Plyfe, a startup that allows brands to promote themselves through games and rewards, is moving onto mobile today — Plyfe games can now be played on the company’s mobile website, as well as embedded in smartphone apps. The company is also announcing that it has raised $750,000 in bridge funding.
The basic idea: Games are a much more engaging way than traditional advertising for brands to… → Read More
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, along with existing investors, has invested $49 million in Xero, the online accounting software for small businesses. It is Thiel’s third investment in Xero. Earlier this year, Thiel and existing investors put $16.6 million into the company. Thiel invested $3 million in New Zealand-founded Xero in 2010. → Read More
One of the most popular topics in education technology these days is the subject of MOOCs, otherwise known as Massive Open Online Courses. Thanks to the buzz around MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udacity and edX, there are few universities and colleges that aren’t currently struggling with whether or not they should hop on the bandwagon. → Read More
AngelPad, the startup accelerator program founded back in 2010 by ex-Googler and investor Thomas Korte, held its fifth ever Demo Day at its downtown San Francisco headquarters today. The twelve startups that comprised AngelPad’s Fall 2012 class each took the stage to give their snappiest three-minute pitches to a very packed room full of the industry’s most prominent investors.
A bit about the… → Read More
There is some consolidation in the error-tracking/monitoring space. Exceptional, the error-tracking service for cloud developers, has announced the acquisition of the Ranger monitoring service to extend the U.S. company’s ‘DevOps’ platform. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although Exceptional CEO Jonathan Siegel tells me it’s a “solid six-figure purchase,” and covers the Ranger product… → Read More
Start-Up Chile, the government-sponsored startup accelerator, is hosting its 3rd demo day today. The focus of this demo day is on social enterprise and green tech and, for the first time ever, the program partnered with Common Pitch to host today’s event. → Read More
You might think Zynga’s newfound flexibility from the end of its exclusivity agreements with Facebook would encourage investors. Instead, $ZNGA is down 13.36% after-hours, likely because it’s lost its special relationship with the social network. Now it can launch games elsewhere and use non-Facebook payments and ads on Zynga.com, but it might stop getting valuable preferred treatment. → Read More
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, took the stage at the company’s re: Invent developer conference for a wide-ranging discussion with the company’s CTO Werner Vogels about Amazon’s web service and retail business, as well as his view about entrepreneurship and his personal projects, such as the 10,000 year clock and the Blue Origin space program. → Read More
As you might have heard last night, PeopleBrowsr, the maker of social influence service Kred, has filed legal actions against Twitter for cutting it off of its full firehose of data. It was given a temporary restraining order, which has kept the current data deal in place. Twitter told TechCrunch last night that it had every right contractually to do so, whereas PeopleBrowsr is crying… → Read More
Kiosked, a Finnish startup that raised $5.75 million from Rovio’s elusive chairman Kaj Hed after bootstrapping for several years, is finally starting to show off what it’s been working on.
Naturally, the company’s products are starting to appear with Angry Birds merchandise on Rovio’s Facebook page. Kiosked is trying to change affiliate marketing by making videos and images more interactive… → Read More
Android phones! There are some that I love. The HTC One X was one of those, thanks to a very attractive external package alongside an Android skin (Sense) that had a fairly light touch and didn’t mess with most of Android’s good features, but brought some nice additional touches to the mix. The HTC One X+ is like the One X, but made better in nearly every important respect. Not surprisingly, that… → Read More
Amazon.com Founder and CEO said in a fireside chat at AWS re:Invent with CTO Werner Vogels that he was surprised by the success of Amazon Web Services. Bezos said they were optimistic that AWS would do well, but they did not anticipate such huge growth. → Read More
In 2010 we held the first TechCrunch Moscow. We were back last year, and will return again this December with two days packed with speakers and startups. You can register here.
Co-organized by Digital October, Kite Ventures, and AOL Tech Media, and backed by numerous partners, the third TechCrunch Moscow will feature some of the world’s leading technology entrepreneurs, including Brent… → Read More
Rap music has certainly evolved over the decades to become a pretty mainstream thing, but the act of rapping itself is not exactly seen as a commonplace hobby.
But Detroit-based entrepreneur Erik Torenberg thinks that’s something that should change. According to him, everybody has it inside of them to freestyle rap — it’s a talent that can be tapped into with the right amount of mentorship… → Read More
Zynga just filed a document with the SEC outlining new terms to its agreement with Facebook. Overall, it seems that Zynga and Facebook establishing a little more distance and flexibility in their relationship, with Zynga being treated more like any other game developer.
According to the filing, any “standard Zynga game page” that uses Facebook data will now be governed Facebook’s standard terms… → Read More
When I spoke with one of the leads on Google search a while back, he told me that one of the biggest features to come along for the company was “instant search” and autocomplete. Basically, you didn’t have to type out a whole search string before performing said search, which required more thought and brain power.
Now when you go to Google, you can type a few letters and it will try and predict… → Read More
Today, the dark day Syria shut down its Internet, web freedom should be at the very forefront of all of our minds. Web freedom was also center stage earlier this week when Stanford Law School hosted an event called “Sticky WCIT: Is This The End Of The Internet.” I asked several of the experts attending the event whether a WCIT meeting next week in Dubai might be a big threat to the free flow of… → Read More
Video discovery is becoming a big deal, as startups seek to help users sort through the millions of videos that are now available over the Internet. But until now, the vast majority of video discovery apps have been focused mostly on on-demand video libraries. What about the growing inventory of live video streams appearing in web browsers and on mobile devices? Squrl is trying to help its users… → Read More
Apple has yet to release the unlocked iPhone 5 in the U.S., even though early on they let images leak depicting pricing of that device on its website. Now a new report from 9t05Mac claims that the company will start selling unlocked iPhones as early as tonight via its online store, with physical retail availability coming shortly thereafter. As we reported at launch, unlocked pricing for the… → Read More
In a piece entitled “Farewell Foursquare“, its first designer, Mari Sheibley, has let everyone know that she has decided to leave the company.
She went on to explain how she first heard from its founder and CEO, Dennis Crowley:
In early December, 2008 I got an email from Dennis Crowley asking if I wanted to help him and his buddy Naveen out on a new “project”.
I said yes. → Read More
Google has just posted research findings on how certain factors affect the launch of a smartphone, with data coming directly from search. According to author Matt Seitz, the senior analytical lead at the Google Agency Blog, searches predict smartphone sales “with over 90 percent correlation throughout the launch cycle.”
With this data, the search giant has uncovered the most important factors… → Read More
“In the Studio” turns the corner into the winter months by welcoming a career finance journalist with a widely-read and often-cited daily email newsletter and, in my opinion, is the single best writer covering venture capital and private equity today.
Fortune’s Dan Primack has been covering the world of private equity and venture capital for over a decade. His work speaks for itself, with his… → Read More
Waterloo-based mobile messaging app Kik, while immensely successful in its category, faced a problem: once you’ve nailed cross-platform messaging, and added group features, where do you go from there? Do too much, and you risk watering down the core product, the one that has helped Kik sign up over 30 million registered users who are coming on board at a rate of about 100,000 new user per day. Do… → Read More
This is competition at work: earlier this week, Google announced that it would reduce the price of its standard Google Cloud Storage by just a bit over 20%. Then, Amazon announced yesterday that it would reduce the price of its S3 cloud storage service by about 25% across the board. Today, in a somewhat surprising move, Google announced that it would reduce the price of Cloud Storage by yet… → Read More
Parse.ly, the content optimization platform for publishers which emerged from stealth in January has been flying under the radar when it comes to press, but has growing the size of its customer base over the past year. The company recently signed one of its largest deals to date, having now added Thomson Reuters to its list of publishing customers, and says that it’s now on track to profitability… → Read More
Amazon Web Services announced AWS Data Pipeline at the re:Invent conference today. The new service is designed to help developers manage applications through a data driven process.
With the Data Pipeline, a customer’s workflow uses pre-made templates to flow the data to the correct destination. → Read More
Yes, that headline. Obvious. But appropriate.
Yes, after much delay (about a month), iTunes 11 is here today. And yes, it is one of the biggest overhauls of the media management service yet. Perhaps the biggest. And yes, it is now better positioned to compete in the era of the cloud. And yes, they even made the icon a bit better.
It was back at the iPhone 5 event in September, when Apple… → Read More
Microsoft’s Windows RT-powered Surface has been… polarizing to say the least, leaving many a gadget fiend pondering the prospect of buying the more powerful Surface Pro instead.
The Redmond-based company has been keeping quiet when it came to the Pro’s more salient details, but Microsoft has finally come forward with some new info — the Surface Pro will be available in 64GB and 128GB… → Read More
A year is a long time, especially in the technology world. I can’t even remember what I was doing at this particular time last year without looking at my foursquare check-in history…sad, I know. I do know where I was in January, though — at The Crunchies. I wasn’t a part of TechCrunch yet. I attended as a guest while working for The Next Web. I wasn’t sure what it was all about, so I definitely… → Read More
Apple just released long-awaited iTunes 11. After downloading, users should expect a totally redesigned version. In October, the company said that there would be a one-month delay. Little has changed over the years, but today’s new version represents a major milestone and a much needed simplification in some ways. → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
