Apache Hadoop is becoming the de facto infrastructure environment for pushing data across a distributed infrastructure to then later analyze with MapReduce in an effort to optimize web pages, personalize content or increase the effectiveness of online advertising.
There’s just one problem.
Hadoop is not meant as a storage environment. Metadata is kept on one server. Data is replicated three… → Read More
Magazine fans, rejoice: Next Issue Media, probably the easiest and most economical way for you to read your favorite titles, is now available on the iPad.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but the easiest way to explain the app is, yes, as Netflix for magazines. Next Issue is a joint venture from five big magazine publishers (namely Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc.). For a… → Read More
Paydiant, one of the more recent entrants in mobile payments, has closed a $12 million round of funding that it plans to use to build out its white-label, API-based product for banks and merchants to offer their own branded payments services on Android and iOS devices. This Series B was led by new investor Stage 1 Ventures, whose MD David Baum now joins Paydiant’s board, as well as participation… → Read More
It takes a lifetime to build up social capital, but now it’s easier than ever to burn it all to earn some discounts via new ecommerce discovery site affiliate programs. But why should Fab, or The Fancy, or other Pinter-esque services care? They’re not the ones getting spammed. It’s Facebook and Twitter’s problem.
But that’s bullshit.
By incentivizing aggressive sharing with monetary… → Read More
500px, the Toronto-based startup that powers a super-slick photo sharing site, announced today that it has made its first acquisition with the purchase of Algo Anywhere, a startup also based in Toronto that specializes in recommendation algorithms. 500px says Algo Anywhere’s recommendation engine technology will integrated fully into its site to power new personalization features.
The price tag… → Read More
Okay, there isn’t much news here, but this is too fun not to post.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need a lot of recapping of the legal dispute between cartoonist Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, and Charles Carreon, attorney for FunnyJunk. (In fact, the first commenter on my last post about the story had clearly been following things more closely than I had, and caught a… → Read More
Parallel Universe is an Israeli technology company that promises video game companies the capability to make Matrix-style games through parallel processing, allowing millions of objects to be tracked in real-time.
Founder Ron Pressler is a software engineer who has been developing simulated environments for the Israeli Air Force. He is part of this summer’s Y Combinator class. Spacebase, the… → Read More
White-hot payments startup Stripe has closed a $20 million Series B round of financing, led by General Catalyst with existing A-list investors Sequoia, Peter Thiel (personally) and angels Chris Dixon, Aaron Levie and Elad Gil also following on. Redpoint will be coming on as a new investor.
Stripe’s valuation during this Series B was in the hundreds of millions, up to a half-billion dollars… → Read More
Archimedes Labs, a Palo Alto incubator, has made its largest startup investment to date, backing mobile web development startup M.dot. Neither side would disclose financial details. M.dot is still in private beta testing, and co-founders Dominik Balogh and Pavel Serbajlo tell us they plan to launch this fall.
M.dot is a free app that allows users to build a mobile website from scratch or a… → Read More
Late last month, Craigslist dealt a big blow to apartment search website PadMapper, sending creator Eric DeMenthon a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he take down any Craigslist postings on his site. Now DeMenthon has found a way to bring Craigslist back to PadMapper, though not in the way he would have liked. → Read More
Tagged photos are Facebook’s lifeblood, and it would be happy to suck them out of other apps. That’s why I suspect Facebook will resurrect Face.com’s facial recognition API, even though it just shut it down less than a month after acquiring the Israeli company.
Reopening the API will let other apps’ users easily tag their Facebook friends in photos…which can then be shared back to Facebook… → Read More
Pinterest is pinning its name on a new office door: the company today officially announced that it is moving its offices from Palo Alto to San Francisco, confirming our reports from June that were further confirmed this weekend by Pinterest’s international growth executive Sarah Tavel. Pinterest tells us its office will be at 572 7th Street for now.
The news was delivered today by San… → Read More
Online sharing service Shareaholic just released new data showing that Pinterest is now beating out Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google in referral traffic (not Google organic, of course). The study is based on Shareoholic’s network of over 200,000 publishers, which reaches more than 270 million people monthly.
The company has been keeping its eye on Pinterest this year, finding in January… → Read More
Uber cannot catch a break in Washington, DC. The city taxi commission tried to shut the private car service down last January over rule violations that it wasn’t actually committing. Now the local government is taking another shot, considering a legislative amendment tomorrow that would force sedan car services like Uber to charge at least five times the minimum cost of cabs.
To be clear, the … → Read More
Andreesen Horowitz is investing an eye-popping $100 million into GitHub, the ever popular repository for developers to post code and collaborate.
It’s GitHub’s first infusion of venture capital. Founder Tom Preston Warner said the round will go to developing GitHub Enterprise, a server side version of GitHub.com. → Read More
Writer and entrepreneur Penelope Trunk has a new book coming out called The New American Dream, but you won’t find it in your local bookstore. Instead, she’s publishing it exclusively with startup Hyperink.
That’s not how the book started out, says Trunk (who writes a popular blog and also authored a couple of controversial TechCrunch posts about women and startups). Her previous book The… → Read More
Representative Darrell Issa (CA-49) signed the Declaration of Internet Freedom, a broad online declaration that aims to keep the internet free and open. Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is the first elected official to sign the document.
Issa has been an outspoken opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Last month, he drafted “A Digital Citizen’s… → Read More
SessionM CEO and co-founder Lars Albright says the company has been recruiting aggressively since it raised a $20 million Series B a few months ago. Today, he’s announcing three big hires from Apple and Google:
Gerald Hewes, who led the analytics, optimization, and insights team for Apple’s iAd program, and who’s now SessionM’s vice president of engineering.
Amy Jerusalmi, who joined Apple… → Read More
A few months ago, I had Doug Edwards, Google employee #59, on the show to confess all about Google’s early days. But whatever Google ex-employees can do, ex-Facebook employees can do better. So instead of employee #59, we’ve lined up Facebook employee #51 to reveal the most intimate truths about what it was like to work at Mark Zuckerberg’s production in the very early days. Katherine Losse was… → Read More
And RIM’s post-earnings PR offensive continues. This time, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins sat down with the folks at CIO for an in-depth interview about himself and the company’s future, and as you may expect he had a few juicy tidbits to reveal.
The most notable of those little revelations has to do with the company’s forthcoming BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Last month RIM infamously delayed the launch… → Read More
Some interesting news for streaming service Hulu today: in a role reversal of sorts, the company is bringing its own original programming to television for the first time with the debut of “Spoilers” on Canada’s SPACE, a sci-fi/horror/fantasy channel. The show features filmmaker Kevin Smith (“Clerks”) and guests discussing their favorite summer movies. The deal also makes the show available for… → Read More
VoiceBunny, a startyup coming out of beta today, aims to make it easier and cheaper to get a professional-quality voiceover.
Co-founder and CEO Alexander Torrenegra says that using the traditional process, recording a 60-second voiceover would take four weeks and thousands of dollars, largely because you need to recruit the talent through casting directors and talent agencies. Things are… → Read More
We hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July and an awesome weekend. You may have noticed that we didn’t have a Disrupt SF ticket giveaway last Friday. That is because we wanted to wait since we have something extra special to give away this week. We noticed last Friday that we had a brand new iPad in the office (yes, the new one, the “new iPad”) and we were feeling celebratory, so we decided to… → Read More
Our TechCrunch Disrupt event is coming back to San Francisco this September 8 to 12, and the agenda is coming together fast. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz will open the show, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will be coming by to share his latest on enterprise disruption. Meanwhile, former New York Schools chancellor Joel Klein is also on the agenda to discuss his work on education… → Read More
Plivo, a telephony startup from the current Y Combinator batch, is today launching its API platform for voice and SMS applications. Despite the sound of it, Plivo is not a direct competitor with developer-friendly Twilio, but is targeting larger businesses in need of scale.
The company’s founders, Venkatesh B and Michael Ricordeau (who go by Venky and Mike), met over GitHub two years ago… → Read More
GoInstant made its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt last fall. Today, the browser collaboration startup has reportedly been acquired by Salesforce.com for $70 million, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.
GoInstant allows people to surf the web with each other without having to download an extra plugin or software. GoInstant Co-Founder Jevon MacDonald calls it co-browsing. You can be… → Read More
Is there room for another social network in the age of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? According to newly launched, mobile-first startup Muxi, the answer to that question is “yes,” and specifically, it’s targeting the LinkedIn crowd with its social network for professionals. According to Muxi co-founder Bertrand Besse, there’s still an opportunity here because “LinkedIn is not a social network,”… → Read More
Eruptive Games, a Vancouver-based developer that’s shortly set to launch a zombie-killing game called Citizen Grim, just picked up $1 million in funding. Investors include Kevin Colleran, who was one of Facebook’s first 10 employees, Guitar Hero creator Kai Huang and Nadeem Kassam of Zynik. A Russian social game developer called Plarium is also putting funding in and will act as an adviser. → Read More
Over the last several months, we’ve seen a slew of casino game launches from indie developers to the behemoth in the room, Zynga. The issue is that while it’s easy to create a casino-style game, it can be difficult to monetize one because of very fragmented and complicated regulations around online gambling globally.
Enter Betable, a social betting company that’s being reborn as a platform for… → Read More
Microsoft kicked off its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto with a bit of a bang earlier today — during the event’s keynote address, Microsoft VP and Windows CFO Tami Reller revealed when manufacturers and consumers would be able to get their hands on Windows 8.
The long-awaited operating system is on track to be released to manufacturers in the first week of August, with a consumer… → Read More
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