Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and random startups. Previously, he worked as a staff tech writer at Adweek, a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco.
Disclosure: I own shares in VentureBeat, as well as diversified investments through my 401(k) and Roth IRA.
OpenKit, an open-source social platform for mobile games, is now open to all developers, according to co-founder Peter Relan. The service, first announced in December, has been in private beta since earlier this year. There are apparently 1,500 developers already testing the service.
Relan previously told me that he started OpenKit in response to the shutdown of OpenFeint, the GREE-acquired… → Read More
CapLinked, a startup offering workspaces for managing business deals, announced today that it has closed a $2.1 million Series A.
The company previously said that it raised a $1.6 million round from FF Angel (the seed-stage fund operated by Founders Fund), Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, and others, so this is basically a $500,000 addition. The new investors include Conversion Capital, Inflection… → Read More
Matt Sanchez, co-founder and CEO of Say Media (which owns sites like xoJane, ReadWrite, and Dogster), just told me that the company has laid off about 10 percent of its 400-person staff.
Sanchez described this as part of Say’s transformation from an ad network to “a digital media company.” The company isn’t getting out of the ad network business completely, but that part of Say is relatively… → Read More
If you’re a fan of endless runner games like Temple Run, starting today you’ll get your chance to do more than outrun a pack of demonic monkeys — you can take on your friends, too, with Zynga’s new title Running With Friends.
That’s the basic distinction that Travis Boatman, Zynga’s senior vice president of mobile, offered when describing the game to me. There’s already “a huge group of… → Read More
A startup called Webflakes aims to bring some of the best international content on fashion, food, travel, and more to English-speaking readers with the help of volunteer translators. The site is officially launching today, and the company is also announcing that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding.
CEO Nathan Shuchami told me that people searching the web can sometimes struggle to find… → Read More
So what does a high Klout score actually get you? The influence-measuring startup already offers prizes through its Klout Perks program, and there are bragging rights (unless your friends think you’re a loser for caring about your Klout score). Now Klout is asking users who are influential on a given topic to answer short, factual questions through the new Klout Experts program. It sounds like the… → Read More
Before he co-founded last-minute hotel-booking startup HotelTonight, one of CEO Sam Shank’s previous companies was the hotel review site TravelPost. And today, he’s launching what he said is a reinvention of the hotel review, optimized for mobile phones.
“What makes mobile different is, mobile’s with you all the time,” Shank said. “With hotel reviews, you’re sort of summarizing your stay. It’s… → Read More
Mass Appeal, a joint venture that’s both reviving the Broolyn-based, graffiti-focused magazine of the same name and also moving into online content, is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in funding.
It’s backed by a mix of traditional firms and figures from the hip hop world. The rapper, (and one-time TechCrunch contributor) Nas announced last month that he had invested a “six-figure… → Read More
BitTorrent is taking a new step today in its efforts to help creators make money (and make money itself) — it’s releasing a new content packaging format called the BitTorrent Bundle in alpha mode.
The company has already been working with different creators to launch promotional bundles. For example, author Tim Ferriss packaged chapters of his book with other supplementary media material as a… → Read More
TenFarms, a startup working on a couple of interesting mobile product ideas, just announced that it has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.
The company has already released its first product, Photopoll, which allows users to share photos (you can pull them from your camera roll, Amazon.com, or Instagram), tell stories around those photos, and ask their friends for… → Read More
CircleUp, a startup that connects investors with retail and consumer companies that wouldn’t attract traditional venture funding, has raised a $7.5 million Series A.
The round was led by Union Square Ventures. New backer Google Ventures also participated, as did previous investors Rose Park Advisors, Maveron, and David Topper. Union Square’s Andy Weissman is joining the CircleUp board, while… → Read More
Chute, a startup that offers tools for collecting and displaying photos, has raised $7 million in Series A Funding.
The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and US Venture Partners. Chute previously raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Freestyle. → Read More
Jeet Singh and Joe Chung have already had a nice exit, taking their enterprise software company Art Technology Group public (it was acquired by Oracle for $1 billion back in 2010). Now they’re hoping to turn the act of building successful startups into a “repeatable process,” through their new firm Redstar ventures.
Singh and Chung, along with their third co-founder Matt Beecher, said they… → Read More
Investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s skeptical comments about the current wave of tech startups (comments that included a not-too-veiled dig at Snapchat), ended up fueling plenty of discussion at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this week. In fact, when I interviewed Sequoia Capital partner Aaref Hilaly backstage, Palihapitiya’s remarks provided a springboard for Hilaly’s take on messaging apps… → Read More
Sometimes the simplest product demos can be effective.
Take a new web editor called Barley. To show off the product, co-founder Colin Devroe opened me a regular old web page, then changed the wording of the page with just a few keystrokes. A small editing menu opened as he typed, but didn’t have to access an admin dashboard, open a separate editor, edit any HTML, or anything like that.
To be… → Read More
SocialWire, a startup building Facebook ads for retailers, has raised $1 million in “seed extension” funding. The company is also announcing that Chief Revenue Officer Bob Buch, a former exec at Aol and Digg, is taking on the role of CEO.
When I talked to Buch this morning, he acknowledged that when he tells people that he works in the advertising business, they usually respond, “Oh, I hate… → Read More
Brian Pokorny, who recently rejoined SV Angel as a general partner, weighed in this afternoon on the future of a number of high-profile companies — Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo.
Pokorny was interviewed at Disrupt NY, where he was joined onstage by his partners David Lee and Ron Conway. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington asked them how they felt about Facebook and whether it was going… → Read More
The founders of lyric website Rap Genius revealed today that they’re starting to move into annotating news content too, under the name News Genius.
They were onstage at Disrupt NY, where they gave a surreal, joke-y interview without too much detail about what News Genius actually is. Co-founder Mahbod Moghadam mostly told the audience to follow the Twitter account and asked, “When is Obama… → Read More
MindMixer, a startup that helps organizations like the City of San Francisco gather ideas from their communities, has raised $4 million in Series B funding.
When the company announced its $1.9 million Series A last year, CEO Nick Bowden recalled his work in urban planning, when local governments and agencies would hold public meetings that no one attended. So MindMixer created tools for… → Read More
Local Market Launch, a startup that helps companies manage the online presence of local stores, is announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding.
The company was founded by Brian Coryat, who previously founded ValueClick, an online ad company that went public in 2000. Coryat told me that he spent much of the past decade working with small businesses, and that Local Market… → Read More
It’s possible that you are an incredibly organized person who remembers everything important from your meetings, and you’re part of an incredibly organized team where every post-meeting task is communicated clearly. But … maybe not. Maybe stuff slips through the cracks. That’s where Retrace, an app that just launched at Disrupt NY’s Startup Battlefield, comes in.
Co-founder and CEO Austin… → Read More
Online real estate company Trulia just released its earnings for the first quarter of 2013, reporting that its revenue grew 97 percent year-over-year to $24 million.
Despite the growth, the company still posted a net loss of $2 million. On a non-GAAP basis, it lost 2 cents per share. Analysts had predicted a loss of 1 cent per share with revenue of $21.08 million. → Read More
Search startup Leap2 is announcing that it has raised $1.6 million in new funding. It’s also releasing new versions of its iOS and Android apps.
Building a better search experience than the existing players is a pretty tall order. In Leap2′s case, it sounds like the focus really is on the experience, incorporating more images and social updates into a unified search result. Mixing different media… → Read More
ClickTale, a company that helps businesses understand what visitors are actually doing on their websites, just announced that it has raised $17 million in Series B funding.
The company tries to go beyond the standard information revealed by most other analytics services, offering things like recordings of visitor sessions, heat maps that show where people moved their mouse and clicked, and a… → Read More
Yahoo is hoping to bring in more advertiser dollars with two new units that it’s announcing today as part of the Digital Content NewFronts.
Vice President of Product and Media Mike Kerns pitched the new formats as the flip side to to the front page redesign that the company rolled out in February. Now that Yahoo has improved its consumer experience (or at least one of the main parts of the… → Read More
Canadian broadcasting executive Kirstine Stewart has joined Twitter as managing director for Twitter Canada.
The announcement was just tweeted by Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue. He also noted that Stewart is the first team member for Twitter Canada, and that the company is looking to do more hiring in Toronto. → Read More
Is it still possible to do something new with online forums? The answer is yes, according to Patrick Clinger, founder of ProBoards — he’s launching a new version of the company’s forum-building software today.
Clinger told me that today’s launch is the company’s first big update since 2008. The company was founded in 2000, and in the beginning, he said ProBoards “actually did have the best… → Read More
Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of investment firm The Social+Capital Partnership, said today that the tech world should be “utterly ashamed,” because “we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started.”
Palihapitiya was interviewed on-stage at our Disrupt NY conference. He argued that in contrast to past decades, where tech entrepreneurs were… → Read More
It’s after 1am on a Saturday night in Manhattan, and there are still hundreds of people at our Disrupt NY Hackathon. The dedication of the attendees trying to build a cool product in less than 24 hours is both impressive and slightly disturbing.
To capture some of the energy, Drew Olanoff and I took a walk around the venue at around 11pm, as the pizza and beer arrived to give the teams a… → Read More
Sites like Kickstarter have been used to crowdfund a wide range of projects, but I don’t think they’ve ever done what Synergist is attempting today — they’ve never crowdfunded themselves.
The site was founded by 17-year-old Jared Kleinert, who described Synergist as a mix of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for social enterprises (i.e., organizations that aim to do good, rather than make money… → Read More
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