Alright folks. If you’re still young enough, immature enough, or bankless enough to own a piggy bank, it’s time to crack that thing open. Black Friday is (count ‘em) two days away, and if you don’t have a plan by now then let’s get to it.
In no particular order, here are some of the Black Friday gadget deals that stand out to us (some are still leaks and thus unverified, but we’ll make it clear which sales are official and which are still a bit mysterious). → Read More
Despite yesterday’s FQ3 earnings statement indicating that Pandora beat Wall Street projections and that it has abundant long-term growth opportunities, Pandora’s stock price fell 11.3% since yesterday to $10.51. This is likely because Pandora lowered its FQ4 guidance to a loss ($0.03) in earnings per share, worse than its $0.02 EPS for last quarter and Wall Street’s ($0.02) guidance for next quarter. Investors see Pandora as a momentum story, betting on it gradually but steadily growing towards significant profitability. The slightly grim guidance, due to increased investments which will go towards hiring more sales people, may have spooked some investors with a distaste for any signs of slowing momentum. → Read More
The primary focus for app developers, aside from making kick ass apps, is finding truly effective ways to monetize those apps, whether it be through targeted, location-enabled ad solutions, in-game purchases, or incentivized downloads. As freemium models proliferate, this stuff becomes increasingly important. The other piece of the puzzle is helping app creators manage and understand their user base, because with a more granular picture of who is using the app, where they are, how they’re using the app, and so on, developers can design better user experiences, and in turn, open up new monetization opportunities.
Appboy, a startup offering a free mobile software development toolkit (SDK) for developers, is trying to do just that. AppBoy, simply put, wants to enable app developers to expand, engage, and better understand their user base. And to help with that mission, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $1 million in seed funding. The investment was led by Blumberg Capital, with participation from Metamorphic Ventures, Accelerator Ventures, Bullpen Capital and T5 Capital. → Read More
If you were thinking of laying out the cash for one of the new touch-based e-readers, now would be a good time. Kobo is dropping the price of its Touch e-reader device, which I reviewed here, to $99 if you’re willing to see ads when the device is sleeping.
That puts it at the same price as the Nook and Kindle – except the Nook is getting a special price this Friday. → Read More
The free-to-play model, while disparaged by some developers as exploitative of players, has certainly proved itself over and over to be financially sustainable if done right. And although I myself have paid a buck or two for extra in-game content myself, I have always found it hard to believe that there are people out there who will sink scores, hundreds, or thousands of dollars into their online personae.
No better proof of this than the news that’s propagating today: German gaming company Bigpoint, which operates a few free-to-play games, has sold 2000 (and counting) items just in the last few days – for the whopping price of €1000 each. Where is your horse armor now? → Read More
Apple’s largest retail store is under construction in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. It takes up an entire mezzanine level at one end of the grand hall where there used to be a restaurant. Currently, the construction site is boxed up and draped in black, but today they added a large digital sign with lettering that flips just like the signs showing the latest trains and tracks above the ticket booths.
I took the picture above this morning, which says simply: “Apple Store, Grand Central. Arriving Soon.” → Read More
People are all caught up in today’s Google Doodles but for all the wrong reasons. Yes, there’s a customizable turkey for the US and a fun sci-fi game for Europe. But did you notice the G+ button hovering below the turkey? Google is now using its most visible, accessible, viral element to get people to sign up and share on Google+. If worked into future Doodles, this could be quite fruitful.
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Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has just submitted its second S-1 for a public offering, seeking to raise as much as $100 million. In 2007, ExactTarget filed for an initial public offering but delayed its IPO plans and withdrew its application with the SEC to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol EXTG due to the recession. Clearly, the company has considered the current IPO climate to be more favorable.
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Walt Disney Studios and YouTube have struck deal which will bring hundreds of Disney movies to YouTube, starting today. The new partnership between the two companies includes movies from Disney, Disney-Pixar and DreamWorks Studios. The films, some of which have already arrived on YouTube, are available to rent starting at $1.99.
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Home is where the heart is. It’s also the place where most people will live and die so give a gift that will make someone’s life a bit easier (or fun). No one wants a $20 coffee pot for Christmas. But yet there are still some awesome household items that will certainly produce a smile Christmas morning. The six following items range in price from $10 to $400. There’s something here for everyone. → Read More
Mobile app monetization platform Lunch Money, has raised $1 million in seed financing from Google Ventures, First Round Capital, Scott Banister, Baroda Ventures, David Sacks, Mike Jones, Kamran Pourzanjani and Alan Braverman. As part of the announcement, Lunch Money is also rebranding to Pocket Change.
As we wrote in our initial coverage of the Lunch Money, the startup offers a set of monetization and distribution tools for mobile game developers via an SDK than can be plugged into games. The platform’s initial products include a social leaderboard and a token system. The social leaderboard doesn’t recreate the social graph, but instead leverages user graphs across Facebook, Twitter and Game Center. It’s a simple ranking of your friends’ scores. → Read More
While smartphone adoption continues to pick up steam here in the U.S., new research from Strategy Analytics shows that China is hungrier for smartphones than we are. For the first time ever, China has pulled ahead of the United States in terms of the number of smartphones shipped. → Read More
Hello, what do we have here? A new facial recognition mobile app? Sure looks like it. The company is called Faced.me, and its upcoming app aims to recognize faces and then connect those faces to users’ social networking profiles, allowing you to friend and follow the people you see. The company emerged from November’s Startup Weekend in Brazil, but hasn’t yet launched publicly.
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Over the last few years, publishing companies have been forced to accomodate eReaders, tablets, social media, and a bevy of new multimedia channels. Perhaps more than others, they’ve been slow to evolve and they’ve struggled, because, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. (Even though it seems that apps can be.)
Link.me, an Australian startup with headquarters in San Francisco, has been hard at work trying to find creative and cost-effective ways for publishers to retain their print businesses while incorporating the new digital technologies that many readers have come to expect. To do so, Link.me started with QR codes — those pervading black-and-white pixellated squares that have come to represent bar codes 2.0. Publishers have incorporated QR codes onto book jackets for several years now, but due to (their seemingly institutional) hesitation, they’ve been slow to integrate those codes into the actual text of their books, magazines, and so on. → Read More
Foursquare, and most of the apps built on top of the location service’s developer platform, are great for exploring the physical world for entertainment. But a new iPhone app called 4sqwifi (download here) offers something that could help those of us who need to be productive remotely — a way to see nearby wifi locations, and the passwords to go with them.
Those of you who have been stuck needing to send an urgent work email while experiencing poor smartphone data reception will understand why this app is useful.
Yes, there are a bunch of other web sites and apps that try to help people find nearby wifi locations. All the ones I’ve seen have had various shortcomings, like outdated or incomplete databases, and no passwords. 4sqwifi solves this problem by finding Foursquare venues near to the user, then searching user tips related to getting WiFi connections (“free wifi,” “wifi password is…” etc.). → Read More
You don’t need to work on Wall Street to have seen this one coming: Today, for the first time since its NASDAQ debut on November 4th, Groupon has fallen below its IPO price, which initially placed the company’s stock at $20 per share. The company’s stock opened (at first trade) at $28 per share, with a market cap of $17.8 billion.
It’s currently hovering at about $17.30 per share, down nearly 14 percent on the day. The daily deal behemoth’s stock has been on a three-day slide, and this marks the third day in a row of double digit declines. This came after the stock hit its all-time (really, all-month since IPO) high on Friday at $26.19 per share.
Welcome to the public markets, Groupon. → Read More
The entrepreneur was fuming over the phone. He is arguably angry: he had heard of a company had just been raided on trumped up charges and I spoke to him one evening after he returned to the UK.
“Chinese people basically believe that their success in manufacturing is because Chinese people are so smart,” he said. “But why does the world get stuff made in China? Just one reason: it’s cheap.”
“That’s the advantage. And it’s going to be so easy for China to shoot that one advantage away,” he said.
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When Bonfire went live last month we had high hopes for this tiny startup which planned to bring instant messaging to the Twitter web site, Facebook-chat style.
With this IM presence, now you would know if your Twitter friends were online or not. The horror…
Except, it didn’t work.
Bonfire crashed under the weight of TechCrunch’s readership and we didn’t hear from them again for some time. Well, it happens.
But, boys and girls, Bonfire is back and appears to be working just fine. Unless of course this post kills it again in 3…2..1…
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Here in the States, Google’s doodle greets us with a blinking turkey in anticipation of tomorrow’s impending gorgefest. Not bad, but Europe clearly has us beat today: instead of a turkey, they get an amazing HTML5-powered game to commemorate acclaimed science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. The occasion? Lem’s first book, “The Cyberiad,” was published 60 years ago today. → Read More
