Alexia Tsotsis works for TechCrunch as a writer. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry.
After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in order to continue her career in new media, first as LA Weekly’s internet culture reporter, and then as SF Weekly’s web editor. Before she joined TechCrunch, Alexia ran the SFweekly.com website while staying on top of memes, the tech scene, and human behavior in the digital age.
At TechCrunch, Tsotsis covers early stage startups, and has had the opportunity to interview everyone from Groupon’s Andrew Mason to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Most recently Tsotsis made the Forbes “30 Under 30: Rising Stars of Media List.” Her Twitter bio reads, “Breaks news, hearts.”
Our SOMA neighbor and “clubhouse for entrepreneurs” Founders Den had its second Demo Day today, out of its spacious office in SOMA. Many of the startups presenting were niche plays, trying to tackle the issues of curation and data in various verticals like education, eCommerce and health care.
My personal favorites? Kaggle, a way to crowdsource the parsing of data through friendly competitions between scientists, and Wanelo, a Pinterest-like site focused on products. → Read More
In case you live under a rock (I hate that played out phrase, someone please come up with something better) Path founder Dave Morin has been through a hellish past two weeks — About a week before Valentine’s Day, his app came under major fire for uploading user iOS Address Books. So we had two weeks of tech news BS around this issue, and then all of a sudden Apple’s all like “My bad.”
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The most impressive thing about Scan is that it, as a humble QR code app, has raised over $1.7 million in seed funding from, wait for it, Shervin Pishevar via Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, Social + Capital Partnership, Transmedia Capital, Ludlow Ventures and angels Ariel Poler, Naval Ravikant of AngelPool, Jim Pallotta of Raptor Group and Gaga manager Troy Carter. → Read More
Last Friday I visited the Aol* building on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. But instead of the stench of death and decay you would normally find at a dying company, I found joy and the hustle and bustle of youth. More importantly, I found startups, tens of startups with founders eager to show me around the various VC firms (SoftTech, Morado) and incubators occupying the building’s first floor. → Read More
Quora has fiddled around with its Credits system and unveiled some new features today, making two very notable changes. The first one is the elimination of the original “Pay to show to Topics” feature of Credits, where users would have to pay credits to have their questions show up to people following specific topics. Instead, users will have to pay 50 Credits to ask a question, any question and all topic additions are “free.”
Users can earn credits by having their questions and answers upvoted, in addition to answering “Ask to Answer” questions or having users gift them credits. → Read More
Twitter has just launched a new app refresh for its mobile apps in Android and iOS, as well as expanded its offerings to the Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble NOOK and NOOK color.
Returning to the iOS and Android apps is the ability to swipe individual tweets to reveal tweet actions like ‘Reply,”Retweet,”Favorite’ and ‘Profile’ — a feature which was initially available in Tweetie, the app that eventually became Twitter for mobile, and then removed inexplicably. Another blast from the past is the ability to copy and paste text of tweets and user profiles, which I for one really missed. → Read More
Small business inventory management startup Stitch Labs is announcing a $1 million seed investment this morning led by True Ventures. In the same space as Bizelo and Ordoro, Stitch Labs allows design-focused small businesses to organize their CRM, product orders and inventory with custom tailored features like Etsy and Shopify integration.
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Let’s say that you’re browsing the searchable web at your job, looking for some facts on some hot startup or whatever it is you get paid to do …
You’re sitting there web surfing, just going about your business on Google.com, and all of a sudden it’s like “Well gee I’ve got seven notifications on Robert Scoble Google+ … Well let me just click on this animated red button here …” → Read More
Three weeks after the launch of Samwer Fab clone Bamarang in Germany, the UK, France, Brazil and Australia comes the news that Fab too has decided to bolster its European front lines through the acquisition of German Flash sales site Casacanda.
According to a source familiar with the proceedings, the deal went down for $11 million in stock, with no earn out.
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From the one man team that brought you Photopile and Onesheet comes another drop dead simple app, TipList. Deciding to take a a trip around the world with his wife Elle last summer, creator Brendan Mulligan received a deluge of “City Tips” emails, or those emails full of must see sights, places, restaurants, bars that your friends think you’d like and that constantly get recycled when people you know come into town/travel. → Read More
Memrise, an online community that attempts to teach people languages through crowdsourcing, is announcing its $1.1 million in seed financing today, from Matt Mullenweg’s Audrey Capital, Avalon Ventures, Balderton Capital, Lerer Ventures, Zynga Boston head Nabeel Hyatt, former Facebook data head Jeff Hammerbacher, Bill Warner, Scott Heller, Walt Winshall and Ken Baumann.
Memrise incorporates a unique way of teaching and teaching foreign words; It crowdsources Mems, or Mneumonic devices from its community and then imparts them to users through online lessons involving animated gifs (below). The startup uses a gardening metaphor to represent a student’s journey — each Mem you learn is a plant, your total sum knowledge is a garden, etc. → Read More
Tablet publishing platform Onswipe is launching its content recommendation throughout its network of publishers today — introducing a Outbrain like feature where readers are given choices of articles from its thousands of partners in realtime. (Readers can access the feature by tapping on the Rocketship in the bottom right corner of the page.)
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Here’s why I love TechCrunch; because I’m going to just post this a little before midnight, and I dare someone to take it down while I sleep.
I. triple. dog. dare. you.
Anyways today we hired a bunch of people (Hi Colleen! Hi Ingrid!) and made some existing people Super Ninja Princesses or something, but in the meantime we lost two crucial members of our team to competitors, Mobile Editor Greg Kumparak and Europe Writer Robin Wauters. It’s a huge loss.
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What a week! In the past seven days I’ve watched the fact that an iOS app was uploading your Address Book tear our industry a new one. Path’s “Find your Friends” feature has now ripped apart friendships, driven apart investors and founders and made Robin Wauters leave TechCrunch (okay, just kidding on that one). → Read More
Because I am going to be an awesome Mom, I will totally keep my ears open to the best possible options for my kids, because I’ve totally set my sights on that, focusing on family instead of career and all. Obviously.
Until hell freezes over then, I will be buying my more reproduction-friendly friends subscriptions to Wittlebee (rhymes with “little bee”), a Science-backed ”get random stuff sent to you” startup run by my old friend and former Myspace marketing exec Sean Percival. → Read More
Sometimes it really does seem like we live in the Wild West of the digital age, the rules of the Internet get made up as we go along.
Due to the newness, it seems like there’s a scandal per week in tech startup land, and, because of social media, the default way of dealing with it for startups has become the grand public apology — tweetable on Twitter! → Read More
Photosharing app Instagram went through a subtle redesign this afternoon. In addition to the brand new “Sierra” filter, Notifications improvements and a UI/UX refresh where the feed, popular, share and news buttons have all been divorced of their copy and are now just streamlined symbols, the company has added the “Lux” feature.
Lux, denoted by an eclipse symbol in the bottom left hand corner of the app’s image edit dashboard, is basically an adjustment of image brightness, midtone contrast and saturation in order to bring out the details in an iPhone photo — sort of like what iPhone HDR wishes it was. → Read More
PaperKarma is one of those ideas that make you realize that the future is nigh. The concept behind it? See a piece of junk mail that offends you in your mail box — anything from magazines, catalogs, coupon books, fliers, credit card offers, and the root of all evils, the Yellow Pages — take a picture of it and boom, the PaperKarma team will “take care” of it, mafia style.
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This might just be the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever heard. It’s definitely the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever written.
Kaitlyn Trigger is a marketing director at Rally.org. She also happens to be Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend of two and a half years (The 26 year old Krieger and 27 year old Trigger met at a friend’s house in October of 2009 and moved in together in October 2010). And my hero.
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In the same space as other “get random stuff sent to you” startups (but especially Manpacks) Meundies launches today to bring users high quality underwear choices in a month to month subscription model.
The Meundies onboarding process basically functions like that of Stylemint, where users select the styles and colors they like and the startup provides them with personalized choices, for $16 a month per item in addition to free shipping and returns. Members have the option of skipping a month or putting their membership on pause during the first five days of each month. Members can also cancel their membership at any time without penalty. → Read More
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