OpenLabel, a startup that wants to augment everyday products’ barcodes with crowd-sourced information that helps you decide whether to buy, has raised $80,000 in seed funding in a round led by Peter Kirwan, also an investor in IFTTT. Also participating in the round were Tim Drees and Doug Taylor. According to OpenLabel co-founder Scott Kennedy, this $80K is just the first part of a larger $300,000 seed round, which the company expects to close prior to the April launch of the mobile application.
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Inherently, we like doing things in groups, as it makes our experiences more social. It’s not about what we’re doing so much as who we’re doing it with that makes our experiences enjoyable. Group messaging took off two years ago, overrunning SXSW, as a better way to keep groups of people engaged; Kickstarter has grown like a week thanks to the power of the crowd lending legs to fledgling projects that need quick capital to get off the ground.
A new startup launching today called Crowdtilt is taking a page out of Kickstarter’s book, riffing on “crowdfunding,” but instead choosing to call itself “groupfunding” or a “Kickstarter for groups of friends.” → Read More
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Wattpad, a Union Square Ventures-backed platform for sharing stories and interacting with writers, has been growing steadily, and it hit a nice milestone in January — during that month, users spent more than 1 billion minutes on the service.
Co-founder and CEO Allen Lau tells me via email that the growth comes from a combination of attracting new users and convincing each of those users to spend more time on the site. The average session for Web users was 30 minutes, while visitors on Android devices spent an average of 28 minutes. → Read More
SneakPeeq, a social shopping startup that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, has raised a new round totaling $2.67 million from Bain Capital Ventures; Metamorphic Ventures; Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta.
As we wrote in our initial review of Sneakpeeq, aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store. So similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, SneakPeeq doesn’t tell you the price instantly when you visit a product’s landing page. You click a “Peeq” button to find the price. The site features daily boutiques that offer discounts on clothes, shoes, home accessories and more from a variety of brands from well-known names like Kate Spade and Puma to smaller designers and purveyors. → Read More
Like most hacks, this discovery of a way to find an Android phone’s Google Wallet PIN requires a lot of initial access but is disturbing nonetheless. Google knows about the hack and is repairing it. Discovered by Joshua Rubin of Zvelo, the hack is one of the most interesting attacks on Google Wallet so far.
In short, this hack allows access to credit card data and purchase history and could, in theory, allow a hacker to use a Google Wallet freely in the wild. However, it does require the hacker to have unfettered root access to the phone. Using a small program, the exploit simply brute-forces a file found in the phone, thereby revealing the PIN and unlocking the wallet.
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NFC is picking up traction everywhere you look, and the latest news comes out of the UK’s Proxama. According to a release sent out this morning, the company is planning a partnership with ARM to create an NFC system.
Employing ARM TrustZone technology in conjunction with the Proxama Mobile Wallet, the venture aims to provide secure NFC contactless payments and mobile internet payments to more mobile devices. → Read More
With MWC drawing ever closer, new handset leaks are hitting the wires hard and fast. Today alone we’ve seen the Galaxy Mini 2 break cover and new images of the LG Miracle Windows Phone emerge, and now HTC’s latest LTE-friendly Android phone has been caught on film.
As PhoneArena notes, this mysterious handset sports the same sort of curvaceous back that gave devices like Verizon’s HTC Incredible and Rezound a bit of extra visual flair. That, coupled with the appearance of Verizon’s own 4G LTE logo and what looks like the Verizon Wave wallpaper means that we could be looking at an early version of a Big Red-bound Incredible 3. → Read More
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In addition to the updated “Explore” feature that rolled out to Foursquare’s Android and iPhone applications this week, the social discovery service also added a special feature to its Android app that sort of flew under the radar: support for NFC.
NFC, or near field communication, allows devices to exchange data over short distances, typically with a wave or a tap. In Foursquare’s Android update, NFC support has been added for the app’s Venue, Lists and Me pages. → Read More
Tesla Motors’ family is growing. The company just unveiled its first crossover, the Model X. Like the Roadster and Model S, the Model X is a purely electric vehicle, built on the same platform as the Model S. Tesla says pricing will be similar to that of the Model S, making the base model around $50k after tax credits. But, if all the available options are checked including the largest battery pack and performance drivetrain, the price could close in on $90k. But who cares about the price when the vehicle packs gullwing-like doors — Tesla calls them Falcon Wings, but you can call them awesome. → Read More
Notorious industry insider Eldar Murtazin has made yet another forward-looking statement, this time regarding Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and one very special Samsung device. This leaves just one question in our minds: Is this one of his hits, or is it another miss?
According to a tweet (below) from the Moscow-based blogger, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be delivered to the Samsung Galaxy S II. After its regional offices had announced which devices would receive ICS, Samsung confirmed in December that the GS II, the Galaxy Note, and Galaxy Tab models will get Android 4.0 in the first quarter of 2012. → Read More
PaperKarma is one of those ideas that make you realize that the future is nigh. The concept behind it? See a piece of junk mail that offends you in your mail box — anything from magazines, catalogs, coupon books, fliers, credit card offers, and the root of all evils, the Yellow Pages — take a picture of it and boom, the PaperKarma team will “take care” of it, mafia style.
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It looks like Amazon Web Services may be launching a new workflow manager called SWF. First spotted by TechCrunch reader Michael Hood, SWF is listed as a service under AWS’ Free Usage Tier. Unfortunately, clicking on SWF takes you to a ’404′ page.
Upon further digging, it looks like SWF stands for ‘Amazon Simple Workflow Service.’ It basically starts, runs, and retains workflow executions, as well as schedules tasks, adds markers, receives signals, and starts timers for those workflow executions. According to the information listed, with the free usage tier, “1,000 Amazon SWF executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free.” → Read More
When you listen, read, or watch through a Facebook Open Graph app, a few of your friends hear about through the news feed, Ticker, or Timeline. Starting this week, Facebook is allowing advertisers to pay for more exposure of listen, read, or watch stories that mention them by turning the stories into a new form of Sponsored Story social ads.
Open Graph action Sponsored Stories could further Facebook’s goal of turn all ads social, and boost revenue by filling the new inventory from Facebook now permitting Sponsored Stories ads in the news feed. → Read More
The culture of hacking continues to bloom in New York, evidenced last weekend by Columbia’s DevFest 2012. DevFest is entirely student run, and had workshops and support from local VC firms and startups. The event culminated with presentations of hacks and awards judged by Fred Wilson (USV), Chris Wiggins (HackNY), Dave Jagoda (Andreeson Horowitz), Ryan Bubinski (Codecademy) and myself (Uncommon Projects). A full list of the winners is below. → Read More
Yozma Venture Capital is selling its stake in startup Conduit for a massive return. The story was reported in the Israeli publication Globes, but I’ve confirmed the details with a source who has knowledge of the deal, and who also identified the buyer (described by Globes only as “a large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars under management”) as private equity firm Silver Lake.
Yozma invested $1.5 million for 9 percent ownership of Conduit in 2006. Now it’s selling its stake for $250 million. In other words, it’s seeing a return that’s nearly 200 times the size of the initial investment. According to Globes, the Israeli venture capital industry has never seen a return on that scale. → Read More
The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their “logical next play” – a vertical food network called Foodie that will offer a social, interactive network (Portal 2.0?) for food bloggers, critics, chefs and, of course, eaters.
But, as Glam’s co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me when he came into our San Francisco studio today, Foodie isn’t just another of Glam’s vertical plays. → Read More
In a few weeks, Apple will unveil the next generation iPad, John Packowski of AllThingsD confirms today. If history (and carrier code) is any indication, it should go on sale shortly after that. Maybe even just a few days later. And that’s interesting because it doesn’t give developers a lot of time to prepare. And they’ll want to prepare for the higher resolution “Retina” display that the device will pack.
The situation is similar to the Summer of 2010. That year at WWDC, Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, the first device to feature a Retina display. That conference took place on June 7. The iPhone 4 first went on sale on June 24 — two and a half weeks later. That timeframe allowed some developers to get their apps Retina-ready, but for many it took quite a bit longer. Again, this year, the window may be even more condensed. → Read More
Ever since Steve Ballmer made that surprise announcement at CES 2011, there has been a lot of speculation about just how Microsoft would be bringing Windows to the ARM architecture. Would it be a whole separate line? Would it be compatible with old applications? Would it be cheaper?
Many of these questions have been answered in a long and technical post on the Building Windows 8 blog today, as Steven Sinofsky explains how they developed (re-developed, really) Windows On ARM, or WOA, and why they made the choices they made.
Some major points, for those unwilling to read: WOA will be totally incompatible with x86/x64-based applications; it will include a desktop only for Office apps and file management; it will be focused on portability, battery life, and “integrated quality.” → Read More
Facebook isn’t the only social network getting ready to monetize its mobile app with advertising. During today’s analyst call to discuss its fourth quarter earnings, LinkedIn executives said they will be introducing advertising to their mobile apps.
There weren’t many details offered — LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said only that the company has been putting the infrastructure in place, and now it’s ready to “start to introduce advertising in our mobile solutions.” → Read More
It was just a few days ago that news of a mysterious home-oriented Google device was being prepped for testing in the homes of 252 company employees, but the associated FCC filing left most of the specifics up in the air. Now, if a new report from the Wall Street Journal holds true, Google’s next foray into the hardware space could be all about pumping up those jams.
According to WSJ’s sources, the device in development is a “home entertainment system” that can wirelessly stream music throughout users’ homes. → Read More
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