Sarah Perez

Writer

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

posted 2 hours ago

Amazon Launches App Engagement Reports, Allowing Appstore Developers To Track App Usage & Revenue

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Continuing to grow its suite of services aimed at mobile app developers, Amazon today announced App Engagement Reports, free app usage reports that are now a part of the company’s Mobile App Distribution Portal. The reports are designed for Amazon Appstore developers in need of information about app performance and revenue. → Read More

posted 3 hours ago

Dozens Of Top E-Commerce Retailers Find It Pays To Put Customers’ Instagram Photos On Their Sites

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The ROI of social media is something of a black box for many e-commerce companies, but New York-based startup Olapic is beginning to change that. The company, which allows brands to collect user-generated photos from services like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to display on their own website, is now offering an analytics suite to help retailers and brands understand what content works and how… → Read More

posted 5 hours ago

CommonKey Brings Password Management To Small Teams

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There are a number of password management solutions on the market today, but CommonKey, a new browser extension out this week, has a different take. Instead of focusing only on the needs of the individual user or offering a complex solution for the enterprise, it provides a password management system which allows small businesses the ability to share passwords securely across a team. → Read More

posted yesterday

Lambda Labs Is Launching A Facial Recognition API For Google Glass

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Lambda Labs, an early-stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release a facial recognition API for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says. The move comes on the heels of a Congressional inquiry into Google’s new wearable technology, which is still very much in the prototype… → Read More

posted yesterday

Loom Is Building A Better iCloud

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Barely a month or two after launching the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing service Popset, the team realized they were solving the wrong problem. Users weren’t struggling to share their photos with groups; they needed tools to help them organize and manage their photo libraries across a variety of platforms and services. So the company decided to change its course, and today it’s… → Read More

posted yesterday

Evernote Adds Reminders To Help Users With To-Do’s, Tasks & Projects

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For those who use Evernote as a to-do list application, the service just became more useful today with the launch of a much-requested feature: reminders. Available to both Evernote and Evernote Business users on Mac, iOS and web (to start), the option now appears as an alarm clock icon at the top-right of the note on Mac and web, and the bottom of the note on mobile (iPhone and iPad). Though a… → Read More

posted yesterday

Pinterest API Documentation Briefly Reappears On New Developer Site

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Remember how over a year ago, everyone was all excited about the forthcoming Pinterest API? CEO Ben Silbermann even teased its release in a March 2012 email to Pinterest users detailing a Terms of Service change. And API documentation even once popped up on the site, only later to lead to a 404? Well, don’t get all excited again, but the API documentation has returned…um, sorta.* This… → Read More

posted yesterday

Shazam Revamps Its iPad App For Second Screen Action, Can Now “AutoTag” In Background While You Watch TV

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Although the majority of Shazam‘s over 93 million U.S. users still use the app on their smartphones to identify, tag and share the songs they’re “hearing,” a growing chunk of that user base – around 10 million in the U.S. last year – has used Shazam to identify TV programs and ads. Today, the company aims to better serve this audience with the release of a new… → Read More

May 22nd, 2013

Deeplink.me Lets Mobile Users Navigate Through A “Web” Of Apps

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Have you ever wished that you could navigate through the apps on the phone as easy as clicking links on the web? Such a thing may now become a real possibility thanks to a new service from Cellogic, called Deeplink.me. In a nutshell, it’s a bit.ly for mobile app deep linking – meaning not necessarily just linking to the app itself, but to a specific page, section or  - in the case of… → Read More

May 22nd, 2013

Photo Albums Are Stupid. Moju Labs Is Building What Comes Next.

Moju Labs

With years of digital exhaust now behind us – over 240 billion photos on Facebook, 8 billion on Flickr, and not to mention the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every month – we’re now transitioning to a time when we’re in need of smarter tools for organizing and accessing our personal data archives. Only a few companies so far have dared to step into this space because of the technical… → Read More

May 22nd, 2013

Artkive Turns Your Kids’ Artwork (And More) Into Printed Books

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Artkive, an app designed to eliminate the overwhelming guilt you get tossing your children’s brilliant artwork into the garbage, now has another purpose, too: you can order printed out books of their creations. Instead of just hiding the child’s crumpled up drawings and precious finger-paint covered handprints that school sends home – what is now, like every day? – under… → Read More

May 21st, 2013

After Getting Booted From Apple’s App Store, Mobile Privacy App Clueful Returns On Android

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Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing — or possibly because of its own behavior – is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful’s maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be compromised in the process. → Read More

May 21st, 2013

Personal Profile Page Startup About.me Is Ready To Take Your Money With New Premium Service, Plans For Wefollow Integration

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About.me, the online identity platform that spun out from Aol* at the beginning of the year before acquiring the one-time Digg spinout Wefollow, is now lifting the curtains on its plans to generate revenue, with today’s debut of About.me Premium. Via this new, paid tier to the service, the company is adding some of the more advanced features users have requested, including domain mapping… → Read More

May 21st, 2013

Hoping To Ride The Crowdfunding Wave, Celery Lets Sellers Accept Pre-Orders, Charge When Products Ready To Ship

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Airbrite, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce startup, is debuting its first product today called Celery (its name a play on the world “sell”). Celery is designed to be a “pre-commerce” store builder – or, in other words, it allows anyone to start selling ahead of having a product to ship. That means sellers can start taking credit cards now, then charge when their… → Read More

May 20th, 2013

AT&T Will Begin Enabling Pre-Loaded Video Chat Apps, Like Hangouts, For Those On Any Data Plan Later This Year

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As AT&T comes under the gun for blocking Google’s new video chat app Hangouts on its cellular network, the company is today hoping to put a better spin on the news by offering a new statement detailing its changing position on support for pre-loaded video chat apps. During the second half of 2013, AT&T says it will begin to enable pre-loaded video chat applications over cellular for all→ Read More

May 20th, 2013

Tumblr Updates iOS App With New Path-Like Interface

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Tumblr is still shipping. Despite all the noise surrounding the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition, the company has just pushed out an update to its iOS application introducing a new user interface that now includes the almost Path-like post chooser, previously introduced in the Android version. This interface design is becoming more common today, but it’s most reminiscent of things like Mac’s… → Read More

May 20th, 2013

Tumblr’s Adult Fare Accounts For 11.4% Of Site’s Top 200K Domains, Adult Sites Are Leading Category Of Referrals

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How much of Tumblr is porn, and what is Yahoo going to do about it? On the latter, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer spoke to its plans for addressing content that is not “brand safe” earlier this morning on a call about its $1.1 billion acquisition of the site, saying that Yahoo will need to have “good tools for retargeting,” and will “monetize in a way that is… → Read More

May 20th, 2013

Sensopia Raises $1.2 Million Series A For “Magical” Floor Plan Capturing Application, MagicPlan

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Sensopia, a company which actually uncovered a practical application for augmented reality, has raised a $1.2 million Series A round for its floor plan capturing application called “MagicPlan.” The app allows users to hold up their phone and then scan the dimensions of the room around them in order to create an instant floor plan that can be exported to various formats, including DXF… → Read More

May 19th, 2013

The New “Handmade”

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Amid grumblings of a “general fatigue” when it comes to software-based startups, a potentially transformative technology called 3D printing is poised to reach critical mass and mainstream awareness. Today’s news headlines about the technology tend to focus on the extreme possibilities in being able to print objects on demand – from the terrors of things like a homemade 3D-printed gun to… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Postach.io Turns An Evernote Notebook Into A Blog

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One of the more interesting projects to emerge from Evernote’s 2013 Devcup hackathon is called Postach.io, a new blogging platform that turns your Evernote notebook into a content management system. Input Logic, the Vancouver-based company behind the now just four-week-old service, has already caught the attention of local investors, as well as Evernote, who met with the team to discuss possible… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Social Trip Planning App Tripshare Converts Travel Inspiration To Bookings

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Tripshare, an iPad application for travel planning, is joining a crowded space. But its CEO knows a little something about the industry – Bob Dana was the former employee No. 1 and first CFO of Virgin America. He once wrote the business plan and feasibility study for Sir Richard Branson in 2003. And now he’s doing a travel startup. Dana tells us the inspiration for Tripshare was based… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Now Netflix Is Promoting “Arrested Development” On Seamless.com

Bluth_s Original Frozen Banana

How do you market a hot new TV show without the benefit of commercial space that you can fill with network promos? Just ask Netflix. The company has come up with a number of clever marketing stunts to get the word out about the upcoming premiere of Arrested Development ranging from Easter eggs on Netflix.com to this month’s live frozen banana stand in New York, which was visited by hundreds. It… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Yahoo Partners With Twitter To Further Personalize Homepage Newsfeed

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Yahoo and Twitter have partnered to bring tweets directly into Yahoo homepage’s newsfeed on web and mobile, the company announced this morning. The move follows the February relaunch of the front page. At the time, the company debuted a redesigned site with an increased emphasis on personalization, as well as a more modern design. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Biz Stone’s New Startup Jelly Raises Series A From Spark Capital, SV Angel, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Al Gore, Bono & Others

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s new and mysterious startup called Jelly still isn’t saying what it’s up to, but it has announced funding. According to details posted to the official company blog this morning, the team has raised a Series A from a notable lineup of investors in a round led by Spark Capital, with additional investment from SV Angel, and a group of angels that includes Square CEO → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Google Wallet Rolls Out To More Devices – Nope, Still No Love For Verizon, AT&T Or T-Mobile Owners

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Google sadly scrapped its plans to introduce a plastic “universal” credit card that works at point-of-sale as a way to use its Google Wallet service out in the real world, but the company has not given up on its NFC-powered payments solution just yet. The company announced Wednesday evening the Google Wallet app now works on more phones: the Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Note II and HTC One… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Death By A Thousand Cuts? Google Wallet’s Plan To Take On PayPal Leverages Chrome, Android, Google+, Gmail & More

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Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements from today’s Google I/O developer conference is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants, such as PayPal. It plans to do so with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more.

It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

TechStars Arrives In Austin, Will Launch First Program In August

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TechStars, the popular startup accelerator with locations in Boston, Boulder, New York, Seattle, London, and more, has today announced an expansion to Austin, Texas – a city TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen refers to as the “natural next stop for us” in this morning’s announcement about the new location. The program will launch its first program this August, and is… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Android 4.3 Release Spotted Briefly In Google Search Results

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Google seems determined to leak all the exciting Google I/O news ahead of the official event. We’ve already seen the new Google Maps go live briefly before being pulled down, are hearing reports of a new music streaming service, and now there’s been confirmation that the next version of Android appears to be Android 4.3. → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Mobile Payments Startup ZooZ Debuts In-Ad Payments (Yes, “Ad” Not “App”)

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Fresh off its $2 million in Series A funding, in-app mobile payments platform ZooZ is announcing a new product today: in-ad payments. Yes, that’s right, “ad” not “app.” The big idea here is to streamline the checkout process for consumers by addressing some of the challenges with e-commerce on mobile’s small screen, and now connecting that process to mobile… → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Cydia Substrate Comes To Android (Cydia Store Next?)

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Cydia, a platform commonly thought of as the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, has just today arrived on Android of all places. Though Android is by its nature more open and customizable than Apple’s locked-down iOS, it now has a growing collection of apps designed for power users who root their devices – a process that’s similar in spirit to the iOS jailbreak. Cydia for… → Read More