Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com
Coverage of the NBA’s All-Star game in Orlando began tonight at 5pm ET, starting with the Sprite Slam Dunk contest, featuring the Indiana Pacers’ Paul George, Minnesota Timberwolves’ Derrick Williams, the Knicks’ Iman Shumpert, and Rockets’ Chase Budinger. The NBA is stepping up its social media coverage of the All-Star game this year, and is making some crowdsourcing-type changes to the Slam Dunk Contest, which we thought were quickly worth sharing.
This year, the dunk contest will only consist of one round, and each competitor will get three dunks, fan voting will open after all four players have performed their acrobatics. But, more importantly, for the first time ever, fans get to vote directly for the winner of the dunk contest through SMS, NBA.com, or the Twitters. To vote on Twitter, fans simply tweet their favorite player’s last name along with the hashtag “SpriteSlam.” The player with the most votes, via this new “dunksourcing” will take home the victory. → Read More
Gaming is changing fast these days, especially in the browser. Sure, social games are great and everything, but there’s always been a sense that, as browser-based technologies mature, the opportunities that present themselves will make casual social, Facebook-only gaming look crayon scrawl. Inherently, one of the best parts of gaming is that it’s inherently social, and gamers want deeper, more interactive experiences – from console to free-to-play online games.
Of course, enabling deep, multiplayer experiences puts a lot of stress on the technology and the game’s engineers (coding, synchronizations, de-buggings, oh my!) – even with how far HTML5 has come, it’s still a pain in the butt and can be expensive. That’s where Game Closure entered the picture. We were the first to cover Game Closure back when they launched at the “demo day” of SSE Labs, Stanford University’s student-run startup accelerator. (Now known as StartX.) → Read More
Well, Kickstarter, it looks like you’ve finally arrived. And I don’t just mean that you launched 27K projects, saw $99 million pledged, or attracted 30 million+ visitors last year — all of which equalled a sizable increase in activity on your compared to the year prior. No, I mean that your winning crowdfunding model has been adopted by the adult industry. Clearly. Indeed, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Groupon certainly saw its fair share of flatterers after its launch, but it didn’t inspire a response from porn, at least not in the early days. (Though there are those that are trying.) → Read More
Out of the annals of history comes this doozy. A man by the name of Theodore Gray is a co-founder of Wolfram Research, best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, the two-year-old computational answer engine, which Siri uses for 25 percent of her mobile searches.
Yesterday, a new video, or rather episode of “Bytesize Science,” emerged on YouTube wherein Gray discusses the tale behind his periodic table table. The video has been making the rounds, and was tipped to us (thanks to Kirk Zamieroski). We thought it was worth sharing, based on pure awesomeness, the high quality kitsch, and DIY mastery. Luckily no radioactive elements made it into the table — or at least we didn’t spot any lead. No one was hurt in the making of the table, as far as we know, other than perhaps Schrödinger’s cat? → Read More
Independent filmmakers have a tough time when it comes to marketing and promoting their films; they really don’t have the resources or tools required to expand their outreach, and get in front of new eyeballs. Only the big Hollywood studios have the resources to drive enough cross-platform advertising to stir up buzz over their upcoming blockbusters, six months in advance. And, it goes without saying that this isn’t just limited to independent filmmakers, it’s true for musicians, artists, and many more.
That’s why early ThePoint/Groupon employee Shawn Bercuson, Zoosk Co-founder John Smart, Dan Rummel, Lee Wilson, and Tyler Seymour launched Prescreen last September — to bring movie lovers an easy way to discover independent films they wouldn’t otherwise and, in turn, give filmmakers, producers, and more a shot at drumming up interest in (and bringing eyeballs to) their work. → Read More
If you’re an iPhone user, you may not be as familiar with Astrid, which has turned into one of the most popular “to-do,” list-making apps for Android. We first wrote about Astrid when it joined thirteen other startups that composed AngelPad’s second batch. Astrid’s value proposition was simple: Offer users a clean, easy-to-use interface to enable sharing and collaboration around tasks. Other services have now come along to make this a familiar service, but the goal was for groups (businesses) to be able to assign tasks to each other, and broadcast to the group when those tasks are completed. → Read More
When most people think of social gaming, they likely think of Zynga and its flagship titles, like FarmVille and CityVille — or even Words With Friends. Yet, as Facebook social gaming matures (right along with mobile technology and platforms), we are starting to see studios begin to push the boundaries more, looking for new ways to engage and educate gamers, maybe even reinventing the wheel while they’re at it. One example is the New York City-based startup Playmatics, part of the Swiss-based Shadow Government Ltd., which collectively raised $1 million last year to build a new game franchise called Shadow Government. → Read More
We’re all becoming increasingly reliant on consumer cloud services, as cloud storage providers like Dropbox make it easy to share and store files, folders, images, sync between platforms, and more. They make our lives easier, but because they store an enormous amount of potentially sensitive data, there are some inherent risks. While Dropbox is for personal use, it and services like it are increasingly being used by businesses — another example of the ongoing consumerization of enterprise and IT.
That’s why virtualization provider AppSense has created DataLocker, a set of mobile and desktop apps for iOS, Windows and Mac that enable users to encrypt sensitive information in their Dropbox accounts for free — without giving up the convenience of cross-platform syncing. → Read More
If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?) → Read More
Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.
Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself. → Read More
There’s a lot of noise in our social media channels. I’m busy clogging up your Twitter feed with my deep thoughts, your friends are sharing their millionth baby picture on Facebook, and Scoble is filming startups in your living room on Google+. There is an unfathomable amount of data being produced every second, as social networks, apps, chat, etc. now facilitate real-time communication and sharing — making email feel like the Pony Express. This makes it nearly impossible for people (and their businesses) to stay on top of — among other things — the real-time communication happening between their customers. → Read More
You may not know this, but Turkey has a fever. And the only prescription is more games. That’s right. Sifting through some of Pando Networks’ recent numbers on international gaming, we found that Turkey owns an increasing share of the global downloads of free-to-play games. Over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free games climbed to over 5 million, a 534 percent increase since 2010 — and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population. → Read More
Entrepreneurs and small businesses are integral to the engine of job creation. According to the White House, companies less than five years old created 44 million jobs over the last three decades in the U.S. and what’s more, accounted for all net new jobs created over that time. In a struggling economy, the incubators and accelerators that help grow startups and SMBs, giving them access to the network and capital they need to grow, are essential to job creation and building a healthy economy. → Read More
Like many other services, goods, and commodities, prescription drug prices can vary widely depending on location and what particular vendor is offering them. Launching last September at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco was GoodRx, a service that’s aiming to bring some transparency back to prescription drug purchases by bringing some sophisticated price comparison technology to the everyday consumer.
GoodRx was co-founded by Scott Marlette and Doug Hirsch, both early employees of Facebook. Hirsch was VP of Product at Facebook back in 2005, and Marlette, one of the company’s first 20 employees, was an engineer who worked on, among other things, Facebook’s photo application. The culture of transparency, openness, and focus on the big picture, Marlette says, had a lasting influence on him after Facebook, leading he and Hirsch to apply some of that psychology to building a better way to serve consumers with the latest pricing info from the prescription drug market. → Read More
At the Goldman Sachs Internet and Technology Conference in San Francisco Thursday, Groupon Founder and CEO Andrew Mason took to the stage to talk about the daily deal behemoth’s newly-minted position as a public company, its roller coaster ride both leading up to and since its IPO, as well as plans for the future.
There was a lot of pressure bearing down on Groupon in the months leading up to its emergence on NASDAQ, with many grumbling about its overvaluation and undercooked business model, among other things. After listing its initial offering at $26 a share in November, the company’s stock today has dropped to $20 a share, after a series of ups and downs. → Read More
You may have heard the buzz by now about a young startup that’s being fueled by some pretty impressive star power, including the likes of the one and only Lady Gaga. The project, called Backplane, was co-founded by Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, and raised an early (then hush hush) seed round from an impressive set of investors, including Google Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, i/o Ventures, and Tomorrow Ventures.
Today, the startup has added to its war chest, closing its series A financing, which adds further Silicon Valley venture clout to its investor pool, with the likes of Sequoia Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Battery Ventures, Formation 8, and Advanced Publications Inc. joining in on the fun. → Read More
On Tuesday, we covered the launch of Nimble 2.0, a simple, affordable social relationship manager designed to give SMBs the same mileage out of social that enterprise has been able to create with its CRM strategies. For most companies, managing customer relations on social media is difficult, time-consuming, and less-than-precise, and they outsource different parts of the social media management, marketing, and sales to disparate solutions.
Thus, B2B startups are increasingly looking to throw a wrench into the gears of legacy CRM models, providing SMBs with lightweight solutions that make it easier for them to interact with customers on social networks, track those conversations and manage relationships across platforms.
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Since its name began appearing on blogs and in media early last year, and launched officially at DEMO in March, Pixable has been able to sustain that buzz — no easy feat in a world saturated with photo apps. That’s because millions of photos and videos are shared on social networks every day, making it difficult to find the ones that matter amidst the noise. So, Pixable pulls that fire hose of images and videos from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo, aggregates them in one place, and then gives users a number of sleek categorization, sorting, and editing tools to help them find the most relevant content. → Read More
There are still entire industries that are badly in need of new ideas, new blood, and disruptive technologies — education, healthcare, and media, I’m talking to you — and accelerators that focus on particular verticals are still very much welcomed. Specialization is key, as it narrows scope and depth, and gives startups the confidence that they’ll be advised and mentored by experts who’ve actually worked (and succeeded) in their particular field.
One of those accelerators, which has flown under the radar somewhat (at least on TechCrunch), is Tech Wildcatters, an accelerator based in Dallas. Founded in 2010, Tech Wildcatters made DFJ’s top 15, and is part of the TechStars Network — an association of 35 incubators around the world that, among other benefits, offer startups a unified application site called accelerato.rs.
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As the art world and the market for fine art and collectible items have becoming increasingly international, one would think digital platforms and technology would help speed their growth, open up new markets, and make transactions more seamless. After all, eBay was founded in the mid-90′s. When one looks to the international scene to find the prime movers of tech-based platforms, one of the names that surfaces is Saffronart.
Saffronart was founded in 2000, taking a page from eBay’s book, as an online auction house — yet one that specializes in modern and contemporary Indian art. Almost immediately, the company found an audience, quickly selling $125K worth of fine art. Despite some bumps along the way (the global financial crisis in 2008 wreaked havoc on the art market), Saffronart has grown to be the largest fine-art auction house in India, online or otherwise, and one of the largest online fine art auction platforms in the world. → Read More
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