Last June, FounderFuel became the latest in a new crop of Canadian startup accelerators, joining Year One Labs and more in the mission to support and grow the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Created by the same team behind Montreal Start Up, FounderFuel launched with $2 million from Real Ventures in tow, kick-starting its 12-week, mentor-driven startup “boot camp” and allowing it to… → Read More
Bee Media, the makers of a mobile shopping platform that serves location-specific offers and info to mobile devices, today announced that it has acquired Adcentricity, a similarly location-focued digital media startup. Under the terms of the acquisition, Bee Media secures rights to the Adcentricity name and will operate as Adcentricity going forward. Doug Woolridge, the current CEO of Bee Media… → Read More
Five years ago, Microsoft reported revenue of $14.398 billion. They reported a profit of $6.589 billion. Last week, for the same quarter, Microsoft’s revenue was $17.407 billion. Their profit was $6.374 billion. The company is still growing, but not fast. And they’re actually making less money.
Compare that with Apple. Five years ago, revenue was $7.1 billion. Profit was $1.0 billion — the… → Read More
Even though I think it’s way too big for the average human, Samsung’s Galaxy Note is doing quite well since its debut in January at CES. In fact, Samsung has sold 5 million units of the Galaxy Note thus far, which comes out to about 1 million Notes sold per month. But could it be selling better?
Possibly.
The phablet is only available at AT&T with a rather steep $299 price tag, but… → Read More
Even though Netflix’s first-quarter earnings came in ahead of analyst expectations, CEO Reed Hastings still had to answer plenty of (usually skeptical) questions during this afternoon’s earnings conference call about how he plans to expand the company’s streaming content library.
Hastings has already talked about how the streaming strategy will differ from Netflix’s past, emphasizing a narrower… → Read More
Facebook makes an average of $1.21 on you per quarter, depending on who you are and where you live according to documents filed today. Most of that goes towards running the site, as Facebook’s net income from January 1st to March 31st this year was just $205 million despite its total revenue of $1.058 billion. So while you are “the product” on Facebook, just like on any website or physical venue… → Read More
Zynga and Facebook are ever gradually trying to separate from each other. It’s working — sort of?
Facebook said today that 15 percent of its revenue in the first quarter came from either advertising or payments tied to Zynga games.* That’s down from 19 percent during the same time a year earlier.
About 11 of the 15 percent in revenue was from the 30 percent revenue share Facebook takes from… → Read More
Netflix just released their Q1 2012 earnings report [PDF], and managed to beat analyst estimates by reporting losses of $0.08 per share on $870 million in revenue.
In the weeks leading up to the release, analysts projected a net loss of $0.27 per share on $866 million in revenue thanks to the company’s pronounced push for international growth.
That works out to a $5 million net loss for… → Read More
Ever since it launched earlier this year, Google’s “Search Plus Your World” initiative has been heavily criticized for favoring results from its own social network over those from larger and more popular services like Facebook and Twitter. Even though Google’s focus on Google+ is keeping the market open for competition, social search isn’t exactly an easy field to enter. Wajam, however, a startup… → Read More
Fitbit has consistently proven to be the best smart pedometer on the market. Competitors exist, including the excellent Striiv, but the ease of use and portability of this little pedometer clip beats them all. In short, Fitbits just work.
With the launch of the Aria wireless scale, Fitbit has added another sensor in the panoply of health data available to high-tech health nuts. This… → Read More
Facebook has just filed a fourth amendment to its S-1 to IPO that notes that it now has 500 million mobile users, 901 million monthly active users, and that it paid 23 million shares at $30.89 a share plus $300 million cash for Instagram for a total of $1,010,470,000. Facebook also made $1.058 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2012, up 44.7% from Q1 2012 but down 6.5% from Q4 2011.
So… → Read More
Remember when Groupon raised, like, a billion dollars? We certainly do.
Well, it looks like Groupon’s slide over the past month is bringing its last round of venture investors ever closer to breaking even. The stock has rebounded slightly this morning to $11.49, but the number to watch is $7.90.
That’s effectively what several top-tier Silicon Valley venture firms including Kleiner Perkins… → Read More
High-end design, fashion and travel-focused Pinterest rival The Fancy is rolling out several new features today, including a new slideshow option, the addition of four more languages, and a new visual search engine that allows users to search for items with similar colors.
The latter addition, which brings to mind the “search by color” feature over on crafty community Etsy or the new color… → Read More
Right after racing to the top of the App Store charts, Viddy just announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a long list of celebrities — not just tech celebrities, but also the kind that non-techies have heard of.
Here’s who invested: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Omniture founder Josh James, Skull Candy chairman Jeff Kearl, Roc Nation (the record label and… → Read More
Facebook had a choice to make: With just 56 patents to its name at the start of 2012 it could pay its way out of Yahoo’s infringement lawsuit with gobs of money and remain vulnerable to other patent attacks, or make a long-term investment into an intellectual property portfolio it could protect itself with for years to come.
Facebook has wisely taken the second path, upping its patent stockpile… → Read More
Google started rolling out its new user interface for Gmail late last year. Not everybody is in love with it, of course, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that a little cottage industry of Gmail enhancement tools has cropped up over the last few months. Google will soon migrate even those users who have, until now, resisted this change to the new version. Even if you hate the new Gmail design… → Read More
These days, it seems SoundCloud is the player to beat in the music platform space. It’s been called (among other things) the “Flickr for audio” or the “YouTube for audio.” Evidence of this lies in the fact that the company raised $50 million in January at a $200 million pre-money valuation — they must be doing something right.
Instead of competing with SoundCloud, Official.fm is taking… → Read More
Personal Democracy Forum CEO Andrew Rasiej told me that most American politicians don’t know the difference between a waiter and a server. Perhaps. But one politician who certainly can distinguish between the two is Anna Eshoo, the Democratic Congresswoman for California’s 14th District, which she has represented since 1993. As Silicon Valley’s representative in DC, Eshoo not only knows her… → Read More
FounderDating, which helps entrepreneurs with co-founders through online networking and offline events, announced a big geographic expansion earlier this year. But what if you don’t live in a traditionally startup-heavy city like San Francisco, New York, or Boston? Do you have to slave away on your awesome idea all by yourself? Not necessarily.
To figure out where to go next, FounderDating is… → Read More
SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage service, is one of the core elements of the company’s cloud strategy. Today, Microsoft is taking the wraps off a number of new SkyDrive services, including a Dropbox-like desktop integration for Windows and Mac (OS X Lion only). With this, SkyDrive will function like any other folder on your machine and any file you save to it will be automatically uploaded to… → Read More
Although Facebook didn’t buy AOL’s patent portfolio the other week — it was sold to Microsoft for $1 billion — it’s going to get a good portion of those patents anyway: Microsoft and Facebook today announced that Microsoft would be selling Facebook 650 of the 925 patents that it bought from AOL to Facebook for $550 million in cash.
It will also get a license for the remaining 275 patents… → Read More
Parking Panda, the startup that wants to make it easier for drivers to rent spaces or rent out their unused driveways, is expanding its regional coverage with today’s public launch. The company has just arrived in Washington, D.C. – its second market outside of Baltimore, which served as the home for Parking Panda’s beta testing.
The team has also closed a $250,000 round of seeding funding and… → Read More
BlablaCar, a European carpooling marketplace that connects any driver who has empty seats with paying passengers, has now launched its iPhone app in the UK. The app connects drivers who have spare seats with paying passengers. At the same time its competitor Carpooling.com will release its new app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch this week. → Read More
We’re a month away, and are very excited to reveal our workshops & judges for the upcoming NYC TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, taking place on May 19th & 20th.
This will be the second Hackathon TechCrunch has organized at Pier 94 in NYC. Last years event had over 300 developers and 100 teams present, and this years event promises to be even bigger and better.
But enough about the past… → Read More
The heat is on to migrate more digital marketing activities into the cloud, and while we have seen a lot of movements from smaller, fleet-0f-foot startups in this area, the big players don’t want to be left out in the cold, either. Enter WPP, which today announced a partnership with the Bangalore-based outsourcing and IT specialist Infosys for a new cloud-based digital marketing… → Read More
BetterWorks, a startup that helps companies give their employees perks and rewards, is launching new features that should make it a better fit for big enterprises.
The startup offers customers a dashboard for managing things like office catering, discounts at local businesses, and a rewards program called Bonus Bucks. For the most part, it has focused on small- and medium-sized businesses… → Read More
It’s been spotted in leaked press renders and blurry photos before, but Verizon has just recently (and perhaps inadvertently) made the new Droid Incredible nice and official. The Droid Incredible 4G LTE just popped up on Verizon’s Droid Does promotional site, and while you can’t have one just yet, it’s comforting to know that it’ll see the light of say sooner rather than later.
In addition to… → Read More
Independent mobile ad network InMobi released its Q1 2012 Ad Data report for North America this morning, covering the mobile ad landscape for the first part of the year. Not surprisingly, the report found the top two mobile operating systems were, again, iOS and Android, each with a sizeable chunk of market share and growing. RIM, meanwhile, was still clinging to spot #3, but has dropped 4.6%… → Read More
Gavin Kim certainly knows how to keep things interesting. After spending years at Samsung and winding up as the company’s VP of Content and Services, Kim jumped ship to take point on Microsoft’s Windows Phone marketing efforts only to resign his post after five months.
So what greener pastures has tempted Kim this time? As it turns out, he has found himself a new home at NQ Mobile (formerly… → Read More
Locu, the data-focused startup launched out of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s lab at MIT to provide structure to the world’s information, has just announced a $4 million Series A round led by General Catalyst Partners. Also participating in the round were Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Lightbank and SV Angel, as well as Locu’s existing angel investors, Naval Ravikant, Babak Nivi, Quotidian Ventures, and… → Read More
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