Oh San Francisco, has it really come to this?
Are we now at the point where the disheveled men on street corners no longer ask for change, but rather developers? Apparently so.
I walked out of the TechCrunch offices yesterday afternoon and passed this guy at the Caltrain station. He handed me a business card, cut out of cardboard with the URL fingg.com scrawled onto it in black Sharpie… → Read More
Not all hotels are created equal. That’s why paying $150 for a room at one hotel may be a rip-off at one hotel while it may be a great deal somewhere else — and that, in turn, is why DealAngel is launching a new way to search for hotels.
When you go into DealAngel and select your dates, the site provides a list of hotels and prices for your trip. Each of those rooms is assigned “value” score… → Read More
RocketSpace, the San Francisco co-working space for tech and new media startups, has attracted a strong set of tenants in the 14 months since it first opened its doors. Uber, Zaarly, Giftiki, Spotify, and GeekList are just a few of the more than 100 companies who have called RocketSpace home for a stretch of time in either in the past or present.
So TechCrunch TV stopped by RocketSpace’s … → Read More
CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based startup that protects web sites from security threats and speeds up their load times, has been in talks to raise funding at a valuation that’s around $1 billion, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.
Apparently on the back of the company’s growth, there was inbound interest during the last three to four months with at least one firm… → Read More
If you’ve ever had to transfer money from one currency to another, you know that it can be a frustratingly pricey business. Now a new company, TransferWise, has raised seed funding totaling $1.3 million to tackle that problem.
TransferWise describes itself as the “Skype of money transfer” because it allows consumers to send money between UK and European accounts for a fraction of the price that… → Read More
I’ve seen plenty of apps get yanked from Apple’s App Store in my day, but the news of an app called iKamasutra getting that same treatment really has me scratching my head. I won’t rehash the entire story, but here’s the gist of what happened:
Apple pulled the iKamasutra from the App Store in February, and after a bit of sleuthing, creator Naim Cesur of NBITE managed to contact someone in… → Read More
CEO Scott Thompson outlined a vision today of how Yahoo can start growing as a company again. His big theme: Focus, focus, focus.
“Yahoo has been doing way too much for too long and was only doing a few things really well,” Thompson said.
He was speaking on the conference call covering the earnings report covering his first full quarter as CEO, where revenue was flat while earnings went up. → Read More
If you’ve ever scoffed at Flickr, felt that photo sharing and storage websites hold your photos hostage, associated photos on the Web with platform lock-in, then you’ve already started to get a sense of why Jaisen Mathai left Yahoo last year to build OpenPhoto. Appalled by having to watch Yahoo let an awesome startup/service like Flickr go to seed, (“I was extremely frustrated by the lack of… → Read More
Technology is all about convenience. At least, that’s where it’s headed. I can now ask someone to run across the city and pick up a package for me on Zaarly (which I did), Songza chooses my music playlists for me, and I can literally push a button and ask my phone where the nearest burger joint is (even if she never quite understands me).
It’s incredible.
And now that same convenience is… → Read More
As Spotify continues its march to becoming a $1 billion-revenue company, the music streaming service is launching a battery of new products to increase the amount of time that people spend on the site: There is an iPad app that could launch as soon as tomorrow; and there is the ability to play Spotify tracks on third-party websites, launched last week. Another development in Spotify’s stickiness… → Read More
VenueSeen launched their new platform today that lets businesses aggregate location specific sentiment, via social photography. What does that mean in layman’s terms?
It means this startup company will monitor and identify any shared photos that a consumer takes inside a place of business. If the photos are shared via Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting or Facebook then VenueSeen can… → Read More
A new breed of mobile applications is coming. These new apps will not only “sense” the world around you, using the smartphone’s sensors like the compass, GPS, and accelerometer – they’ll also be able to combine that data with a history of your actions to intelligently determine your likes, interests and favorites. This understanding of the world, or “ambient discovery” if you will, could then be… → Read More
In what I suspect will be an increasing trend, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three “packs” of his popular FoxTrot comics for the iPad. He built the books by himself using iBooks Author and proceeds go to the Help Bill Amend Eat Food Fund (I suspect).
He’s selling three titles including a special issue — number 3.14 — featuring geek strips. Each book contains 100 strips and is optimized… → Read More
IBM just reported mixed first quarter earnings for 2012. GAAP earnings came in at $2.61, up 13 percent with non-GAAP earnings at $2.78, up 15 percent. Revenue was flat for the quarter coming in at $24.7 billion, up 1 percent adjusting for currency. Analysts expected $2.66 a share and $24.82 billion in revenue.
Net income for the quarter came in at $3.1 billion, up 7 percent from last year. → Read More
Yahoo today reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2012, and after three years of declining annual revenues, the company looks like it may just be on track to stop the streak — or at least slow it down.
Yahoo posted first quarter revenue on a GAAP basis of $1.22 billion, up one percent from the $1.2 billion in GAAP revenue Yahoo reported in the first quarter of 2011 (which… → Read More
Chrome for Android is becoming somewhat of a flagship product for Google, but given that it’s only available on phones and tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich, its reach is pretty limited. It’s still one of the best mobile browsers on the market, though, and Google is adding a number of cool features to it today. Chrome for Android is now also available in 31 additional languages and in all… → Read More
Skybox Imaging just closed a massive $70M Series C round led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund got in on the action as well. The new investors join Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners and brings Skybox Imaging’s total amount raised to $91 million.
The latest round of financing will allow Skybox to launch its first two high-resolution… → Read More
So, I’ve just recuperated from our VA mini meet-up tour, during which John and I visited DC, Norfolk, and Richmond in an attempt to find startup gems in unexpected corners of the country. This time we’re bringing things a little bit closer to home.
That’s right New Yawkers: get your pitch in order, your demo up to snuff, and throw on your schmoozing hat! We’re having a meet-up in the Big… → Read More
The Apple II personal computer is 35 years old today, a bit of news that I’m sure is either making you feel wildly old or gives you an odd rush of steampunk retro-nostalgia. The computer, launched on April 16 and 17th at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, went on to become the definitive machine for primary and high schools everywhere and whose wonky screen and clacky keys brought millions of… → Read More
Twitter is an innovative company, and today’s introduction of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement shows that their legal department can be innovative too. The Innovator’s Patent Agreement, a draft of which was released on GitHub, will allow inventors to retain control of their inventions to make sure that they are only used for defensive purposes. This new agreement is a clear PR and… → Read More
Well, Sprint certainly seems hell-bent on making this Earth Day one to remember. Not only have they decided to launch the LTE-friendly LG Viper and Galaxy Nexus on April 22, Sprint has announced that they have chosen that same day to release the new eco-friendly LG Optimus Elite.
Unlike the flashier handsets launching alongside it, the Optimus Elite is unlikely to turn too many heads. It’s a… → Read More
The Lumia 900 is an excellent handset, whether or not European carriers like it.
But it’s hard to imagine how Nokia and Microsoft plan to achieve a high level of penetration with the phone on a single carrier (AT&T).
Luckily for the partnership, it would seem as though T-Mobile will be getting the Lumia 900 over the course of the summer as well. → Read More
Storify, the startup that lets anyone “curate” stories from around the web by collecting posts from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, is today announcing its first-ever syndication deal. Through a new partnership with popular news reader Pulse, Storify’s curated feeds will now appear within Pulse’s app, allowing readers to subscribe to curated stories from a number of sources… → Read More
Today Facebook co-opts the best thing about Myspace pages — rapid music discovery — by prominently adding a “Listen” button to musician Pages right next to the Like button. When clicked, the artist’s jams will start to play in your most frequently used Facebook music streaming app such as Spotify or MOG. If you haven’t authenticated any music apps, Facebook will prompt you to set up the one… → Read More
Gmail seems to be suffering from a bit of downtime this morning. Most of us here at TechCrunch haven’t been able to log in to our accounts and the reports on Twitter seem indicate that this issue is affecting users worldwide. On its app status dashboard, Google confirms that it is aware of this issue and that it will provide more information shortly. → Read More
It looks like Twitter is taking a fresh approach to the huge, expensive mess that is the U.S. patent system, as outlined in a just-published blog post. The post summarizes something that Twitter is calling the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, which would commit the company to only use employee-invented patents defensively — any offensive litigation could only happen through the approval of the… → Read More
Social data startup Gnip has scored another impressive partnership — it says it’s the first company to syndicate the full firehose of content from blogging service Tumblr.
Gnip is probably best-known for being the first authorized reseller of the Twitter firehose, but it also offers data from Facebook, Google+, Disqus, WordPress, YouTube, and more. So what does Tumblr add to the mix? → Read More
Google is announcing this morning that YouTube creators can now link their videos to projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The company says that these crowd-sourced fundraising platforms were already being used by many YouTube creators, so it wanted to make it easier for those folks to connect their YouTube viewers to their project’s page.
The new links will be supported by YouTube’s… → Read More
Google made quite a splash with its Project Glass video earlier this month. While Google’s vision of wearable computing still looks a bit like science fiction today, a new report by Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues that “in three years, wearables will matter to every product strategist” and that smart developers should start experimenting with applications for wearables on the “big five”… → Read More
As the daily deal space has become increasingly crowded over the last two years, local merchants increasingly feel pressured to run deals, but for many reasons, they end up overwhelmed by the prospect of managing those deals from start to finish, and the big deals players are failing to help them.
So, Setster has decided to do what LivingSocial, Woot, Gilt, and other deal providers are either… → Read More
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