Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that couples a skyscraper and an accompanying tri-sphere bio-dome like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”
Because God forbid employees walk to the park… → Read More
Runscope launched at the Glue conference today with $1.1 million in seed funding from True Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz for its tools that monitor API traffic and address the problems with broken APIs. Also participating were Lerer Ventures, and a group of prominent angel investors. → Read More
For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’ It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience. But that’s a stereotype that… → Read More
Another photo sharing app bites the dust? Or is something with promise getting another chance? Either way you look at it, betaworks is adding more technology and team members to its arsenal, as photo sharing app Piictu has announced that the team will “join forces” with a betaworks company that has yet to launch. → Read More
Google’s Drive app for Android just got a major redesign that brings the Google Now-like card-style look the company introduced with Google Now to its mobile productivity app. → Read More
Shashi Seth, whose résumé includes management and executive roles at Yahoo, Aol, and Google, is joining the Tribune Company as the president of a new unit called Tribune Digital Ventures.
Seth’s role was first reported yesterday at AllThingsD, and the company is now confirming the news. It says Tribune Digital Ventures will operate as an independent unit based in Silicon Valley. → Read More
EAT Club, which is launching in private beta today, has a unique spin on the way that users get lunch. The service hopes to get rid of all the hassles around waiting in line, paying, and waiting for your food, all with a convenient food truck that serves a variety of foods, and a mobile app to handle ordering and payment. → Read More
Chrome 27 for the desktop arrived yesterday and today, Google updated Chrome for Android to version 27 as well. While the desktop update mostly focused on improved speed, the Android version actually includes a number of new features. The most important of these is probably the new fullscreen mode for phones. Just like in the iPhone app (or in the old stock Android browser), the toolbar will now… → Read More
Skyhigh Networks discovers,manages and analyzes data from all the apps that people use at work. Today the company raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from existing investor Greylock Partners. Skyhigh discovers, analyzes and controls the cloud services that a customer’s employee uses. It sees the cloud services customers use and all the associated… → Read More
People are afraid that if they drive an electric vehicle, they’ll run out of juice somewhere. So to convince more people to buy electric cars and dominate the charging station locator market, Xatori and Recargo are merging. The combined charge finder developers will go by the name Recargo to promote their station map and trip planner app PlugShare. Xatori and its co-founders Forrest North… → Read More
As Foursquare evolves, it wants to help you find either new places to check out or lead you to places where your friends have already been. Mixed in with that is recommendation technology to show you places that you might be interested in based on where you’ve been before. Today, Foursquare updated its iOS and Android apps with an advanced search option that lets you control how the service seeks… → Read More
With years of digital exhaust now behind us – over 240 billion photos on Facebook, 8 billion on Flickr, and not to mention the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every month – we’re now transitioning to a time when we’re in need of smarter tools for organizing and accessing our personal data archives. Only a few companies so far have dared to step into this space because of the technical… → Read More
Launching today is Cookening, a new French startup co-founded by Cédric Giorgi (previously co-editor of TechCrunch France) that combines elements of both Airbnb and Housebites. Starting with France first, a country known for its gastronomy, it enables locals to be matched with tourists so they can invite them into their homes to experience an authentic home dining experience. → Read More
Cloudscaling has raised $10 million from Trinity Ventures, Juniper Networks, and Seagate Technologies in a deal that shows how software defined networking has become a focal issue for companies building out their own clouds. Cloudscaling delivers an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure system for enterprises, SaaS providers and cloud service providers. The company foreshadowed a deal with… → Read More
Every year Google creates a summary Zeitgeist feature to sum up the year in search data, showing what has been the most popular among its users. Now, it’s rolling out Top Charts, a new monthly series of lists similar to that year-end feature, available on Google Trends as of today. It’s built on Google’s Knowledge Graph, and provides a representation of the actual things people are interested in… → Read More
SparkLabs, the startup accelerator that wants to inject South Korea’s startup ecosystem with Silicon Valley expertise, announced its second intake today. Its latest class is an international lineup of companies that represent a variety of sectors and are at widely different stages of funding, from bootstrapped financing to those that have closed a Series A round. → Read More
Gifs, man! They’re trending harder than Jennifer Lawrence right now, but that doesn’t mean that finding them is the easiest thing in the world. That’s why Giphy, a startup that launched out of betaworks last month, is rolling out new tools to build out its library of awesome, high-quality gifs.
See, Giphy is a gif search engine. It lets you search by keyword for any gif you could possibly… → Read More
Artkive, an app designed to eliminate the overwhelming guilt you get tossing your children’s brilliant artwork into the garbage, now has another purpose, too: you can order printed out books of their creations. Instead of just hiding the child’s crumpled up drawings and precious finger-paint covered handprints that school sends home – what is now, like every day? – under… → Read More
Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of “handpicked” developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 600 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with other directory services. → Read More
One interesting element of Google I/O this year were the sensors laid out everywhere around Moscone tracking environmental data throughout the event. Those types of sensors are now all around us, including in our phones and in various smart home devices, and now a new Kickstarter project from ManyLabs wants to help kids get familiar with them very early on. → Read More
Sometimes a writer creates a universe so compelling that others feel the need to join and help flesh out that world with their own tribute fiction. And sometimes you make something crappy like Gossip Girl and loads of people want to write using those characters and that world anyway. Now Amazon is introducing a way to let writers profit from their fan fiction, via “Kindle Worlds.” → Read More
Los Angeles-based content delivery startup EdgeCast launched a new product called EdgeCast Transact, provides a dedicated CDN built just for e-commerce companies, with all the features that e-commerce companies need. EdgeCast Transact is built on top of the company’s new Commerce Acceleration Network, which is built to be PCI-compliant and enable acceleration and optimization of e-commerce pages. → Read More
Google has updated Chrome in build 27 to include conversational voice search, a feature it demoed on stage at Google I/O this year that allows you to search by voice, but also transcribes your queries in real time and lets you use natural language, asking Google straightforward questions and getting straightforward answers, both read back to you by dictation and in actual Google search results. → Read More
Porn is the new Tumblr. It seems that everyone with a CS degree and a little free time is trying to cash in (or at least dabble) in the world of online sexuality, a happenstance that I’d chalk up to the ubiquity of boobies online and the potential for perceived riches. But what inspires a pair of designers and artists to create a site that essentially catalogs every NSFW GIF they can find? → Read More
Practice Fusion has made a name for itself over the past few years by tapping into enormous demand for digital health information — particularly health records. From its inception in 2005, the startup has been on a mission to disrupt the slow-moving, archaic world of Healthcare IT by providing a free, web-based electronic medical records (EMR) platform to doctors and their practices. → Read More
The last time we met with the folks from Scanadu, we had a very limited look its much buzzed-about line of gadgets that aim to bring vital sign monitoring beyond the realm of the hospital and available to anyone with a smartphone. This week, the company’s CEO Walter De Brouwer stopped by TechCrunch TV with an update to allow us to demo an updated version of the SCOUT and show that Scanadu is… → Read More
Web security provider Blue Coat Systems — itself acquired in a $1.3 billion deal by Thoma Bravo at the end of December 2011 — is making an acquisition today: it’s buying Solera Networks, a specialist in big data security, for an undisclosed sum (although we have reached out to the company to ask). The deal is expected to close in the next thirty days. → Read More
Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with… → Read More
Australian startup, Airtasker, is keen to expand out of its home country into Southeast Asia, which it says hasn’t been touched by large competitors yet. The year-old startup provides job matching for freelancers and employers, similar to what oDesk and Elance do. For its first steps outside of Australia, its first port of call will be Singapore, where it wants to hire two country managers. → Read More
SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an 11th European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and Russia, giving it a larger geographical footprint than other European rivals including iZettle and Payleven. → Read More
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