Sarah Perez
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.
CrunchBase profile →Latest from Sarah Perez
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WinZip Moves To The Cloud With Launch Of ZipShare, A Way To Zip, Manage & Share All Your Online Files
WinZip, makers of the file compression utility first launched in the early 90′s that still sees north of 30 million downloads per year, is today making a shift to the cloud. The company is launching ZipShare, a file zipping, management, encryption, and sharing service that works with the major online file hosting platforms. Currently, ZipShare lets users zip and share files both from their… Read More
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GoDaddy Will Take On Shopify With A Simpler E-Commerce Storefront Arriving This Spring
GoDaddy is launching a Shopify competitor aimed at small business customers, TechCrunch learned and the company has confirmed. The “GoDaddy Online Store,” as the new product is being called, will be announced later this week, and is intended as a replacement to the company’s current e-commerce offering QuickShoppingCart. The forthcoming e-commerce storefront was built on top of… Read More
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Alexa & comScore Competitor SimilarWeb Raises Series C From Naspers, Is Now Headed To Mobile
SimilarGroup, the makers of a would-be Alexa killer called SimilarWeb, which analyzes web rankings via a panel containing millions of web surfers, has raised a Series C round of funding. The new funding comes entirely from Naspers, the South African multinational media group that owns minority stakes in major Internet companies worldwide, including a 30 percent stake in Tencent (Asian… Read More
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The Google Smartwatch Is Real, And It’s Coming Soon (But Maybe Not Too Soon)
Google's long-rumored smartwatch is real, and still "officially" expected to begin shipping in mid to late March. However, many members of the smartwatch team inside Google believe that date will either be pushed back to June, or the watch will end up shipping incomplete with a smaller feature set than originally intended. As it stands now, the timeline for the watch's release is far from being… Read More
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LinkedIn Finally Lets You Block Other Members
LinkedIn has at last added a long-requested feature with the introduction of member blocking. This adds a new privacy control to the service, which lets you restrict access to your profile, direct interactions, and network activity from any other logged-in member who you don’t want to interact with on LinkedIn. The company says that it introduced the option not only because of user feedback… Read More
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TestFlight Owner Burstly Acquired By Apple
Burstly, the makers of an in-app ad management platform called SkyRocket and the parent company of popular mobile app testing platform TestFlight, has been acquired, we’re hearing. Though we’re working to get more information on this now, including deal terms, our understanding is that Apple is the acquirer here. We’ve been pointed in Apple’s direction by a few of… Read More
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42, An Online Platform Bringing Big Data To Brick-And-Mortar Retailers, Makes Its Debut
Y Combinator-backed online retailer platform and former TechCrunch Disrupt participant, 42, is today making its official debut. The company, founded only a year ago, is working to turn raw point-of-sale data into actionable insights for brick-and-mortar businesses that can help them boost their sales. This includes details about a store’s best customers or which products are top sellers… Read More
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Real-Time Mobile Analytics Platform Amplitude Takes On Flurry & Mixpanel
Amplitude, a Y Combinator-backed mobile analytics service aiming to take on the likes of Flurry and Mixpanel by offering advanced features at more competitive prices, is officially making its public debut today ahead of YC's Demo Day. And the company has actually gone through this process before, as it turns out - it's the same team from the text-by-voice Android app Sonalight, which was in… Read More
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Crowdtilt Publicly Launches Its Open Source, Customizable Crowdfunding Platform, Now Called CrowdtiltOpen
Fresh off its $23 million in Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, crowdfunding platform Crowdtilt is opening up its open source, white-label platform CrowdtiltOpen to all interested business users as of today. This product, previously called Crowdhoster, has been rebranded and relaunched with several more features designed for those who want to better customize and self-host… Read More
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Hop Brings Its Instant Messaging-Like Email Client To The iPad
Hop (formerly Ping), a mobile app that makes replying to email feel more like instant messaging, is now available on iPad, the company is announcing today. In addition, hop now also supports multiple email accounts – something users have been asking for since the apps’s fall 2013 debut. For those unfamiliar with hop, the idea is intriguing. The app basically turns email threads into… Read More
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Samba Offers A New Video Messaging App That Records Your Friends’ Reactions
Thanks to Facebook’s $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition yesterday, the tech industry is going to be on the lookout for the next great mobile messaging app. With fortuitous timing, a new mobile video messaging app called Samba is debuting today – and, no, they didn’t move up the launch to take advantage of the buzz, the plan has been in the works for weeks. The app, which is very… Read More
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Acompli Raises $7.3M Series A From Redpoint & Others To Fix Mobile Email
Acompli, a company building a mobile email application which functions as an all-in-one productivity app for iPhone, has raised $7.3 million in Series A funding – a sizable investment that points to the scale of the problem the startup is aiming to solve. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, and includes participation from Harrison Metal and Felicis Ventures. The app itself is due out on… Read More
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How One Scammer Manipulated Apple’s Top Charts To Earn Tens Of Thousands Daily Using A $10 GameSalad Template
Something fishy has been going on with Apple's App Store top charts. No, I'm not talking about "Flappy Bird" (well, maybe that too), but rather how on earth two different developers used a $10 GameSalad template to send their respective apps -- one free, and one paid -- into the App Store's top charts. And more importantly, how did that paid app keep climbing the charts, earning a developer who's… Read More
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Postcard For iPhone Lets You Post To Any Social Network At Once, Even Your Own Website
A new application, Postcard, launching today, will help you cross-post to various social media websites, but with a few unique twists. Unlike similar tools, this "Swiss Army Knife" of an app lets you set any one social network, or even your own website, as the content's host. So, for example, if you run multiple Twitter accounts, the app could allow you to tweet from one, while the others re-tweet… Read More
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A New Android App Called Glove Will Tell You What Carrier Is Best For You
Glove, a new Android application launching today, is attempting to address a real-world pain point that affects an important decision that nearly every individual or family in the U.S. has to make at some point: which wireless carrier is the best one for you? To do so, the app is installed on your device where it will run in the background for three days, keeping tabs on where you use your phone… Read More
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Payments Startup Loop Debuts A Mobile Wallet App That Lets You Pay With Your iPhone
Loop, the mobile payments startup backed by $10 million in Series A funding, and the makers of a series of hardware devices that allows smartphones to function like magstripe credit cards at point-of-sale, is today publicly launching its LoopWallet application in the U.S. Apple App Store. An Android version will be available in April. The company, for background, is headed up by payments industry… Read More
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Amazon Coins Come To Android Users In U.S., U.K. & Germany
Amazon Coins, the virtual currency introduced by the e-commerce giant last spring, are now available on Android devices, including both smartphones and tablets, in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. This is the first time the Coins have been offered outside Kindle Fire tablets, which is where they first launched. Read More
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LinkedIn Opens Its Publishing Platform To All Members
To date, LinkedIn has allowed a small, editorially selected group of "Influencers" like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Barack Obama to publish their thoughts and advice to its network as long-form blog posts. Now, that changes, as LinkedIn prepares to open up access to its publishing platform to all 277 million users on its network. Read More
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Kimono Is A Smarter Web Scraper That Lets You “API-ify” The Web, No Code Required
A new Y Combinator-backed startup called Kimono wants to make it easier to access data from the unstructured web with a point-and-click tool that can extract information from webpages that don’t have an API available. And for non-developers, Kimono plans to eventually allow anyone track data without needing to understand APIs at all. This sort of smarter “web scraper” idea has… Read More
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Kidizen Lets Parents Buy & Sell Kids’ “Pre-Loved” Clothing And Other Items Via Their iPhones
A new iOS application called Kidizen is launching a mobile, peer-to-peer marketplace allowing parents to buy and sell their children's clothing, toys, shoes and other easily shippable accessories. By offering parents the option to ship items directly to the buyers themselves, sellers can retain roughly 90 percent-plus of the selling price, the company promises. This undercuts competitor ThredUP… Read More
