October 2013

Runtastic, an Austrian running startup with an aim of hitting the Polars and Nikes of the world where it counts, has released something it’s calling “Story Running,” essentially an app…

Circle Internet Financial has launched with $9M of Series A funding to increase mainstream adoption of digital currencies like Bitcoin by providing a payment platform for consumers and merchants. Investors…

Less than one year after completing a $12 million Series A round, the multi-category retailer Nomorerack has raised $40 million in Series B financing led by Oak Investment Partners and…

Someone should probably go make a Wikipedia page for the “Warby Parker model,” since it has rapidly become the go-to business strategy for online retail startups.

Most all of Tesla’s IT is homegrown, said CIO Jay Vijayan, appearing onstage at the Constellation Research Connected Enterprise event today. The reason: the traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems did not cut…

The Snowden revelations have reignited a discussion about privacy — especially privacy in the digital age. That discussion will eventually, we can hope, not only reform how the government views…

The mayor of Seattle has alleged that Comcast donated significant sums to his rival ahead of the November 5 election. The money could have been donated, perhaps, in hopes of…

The Nexus 5 is here! The Nexus 5 is here! After months of hype and more questionably “accidental” leaks than any device in recent memory, Google announced their new flagship…

The Rockstar consortium is an organization backed by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson and Sony. It purchased patents off of the defunct telecommunications company Nortel in 2011, in a bidding war…

Today, Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier and Serena Saitto report that Twitter’s highly anticipated initial public offering is oversubscribed, indicating booming interest for its shares as the firm looks to become a public company.…

Music-focused social network SoundTracking released a new version of its smartphone app today, one that co-founder and CEO Steve Jang said will make the app useful beyond “hardcore music lovers.”…

In this week’s special episode of Ask A VC from Disrupt Europe in Berlin, Germany, AngelPad founder and former Googler Thomas Korte talked to TechCrunch about his incubator’s strategy, expansion…

Google Cloud SQL now supports native MySQL connections, a move that is intended to make it easier to integrate third-party applications. With the support, native MySQL apps can be plugged into…

Workers from tech giants Google, Red Hat, and Oracle and other companies have reportedly joined with the government to help fix the notoriously broken Healthcare.gov website that is a key…

How old is social media? Maybe we can date it from the birth of Facebook in February 2004. Or perhaps we can go back to 2002, to when Friendster was…

It should be clear by now that there’s much more at play in Android 4.4 KitKat that some early reports alluded to, and one of the most interesting (to me,…

Today Google announced details of its long-awaited Android 4.4 KitKat operating system for the first time, going beyond just the candy bar branding. KitKat is designed around three major tentpoles,…

At long last, Google has officially announced what has been perhaps their worst kept secret in a while: the Nexus 5. The Nexus 5 had seen more than its fair…

Amazon today launched the developer preview of its AWS SDK for JavaScript. With this, developers can now easily build dynamic JavaScript applications that can access AWS services from the browser…

Another chapter in the ongoing saga between city cab regulations and on-demand taxi apps: cab app Hailo, which in London relies on a portion of the city’s black cabs to…

Hey, squishy human, ready to be imprisoned and forced to buff robot parts to a high shine by hand until your body and soul are destroyed? I bet you are!…

Twitter did an interesting thing this morning with its @magicrecs recommendation service. It introduced a text-based menu system that you access via DM, which lets you tune the recommendations that…

FightMe, a social video app with what may be my favorite startup name ever, is announcing that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding from an undisclosed London investor. Using…

Our European podcast this week mainly focuses on what we liked at Disrupt Europe. Marc Samwer opened the show in a rare public appearance, trying to respond to some of…

HowAboutWe, a startup that recommends date activities for both singles and couples, is launching the first internationalized versions of its iOS app. The company bills itself as “the first offline…

For years now, most of us have been quietly not turning off our phones and devices at landing and take off, and merely putting the screens to sleep and stuffing…

58.com, the online classifieds marketplace often referred to as the “Craigslist of China,” will hold its initial public offering of 11 million American Depository Shares (ADS) at $17 each on…

And so it begins. Twitter, now firmly on the road to IPO, has equally firmly turned its attention to monetisation — which means it’s turning on new features that are…

Music video powerhouse VEVO is launching a major redesign this week, after rebuilding its back end from the ground up. The online music video site has undergone a complete overhaul,…

A new patent application published by the USPTO this week indicates that Apple has been thinking about how to practically deliver the benefits of solar power to mobile devices, without…