Natasha is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining September 2012, based out of London. She arrives after a stint reviewing smartphones for CNET UK and, prior to that, more than five years covering business technology for silicon.com (now folded into TechRepublic.com). At silicon she focused on mobile and wireless, telecoms and networking, and IT skills issues, and has also freelanced for organisations including the Guardian and the BBC. Natasha studied English at Cambridge University, and also holds an MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its 5m registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200m+ monthly active users, and 600bn messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it’s 4… → Read More
Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the Financial Post. The Canadian Competition Bureau has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe. → Read More
Calling all hardware hackers: the Raspberry Pi camera module has gone on sale online via Pi suppliers including RS Components and Premier Farnell/Element14, providing the eye required for all those computer vision projects you had in mind for Pi. The module actually went on sale yesterday and is currently temporarily out of stock on RS’ website. The module costs between £17 & £19 or around… → Read More
Another funding raise for a collaborative consumption startup: Spain-based private sales club Privalia, which sells branded clothes and accessories at discounted prices to members in the five markets it currently plays in, has closed a new €25m round ($32.3m). The company did not specify which round this latest raise falls under but has previously raised a total of $218m in two rounds. → Read More
Nokia has added another device to its burgeoning Lumia portfolio of smartphones today, with the introduction of the Lumia 925: a sleek, PureView-branded handset that will be its first flagship on T-Mobile U.S. At today’s London launch, Nokia executive VP of smart devices, Jo Harlow, sat down with TechCrunch to field a few questions. → Read More
Meet the Lumia 925, the latest smartphone flagship in Nokia’s increasingly populous Windows Phone portfolio. The 925 is clearly Nokia’s answer to criticisms of its high end devices being too heavy. The 925 drops a full 46g compared to the earlier Lumia 920, weighing in at 139g vs the 920’s hefty 185g. The phone feels pleasingly light in the hand, helped by its slender profile. → Read More
Rightware, a Finnish startup that sells embedded user interface software and performance benchmarking tools to car makers and consumer electronics companies needing to build graphical user interfaces has announced it has closed a $5.2 million Series B round. Investors in the round include Inventure and Nexit Ventures, along with new investor Finnish Industry Investment. → Read More
Fresh from last week’s Verizon Lumia device launch, Nokia has taken the wraps off a new smartphone in its Windows Phone-based Lumia range at an event in London today. The Lumia 925 is its first flagship for T-Mobile in the U.S. This means that following the Lumia 928 launch on Verizon, and factoring in Nokia’s initial launch of the Lumia 920 on AT&T last year, Nokia now has a… → Read More
Finnish MeeGo startup Jolla has been trailing the launch of its first handset ever since it started work on its Sailfish UI back in 2012. Since then, Jolla has shown off its MeeGo-based Sailfish software and released an SDK but kept its hardware plans tightly under wraps. That’s set to change very soon though, judging by a press invite sent out today. → Read More
Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has announced it plans to invest around $50M into Japanese digital entertainment company Pioneer Corporation, which makes in-car electronics, to acquire approximately seven per cent of the company. The pair described the investment as “a business and capital alliance”, and said they plan to jointly develop an intelligent transport system for launch this year. → Read More
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has quit his position as a U.K. director of the company, days after Twitter subsidiary Tweetdeck was dissolved as a separate U.K. business by business registrar Companies House, according to Sky News. We’ve reached out to Twitter for confirmation and comment and will update this story with any response. → Read More
The global mobile messaging app space is the new social battleground. Startups that would have had little chance of unseating Facebook’s dominance on the web are attacking Zuckerberg’s empire by refocusing social networking around the mobile phone contacts book. Enter your phone number, and these apps already know who all your friends are. No need to go laboriously recreating your social… → Read More
Nokia has run a TV advert teasing a new Lumia device it’s widely expected to unveil at an event in London on Tuesday. The advert ran during a prime time evening slot on Channel 4, during a screening of The Inbetweeners movie. The teaser advert focused on the camera of an unnamed new Lumia smartphone, with close up shots of the lens and flash, and the words “more than your eyes can… → Read More
Facebook Home’s circle of supported devices has just got a little wider. The Android launcher which Facebook unboxed with much fanfare back in April was only initially available for download to four devices but that select club now has a couple of new members, according to Android Central: namely HTC’s flagship HTC One device, and also the flagship Samsung Galaxy S4. → Read More
Another move in the oh-so-hot mobile messaging space today: South Korea’s Kakao Inc, which owns the KakaoTalk cross-platform mobile messaging app, has inked an agreement with digital marketing company IGAWorks to bring its mobile ad product, adPOPcorn, to the messaging app. IGAWorks will also provide adPOPcorn to game developers whose products integrate with KakaoTalk. → Read More
Messaging app Line, which recently announced it has passed 150 million users, has withdrawn a function from its iOS app that allowed users to gift paid-for stickers to each other by paying for them with a virtual currency. The change, spotted earlier by The Next Web, was made at Apple’s request, said the company in a blog post today. → Read More
How big is the connected devices universe? Analyst ABI Research reckons the Internet of Things contains some 10 billion+ wireless connected devices today. But it’s predicting this figure will triple in size to more than 30 billion devices in an Internet of Everything by 2020, as more and more objects are plugged into the network. The figures come from new ABI research published today. → Read More
Pinterest is ramping up its international strategy by kicking off a localisation effort in the U.K. today, tweaking the site so that it deliberately foregrounds U.K. content to U.K. users and also adding a British English language setting to make Brits feel more at home. The U.K. is the first part in what appears to be a bigger strategy to target more usage, and more users, outside of the U.S. → Read More
Line, a free-at-the-point-of-use messaging app made by NHN Japan Corp which recently passed 150 million users, has announced earnings for Q1 2013 — revealing for the first time how much of its revenue comes from game in-app purchases and how much from its other shtick: stickers. Line uses free social messaging and gaming services as its hook to draw in users, and monetises via paid add-ons. → Read More
Nokia has given its S40-based range of touchscreen Asha smartphones another push to try to keep up with the low end reach of Google’s Android platform today. The mobile maker has announced a new addition to the range — the Asha 501 — which also ushers in a new version of the Asha touch UI that’s designed to be quicker and slicker, and has a strong focus on swiping gestures. → Read More
Online real estate company Trulia has announced it plans to acquire real estate SaaS CRM provider Market Leader for approximately $355 million. The pair said the rational for the merger is to create a “combined platform” that covers both house buyers and real estate agents, with Trulia’s front end listing businesses being complemented by Market Leader’s back-end SaaS CRM. → Read More
As tablet ownership & usage continues its upward trajectory, little surprise that more people are expected to be paying for more stuff on tablets in the coming years. But analyst Juniper has put out a new mobile content revenue forecast predicting that purchases on tablets will be the primary engine for growth — so beating out handsets — in the mobile content market over the next three… → Read More
Nokia is teasing the Lumia 928 — a phone it has not officially announced yet, despite all the leaks, rumours and, er, magazine ads — in a camera comparison video posted on its U.S. website. All this teasing smells like a new strategy for Nokia to try to manufacture a little hype for the forthcoming Windows Phone 8 flagship, which is apparently heading to Verizon. → Read More
In the tangled web of digital social networks that we weave one thing is increasingly absent: a sense of mystery. We are so wrapped up in our digital social graphs there’s rarely room for gaps. The challenge now is about piecing together the endless jumble of data that’s being pushed at us. Instead of dreamers, we’re policemen sifting through a bottomless box of evidence. → Read More
Chef Sleeve has been selling its iPad-protecting plastic sleeves since 2011 to keep kitchen gunk off the iPad you’re using while you cook. They also make a chopping board with a built in iPad stand. But Chef Sleeve’s grand plan is to create a range of connected devices for the kitchen that link up with an iPad app to let people track their nutrition in a highly granular yet low hassle way. → Read More
Meet Lumu: a digital light meter for photographers that plugs into the iPhone’s headphone jack as a smaller and smarter replacement for traditional analogue light meters. It’s used in conjunction with Lumu’s app — being demoed in prototype here at hardware alley at Disrupt NY — to help photographers figure out the best camera settings for their current location. → Read More
Line, a free messaging app made by NHN Japan Corporation that’s competing with the likes of WhatsApp and Viber, has pushed past 150 million registered users globally, up from 100 million in January. Line launched back in summer 2011 in Asia, and is especially popular in Japan, but has been pushing outside its home region, expanding into the U.S., Europe and Latin America. → Read More
Webydo is a cloud-based SaaS for designers who want to be able to sell their website design services without having to get their own hands dirty doing any coding or hire a developer to do it for them. The system offers a custom CMS where designers can build the website. Once they’re happy with the design, Webydo’s software converts it into code for them. The company also hosts the published site. → Read More
Here’s a startup hoping to fill the gap left by the demise of Facebook Questions: French-Belgian startup Poutsch, now based in New York and exhibiting here at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley, has built a platform for tracking opinion data by crowdsourcing market research, which is incentivised through a free-to-use-and-browse social opinion network. → Read More
What do digital payments companies make of Bitcoin? Here at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, a digital money panel featuring PayPal, Stripe and Gumroad gave its thoughts on the currency that has VCs emptying their bank accounts to invest afresh. → Read More
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