There may be no greater gift than a quality piece of home entertainment equipment. I mean that, too. Forget train sets, diamonds and puppies. Everyone wants entertainment this holiday season and we’ve rounded up six solid bets ranging in price from $40 to $600. There’s something here for everyone including your great aunt or boyfriend that already has everything. → Read More
Back in January, Yuri Milner and SV Angel partnered to offer every startup that was part of Y Combinator’s winter batch (some 40 startups) $150K each in convertible debt. In September, national startup accelerator, TechStars, followed suit, upping its investment in each startup to $100K in convertible notes.
Providence, Rhode Island may not be the first city that pops into your head when you think of burgeoning startup ecosystems, but it looks like the city and one of its prominent young incubators is looking to change that. This week, Betaspring, the Providence-headquartered startup accelerator, announced that all startups that complete its 12-week accelerator program will be automatically eligible for a $50K equity investment from Rhode Island’s capital city. → Read More
We’ve all built up a ton of connections through networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now there’s a way to greedily exchange that social capital for real-world dollars. Shopcade is a new affiliate ecommerce platform where users create a personal store and feature products from a catalog of 40 million item. They can then blast store links to their social networks and earn affiliate kick-backs when their products sell. When used for good, Shopcade helps people structure the shopping recommendations they give friends to aid product discovery, and give to charity. But when used for evil, Shopcade incentivizes social network users to spam their friends.
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Startups thrive on discontinuities and disruption. NPR and Kaiser Health News broke a major story that Walmart intends to become the largest provider of primary care in the country. While Walmart backed away from some of what was reported in their Request for Information, there’s enough wiggle room in their statement to drive a truck through. In my view, this is the biggest news in healthcare since health reform. Regardless of how one feels about Walmart, it’s indisputable that they have a massive footprint and ripple effect that is good news for healthtech companies.
With 1.4 million employees and hundreds of millions of customer visits every month, Wal-Mart’s impact is without parallel. It’s one reason that the Sierra Club partnered with Walmart on its Sustainability Program. At one time, Walmart would have been a target of scorn by the Sierra Club but they saw the impact they could have. The effect of Sierra Club’s partnership with Walmart may have had a more positive outcome on the environment than just about any other Sierra Club initiative. → Read More
According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.
We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.
VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
It looks like we can expect faster wireless connections in the near future: Japanese electronic parts maker Rohm yesterday announced [JP] it has developed a chip that reached a wireless data transmission speed of 1.5 gigabits per second in experiments, the highest level ever. And according to the company, even 30Gbps will be possible in the future.
The semi conductor device uses terahertz waves for data transmission, has a micro antenna attached to it and is 2cm long and 1cm high (size of the module). Rohm developed the technology in cooperation with a research team at Osaka University. → Read More
Mobile ad network Millennial Media is releasing its October Mobile Mix report this morning. In October, Android led the Connected Device and Smartphone OS Mix on Millennial with 56% of the impressions on the ad network. Android has now been the leading OS on Millennial’s platform for the past 11 months.
iOS was the second largest smartphone OS on Millennial’s platform with 28% of the impression share. RIM followed with 13% of the share. iOS led the Connected Device OS mix, thanks to the growth in the iPad, which has has been the number one tablet device on Millennial since its debut in April 2010. → Read More
Hojoki this morning announced that it has raised $620,000 in seed funding as the German startup gears up for the launch of its public beta on the 7th of December (coinciding with the Le Web conference in Paris). The round was led by Kizoo Technology Ventures.
Hojoki’s mission is to solve the problem of ‘information fragmentation’ by building a unified activity stream inbox for cloud apps such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Highrise, GitHub, and plenty of others. → Read More
We’ve shown you many Kinect-based hacks and applications over the past months, and here is a new one from Japan: major robot maker Yaskawa has developed a humanoid that can be remote-controlled using a Kinect interface. Dubbed SmartPal VII, the telepresence robot can be used to communicate with other people over a distance or even help them cleaning up rooms, for example (by controlling the robot’s arms using Kinect). → Read More
What exactly is a PC? That question is likely to become a hot topic over the next few years.
Originally, we thought of PCs as the Apple II or then the IBM PC. They were machines that had to sit on a desk because, while significantly smaller than a mainframe, they were still big and bulky. They had large monitors, boxy bases, and big keyboards. The original Macintosh attempted to make this footprint a bit smaller and the package more compact, but the IBM clones won the day. Windows won the day. PCs by Compaq and HP led to machines by Gateway and Dell. Boxy bases were joined by massive towers. Bigger seemed better. Small monitors were replaced by huge monitors. Then something changed.
While laptops had existed in various forms for years, by the mid 2000s, the prices, performance, and size made them viable “desktop replacements”. They were different enough from traditional PCs that they had their own name, and people thought of them differently. But eventually, as they started to dominate the market, people just began thinking of laptops as PCs as well. They were, after all, personal computers.
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Microsoft this morning blasted out an email to all subscribers of its Bing Daily Deals offering, informing users that the service will henceforth be known as ‘MSN Offers’. It’s a confusing move, but then Microsoft has a history of making confusing moves when it comes to naming and branding its products and services.
The company claims it didn’t want people to mix up the daily deals it offers with its Bing Deals service, which essentially aggregates daily deals from a range of third-party providers. → Read More
Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
If you’re running a political campaign, a charity, or any other group where keeping in touch with community members — and/or delegating tasks to them — is critical, then you’ll probably be interested in a startup called NationBuilder.
The service launched in April, closing a $500,000 seed funding round the following month that was led by Chris Hughes. Hughes is best known for cofounding Facebook and leading President Obama’s online campaign efforts in 2008 (in other words, he’s exactly the sort of backer you’d want for this kind of startup).
And this fall, it’s started getting some strong traction. In September it had almost 200k unique visitors doing 1.2 million page views — that jumped to 400k uniques the following month, with 2.5 million page views. The service now has 300 groups on board, with a total of some 1 million supporters signed up. One of the site’s core features is fundraising, and groups have raised $3.3 million so far using the platform.
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Earlier today patrons of Wine Library received an email informing them that the credit card information they had used to sign up to the WineLibrary.com site may have been compromised in a data breach. The site is the hub of NYT Best Selling Author Gary Vaynerchuk’s family business, made famous by his popular and now retired television show Wine Library.tv.
While the email doesn’t reveal how many accounts were impacted, the site likely has hundreds of thousands of users.
The company reveals that it started investigating a possible breach in October when they received initial customer complaints, complaints which increased towards the beginning of November. The company removed all credit card data from its site on November 11th and last week confirmed that an IP address originating in China was used in the attacks. → Read More
As many of you already know, CrunchBase is a big, free resource for anyone trying to get the latest information on hot new startups, or competitors to their own hot new startups, the investing focus of various investors, and much more.
The thing is, CrunchBase isn’t used all that much on TechCrunch itself beyond the widgets you see at the end of articles. So, I’m going to start testing out a variety of posts with the goal of surfacing new and interesting information for all of you. To kick things off, I’ll take a brief look at the largest seed and angel funding rounds that we recorded over the last 30 days — you’ll see just how big some of these rounds have been getting.
But before I get into that, though, here are a few thoughts on using CrunchBase on TechCrunch. → Read More
Uh-oh. Samsung and Google are still in talks regarding its upcoming Google TV offering. Reuters is reporting that Samsung’s president indicated that the two companies are in “late-stage talks” and that Samsung’s devices will launch in early 2012, just not at CES like it was previously thought.
Google has been working with Samsung for sometime now. In fact Samsung demonstrated a Google TV companion device at last year’s CES. Here’s a demo and the press release. But here we are, almost a full year later and Samsung has still yet to release a model, which in retrospect, was probably for the best. Isn’t that right, Logitech?
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HouseTrip, the holiday lettings marketplace raised $2.7m from Index Ventures back in April and relaunched to appeal to a wider market than its holiday apartments rental space. HouseTrip built a reputation by removing the need for guests to negotiate with homeowners directly, thus building in a degree of security. Today it’s completed a $17 million Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital. Index Ventures reinvested pro-rata.
The funding will be used to develop the product, generate more inventory (through additional outreach to holiday apartment hosts) and reach (through marketing and localisation). → Read More
It’s possible new media will steal a page from the VCs and the economics of the Cloud, putting these streaming deals together on multiple networks (Facebook, YouTube, Ustream, iCloud) with talent owning the rights in return for low startup costs. Spotify could fight off the independents by offering contracts directly to the artists, and team with the streaming studios to live cast sessions and concerts over the federated network. Soundtrack compilations for stream network-owned series like House of Cards may be where music and gaming crossover first occurs.
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Before we kicked off Disrupt Beijing, the TechCrunchTV team had just enough time to venture out into the city to begin exploring the local startup scene. One of our stops: The Garage Café, a coffee shop where startup companies go to work on their projects. For the price of a cup of coffee (a little over 3 US dollars), teams can set up office for the day and have access to a library of reference books, job boards, and the venture capitalists that also frequent the space. With at least ten early-stage startups working in the café at any given time, the Garage Café has become a go-to place for entrepreneurs to meet, exchange ideas, and in a dozen instances since the café opened in April, find investors. → Read More
Installing Windows has always been something of a joke. Not always warranted, of course, but we all know how funny and catastrophic anecdotes outlive the less thrilling reality of something as commonplace as an OS install. Yet we all have heard a few horror stories about Windows installs, or at the very least joked about how long it often takes.
Microsoft actually went to some lengths in Windows 7 to correct this soft spot of theirs, and it’s true that the installation process is simpler and better. Seeing how well this was received, and also noting a number of market trends worth integrating, they are now taking the improvements a step further with Windows 8. A one-click install or upgrade is still a ways out, but the new features are kin with Windows 8′s approach of marrying stability with mobility. → Read More
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