Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com
Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow. → Read More
Freshdesk, the makers of cloud-based help desk software that allows companies to support their customers through email, phone, website, Facebook and Twitter, are on a mission to compete with the big boys of the space, like Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com. Though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering a unique brand of cloud-based customer support to the enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well.
That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through $10 million-worth of services which includes free support for one year. Any startup with less than $1 million in annual revenue qualifies, but to get thing started, Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made. → Read More
It’s almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the NASDAQ bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go forward with one of the largest IPOs for an Internet company in history, the markets will hit a fever pitch, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse will update their statuses — and the rest of us will just go back to using Twitter.
Nonetheless, Facebook is expected to go public at a valuation between $92 and $103 billion. As such, it’s pretty clear what Facebook is worth to us (really, to the market), but the real question is: How much are you worth to Facebook? Hmm? → Read More
Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks, the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more. → Read More
Last week, Bing began the initial phase of rolling out a major redesign, in fact the “most significant” redesign in its three-year history. Today, the wait is over. This afternoon, Bing officially turned on its new design, and has made it available for everyone in the U.S. You can check it out here. → Read More
Last year, CollegeBudget launched with the goal of bringing a variation on the Groupon discount and group buying model to the campus. The goal being to help college students at colleges and universities across the country fight high costs by offering discounts on everything from textbooks to student loans.
Today, CollegeBudget is moving more aggressively into local offers, particularly around food. For hungry, cash-strapped students, food discounts can be extremely appealing, especially when one of the alternatives is the school’s cafeteria. That’s why the startup is today announcing that it is acquiring Y Combinator-backed Munch On Me, a food discovery portal that connects people with great good at affordable prices from local restaurants. → Read More
Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. And that’s just for third-party mobile apps. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its referral funnel, Facebook now has the ability to take sites from 0 to 60 in a matter of weeks. While this is true for content of all stripes, be they photos, games, or news readers, the most recent and most-buzzed-about evidence has been Open Graph video apps, like Socialcam and Viddy.
Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train — the Open Graph/Timeline Lift — and these video apps are not alone in their Facebook integrations. Now, both the cult favorite community-directed Q&A site, Quora, and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy are on board. And, as a result, educational content is becoming social, gamified, and more discoverable. It’s friends helping friends get smart. → Read More
Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health’s inaugural batch, HealthInReach has been on a mission to combat the high cost of healthcare and put consumers back in control of their healthcare by creating a transparent online marketplace for comparing the quality and price of health providers and procedures. The startup has built a consumer-focused (or B2B2C) complement to services like Castlight, whereby those who are uninsured or pay out-of-pocket for medical procedures can use its platform to search for and learn about doctors and dentists based on experience, reputation and prices. To date, over 3 million people have used the service to look for doctors.
However, from the outset, HealthInReach intentionally limited its market to southern California (the startup is headquartered in LA), and, as a result, it’s been looking to expand nationally and grow its database of doctors, optometrists and dentists. To do so, the company is today announcing a merger with PriceDoc, a similarly aligned marketplace for healthcare providers, in an effort to combine HealthInReach’s proprietary tech with PriceDoc’s national database of tens of thousands of providers. → Read More
There’s currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services — MOG, Spotify, and Rdio — each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by offering the best mobile experience for tunes on-the-go. You can check out Josh’s in-depth comparison of the battle for mobile supremacy here.
While it wasn’t Josh’s top pick for music streaming on the tablet, Rdio is today taking a big step forward, launching a completely redesigned music listening and discovery experience, starting with the web and its desktop apps. While the company unveiled its plans at SXSW, today marks the first time the new Rdio will be available to all. → Read More
For a while now “gamification” has largely existed as a buzz word. It’s felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it. However, as Tim Chang pointed out this weekend, although it’s important to avoid thinking of “gamification as the panacea,” it’s real, it’s moving beyond media and fitness, and it needs to be taken seriously. When it comes to educational tools, gamification has real value in its ability to make learning more fun and engaging. But as with all emerging trends, it can’t be applied willy-nilly.
BenchPrep, a young edtech startup backed by $2.2 million from Lightbank, launched last year to convert content from big educational publishers, like McGraw-Hill, into interactive web and mobile courses. While the startup expanded beyond college admission test prep in January, today it’s announcing that it is teaming up with Princeton Review to contemporize test prep for students, using game mechanics, leaderboards, and social features to make the tedious and teeth-grinding process of test prep more engaging and, hopefully, more effective. → Read More
At the end of March, we covered Behance’s major site redesign, at which point we learned that the startup was launching over 20K new projects every week, with 1 million projects created to date, and its network had doubled over the last month, with 10 million visits to its network in the last 30 days.
Since its founding in 2006 and launch less than a year later, Behance, which, for those unfamiliar, is an online platform on which creative professionals can connect, showcase and discover creative work, has been a bootstrapped enterprise, Behance CEO Scott Belsky tells us. But, no longer. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised its first round of outside funding, a $6.5 million round, led by Union Square Ventures, with noted investors like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment fund), Path Founder Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure, Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp. → Read More
At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. Speaking to a crowd at the Grind work space in New York last week, Fred Wilson addressed this ongoing shift, saying, “there’s two times as much capital in the venture capital business today than we, the professional investors who make up the venture business, can actually put to work intelligently.” Bad for VCs, Wilson says, but good for entrepreneurs.
Of course, the fact of the matter is that the top investors are custodians of an equally valuable currency — information. With the noise and hype growing, it’s becoming even more essential to understand what it is about the anatomy of startups that makes them appealing to the right investors — or perhaps more importantly — why some of the best fail in spite of themselves.
In a new book, called Venture Capitalists at Work, Tarang and Sheetal Shah set out to provide entrepreneurs with real insight into how some of the top investors in the game evaluate, invest in, and mentor their startups — information that can be extremely powerful if put to use correctly — and that has thus far remained, they say, in a “black box.” → Read More
It wasn’t so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people “stop out of school.”
For these reasons, Thiel’s decision to teach a higher ed course was unexpected, even controversial. Last month, he began teaching a class at Stanford called “Computer Science 183: Startup.” One of his students, Blake Masters, provides a glimpse into Thiel’s lectures through his comprehensive class notes.
Masters has turned his notes into essays and posted them on his blog, one of which is a fascinating conversation between the investor and Marc Andreessen on the past, present, and future of the tech industry, which we’ve highlighted herein. → Read More
This year, Shereef Bishay came up with an ambitious engineering and educational challenge: Try to take 20 aspiring developers, at various levels of ability, teach them Ruby on Rails, and have them job-ready in 10 weeks. The result: Dev Bootcamp, a 10-week engineering gauntlet specifically that subjects those willing to some 400+ hours of intense technical training. The cost, with a $1K discount for signing up early, is $11,200, which can be paid in lump sum or in monthly payments over two years. While that may sound like a lot, compared to the cost of a 4-year education, it’s minimal. Of course, it’s all about the return on investment.
And judging by the numbers Dev Bootcamp has shared, the future looks bright. Altogether, 88 percent of its students have received job offers, with the average salary being offered at $79,000. As to who’s doing the courting? ThoughtWorks, Ooyala, DailyKos, Inigral, MochaLeaf, Zendesk, Milyoni, and GeneralThings, to name a few. Not bad for 10 weeks. → Read More
Three guys from Provo, Utah set out on a mission to make QR codes, those boring pixellated, black-and-white squares come alive — in other words, to extend their functionality by turning them into realworld “like,” “follow,” and “buy” buttons. And it’s been working. In February, Scan announced a seed funding round from Shervin Pishevar, Google Ventures, CRV, Start Fund, Social + Capital, Ludlow Ventures, and more. The company moved their operations from Utah to San Francisco, and is currently sitting at just over 12 million downloads across iOS devices.
As Scan is in the business of creating apps that extend the potential application of QR code tech, Scan is today leveraging the buzz around Instagram to let businesses, organizations, etc. build their Instagram user base via QR codes. The new app, appropriately called Scan-to-gram, which launches today, lets users scan QR codes and instantly follow a company and its employees. Notable Instagrammers to be part of its initial launch, including Warby Parker, Zooey Deschanel, Nike, Marc Jacobs, and, notably, the Instagram team itself. → Read More
About six years ago, Google launched Apps for Your Domain, which, for the first time, wrapped its suite of emerging cloud products under one umbrella — as a service for businesses and the enterprise. Today, the service is better known as Google Apps and is, according to Google, being used by at least 4 million organizations, with some 40 million-plus end users.
Yet, as the Google Apps ecosystem has expanded, and its tools have become integral to the day-to-day operations of millions of businesses, many are looking for better ways to monitor, control and secure end-user access to apps like Google Docs, Sites, and Calendars. That’s why BetterCloud launched earlier this year — to provide a suite of complementary products that provide Google Apps with enhanced management and security tools for both IT admins and end users. To help it get off the ground, the New York City-based startup is today announcing that it has raised $2.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors. → Read More
Back in July of last year, we wrote about a New York City-based startup, called Consmr, which was attempting to build the Yelp, or Rotten Tomatoes of consumer goods. There’s now more web research on consumer goods than ever before, but few resources that use crowdsourced data and social integration to recommend the right product. There are cool sites like Fixya, but opportunity for a service that provides ratings and reviews of consumer packaged goods.
At the time, Consmr was just starting out and to really up its value proposition, it was focused on becoming a data-vore and growing its user base to increase the quality of its recs before adding a component. Of course, for a service like Consmr, it’s all about the aisle experience — being able to whip out your phone at the point of (in)decision. So, today Consmr added a big piece to the puzzle, launching its iPhone app, which is now powered by over 100K user ratings. → Read More
EveryMove, an alum of TechStars’ Seattle accelerator program building what they’ve dubbed a “mileage plan for health benefits, today announced that it has closed a $2.6 million round of series A financing. Participating investors include Penera Blue Cross, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Nebraska, BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Founders Co-op, Summit Capital, Jonathan Sposato, Voyager Capital Partner Geoff Entress, Matt Shobe, William Lohse, BuddyTV Co-founder Andy Liu, Ken Kuntz, and others.
Founder and CEO Russell Benaroya tells us that the way health care is set up (in the U.S.) today, the people making healthy lifestyle choices end up subsidizing those who are making unhealthy decisions; instead, they should be rewarded for it. If the country is going crazy for consumer-centric healthcare, then that inherently demands that people be given control over their health (and healthcare). That’s where EveryMove comes in. → Read More
Back in September, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, unveiled their new mobile travel guide, Triposo, setting out to do for travel content what Google and PageRank did for search. The startup developed a set of algorithms to crawl and parse the Web’s biggest travel information databases (like Wikitravel and Open Street Maps), before ranking the data to determine which pieces have the most relevance to its users and serving them up as rich travel guides.
Of course, this is no easy task, and Triposo has been in an ongoing process of honing these content algorithms, launching 30 destination travel guides for iOS and Android to help test the waters and encourage user feedback. Today, Triposo is ready to take its next big step forward, officially unveiling its new and improved iOS app, which aims to make the old hands of travel content, like Lonely Planet, shake in their boots. → Read More
When New York-based Sitesimon first emerged from Entrepreneur Roundtable’s accelerator program last year, it was as a social browsing tool that aimed to automate the process of finding and discovering personally relevant content on the Web — not unlike StumbleUpon. A good idea, to be sure, but co-founder Steven Gutentag tells us that, in fact, users were less interested in new destinations than they were in finding better ways to filter and discover content from sites they’re already visiting.
The team listened to its users and is today announcing a pivot and re-launch of SiteSimon, which sees the startup turning its full attention to the browser. SiteSimon is, for now at least, a Chrome extension that seeks to transform your browser into an intelligent assistant, locating the content that it has deduced will be most relevant to you — in near realtime, within whatever site you happen to be visiting. → Read More
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