For the most part, if you’re an active Twitter user, you partake voluntarily, contributing to a real-time hum of over 200 million updates daily.
On the receiving end of these updates are people who’ve chosen to subscribe to your one way broadcasting of your constant status. Like it or not, they’ve opted in to what you ate for breakfast, read this morning, or think about the financial crisis in Europe. → Read More
Last week, an Australian company called Pixel Capital acquired the domain name creditcard.net for $138,000 in a bid to more adequately market its financial comparison website network in the United States.
Said network includes sites like CreditCard.com.au and Creditworld.com.au. → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Netflix has taken a few hits lately with the reaction to its plans to split its streaming and DVD business, but now it is punching back. The company signed a deal with DreamWorks which will give it access to its movies and Tv shows for streaming over the Internet during the pay-TV window. Netflix won the deal over HBO, which currently is first in line among TV networks to show DreamWorks movies.
That’s right, Netflix outbid HBO. Estimates put the Netflix deal at $30 million per DreamWorks movie, versus the $20 million per movie that HBO is currently paying. This is exactly the kind move Netflix needs to be doing right now to bring streaming up to par with cable TV. Netflix will have to cut many more deals like this with other studios to make that happen, but this suggests it will be more aggressive in the future. Normally, Netflix purchases streaming rights for later time windows, usually after premium cable channels get to show the movies. → Read More
“‘What?.’ ‘We made it to Disrupt,’ Sarah said calmly. ‘We screamed so hard we woke up the building.’”
After the screaming ended, the Israel-based Shaker team ditched Burning Man plans for TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 rehearsals in San Francisco, devising a plan that would buy them some time (asking if they could have all 13 founders on stage) and having that plan backfire (we said “Yes.”).
→ Read More
It’s been over 72 hours since Facebook first debuted a series of groundbreaking new features at f8, which is all the time I need to predict the company’s long-term outlook, the way it will reinvent the web, and the pricing of its inevitable IPO.
Okay, maybe not. But it’s given me some time to try the features out, as opposed to basing my impressions off of Facebook’s well-crafted keynote presentations. And while many of these obviously have a lot of potential, in practice I’m finding them to be a mixed (or, in some cases, a downright irritating) bag.
Social Overlubrication
One of the big announcements at f8 was something called frictionless sharing. Here’s the gist: Facebook will let third-party sites and apps integrate what’s effectively a sharing firehose. Turn it on, and everything you do in the app gets shared with your Facebook friends.
→ Read More
Wow. PayPal released some new public numbers recently that show the payments platform is processing a massive number of payments per day. PayPal says that it saw $3,650 in Total Payment Volume every second in Q2 2011. By our calculations, that means PayPal is processing around $315.3 million in payments per day. On average, the payments platform is seeing upwards of over 5 million transactions a day.
PayPal has unequivocally been the crown jewel in parent eBay’s family of businesses. This past quarter, PayPal delivered its first-ever billion dollar revenue quarter. Total net total payment volume (TPV) grew 34% compared to the same period of last year. And PayPal is actually closing in on eBay’s marketplaces segment in terms of revenue (which posted $1.6 billion in revenue in Q2). → Read More
As I watched the Google antitrust hearings last Wednesday, with its gotcha moments and Senators pontificating about the dangers Google poses to society, it struck me that what I was watching was theater. And not just any theater, but monopoly theater. I am borrowing from the concept of security theater: “a term that describes security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.” In the same way, talking about Google’s monopoly power and what the government should do about it provides the feeling of improving competition while doing little or nothing to actually improve it.
The hearing touched upon many serious concerns about Google’s market power, but in the end it was just monopoly theater. Nothing antitrust regulators do to Google will actually improve competition. → Read More
