We’re hearing that Google is in talks to acquire Katango, the Kleiner-backed startup that uses algorithms to automatically sort your friends into different groups, with very little effort required on the user’s part (see our full post on their launch here).
Katango would be a very obvious fit for Google (in fact, we hear that Google has been interested in the company since they launched in July). Why? Because Google+ revolves around grouping your friends into different Circles, be it acquaintances, family members, and so on. But at this point, while Google+ is great at telling you who you might know, it doesn’t suggest to you which of these Circles to put them in. → Read More
The first device Jeff Bezos showed off at today’s Amazon event was the diminutive Kindle Touch, a $99 e-ink device that should be on everyone’s Christmas lists this year. The Touch has an 6-inch, IR-based touchscreen and includes all of the features found in the ne Kindle models including the new X-Ray feature that adds research and information to any book downloaded from the Kindle store.
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We’ll all been there. You are craving that delicious sandwich from that place a couple of miles from your home for lunch, when you realize your wife took the car to go shopping (again). So you hop online, looking to compare prices for the best private aircraft and nearest available flight, and begin to search frantically for a website where you can quickly charter a helicopter or small private jet so you can get that smoked salmon and avocado sandwich pronto.
PrivateFly.com feels your pain, and has established a private aircraft booking service that lets you find, compare and book your private charter jet or helicopter flight all in one, online place. The company has just raised £2 million from a number of private investors to roll out internationally. → Read More
New York-based startup Hyperpublic has some big news today that should catch the eye of developers looking to do anything with local: they’re opening access to a new Point of Interest (POI) database called Places+, and they’re also giving developers a straightforward and easy way to start monetizing. All free of charge.
Founder Jordan Cooper, who is also a Venture Partner at Lerer Ventures, walked me through each of the releases. He says that Hyperpublic has offered some location APIs before, but that they were small potatoes compared to what they’re bringing to the table now.
The Places+ product will be competing with the likes of Factual and Foursquare’s location database (each database allows mobile apps to display which restaurants and other venues are near a given location). But Cooper says that Places+ contains a superset of its competitors’ data — and he thinks that it has fresher data to boot.
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Earlier today, Microsoft and Samsung disclosed that they reached a cross-licensing agreement over patents. The key point: it’s a bad blow to the notion that Android is free. Instead, it’s more like “free” with huge Android OEM partners like HTC and now Samsung agreeing to pay Microsoft to use Android. Google must be pissed off.
And they are. Here’s their statement:
“This is the same tactic we’ve seen time and again from Microsoft. Failing to succeed in the smartphone market, they are resorting to legal measures to extort profit from others’ achievements and hinder the pace of innovation. We remain focused on building new technology and supporting Android partners.”
What if Mad Men’s Don Draper has presented Timeline instead of Mark Zuckerburg? Would we be worrying about privacy, or instead balling our eyes out at the nostalgia generated from our past lives, leaving us wanting more?
That’s the idea behind a video put together by Chicago-based Eric Leist. The original presentation saw Draper present the Kodak Carousel slide machine – a smash hit in the 1950s – but Leist has cleverly adapted the idea.
As he says: “Reminiscing is a social activity. It always has been, and now Facebook is bringing that activity online.” → Read More
mDialog, a video-advertising-as-a-service company, has closed a $5 million Series A round of funding led by the BlackBerry Partners Fund.
The company says the investment will be used to expand its offerings across all mobile and connected devices such as the iPad and iPhone, as well as Android, Roku and other platforms. → Read More
This is a guest post by Philip Petersen, CEO of ad infinitum.
The seed for this article was sown by Sarah Lacy when she stated she was not writing enough about “admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names.” Boring? How can anyone think that about data centre energy management software! Then Mark Goldenson discovered that “only 2% of TechCrunch stories are about enterprise companies.” And that did it – time for action. So, this is for enterprise software and some other boring sectors, too!
Earlier this month, Foursquare held its second hackathon, with 500 developers from around the world contributing. Today, the company is announcing the winners. The grand prize goes to Plan Your Next Trip, which uses the Foursquare API to help you plan out your upcoming 2-day trip to any city in the world using the recommendations from Foursquare’s “Explore” feature.
Several grand prize finalists were also named, including Sqavenger, Intersquares and sponsor-chosen winners Near.co and VenueMachine. → Read More
Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised a whopping $50 million in new funding with participation from CRM giant Salesforce.com. Past investors also participated in the round, as well as new ‘strategic partners’, who will be revealed soon. Box’s past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. This brings Box’s total funding to $128 million.
Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others. → Read More
At the company’s first customer conference today, cloud storage platform Box.net is revealing a number of new features and products. The company is debuting a cross-platform enterprise sync solution for both Mac and PC devices, additional security features as well as new social capabilities.
For background, Box, which has 7 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, access the platform via the mobile web, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.
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The first startup to come out of New York-based incubator Jesta Labs is Gush, which launches today with a (currently invite-only) service that lets people put all their photos – no matter how many they have – privately in the cloud and organize them in a straightforward way.
Gush, which is free of charge, aims to become a central repository for photos that people currently have scattered all over their computers and phones, Facebook profiles, Flickr and Instagram accounts and so on. → Read More
It wouldn’t be utterly shocking to find that you are unaware of the Occupy Wall Street protests currently underway in downtown Manhattan. The mainstream media coverage of it has been shockingly minimal, but it’s real, it’s happening, and apparently it’s spreading.
And who, you might ask, has been the mouthpiece for this uprising? None other than the infamous hacktivist group Anonymous, who plans to expand the protest to the far reaches of the globe (or so says their new video). → Read More
This is a guest post by DueDil, the free UK company information startup.
First: Ask family and friends
The first stage to raising finance is through family and friends, getting off the ground can be the hardest part. The thing with this is that it’s probably the easiest access to finance. If you go to an angel investor with just an idea they will obviously want way too much equity to fund it, and you end up working your ass off for peanuts. Families and friends are your biggest allies early on, even if it means asking for enough to make a MVP- minimum viable product. By building a MVP, at least you can prove to potential investors that this could work, instead of just given them a theory, build them a website with example scenarios or create a prototype. → Read More
While startups in the US, especially in the Valley, tend to be able to find funding at different stages of their life-cycle, there remains significant funding gaps remains in Europe, a disparate market of multiple countries. While the seed stage is gradually being addressed by programmes like Seedcamp, SpringBoard, StartupBootcamp and others, the stage just before venture capital kicks in remains problematic. Often that first round of VC is designed for a significant marketing push or expansion. But a new German initiative looks like creating an exciting model for other countries to follow. It’s really worth watching how this pans out. The newly created GMPVC German Media Pooltakes a “media for equity” approach. → Read More
If Amazon’s new slew of keyboard-less Kindles leaves you feeling frightened and confused, you’ve still got time to pick up one of their soon-to-be classic models. The 3rd generation Kindle (which has been retroactively renamed the “Kindle Keyboard”) is enjoying a bit of a price drop on Amazon.com as we speak. → Read More
Last week, Facebook introduced one of the boldest makeovers to the Facebook profile page since the company’s launch with the new Facebook Timeline. The updated profile provides a deeper look into your past, with navigation that lets you time travel back through the previous months and years spent on Facebook.
The most noticeable and eye-catching change to your Facebook profile, however, is not the Timeline navigation – it’s the large banner-sized photo that’s displayed at the top of the page where, as of today, a series of smaller profile pictures appear. But what if you don’t have a good photo to feature there? That’s where the newly launched Cover photo resource at MyFBCovers comes in. → Read More
Today, at an Amazon event in New York City (read our liveblog), Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire, a new media tablet that pulls together all of Amazon’s media services from the cloud. These include 18 million digital books, movies, songs, magazines, apps, and games.
The $199 Kindle Fire is designed to tap into all of the digital media products and services Amazon has been building for the past few years: Amazon Web Services, Instant Video, Kindle Books, Amazon’s MP3 music store, cloud storage, and Android app store.
When Amazon was designing the Fire, CEO Jeff Bezos says they asked themselves, “Is there some way we can bring all of these together into a remarkable product offering customers will love?” → Read More
One week after its launch, new startup accelerator and incubator Advise.me has received over 200 applications for its “Global Startup Initiative,” a program that encourages companies from all parts of the world to apply. Several of those entrants are “pretty compelling,” Solomon Engel, Advise.me Founder and CEO tells us. That may be one of the reasons why the program is now increasing the funding possibilities for its participants.
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