Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and other 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.
Last month, a startup called Joyride came out of stealth mode and announced that it has raised $1 million in funding. Since the company is building a platform for creating entertaining drivetime experiences, we decided that the best place to see the Joyride app in action was on the road.
Co-founder and CEO Jeff Chen described Joyride as an attempt to “make drive times more fun and more… → Read More
Zynga hasn’t been releasing as many new titles in recent months, but things are about to pick up again, executives said during today’s conference call discussing the company’s first quarter earnings report. In fact, they said they’re launching a big new title later today — Draw Something 2.
Chief Operations Officer David Ko said that there’s been “a little bit of a pause in our title slate.”… → Read More
The makers of Just Sing It have announced that they raised $1 million in funding.
I wrote about the app when it launched earlier this month. At the time, CEO Alec Andronikov told me that his vision is to create a truly addictive social experience — users don’t just share karaoke performances, they actually play a game where they have to guess what the other person is singing, and they can win… → Read More
Hearsay Social, a Sequoia- and NEA-backed company that helps large organizations manage their social media presence across local branches and sales teams, is announcing that it has opened an office in London. Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Steve Garrity said it is the first step in the company’s European expansion.
The new office will be led by Peter Caryotis, who previously managed… → Read More
Vibrant Media, which powers in-text ads and other contextual ad products, is going cross-platform today with the launch of a number of new units.
Some of those ad units are entirely new to Vibrant’s lineup, while others take the company’s desktop ads and optimize them for touch interactions. CEO Cella Irvine told me that there’s growing interest from ad agencies in campaigns that span desktops… → Read More
LightSpeed, the retail software company that raised $30 million from Accel Partners last year, is launching a new Mac application today that it calls the StoreMaster — it’s supposed to serve as a “command center,” offering a real-time, customizable view of the latest sales and inventory data.
The StoreMaster is the big piece of LightSpeed’s version 3.8 upgrade. Founder and CEO Dax Dasilva… → Read More
Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for Adobe Social — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat.
Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked me through the new features earlier today in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data —… → Read More
Apple announced today that it now has 300 million users for iCloud, up 20 percent from the 250 million that it announced in January.
iCloud, which allows users to sync their content and data across devices, was launched 18 months ago to replace the MobileMe service. Company executives said today that they will “continue to invest in the ecosystem” with new features and capabilities coming… → Read More
Nativo, a startup aiming to make it easy for online publishers to run sponsored content, and for advertisers to distribute that content, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding.
I covered the company last year under its old name, PostRelease. Despite the name change, the vision remains the same — publishers add some code to their site and create a template for sponsored content… → Read More
Salesforce.com is expanding its social ad offerings today with a new product called Salesforce Social.com.
Thanks to its acquisition last year of Buddy Media, Salesforce already runs social ad campaigns for a number of major ad companies like GroupM and Omnicom. But today it’s breaking out its ad product into a separate entity that’s distinct from Buddy Media’s social publishing capabilities. → Read More
Event registration and ticketing service Eventbrite announced earlier today that it has raised $60 million in new funding.
The round was led by Tiger Global Management, which previously led Eventbrite’s $50 million Series E. New investor T. Rowe Price also participated. In the funding press release, CEO Kevin Hartz argues that “live experiences are the new luxury good” and describes the round… → Read More
A year ago, Dave Girouard left his position as the president of Google Enterprise to start a new company, Upstart, that allows users (mostly recent college graduates) to raise money for the pursuit of entrepreneurial goals — they pay their lenders back with a percentage of their income.
And today, lining up with the anniversary of his departure, Girouard is announcing that he has raised $5.9… → Read More
Earlier this month, we wrote that High Fidelity, the virtual world startup led by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, had raised $2.4 million of a $3.4 million round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, we didn’t know who had actually made the investment — until today.
Tony Conrad of True Ventures just announced that his firm led High Fidelity’s Series… → Read More
Doug Renert told me yesterday that his firm Tandem, which backs early-stage mobile startups, is about to expand in a big way. The first step is bringing in more people, starting with two new partners that Tandem is announcing today — Rohit Bhagat, formerly chairman of Asia Pacific for investment firm BlackRock, and John Ellis, co-founder and executive vice president of product and technology at… → Read More
During the conference call discussing Google’s latest earnings report, executives were asked about how mobile will affect the company’s business — both the general usage of search, as well as Google’s revenue and profits from advertising.
CEO Larry Page responded that he “always” gets asked about how the popularity of mobile apps affects Google search, but he’s “not super-concerned” about it. → Read More
Last month, social media curation service Storify revealed its first paid plan, Storify VIP. It sounds like VIP is designed for large media organizations (the first announced customer was the BBC), but today, Storify is announcing that it created a more accessible, less journalism-focused option called Storify Business.
“The new features will broaden our user base beyond journalism to these… → Read More
Nielsen-owned Vizu is releasing its 2013 Online Advertising Performance Outlook today, and the results suggest that despite concerns about measurement and return on investment, marketers plan to increase their online spending on brand advertising, and to spend more in emerging areas like mobile and social.
The blog post outlining the findings describes 2013 as the “year of brand advertising.”… → Read More
Volio, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (among others) and led by Nuance founder Ron Croen, launched last month with the promise of allowing apps to create a conversational experience with their users. Now it’s adding a social dimension with the launch of Voliocasts.
Founder and CEO Ron Croen laid out his vision for me earlier this week: “If you put a real human image on a computer, you… → Read More
There’s been a lot of excitement around the possibilities that smartphones and especially tablets offer to traditional publishers, but they also present a big challenge — the costs are often too high, said MediaWire CEO Clifford Hoffer.
That’s why MediaWire is launching a new product called MediaWire Mobile, which allows publishers to launch their own branded apps on the Apple Store, Google… → Read More
Earlier today, Twitter announced that it will allow advertisers to target their promoted content based on the keywords in a tweet. I had a brief conversation with Senior Director of Revenue Products Kevin Weil who laid out Twitter’s perspective on the announcement’s significance.
“People always say that you are what you tweet,” Weil said. (Always?) At the same time, he noted that the content of… → Read More
Stipple, a startup that allows publishers to enrich images with additional content and links, is launching a new feature that it says will allow merchants to include a full-fledged online store in an image.
Co-founder and CEO Rey Flemings told me that this is powerful because product images will usually get better distribution than a traditional ad — “More people will see Nike’s photos and… → Read More
A new startup called Repost aims to make it easy for online publishers to distribute their articles via embedding — the same way I can share a video from YouTube or a document from Scribd directly in a blog post.
Right now, if I saw an article that I thought TechCrunch readers would find valuable — such as this blog post from Repost founder and CEO John Pettit — I could share a link on… → Read More
Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer said today that the company is nearing the end of its first “sprint” during her tenure as CEO. That sprint, she said, was focused on “getting people to believe in Yahoo” and making the company an appealing place to work.
Mayer offered a number of comparisons to illustrate that things do seem to be turning around when it comes to talent. She said that the number of… → Read More
Yahoo just released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2013, with better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings per share of 38 cents. Revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) was flat compared to last year, at $1.07 billion.
Analysts has predicted that the company would report revenue of $1.1 billion and 24 cents EPS. Wall Street normally evaluates Yahoo on an ex-TAC basis —… → Read More
Action.IO, a startup promising to make it easier to create, configure, and share development environments, just announced a new name — Nitrous.IO — and $1 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, TIBCO Software, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures, and Peanut Labs… → Read More
BlueKai and Information Resources, Inc. just announced a partnership that will enable consumer packaged goods manufacturers to access IRI’s offline shopping data through BlueKai and use it to target ads.
This is the first time BlueKai has built a product for CPG advertisers and their agencies/ad buyers, the company said. BlueKai’s senior director of business development Jeffrey Teng told me… → Read More
The Internet Advertising Bureau just released its full-year report for 2012, showing that digital ad revenue set a new record of $36.6 billion, up 15 percent from 2011.
Mobile was the fastest-growing category, though it still accounts for a relatively small part (9 percent) of overall revenue. Mobile ad revenue totaled $3.4 billion, compared to 2011 when it grew 149 percent to $1.6 billion. → Read More
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and among the winners was the staff of The Denver Post for its coverage of the Aurora, Colo., shootings last summer – coverage in which Twitter and Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Storify) played a big role.
At this point, it’s so obvious that it seems almost silly to note that social media plays a role in how reporters break stories. However, it also… → Read More
A new report from online advertising company Turn suggests that costs for display advertising, video ads, and other rich media are rising, while those for mobile and social ads have fallen. The report also looks at a category of consumer that advertisers are spending heavily to reach — a group that Turn calls the “digital elite.” The report is based on activity on Turn’s ad-buying and… → Read More
CodeNow, a nonprofit program that teaches coding basics to high schoolers (with an emphasis on reaching girls, ethnic minorities, and other underrepresented groups), is in the middle of a significant expansion.
After launching in Washington, DC in 2011, the program has now launched in New York City and is currently holding training sessions with its first NYC group. In a few months, it’s going… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
