Klint Finley is a technology journalist working for TechCrunch. He has also contributed to publications such as Wired, ReadWriteWeb, Disinfo and Shift.
Locu, an app that makes it easy for restaurants to update their menus, will debut its public API at the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco Hackathon tomorrow. The API will provide access to much more the menus of Locu’s existing users — it’s a full blown local search engine. → Read More
Prince Siddhārtha is said to have left behind his life of privilege, and his wife and child, to dedicate his life to the search for enlightenment and eventually become the spiritual leader known as Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism.
Y Combinator backed company Bushido’s pivot is less drastic than Siddhārtha’s, but the founders are leaving behind a baby of their own. They’re ceasing… → Read More
It’s been over two years since Box CEO Aaron Levie declared here at TechCrunch that enterprise is sexy again. Since then there have been a few strong enterprise IPOs, like Jive Software, Palo Alto Networks and Splunk, along with some hefty acquisitions, like Microsoft’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer.
So yeah, enterprise tech startups are hot, if not sexy, and it makes sense that there’s… → Read More
As carriers drop unlimited data plans and throttle bandwidth, the need to stay under a data limit is on more people’s minds.
“The thing about web data is that no matter how bad you think it is now, it’s only going to get worse,” says Snappli co-founder Roy Tuvey. Snappli has just raised $1 million from investors including Greylock Partners, Index Ventures and early Facebook investor Klauss… → Read More
Today Atlassian announced a new version of its enterprise wiki Confluence. The big new feature is “WorkBox,” which adds a task management system to Confluence’s activity stream.
Ever since Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham called for startups to “replace e-mail” last March, “inboxes” have become trendy in the way activity streams were a couple years ago. But for the most part these are… → Read More
There’s real movement behind the democratization of space. Not in the form of sending more people into space, but in giving more people access to satellites.
Nano-satellites are getting cheap enough now that groups can raise enough money on Kickstarter to buy and launch them. That’s only a slightly interesting development on its own, but what fascinates me is that some of these groups are… → Read More
Earlier this month Joyent announced that it would pull the plug on legacy “lifetime” hosting accounts. Now a long lost co-founder of the company is stepping up to honor the agreement. → Read More
Today HireVue, makers of a video based job interview and hiring management platform, announced that it raised a $17 million Series C round led by Investor Growth Capital along with an expansion of its debt facility for a total of $22 million in new funding. The company raised a total of $6 million during its B and C rounds, bringing its total raised to $28 million. → Read More
Israeli security company Dome9 provides a hosted firewall for protecting servers in both private or public clouds. It enables customers to lockdown SSH access or admin panels until they’re specifically opened via the web-based Dome9 console. Today the company released an iPhone app that will provide more convenient access to the console. → Read More
News publishers are becoming tech companies, right down to the Google Labs style experimental sites: The New York Times Company Research & Development Lab, The Globe Lab, WapPo Labs…
And now there’s HuffPost Labs, which will unveil its first project today: Highlights, a collection of the most popular sentences from articles and blog posts across the Huffington Post empire. → Read More
Yesterday NoSQL company Citrusleaf announced an undisclosed new round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Apparently the someone thought “Citrusleaf” was too soft and friendly a name for today’s more mature NoSQL audience, so the company also got a grimmer, grittier name: Aerospike. But it didn’t stop there. The company needed even more new, so it today Aerospike announced its acquisition… → Read More
Notational Velocity is a cult favorite open source note taking app for OSX. The phrase “life changing” gets thrown around a lot by it devotees. It’s simple, fast and it can sync with either Simplenote or Dropbox, giving you access to all your text notes from virtually any device.
But it’s only for OSX. Now there’s an open source clone called nvPY that runs on OSX, Windows and Linux. → Read More
Last week The New York Times ran a story by John Markoff about robots replacing human workers. Andrew McAfee, co-author of the excellent Race Against The Machine followed up with a post of his own. The gist: technology and automation lead to more job creation than job displacement in the past, but that may be changing.
Writing is one of the few areas that McAfee and his co-author Erik… → Read More
Last week tens of thousands of migrants from India’s northeast region fled urban areas as rumor ricocheted through text messages and social media that Muslims would attack them after Ramadan. Fake photos added to the rumors’ credibility.
Given how forward button happy we can be in the U.S., I can’t help but wonder if a similar panic could happen here. I spoke with Shlok Vaidya, a former… → Read More
Wall Street has been dealing with big data since before it was a thing. But the rise of algorithmic and high frequency trading is making big data even bigger and has led many firms to adopt the same free open source tools that tech startups and scientific researchers are using, according to Dharmesh Malam, CEO and co-founder of the Y Combinator alum BigCalc. → Read More
One of the big trends of the past couple years, spurred the growing demand for programmers, is the rise of in-browser programming tutorials. Gone are the days when you’d have to buy a book and configure a development environment before you could get your hands dirty with a little code.
Maybe you want to start learning on your work computer and don’t have access to install a programming… → Read More
Google, as you might expect, has massive amounts of data and it’s built many tools to handle it. Stuff like MapReduce and GoogleFS, which spawned the open source Apache Hadoop, and BigTable, which spawned Apache HBase.
But Google didn’t stop with those projects. It’s continued to create new big data tools and continues to publish papers about them. Dremel (PDF) is designed to make querying the… → Read More
Back in 2006, cloud computing company Joyent offered a lifetime subscription to bundle of hosting services for a one time fee of $500. Now, according to an e-mail sent to customers, Joyent is pulling the plug on those lifetime accounts. Customers are predictably upset, but not for the reasons you might expect. → Read More
Today Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to commercialize the open source content management system, acquired Mollom, a spam filtering service also co-founded by Buytaert. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Acquia CEO Tom Erickson tells me the Mollom service will continue to be available for non-Drupal users and pricing will remain unchanged. → Read More
Wikileaks‘ website is up again after over a week of denial of service attacks, though as of this writing I’m still seeing many errors on the site. On its Twitter account Wikileaks credited CloudFlare, a company that provides a web security service, for helping the organization get its site back online.
Earlier this month Wikileaks resumed publishing e-mails acquired (yes, illegally) by the… → Read More
It’s long been said that “I agree to the terms of service” is the biggest lie on the internet. And even if you do read them, many TOS are so ridden with legalese that you practically need to be a lawyer to understand them. Also, as I wrote in a gloomy post last weekend, users have no choice but either agree to the terms offered by a web app or simply not use the service at all.
But a new… → Read More
Ecco Pro, a much beloved outliner and personal information management application for Windows was discontinued about 15 years ago. But you can still download it and run it on Windows 7 today thanks to the efforts of a handful of volunteers. Even though the software isn’t open source a few devotees have continued modding it and keeping it current for modern operating systems. They say that no… → Read More
Y Combinator Summer 2012 graduate Data Nitro (formerly known as IronSpread) has a simple proposition: it enables you to to use the popular programming language Python in Microsoft Excel. The plugin is free for individual non-commercial and enterprises will pay for the privilege. So far it’s only available for the Excel 2007 and 2010 for Windows. The company has no plans to support OSX. → Read More
BMC Software, perhaps best known for its Remedy line of IT management products, announced today that it will acquire VaraLogix, makers of tools that help companies automate software deployments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The move follows BMC’s acquisition of StreamStep and continued efforts to tap into the growing DevOps market.
“DevOps” is a nebulous term referring to, among other… → Read More
Today agile software project management Rally Software announced that it will acquire its longtime partner Agile Advantage. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Agile Advantage makes that helps organizations track the return on investment of agile software methodologies. Features from the company’s Performer product will be integrated into Rally’s existing Portfolio Manager tool. → Read More
MakeGamesWithUs is a new iOS game publishing company with a twist: its focus is on helping high school and college students to build games. MakeGamesWithUs us will take the kids’ creations, provide professional graphics and art and publish them in the App Store. The kids will own the code, and the company will own the graphics and take a cut of the sales. The company already has a few games built… → Read More
Twitter’s suspension of journalist Guy Adam’s account earlier this week should further discussions that have been bubbling over the past couple weeks about the need for a more open alternative to Twitter. Although Twitter reinstated Adams’ account, the company’s actions show why such an alternative is important. It’s not about giving developers more API tools to play with. It’s about building more… → Read More
In response to a security breach, Dropbox promised to add an optional new layer of security known as two factor authentication. If you want to add two factor authentication to your own app but don’t know where to start, you’re in luck: Authy is a YCombinator backed startup launching today that makes it easy to add optional two factor authentication to your application. You just add some API calls… → Read More
HireVue today announced its acquisition of CodeEval, a platform technical evaluations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but HireVue founder Mark Newman confirms that the CodeEval team is joining HireVue to continue developing the CodeEval product. No acqui-hire here. → Read More
During the great Amazon Web Services outages of April 2011 and June 2012 many users were stuck. They could, in theory, move their apps to another AWS region, or to another cloud provider altogether. But in practice the architecture of AWS regions are unique – each one supports slightly different features and APIs.
The thing is, every cloud provider will eventually have some downtime. Quite… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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