Today comes news of a small but indicative acquisition in the area of daily deals: the UK-based deals aggregator Coupobox has been bought by rival site DealCollector for a song: the price was in the “lower six figures,” according to Stavros Prodromou, the founder and former CEO of the company.
The acquisition is a sign of how consolidation in the sector is hitting aggregators, too. → Read More
The end is in sight for Churn Labs, the startup generator created by AdMob founder Omar Hamoui and AdMob’s first engineer Mike Rowehl. Two new companies will be spinning out in mid-July, Hamoui tells me, and they’ll be taking the Churn team with them. → Read More
To improve academic outcomes and keep students in school, teachers, learners and administrators need access to insight in realtime. Big data, predictive analytics, machine learning and recommendation engines are transforming the way we buy products, play games and watch movies, and Civitas Learning believes that the same should be true for education.
Historically, higher education has been… → Read More
If you hate accidental auto-sharing, you’re in luck. Now you have to be watching or reading something for at least 10 seconds before Facebook apps can auto-share the activity to your Timeline. That should drastically reduce the amount of crappy click-bait articles and video clips you see in the news feed and ticker.
Video apps must also now inform you that they auto-share and provide an option… → Read More
With Skype under Microsoft ownership, Rebtel now claims to be the largest independent mobile VoIP provider, with 17 million users in over 200 countries accessing its service over WiFi and 3G on iPhone, Android, and PCs. Rebtel has added two million users since February, and is seeing an average of 650K new users a month — many of whom have been attracted by its low-cost calling to landlines and… → Read More
If you want to learn about the booming tech startup scene in New York City, it doesn’t get much better than talking to Fred Wilson. Wilson has emerged as perhaps the most recognizable figure of the now-booming New York tech scene, through his 25-year career as a venture capitalist (currently he’s a partner at venture capital firm Union Square Ventures) and also through his very popular “A VC”… → Read More
“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER!” – ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, The Social Network. Not quite. Facebook has been offline or slow to load for some users around the world for over two hours. Reports started flooding in to Twitter at roughly 4:26pm PST on 5/31/2012 with many users quipping that “Facebook is down. Just like its stock price.”
Despite… → Read More
The RIM PlayBook by just received a developers update that adds some interesting new Android functionality to RIM’s tablet. This new version now supports Android apps running in their own windows, improving compatibility with the general Android app universe. → Read More
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, dropped us a line about the systems in place to “hide” failed projects. He told us that Kickstarter does indeed hide many projects from search robots, but it’s for a good cause.
“The original poster was correct in noting that we don’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful,” he wrote. “This isn’t to ‘hide failure,’ as the… → Read More
Solar Mosaic, an Oakland, California-based startup that is creating a crowdfunding platform specifically for solar energy projects, has taken on $2.5 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Spring Ventures with the participation of Serious Change, Jim Sandler, Steve Wolf, Tom Chi, and a group of angels from the “Toniic” investor network. → Read More
Another day, another iPhone 5 leak. This time we’re looking at a four-inch long front panel of what appears to be a new iPhone. This panel suggests a longer, 16:9 style body and screen and lines up with previous news of a longer iPhone casing with a Micro USB port on the bottom.
I’m very skeptical in regards to these videos simply because rapid prototyping and sourcing is getting so simple… → Read More
It was just last September that we covered the launch of Prescreen, the startup founded by former Groupon and Zoosk execs that aimed to help independent films find the publicity they nearly always lack. To do so, they built a curated, on-demand video platform that would give filmmakers and distributors an alternative to traditional ad and distribution channels, while giving users an easy way to… → Read More
I’m smack dab in the middle of my HTC Evo 4G LTE review (the full review will be up tomorrow), but as I judge, I felt the need to bring John Biggs into the mix for a little Fly or Die.
Now, John is notoriously hard on Android phones, namely because they’re all incredibly similar. The Evo 4G LTE is no different. I, on the other hand, think it brings some pretty strong design language to the… → Read More
Y Combinator’s Paul Graham recently begged entrepreneurs to consider “frightening ambitious startup ideas,” like building a better search engine or replacing universities. “Any one of them could make you a billionaire,” said Graham. “That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them,” he said. “Don’t worry… → Read More
What’s the best thing that I (and others) learned at D10 this year? (Other than the fact that Steve Jobs used to own a peacock, of course.)
Onstage at D10, Google SVP of Advertising Susan Wojcicki revealed, in answering Walt Mossberg’s question about the sad state of ad relevancy, that Google calls its machine learning smart ad targeting technology “Smart Ass” internally.
Aside from those… → Read More
Remember this report about Google Chrome passing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in browser market share? Well, at today’s D10 conference, Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai basically confirmed this is true, saying that Chrome is “#1 in most countries” and even noting that Chrome’s market share is over 50% in some regions.
One-third of people are using Chrome, said Pichai. → Read More
Microsoft just announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview, the company’s final pre-release version of Windows 8, is now available for download. With this release, Microsoft is also making new versions of its Windows 8 apps for Hotmail, SkyDrive an Messenger available, as well as hundreds of new and updated apps from third-party developers in the Windows Store. → Read More
Businesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That’s why PostRocket has raised $610,000 to help businesses blow up on Facebook thanks to news feed optimization. PostRocket analyzes your Facebook Page, and provides recommendations for when and what to post.
The 500 Startups Fall… → Read More
OnSwipe’s been around for a little over a year, and since raised a total of $6 million in funding and launched content recommendations within its HTML5 tablet publishing network. But just as tablets are entering into mainstream territory, people are now entirely comfortable consuming long-form content on their even-smaller iPhone.
That said, publishers who don’t want to build out an app will… → Read More
“In the Studio” begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable box to TimeWarner, an experience which motivated her to assemble a new squad, form a new company, and move west to Silicon Valley where she now leads a small team based out of 500 Startups that may be sitting on the next big idea.
Privacy guidelines such as the “Do Not Track” option proposed by the Federal Trade Commission does not necessarily mean the end of the kind of targeted online ads that have brought such riches to web companies over the past decade. In fact, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says, more privacy on the Internet could actually bring the industry much more money that it attracts now. → Read More
Quite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple’s Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not.
John, Matt and I discuss this and more in this week’s TC/Gadgets webcast. → Read More
Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube. According to Google’s chief Internet evangelist and “father of the… → Read More
Until now, online and mobile video dating has mostly been about looking at video clips. Flikdate for iOS, however, is all about live video calls, making it feels more like a mix of Chatroulette and Match.com than the current crop of video dating services.
The Flikdate team gave me a demo of the service earlier this week and it turns out the app is about as easy to use as it gets. You simply… → Read More
Banjo, the slightly creepy social discovery app that shows you who’s doing what nearby, has been updated today with a handful of new tweaks for its iOS version. Sorry Android folks — you’ll have to sit this one out for the time being.
Here’s a quick recap if you’ve never messed with Banjo before. Banjo pulls in geo-tagged pictures and updates from all of the major social platforms (think… → Read More
Those who don’t live or haven’t recently traveled to China may not have experienced this first hand, but Google Search has been known to be “inconsistent and unreliable” in mainland China — to use Google’s words. Error messages like “This webpage is not available” or “The connection was reset” are common and those errant queries then prevent users from searching again for a period of time. In a… → Read More
What once you had to use or pay for outside software to do, Facebook now offers for free. Facebook today rolled out Page administrator permissions and post scheduling. The two critical marketing features were previously only available in third-party Page management products like Buddy Media and Vitrue, which are fetching big acquisition prices in part because of these service.
Roles let a… → Read More
Megan Quinn, the web exec who most recently served as the Director of Products at credit card processing tech firm Square, has joined Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an investment partner. The hire was announced by KPCB in a press release today. → Read More
Startup Bizo tries to help advertisers reach a business audience using methods like retargeting. Now it’s making those retargeting capabilities available in a self-serve product.
For anyone who needs a refresher on the nomenclature, if you visit a website but failed to sign up or buy anything, then see ads for that company following you around the Web — well, you can thank retargeting. (As… → Read More
Mobile video is taking off, especially due to high-quality video streams available over increasingly fast LTE mobile networks. The only problem is that most users have wireless plans that include a limited amount of data usage — usually just 2GB or 5GB per month. Since movies can quickly run up data usage, mobile viewers are in a bit of a catch-22: They can now watch mobile video at almost the… → Read More
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