Adherence to prescription drugs and supplements is a problem that not only puts the long-term health of millions of patients at risk. It’s a problem that may add an extra $100 to 300 billion in health care costs in the U.S. alone.
Enter Mango Health, a startup that’s adapting some of the triggers and rewards from the social gaming industry to the complex world of health care. The startup is… → Read More
Uber is still growing its business as a disruptive (sometimes controversial) car service app, but in the meantime it continues to push the envelope on what else it might eventually do with the logistics infrastructure it is also creating. The latest development comes by way of Chicago, where Uber is now laying on busses with DJs and drinks. Yes, it’s bus bumping from Uber.
Uberpalooza will… → Read More
For some of you this will be news, for some, a reminder. But the long and short of it is that Netflix has been forced to change its approach to user privacy, specifically in regard to how long it stores rental history for those who have unsubscribed. Netflix was forced to do so by a class-action lawsuit, which alleged that the company was illegally retaining and disclosing the personal information… → Read More
Stypi is a YCombinator backed startup that was recently acquired by Salesforce.com.
Their story details the mechanics for how a small company can manage an acquisition. It provides lessons for startups going through the process for the first time.
Stypi is a real-time editor that multiple people can edit at the same time. It also supports several programming languages which makes it an… → Read More
There has been quite a brouhaha around Twitter, NBC, and The UK Independent reporter Guy Adams these past couple days. It boils down to this: Adams’ Twitter account was suspended after he tweeted out the email address of the NBC executive in charge of the network’s much-criticized handling of broadcasting the Olympics. → Read More
Earlier this year French entrepreneur Ramine Darabiha called for a cypherpunk revival. Looks like he might be getting his wish.
Cryptosphere is a new darknet now under development. A darknet is a private and/or anonymous network, sometimes using the public internet for connectivity. Silk Road, a marketplace for illegal drugs, is probably the most famous. You can’t use Cryptosphere yet, but… → Read More
Several weeks ago, reports started to trickle out that a number of Dropbox users were under attack from spam. Since then, Dropbox has been investigating those attacks (with some help from a third-party) and today gave the first update on the progress, saying that some accounts were indeed accessed by hackers, but that it is now adding two-factor authentication and other security features to… → Read More
There’s a staggering new statistic in Facebook’s 10-Q SEC document today: 102 million people accessed Facebook solely from mobile in June, a massive 23% increase over the 83 million mobile-only users in March. 18.7% of its 543 million monthly mobile users don’t even visit its desktop site. That means if it can’t make its mobile advertising generate a lot more money within the next year, revenue… → Read More
Guys, guys, so because everybody obviously wants to party with Josh Constine, tickets to the TechCrunch annual summer party at August Capital are officially sold out.
In case you want a backdoor way in, don’t know a guy and don’t want to scale the fence, our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp tickets are still on sale, though we’ve only got a few left so yeah, roll the dice. → Read More
After just six weeks of hard work, Digg‘s new owners at Betaworks just flipped the switch and re-launched the site. The new Digg was originally scheduled to launch tomorrow, but despite the tight deadline, the Digg team managed to get this completely rewritten version of the site out ahead of schedule. As promised, the new version of Digg puts a strong emphasis on images and is currently free of… → Read More
Here’s another nugget from the release of Facebook’s 10-Q today: Zynga accounted for 14 percent of its revenues in the first six months of 2012, but that number is down from the 19 percent of revenue that Zynga made up in 2011.
Revenues that Facebook collects from Zynga include payment processing for purchases made through its social games, advertising that third parties show on its gaming… → Read More
Burf aka Simon Burfield is an iOS programmer and Lego experimenter who tries to take building blocks to the next level. Interestingly, if this wild rideable Lego wheelchair is any indication, he’s left the next level and is now firmly in the distant future.
Made with 12 Lego NXT motors and 12 multi-directional wheels, this carefully designed prototype can carry around a 198 pound person and is… → Read More
Verizon has been slapped with a $1.25 million fine for charging customers to use their cell phones as a mobile Internet hotspot, and has declared that it must allow tethering for free. Google must also reinstate tethering applications from its Android store, which Verizon had asked them to remove. This is especially great news considering more Android devices (and perhaps the next iPhone) are… → Read More
Mozilla announced today that they are expanding the size of their San Francisco office and will add 125 employees to the office’s current staff of 150 by early 2013. Mozilla currently occupies the seventh and part of the third floor of the Hills Brothers Building at 2 Harrison St. and will expand to include the first two floors. → Read More
Facebook makes a good number of talent-focused acquisitions, aka acqui-hires — but the cost of each deal is normally kept under wraps. In a regulatory quarterly filing the company made today, though, it put an aggregate pricetag on all those “non-material” sized deals it made in the first half of this year: $24 million.
Facebook also broke out the exact amount of money it spent on acquiring… → Read More
Here’s hoping you weren’t planning on using one of Google’s Nexus Qs any time soon — the company has just revealed to pre-order customers that it has postponed the device’s consumer launch because users wanted more out of the curious little orb.
That said, Google’s tiny media streamer has been unceremoniously yanked from the Google Play store. All interested consumers can do now is give the… → Read More
Wildfire, just acquired by Google, isn’t a social ads company. It relies on its partner Adaptly for access to ads APIs for Facebook and other sites. That means Google may buy Adaptly or another ads company any minute now. Otherwise Google will have to split the profits of social ads Wildfire will continue to sell through Adaptly.
As Facebook Sponsored Stories and Twitter’s promoted products are… → Read More
Mobile usage is upending web empires, as Silicon Valley has come to realize over the last few years. And we’ll have two companies smack in the middle of the shift present at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday in Redwood City, Calif., sharing how they’re surviving in this new world.
Get your CrunchUp tickets here.
Zynga, the dominant social game developer on Facebook, has been… → Read More
Twitter posted an explanation and apology on their blog regarding the Guy Adams/NBC debacle.
“That said, we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up,” the post reads. → Read More
Shahar Nechmad, who previously founded and ran web analytics company NuComony (which was acquired by LivePerson), has a new startup whose pitch, at least, is a little more fun. Stagedom aims to be the app where people can find new music, tour dates, videos, and other updates from their favorite artists.
Nechmad admits that music tech is a pretty crowded field right now, but he says that… → Read More
Today the first shots were fired in the high-profile U.S. patent war between Apple and Samsung, beginning with Apple’s opening statements.
And no punch was pulled — Apple’s lawyer made a few hard-hitting claims in the courtroom, providing documents that show Samsung thought the iPhone was “easy to copy.” Harold McElhinny (Apple’s lawyer) also showed documents prepared by a Samsung… → Read More
Amazon just updated its Cloud Player music storage service with a number of interesting new features, including an iTunes Match-like scan and match technology that allows Amazon to just scan a user’s music library and add matching songs to that user’s library without having to upload those songs one by one. Just like Apple, Amazon now also upgrades the audio quality of matched files to 256kbps… → Read More
Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Wildfire has grown to 400 employees over the last four years and now serves 16,000 customers. [Update: We’ve now learned from a source close to Wildfire that the company sold to Google for $350 million, higher… → Read More
Independent reporter Guy Adams’ Twitter account was restored today. It was suspended after Adams tweeted NBC President of the Olympics Gary Zenkel’s email address.
Adams tweeted in two parts, “Twitter emails to tell me: “we have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request…Therefore your account has been unsuspended.” No further explanation given, or… → Read More
Yahoo Mail users were surprised today by an upgrade that never went through, blocking them from accessing their inbox. Hundreds of users have taken to Yahoo Answers to try to figure out what’s happening.
Yahoo user “Brad” started a popular thread, “I got a message that Yahoo Mail has been upgraded, that it’s faster and easier to use. Yahoo said I needed to consent to the new terms of service. I… → Read More
We’ve been pretty outspoken about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. From what looked like a good start full of social media promise, the broadcaster has failed to deliver the most crucial element of all: a large, unfettered river of live sports content from the event itself, available to anyone, not just cable subscribers (coverage here, here, and here). It’s been getting a lot of grief on… → Read More
It looks like someone made the colossally silly decision to buy Mitt Romney Twitter followers. In just a few days earlier this month, Romney saw of a spike of 150,000 Twitter followers, and most of these likely fake accounts, had less than 2 followers themselves, according to some crack reporting by The Atlantic. It is unknown whether the purchase was made by someone at Camp Romney, a clueless PR… → Read More
Google’s browser-centric Chromebooks have now found their way into your local big-box electronic store and they seem to be a hit with schools, but there is little evidence that mainstream users are warming up to Google’s ChromeOS devices. Nevertheless, the company is pressing on with this program and now it looks like Google has a nice perk for ChromeOS users up its sleeve that could make… → Read More
Today Facebook begins the roll out of “Page Post Targeting Enhanced” allowing Pages to target their posts to segments of fans with certain genders, ages, and other characteristics so they can tailor market messages to specific audiences. For example, a business could tell teens they’ve got “swag” while telling adults they’re “reputable”.
Until now, Facebook Pages could only target posts to fans… → Read More
When Shelby.tv shut down its online video discovery engine earlier this month, some viewed it as a sign that the New York City-based startup was in trouble. While Reece Pacheco assured users that and headcount would remain the same, it’s not every day that a startup just pulls its product without having something new ready to show off. Well, breathe easy Shelby.tv fans: Investors have doubled down… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
