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.
In the midst of Amazon’s recent moves to rapidly grow its content collection on Amazon Prime Instant Video, the company has also been brokering deals for another one of its video properties: European Netflix competitor LOVEFiLM. Today, the company is announcing a new multi-year deal with NBCUniversal International Television Distribution, which will offer LOVEFiLM members access to streaming titles from Universal Pictures during the second pay window.
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WordPress just hit an impressive milestone today: it has now filtered its 50 billionth piece of spam. Akismet, the homegrown comment filtering system from WordPress maker Automattic is the tool responsible for all the spam fighting. And those spammers keep the system busy. In April, Akismet blocked 1.8 billion spam messages, or 60 million pieces of spam per day, 2.5 million per hour, or 700 per second.
Whoa, that’s a lot of spam. → Read More
Mobile app downloads continued to decline in April and the cost to acquire loyal users picked up, reports mobile marketing firm Fiksu in its latest report out today. This downward trend was expected, as no major events sparked app discovery during the month, explains Fiksu CEO Micah Adler. However, mobile app marketers were particularly aggressive in the social networking and games categories during April, both of which experienced volatility throughout the month. With the former (social networking), the reason had to do with the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, which drew increased attention to the category. There were also a number of new game releases in April, which led to increased interest and competition among the developer community in that category, as well.
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JackThreads, the members-only shopping club bought by men’s lifestyle brand Thrillist two years ago, just hit a major milestone this morning: 2 million members. At the time of the original acquisition, JackThreads was really small, says Thrillist co-founder and CEO Ben Lerer. It only had around 100,000-150,000 members in total. But it soon grew. JackThreads hit the 1 million member mark in July 2011, and since then, the average number of orders placed per month has more than doubled, average daily sales have more than doubled, unique site visitors per month grew 143%, and mobile visits grew 163%.
The company hosts flash sales with top apparel brands, but is now starting to try new things. It recently launched its own private label line collection called Goodale, which Lerer says led to the best-selling sale the site has ever hosted. It’s also planning to expand beyond flash sales, and will soon allow members to search the site’s inventory for specific items. → Read More
Australian travel search FlightFox has a new take on how to surface the best airline deals, and now it has a round of angel funding and entry into top startup incubator Y Combinator, to go along with it. The company has just closed an $800,000 round of funding from YC, 500 Startups, Kevin Laws (board member at AngelList), Matt Dickinson (early investor in Ark), Mick Liubinskas (from Pollenizer), and others.
As for what makes FlightFox unique? Instead of developing algorithms to return a list of flights to choose from, the company taps into the power of crowdsourcing instead. → Read More
Your Powerpoint pitchdeck is so boring. So. Freaking. Boring. Although tech bloggers aren’t sent startup’s actual pitchdecks as often as investors are (thankfully), we’re still walked through them on dreadful, “let me read to you from my Powerpoint” phone calls more often than should be socially acceptable. That’s why when image aggregator Piccsy, which is simultaneously a competitor to Pinterest as well as a top 20 content source for the site, pinged us to take a look at its pitch deck, we were pleasantly surprised. A pitchdeck that’s actually fun to read? Can such a thing exist?
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It may not be the end, but the prognosis doesn’t look good. Social micro-payments platform Flattr is taking an unkind hit in terms of its future growth opportunities on mobile, the company details on its blog this morning. After being integrated into popular third-party podcast manager Instacast back in February, Apple decided at the beginning of May to reject the app from the iTunes App Store due to its Flattr integration. The result? The only way Instacast could get back into the app store was to change the user flow in the app to direct the actual “flattr” (as the micro-payment process is called) to take place in the Safari web browser instead. Not an ideal user experience, Apple admits, but it’s as required by the App Store Review Guidelines.
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TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.
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PayPal is expanding its in-store payments technology to 15 new national retailers, following its initial brick-and-mortar rollout with Home Depot earlier this year. At a press conference held yesterday at PayPal’s San Jose HQ, the company confirmed it is now adding new merchants including Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, Jamba Juice, JC Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us.
The merchants will soon be integrating PayPal technology at their point-of-sale, allowing customers to choose it as an alternative payment option to cash, check or charge.
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Belly, the Chicago-based loyalty platform which just closed its $10 million Series B from Andreessen Horowitz earlier this month, is today announcing a pretty significant milestone: its 1 millionth check-in. The startup allows customers to check-in to a location using a physical loyalty card or mobile app which they scan via a consumer-facing iPad installed at point-of-sale. By doing so, customers collect points that can later be redeemed for unique rewards tailored specifically for the business in question.
The company has been growing fast, and CEO Logan LaHive tells us that in some of Belly’s locations, there have been more Belly check-ins within its first month of being up-and-running, than the total number of Foursquare check-ins the business has seen to date. → Read More
A big win for healthcare expense-tracking platform Simplee, fresh off its $6 million Series A from earlier this month: the company is now announcing a partnership with top HSA provider in the U.S. ACS (a Xerox company). This is the first major HSA partner for Simpleee, which now introduces its service to ACS|BNY Mellon’s The HSA Solution’s 800,000 members.
While perhaps not as exciting as a brand-new, Instagram-like Facebook Photos app (I’m so downloading that), Simplee is one of those companies solving a real-world challenge that has a big impact on our lives: health care expense management. The company takes a consumer-friendly angle to the problem with its service, which helps patients track their bills and payments, while also visualizing, in something of a Mint.com-like style, what their current situation looks like. → Read More
SittingAround, the new service that allows parents to quickly and easily find and schedule a babysitter online, is now getting their sitters clients equipped with Square credit card readers. CEO Erica Zidel tells us that, starting now, all sitters are being offered a free Square dongle as a part of the signup process on the website, and can then indicate whether or not they accept credit cards in their online profile. Parents, meanwhile, can now search and hire sitters based on the payment method they accept.
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This afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, our own Josh Constine sat down with David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” to discuss what they thought about the future of the newly IPO’ed social network. Specifically, the two focused on the potential for Facebook’s advertising platform, its competitive advantages over incumbents and competitors, and its potential acquisition targets which could help its platform expand.
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Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery, which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in the deal are titles like Mission: Impossible 3, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, Nacho Libre and Clueless, to name a few, and Amazon says more will be added “soon.”
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This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, Chris Dixon, co-founder and partner at Founder’s Collective (and co-founder of SiteAdvisor and Hunch, acquired by McAfee and eBay, respectively), sat down with ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi to talk about ZocDoc’s road to success. The company, for those unfamiliar, is a professional booking platform for doctors. Users go online to search, find and book a doctor, dentist or other health care professional, and can even make same-day appointments thanks to ZocDoc’s real-time access to doctors’ schedules.
Although ZocDoc has now raised $95 million in funding to date, it didn’t necessarily have that many early believers. → Read More
While we don’t make a habit out of covering every iteration of the Google Doodle, today’s version is especially awesome. The doodle is celebrating the birth date of Dr. Robert Moog, the inventor of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The what?, you may ask. The synthesizer was an instrument Moog created in the mid-1960′s, which took the music world by storm, and was picked up by artists like The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk, and others. It transformed how people thought about electronic music. Instead of producing a “synthetic” sound, as previous synthesizers did, the Moog version created a richer, organic sound. Today, some 50 years later, musicians still hold the Moog Synthesizer in high regard.
And, if you’re curious to see what all the fuss is about, you can try out the Moog yourself now on the Google homepage via a working, playable version of the instrument. → Read More
What good is a Foursquare check-in if it doesn’t lead to a coupon or freebie? Why bother tweeting about a brand you like if they don’t acknowledge your undying love and loyalty? With TechCrunch Disrupt finalist SocialStock, those types of actions may now be rewarded…or at least that’s the company’s vision. The service, founded by Subbu Rama, aims to be a stock market for people and places which assigns a point value to users’ social networking actions. Mimicking the framework of a real stock market, those actions become shares and then those shares can turn into real-world rewards from participating business or brands.
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Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report citing FactSet data.
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Remember address book-gate? Locationgate? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the data we presumed to be ours alone was actually being stored, accessed and shared by others…in many cases, “others” being mobile app developers.
Well, leave it to a security firm to capitalize on the privacy scare trend. And by capitalize, I mean launch a $4 app that tells you what the apps on your phone are doing. Introducing Bitdefender’s Clueful. → Read More
TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington sat down with Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha in another fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 this morning. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Botha served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal during its sale to eBay, and today considers himself a champion of consumer web plays. He also sits on the board of hot startups like Eventbrite, Square, TokBox, Tumblr, and Jawbone, to name a few. And he’s an investor in other startups like Unity Technologies, a company helping developers build 3D games, as well as the interesting (and sci-fi-ish) Gene Security Network, which Botha describes as helping parents have healthy babies via in vitro fertilization. → Read More
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