Klint Finley is a technology journalist working for TechCrunch. He has also contributed to publications such as Wired, ReadWriteWeb, Disinfo and Shift.
Analytics company Datameer raised $6 million today according documents filed with the SEC. The company’s PR manager Susan Puccinelli confirmed the funding and said the round came from Redpoint Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. → Read More
Have you ever tried to search the web for reviews of web hosting services? Search results typically fall into two categories: A) Spammers posting rankings and positive reviews to get a cut of the sign-up fees from services with affiliate programs and B) Anecdotal experiences. It’s hard to get an overall idea of what hosts actually have a good reputation. → Read More
Today Adobe announced that its Adobe PhoneGap Build service is now out of beta. The service is based on the open source Apache Cordova and enables developers to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build cross-platform applications that work on iOS, Android and other mobile platforms. → Read More
UberVu tries to go beyond social media monitoring by providing actual suggestions of things for social media managers to do. Today its Signals service, which we covered previously, is out of beta. The service also comes with a completely redesigned interface. → Read More
Factual is a company that provides open data sets for developers, most notably its location data sets and APIs. The company just announced that it has added thousands of new locations to its U.S. point of interest sets, for a total of over 22 million places in the U.S and 62 million places around the world. → Read More
TrackVia, a company that provides tools that enable non-coders to build simple web apps, announced today that it raised a series B round of funding Led by Longworth Venture Partners and Fairhaven Capital. Others participating in the round include Access Venture Partners, Flywheel Ventures, Draper Associates and Allen & Company. → Read More
Competition in the social task/project-management market is heating up. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s startup Asana and Salesforce.com’s Do.com are some of the most visible players (see my previous coverage), but they’re not the only ones. Case in point: Producteev, which just added some new collaboration features via a partnership with Crocodoc. → Read More
Facebook engineer Sean Lynch has built a mind-blowing, custom server-monitoring tool for the company that uses heat mapping to keep tabs on a huge number of servers at a glance. Lynch is part of the cache performance team at Facebook. When things go wrong he needs to know quickly whether problems are being caused by caching or something else. Off the shelf monitoring tools just weren’t good… → Read More
Salesforce.com will announce new features for its “Facebook for enterprise” service Chatter this week at its annual Dreamforce conference. CEO Marc Benioff already revealed during his TechCrunch Disrupt fireside chat that the company is adding a Box/Dropbox-style file-sharing system called ChatterBox. Now I’m hearing from multiple sources that Chatter will also be getting secure cross-company… → Read More
PersonalWeb and Level 3 Communications have filed patent complaint against Rackspace for hosting GitHub. Update: PersonalWeb has a history of suing large tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Apple.
Update: Here’s Rackspace’s response. → Read More
RIM has licensed the exFAT file system from Microsoft. This will enable BlackBerry devices to handle files larger than 4GB. → Read More
10gen, the sponsor company of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, today announced undisclosed investment from In-Q-Tel, a non-profit private equity and venture capital firm that invests in technologies deemed beneficial to the U.S. intelligence community. The typical investment from In-Q-Tel is rumored to be between $1 million and $3 million. → Read More
Today Freshdesk announced Freshdesk Arcade, a new game mechanics system for its web-based help desk software.
Freshdesk Arcade will award points based on several factors, including the amount of time it takes to close a ticket, whether an issue is resolved in one call, and customer satisfaction. Points can be tracked through internal leaderboards, and agents will be able to rise through several… → Read More
Apparently not wanting GoDaddy and GitHub to have all the outage fun this week, Cloudflare confirmed on Twitter that it had issues this morning. Some sites may still be experiencing issues. → Read More
The engineering team at Dropbox re-wrote its browser-side codebase one week last July, according to a post on the Dropbox tech blog. The rewrite was done to translate all of its JavaScript into a language called CoffeeScript.
CoffeeScript is a language that compiles into JavaScript. It offers an alternative syntax that looks more like Python or Ruby, with the goal of enabling “literate… → Read More
Online dating is a huge business, but most dating sites are still stuck in the 90s. They don’t take advantage of developments in video and social networking, and they don’t have good mobile experiences.
Here are a few startups I met at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that want to bring online dating into the modern era. → Read More
When I read Spestle’s pitch for Startup Alley I thought it was either a prank or a goofy placeholder for a stealth startup: “Spestle lets you create custom seasoning & herb blends.”
But Spestle is real and serious. It’s a service that enables you to create a custom seasoning blend, complete with your own packaging, and sell it online. When someone buys your spice mix, Spestle will make the… → Read More
Industry analyst firm RedMonk published today its latest quarterly programming language popularity ranking. JavaScript came out on top, followed closely by Java, PHP, and Python.
The rankings are based on data collected from the open source project host GitHub and the programming questions and answer site StackOverflow, a measurement invented by Drew Conway and John Myles White in 2010. → Read More
Following its lengthy outage on Monday, hosting provider GoDaddy today sent an e-mail to customers containing a mea culpa and a credit good for one month of free service for each “active/published” site the customer hosts with GoDaddy.
The e-mail also reiterated that the outage was due to internal network issues that corrupted DNS tables, and that no customer information was compromised. → Read More
I’ve had a sense for a while that infrastructure-as-a-service (like Amazon Web Services) and platform-as-a-service (like Heroku) are converging. Developers love the idea of using a PaaS to speed up provisioning and deployment, but don’t necessarily want to completely give up control of their environments. One sign of this convergence is Pagoda Box, a PaaS that provides a deeper level of control… → Read More
The web makes it easy to find instructional videos on practically any topic. There are 18,600,000 search results for “how to” on the site at the moment. Obviously not all of them are relevant, but that’s a staggering number. But if you’re trying to learn a physical skill — like dancing, yoga or martial arts — how can you tell if you’re doing the moves correctly? → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said that Google chose to use his company’s productivity app Do.com over Asana, which was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Googler Justin Rosenstein. → Read More
Cross-platform video conferencing company Blue Jeans Network announced today that it will integrate with Salesforce.com.
Blue Jeans developed a cloud-hosting video conference service that makes it possible for people using different video conferencing and telepresence systems to talk to each other. So far it works with products from Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize and others, as well as software… → Read More
According to many customers, sites hosted by major web host and domain registrar GoDaddy are down. According to the official GoDaddy Twitter account the company is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it. Update: customers are complaining that GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, along with GoDaddy phone service and all sites using GoDaddy’s DNS service.
Update 2: Anonymous… → Read More
Computer vision/robotics company Blue River Technology announced today that it has raised a $3.1 million Series A round of funding from Khosla Ventures. Steve Blank, Ulu Ventures and Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs also participated.
Blue River is designing weed elimination robots for agriculture. No, the company’s not making marijuana crop destructobots — these machines will kill the bad… → Read More
Unlike something like Evernote, which helps you store and reference information, TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon entrant Memstash helps you actually memorize stuff. For example, if you want to memorize a famous quote, you can put it in your Memstash through a bookmarklet and the app will send you that quote via SMS or e-mail at specific intervals until you have it memorized. → Read More
Peter Ma says hadn’t switched on his HP laptop for nearly six months when he booted it up at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon yesterday afternoon.
From May until August he backpacked alone in the Sierra Nevada, with no electronics other a watch and a head lamp, just trying to get away from society and come up with a truly new idea. “I wanted to get in touch with basic human needs,” he explains. → Read More
Hex3 founder Jon Atherton didn’t have any hardware hacking experience when he launched Kickstarter campaigns for the company’s debut products, the AppTag Laser Blaster and the JaJa Pressure Sensitive Stylus for the iPad. But now, just a few months after raising over $100,000 between the two campaigns, both are real and available for hacking at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. “I’ve had the… → Read More
This week Twitter launched its new API. There are still lots of questions about what this means for developers, and what role developers have played in Twitter’s rise. But the general consensus seems to be that it doesn’t matter much for most users.
Apparently most users just use Twitter’s official clients and supposedly will never notice if Twitter bans most third party clients. Even if that’s… → Read More
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