Sigh. Here we go again.
A patent troll called Mount Hamilton Partners has filed two separate patent infringement lawsuits against daily deals juggernaut Groupon and Google, which also operates a digital couponing business called Google Offers.
Mount Hamilton Partners, which purports to be an ‘investor in technology companies’ on its website, garnered headlines about two and a half years ago when it sued OpenTable right before the restaurant reservation service provider went public. Now they’re going after Google and Groupon. → Read More
In-Flight Wi-Fi provider Gogo has just filed for an IPO, and will raise as much as $100 million in a public offering.
Gogo, which has raised over $500 million in funding, provides in-flight connectivity to nine of the ten North American airlines that provide internet access, including Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, Virgin America, Alaska Airlines, US Airways, Frontier Airlines and Air Tran Airways. The company also has trial agreement with United Airlines and Air Canada. → Read More
Remember when researchers said a security vulnerability could allow hackers to remotely take over Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers and even cause them to burst into flames? Fun times, for sure.
Of course, HP was quick to point out that the researchers had it all wrong, lamented the “sensational and inaccurate reporting” surrounding the supposed security flaw and said not a single customer had reported any instances of unauthorized access to its LaserJet printers. → Read More
Well, it’s that time of year again when families come together to stare moodily at each other over lunch and, in theory at least, we’re supposed to be thinking about others less fortunate than ourselves. To that end, stay you hand before you switch off the office PC and head off for some seasonal shopping. For those CPUs could be put to good work for charity, no less.
The Charity Engine is a non-profit volunteer computing grid. Based on Berkeley University’s BOINC software for grid computing – as used by dozens of famous ‘citizen science’ projects such as SETI@home. Charity Engine’s version of BOINC simply donates what it makes from research projects on its grid and donates the cash to charity, while incentivising users with randomly generated cash prizes. Profit from the commissions from science and industry is shared 50-50 between the charities and prize winners. You can use the invite code for the beta: CRUNCH. → Read More
Kiip is not an ad network. It’s a mobile games reward network. Today it launches Swarm, a feature with a very unique value proposition: Let brands sponsor in-app tournaments where users win big prizes for high scores. Brands get exposure by piggybacking on an app’s existing user base, developers get paid, and users get to play for real-world rewards without being interrupted by ads.
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India is getting a second government-sponsored tablet. The first model (the so-called Aakash) sold out in just a few days after it was launched online last week, but maker DataWind has already followed up with another 7-inch model, the Ubislate 7. It was actually announced a few weeks back, but is now available for pre-order, priced at US$57 (US$10 more than the original Aakash), and features much better specs.
The Ubislate 7 comes with the following features. → Read More
A new, relatively stealth startup called Rock City Apps is gearing up for the launch of a mobile application called UpTo, and has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures to finance the development of the product.
The company, which is based in Detroit, Michigan, plans to launch its first iPhone app ‘soon’ and lets you indicate your interest by inviting you to sign up to receive an invitation to the private beta.
You can do that here. → Read More
It seems Sharp saw good sales when the company launched the so-called AQUOS PHONE THE HYBRID 007SH on the Japanese market, the world’s first clamshell Android phone. Today, Sharp’s AQUOS PHONE IS14SH [JP] went on sale in Japan, and again they squeezed a ton of smartphone functions into a feature phone body.
The obvious target here are customers who want to type on a physical slide-out keypad but don’t want to miss out on the typical specs a Japanese Android phone is offering. → Read More
Since the list of 120 or so SOPA supporting companies hit the Internet yesterday, the lines have been drawn; People are publicly promising to pull thousands of domains from domain registrar Godaddy after it appeared on the list as a supporter. Other people are calling those people “bullies.”
Whether you’re for or against SOPA has become somewhat of a pain point amongst techies, with the overwhelming majority, including myself and almost every other writer on the TechCrunch team, leaning heavily towards “against.” → Read More
In the West, the battle for the social graph is over for now. Facebook is the undisputed champion. All my Western friends use Facebook, and many are addicted.
“If Facebook is the world’s social graph, then QQ (Tencent’s instant messenger) is China’s social graph,” says Hong Bo (a.k.a Keso), China’s most famous tech blogger. In China, Tencent is the longstanding champ, but its title is being disputed by Sina, one of China’s earliest portal sites.
Sina Weibo is the biggest story in the Chinese Internet over the past year, reaching 250 million registered users, and about 25 million daily active users as of Q3 2011. The coverage of China’s state-directed media leaves a lot to be desired, so Sina Weibo had become a prime source for breaking news events and commentary. It’s also a prime source of celebrity sightings and cultural memes—actress Yao Chen has more than 15 million followers. And instead of exchanging name cards at dinner, it’s now common practice to instead ex → Read More
Once upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook announced today that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching hundreds of millions of daily active Facebook mobile users.
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Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator best known for German-language clones of US startups like Zappos and Groupon, now has big ambitions, especially in the online furniture space according to information passed to TechCrunch Europe.
In a confidential email sent by Oliver Samwer which we have confirmed is genuine, the head (with his brothers Marc and Alexander) of European Founders Fund and the driving force behind Rocket, says their strategy is to become “number one” in the ecommerce sector for furniture over the next year. But the language he uses – including the world “blitzkrieg” – indicates an aggressive and potentially insensitive management style which appears to be a ‘modus operandi’ of Rocket Internet culture. Samwer has since apologised for using the term. → Read More
Smoking hot startup Codecademy, a service which teaches you how to program online has launched its Labs feature today, as a sign of things to come.
Codecademy founder Zach Sims tells me that Codecademy, and specifically new hire Amjad Masad, built the feature because it wanted people to be able to play with what they’ve learned on Codecademy without having to download a desktop-based code editor or integrated development environment (IDE). He says that most other online code-learning environments (like Treehouse) don’t yet offer a way for students freeform write and run the code they teach in-browser. → Read More
You want the best price on things you buy second hand, but finding out how much you should pay is a hassle. Removing this friction from a lucrative part of the purchase funnel is the goal of Priceonomics. The first startup out of the winter 2012 Y Combinator batch, Priceonomics has crawled the web to compile its next-generation price guide. It launches today featuring 10 million prices on 50,000 products, and plans to expand across verticals soon. → Read More
Does anyone out there actually own Sony Ericsson’s handset-formerly-known-as-Playstation-phone, the Xperia Play? I’ve never seen one in the wild. Not once.
If any Play owners are out there reading: A) raise your hand, and B) know that your device learned a cool new trick today. That fancy slide-out gamepad built into your device? It’s now compatible with OnLive’s crazy gaming-in-the-cloud service. → Read More
And the anti-SOPA rallying of the tech world’s best continues.
Just minutes after Ycombinator’s Paul Graham disclosed that SOPA-friendly companies would be blacklisted from the YC Demo Day, Cheezburger (as in I Can Has Cheeseburger, FAIL Blog, Know Your Meme, etc.) CEO Ben Huh has announced that they will be moving their array of over 1,000 domains away from GoDaddy unless the registrar recants their support of the act. → Read More
Intuit has just released some good news for ”Quicken for Mac” users. The accounting software company says they will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac “Lion-compatible” by early spring 2012. Yes, irony alert. Back in July, I wrote about the dilemma facing those users, because Apple Lion OS was dropping support for Rosetta. Without Rosetta, Quicken 2007 wouldn’t run on the Mac with Lion. And I wrote each of the three options Intuit proposed (Quicken Essentials for Mac, Mint.com, Quicken for Windows) had their own flaws.
Aaron Forth, Intuit’s General Manager of its Personal Finance Group which includes Quicken and Mint.com, wrote a note to existing customers saying “I am committed to creating products to help you reach your financial goals. I recognize, however, that we have not always delivered on this promise to Quicken Mac customers.” → Read More
There are lots of third-party guesstimates floating around about Google+ traffic. Are users losing interest like search trends seem to show? Has the service grown to 150 million active users like this research firm thinks? I’ve gotten new numbers from comScore, which arguably the best third-party measurement firm for web traffic in the world.
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We’re creatures of habit. We go where we’ve already gone. That’s why Facebook’s new Suggested Events feature I just discovered is so powerful — it knows where we’ve been thanks to our checkins. Replacing the old Friends’ Events sub-tab of the home page’s Events bookmark, Suggested Events helps you discover things to do that take place at venues you’ve checked in to, that friends are RSVP’d to, that are hosted by Pages you Like, or a combination. The feature could reduce the need third-party event discovery apps, and get more people out of their houses to attend concerts, club nights, and conferences. → Read More
At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things.\
While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the list revealing the companies who support the act was released yesterday, and many startups, such as Reddit, have begun to drill down into boycotts of individual companies like domain provider GoDaddy.
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