SurDoc is doing what Adobe has sort of done with its PDF file format, which is make it as easy as possible to share formatted documents across computers and mobile devices without losing the formatting. The difference it offers is that you don’t need to mess with any file formating or PDF reader to access the documents — or with all of the vulnerabilities of PDFs. You can just upload text, spreadsheet and presentation files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) to its online service, and share them from there.
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Just two weeks after Verizon’s 4G data network most recently went on the fritz, it looks like customers are once again being forced to live their lives without data. Verizon users across the country will be waking up without without so much as a 3G connection in sight. → Read More
Online audience measurement and Web analytics companies Nielsen and comScore have settled their patent disputes, according to a joint statement released this morning.
Nielsen filed suit against its rival in March 2011, accusing comScore of infringing five patents it owns that relate to measuring and displaying online content. Sure enough, comScore countersued Nielsen just a few days later.
Now, the companies have seemingly buried the hatchet and come to this elaborate agreement:
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Spreecast is a social video platform that lets people broadcast together, has raised $4 million in seed funding from Frank Biondi, former CEO of Viacom; Gordon Crawford, media and technology investor at The Capital Research Group and Edward Scott, Jr., founder of BEA Systems.
The brainchild of StubHub co-founder and investor Jeff Fluhr, Spreecast can be used publicly or privately to create interactive, social online video broadcasts. Up to 4 people at a time can be face-to-face, streaming their conversation live while hundreds of others can watch, chat, and participate by submitting comments and questions to those on-screen
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The Robocalypse is near: Osaka-based Hajime Research Institute is working on a humanoid that will stand 13 feet (4m) tall, which is much taller than most other existing robots of its kind (the latest version of Honda’s Asimo, for example, is just 130cm high). It will also sport a built-in cockpit.
Hajime Sakamoto, president of the institute, is on a mission. After having successfully developed a 7-foot robot in 2009 (pictured above), the plan is to build the aforementioned giant robot next, before following up with humanoids that are 26 and 59 feet tall after that. → Read More
The Health 2.0 space is getting super-exciting — between services like Practice Fusion, CakeHealth, Virgin Health and hardware plays like the Fitbit and UP, it finally seems like technology has caught up to some real world human problems that need solving.
In yet another vote for the space, Health 2.0 innovator Adam Bosworth, who is most known as one of the creators of Google Health, has just raised $6.5 million for Keas from Atlas Venture and Ignition Partners. This funding brings the Keas investment total to $16.5 million. → Read More
LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction. Read more over at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: → Read More
Once upon a time, we bought our concert tickets from a good old-fashioned cashier at the local box office. As time went on, we took some of the work out of the hands of the cashier and started buying our tickets at home — on the Web. (For a fee, mind you.) And if what we’re seeing today is any indication, the next step in the evolution of the box office? Facebook.
Ticketfly’s Facebook ticketing app, which launched last week, aims to boost sales by letting people know when their friends buy a ticket. The big idea is to complete the ticket-buying circle — from finding out about a show to buying a ticket — without ever sending the Facebook faithful outside the confines of their favorite social network. → Read More
Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing integration has been a huge win for Yahoo! News US. After just 2 months, 1 million articles are being shared to Facebook daily leading to 500,000 daily referrals. To build on this, Yahoo! has expanded the integration to 26 more of its news sites. These include many international sites such as Yahoo! News Philippines and France, as well as vertical sites like OMG, Music, Movies, and Games. → Read More
Great news, Kindle Fire owners. Amazon just announced the long overdue Kindle Fire update that’s said to resolve many of the issues with the budget tablet. Most of the common complaints are addressed: owners can now select and remove items from the carousel, the WiFi system is more robust and supports passwords, but most importantly, update 6.2.1 reportledly improves overall performance and the touchscreen response. → Read More
Most entrepreneurs found companies to solve a problem. Adam Archer founded GamesThatGive to save the world. During a backpacking trip across the world he was inspired with the idea for the company. He then left Apple in 2008 to work on a farm before founding GamesThatGive, which builds social games where users earn money for charity by playing thanks to sponsorships from major brands. It raised a little over $1 million dollars before selling to Facebook Page management platform Vitrue earlier this year..
Watch as we talk to Archer about the challenges and advantages of starting a social good company, and how one can make a difference in the world and still turn a profit. → Read More
Here’s a bit of science that’s contrary to what a heavy utilizer of social networks might expect. Researchers at Harvard tracked the Facebook activity of hundreds of college students for four years, and came away with the rather unexpected result that the interests of friends don’t, in fact, tend to influence one another. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen at all, of course, but it’s clear that propagation and virality are subtler and more complex than some people (marketers and, I suspect, researchers) tend to think they are.
But the study is also clearly flawed in ways that those versed in social graphs are likely to easily perceive. Pulling useful data from social networks is like catching lightning in a bottle, and I wonder whether the findings may in fact be, as the study attempts to avoid, “a spurious consequence of alternative social processes.” → Read More
GoChime, a graduate of the 2011 TechStars Seattle program, is today announcing that it has raised $630,000 from a host of entrepreneurs and angel investors that include Geoff Entress, who has invested in companies like Hootsuite and Cheezburger, Walter Winshall, an investor in Harmonix (Guitar Hero), Co-founder of Feedburner and former Googler, Matt Shobe, Dave Carlson (investor in Socialthing, Daily Burn), and Founder and CEO of Bigdoor Keith Smith — to name a few.
What is GoChime? Simply put, the startup is delivering relevant offers to people based on real needs they’ve expressed across their social media profiles. In other words, it’s direct marketing for social, something which GoChime Co-founders Matt Walters, Josh Emert, and Austin Evarts are convinced has not yet been done successfully. → Read More
First, the bad news for Buffer. The startup of European expats in San Francisco is being kicked out of the country due to our stupid, self-destructive immigration laws. They’re temporarily relocating to Hong Kong while they try to figure things out. And the good news? The company, which offers a tool for letting you schedule social content sharing over the course of the day and the week, is announcing that it has raised $400,000 in angel funding.
Not bad for some guys who showed up in Silicon Valley, as they’ll tell you, with no money or connections. → Read More
Tablet use has skyrocketed over the past year, so it makes sense that advertisers are flocking to these devices and platforms to reach consumers. Google tells us that in November 2011, AdMob saw 8 billion ad requests coming from tablets, an increase from 1 billion in December of 2010, and a 700 percent increase in the past year.
To put that number in perspective, AdMob sees nearly 3 billion ad requests a day globally. In May, Google introduced new formats for tablet ads, allowing advertisers and publishers to serve full-screen interstitial ads built with HTML5 on smartphones and tablets. → Read More
To say that RIM has had it rough these past few months is a understatement, but according to a new report from Reuters, it may not have had to go through these trials alone. In a surprising twist, Amazon was reportedly considering a RIM acquisition as recently as this past summer.
According to Reuters, Amazon had tasked an investment bank with exploring the possibility of a RIM buyout, although their sources don’t mention how far both parties were from finalizing a deal. The talks seemed to be largely informal in nature so it may have been nothing more than an open-ended meeting of the minds, but man — what a deal that would’ve been. → Read More
The browser wars continue to simmer, and Firefox, once the tech world’s champion against the insipid tyranny of Internet Explorer 6, has been losing ground to Chrome. In fact, just a few weeks ago, one report put Chrome in front of Firefox for the first time, with both taking up about 25% of the market but within a point of each other.
Mozilla said in October that they expected their agreement with Google, by which Google is the default search engine in Firefox, would be renewed — but the internet was all a-whisper with the idea that Google might take this tipping-point timing to alter the agreement. That’s still a possibility, but at any rate an agreement has been reached, for no less than three years of continuing partnership. → Read More
Paris-based VC Partech has announced the announces the €100M first close of its new venture fund, Partech International VI. The fund will be primarily dedicated to investments in internet / IT in Europe and Silicon Valley.
Partech had a eight exits in 2011, including one IPO (InvenSense), and seven trade sales (notably Brands4Friends to eBay, Dailymotion to Orange, Inquira to Oracle, Digitick to Vivendi and JobPartners to Taleo). → Read More
We first covered FixYa, the Q&A site for products, back in 2007, after the startup demoed at the TechCrunch40 DemoPit. Over the course of the next year, FixYa went on to raise $8 million in two rounds from Mayfield Fund and Pitango Venture Capital, with Chamath Palihapitiya joining the board of directors.
It’s been a few years since we’ve tapped into the startup’s progress, but Founder & CEO Yaniv Bensadon told us that the company is now seeing 20 million unique visitors a month, with 650K users having answered questions from the 10 million product problems and solutions currently live on the site. And, since 2009, the company has been cash-flow positive. → Read More
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