Klint Finley is a technology journalist working for TechCrunch. He has also contributed to publications such as Wired, ReadWriteWeb, Disinfo and Shift.
Fake meats have been around for years, but a new crop of Bay Area startups backed by tech investors think they can make meat substitutes good enough to compete with the real deal. The most ambitious project is Rob Rhinehart‘s cheekily named “Soylent,” an attempt to replace food entirely with a liquid shake that has all the protein, fat, carbohydrates and micronutrients you need. The only… → Read More
The biggest change I’ve seen in the tech industry in the past decade isn’t social media, cloud computing, big data, consumerization or even mobile. It’s the mainstream acceptance of open source. Even 10 years ago open source was controversial. Back then “open vs. proprietary” arguments would still erupt at meetings and parties. Back then vendors spread FUD about open source. Today, every vendor… → Read More
The Internet makes it easy to collaborate across borders. But despite the rise of remote work and virtual teams, founders still need to travel for business sometimes. For some, travel practically becomes the job. And while data and capital now flow virtually unrestricted across borders, physical border crossing have gotten no easier. That’s causing headaches for global startups. → Read More
Today Neo Technology, makers of the NoSQL graph database Neo4j announced that it has raised a $11 million Series B led by Sunstone Capital with participation from previous investors such as Fidelity Growth Partners Europe and Conor Venture Partners. → Read More
Despite the efforts of many different organizers over the years software developers have resisted unionization. The relatively high pay and good working conditions of developers, the stereotype of geeks as loners and the general decline of unions in the U.S. are all commonly cited reasons. But maybe unions are failing in tech because they’re not addressing the real issue: giving developers more… → Read More
FastMail is a popular e-mail provider among power users who want to be customers instead of products. But its interface has been stuck in the 90s — until this week when it rolled out a brand new AJAXy UI. And it’s really, well, fast. → Read More
Prezi, a popular alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint and other presentation applications, launched a new version of its interface today. The company, which is advised by Jack Dorsey, also announced that it has passed the 15 million user milestone. → Read More
Open source business intelligence vendor Pentaho today announced that it has received a $23 million round led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures. This is the company’s 5th round of funding, but it’s being called a series C. This brings the company’s total funding to $55 million. → Read More
Last month we wrote about DevelopersAuction, a company that lets startups “bid” on developers who are looking for work. During the first two-week long auction companies made $30 million worth of offers from companies like Quora and Dropbox. Our first story on the company garnered plenty of skepticism in the comments, but the most recent auction hit $78 million worth of bids according… → Read More
Acquia was founded by Dries Buytaert, the creator of the open source content management system Drupal, to monetize the project offering hosting and support. Today the company launched a beta of a new service called Acquia Media Cloud and released a new version of Drupal Commons, a distribution of Drupal that comes bundled with a set of addons for building community sites. → Read More
Today cloud cost management company Cloudyn announced a new free service for calculating costs of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are sort of like cloud instances that you pay a retainer for: you pay an upfront fee, and can then pay a discounted rate if/when you use them. → Read More
Responsa is a tool for adding interactive FAQs (frequently asked questions) to your company website through an embedded widget.
That sounded more like a feature than a business to me — after all, help desk applications like Zendesk and GetSatisfaction already have knowledge management systems for handling FAQs. But founder and CEO Gabriele Antoniazzi says that not everyone needs such a complex… → Read More
More established companies are turning to skunkworks projects — relatively independent teams within large companies — to compete with nimble startups or just generate fresh ideas. One example is Dell’s most recent foray into Linux laptops. Another is Deltek‘s new web service/mobile app Kona, a social task management app that’s taking on Asana and Do.com. → Read More
Last month as part of our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield Coverage, we wrote about Famo.us, the company behind a forthcoming HTML5 framework that its developers claim will make it easier to build HTML5 apps that perform as well as native apps. Now the company is revealing more information about how it works and what it can be used for. → Read More
Today cloud app store company AppDirect announced its acquisition of open source billing company jBilling. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. AppDirect co-CEO Daniel Saks says existing jBilling won’t be affected and AppDirect will continue to sell and support jBilling products. AppDirect makes “white label” software-as-a-service app stores. Saks says its customers are mostly… → Read More
Google previewed the new version of the developer console for its Google Play app and media store at its annual I/O conference in June. The new version has been in private beta ever since, but as of today all developers can opt-in to the new console. → Read More
Today the Apache Foundation released a major update to the open source search engine building tools Lucene and Solr. Version 4.0 adds several new features aimed at making Solr easier to use, more scalable and more customizable. → Read More
Open source IT management and monitoring company Zenoss raised a $25 million series C lead by Summit Partners with participation from previous investors Grotech Ventures, Intersouth Partners and Boulder Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $45 million. → Read More
Back in the days before Google Analytics hundreds of thousands of sites relied on WebSideStory‘s Hitbox service for visitor stats. If you surfed the web in the late 90s you probably saw a lot of homepages with Hitbox’s graphics in their footers. Maybe you even had one on your Geocites page. → Read More
When Google started raising money in 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t have a revenue model — or at least that’s how the story goes. The company’s highly successful text ad program didn’t start until 2000, but Brin and Page may have had at least some idea of how to monetize the service by the time Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim gave them their check. → Read More
Today Autodesk, best known for its AutoCAD product, announced that it has acquired enterprise social networking company Qontext from the India-based incubator Pramati. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
RainStor, makers of a “NewSQL” database, announced that has received a $12 million series C round led by Credit Suisse And Rogers Venture Partners with participation by previous investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Storm Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company. The company has now raised at least $23.5 million. → Read More
Today Trifacta, a company building a cross-platform interface for dealing with big data, announced that it received a $4.3 million investment from the Accel Partners Big Data Fund. The company also raised money from X/Seed Capital, Data Collective LLC, Dave Goldberg, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman.
Trifacta is a team of computer scientists with deep experience in data visualization… → Read More
Today open source content management company MODX is launching a hosted cloud service to commercialize the product, much as Acquia and WordPress.com have done for Drupal and WordPress. → Read More
Last month I said that collaboration and project-management apps should focus on killing e-mail from within, not creating yet another place users have to look for communications and information. Today GrexIt is coming out of beta not to kill e-mail, but to make it better. → Read More
Today cloud-hosted database provider Cloudant announced it has received both a custom development agreement and an undisclosed investment from In-Q-Tel, an independent non-profit venture capital firm funded by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The announcement follows In-Q-Tel’s investment in MongoDB makers 10gen last month. In-Q-Tel investments are rumored to typically range from $1… → Read More
Today Microsoft released a developer preview of TypeScript, a new JavaScript-like programming language that is translated into JavaScript so that its apps can be run in any browser. The language and compiler are open source under an Apache 2.0 license. → Read More
“The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation,” Tim Berners Lee wrote in his Usenet post announcing the World Wide Web in 1991. “We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data.” Today the “other areas” part has been tremendously successful, but some scientists wish the web was better at its… → Read More
Quantcast, an internet audience measurement and ad targeting service, processes over 20 petabytes of data per day using Apache Hadoop and its own custom file system called Quantcast File System (QFS). Today, it’s making that technology available to as open source under an Apache license. You can now find it on GitHub. → Read More
Social project management software-as-a-service Wrike released a big update today, including in-line integration of the open source text editor Etherpad. The idea is that instead of attaching documents to a task, the task becomes the document, enabling users to actually do work in the same place they manage tasks. → Read More
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