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.
What are the challenges that the New York tech scene needs to address? This topic kicked off the conversation this morning between TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and venture capitalist Bill Gurley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. Gurley’s VC firm, Benchmark, has invested in some of the most disruptive technology companies over the past 10 years, including Dropbox, Zillow, Uber, Twitter… → Read More
ThredUP, the online children’s clothes consignment shop, is today launching into a new vertical with the debut of a store for women’s secondhand clothing. The move, which puts the service up against competitors like Poshmark and Threadflip, follows its expansion into junior clothing announced at the beginning of the year. The women’s site had previously launched into beta in… → Read More
EverSlide is a basic, but potentially very useful, hack built over the weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon. As you might guess by the name, the service turns your Evernote notes into slideshow presentations. And it’s crazy simple to use, too. The first line of text in your Evernote note becomes the slide’s title, the second line becomes the slide’s content, and to… → Read More
Dosi.io is a new Chrome extension that builds a better dossier at the top of LinkedIn profiles where it helps you determine who’s worth your time. Once installed, LinkedIn stalking gets a lot more interesting, as Dosi.io displays more information about the person in question by pulling in additional data from CrunchBase, GitHub and AngelList. It also displays a score indicating that… → Read More
Some of the creators of TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon project Espace are still learning to code, and this was the perfect event at which to hone their skills. The six-person team designed a site this weekend to connect meetup groups with venues offering space where events can be hosted. Organizers and venue owners use the site to sign up and list their needs or what they have to offer… → Read More
Rendezvous is an upcoming mobile application built at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon by San Francisco developer Taran Gill and designer Mehtab Bajawa. The app intends to connect you with others nearby who share your interests, as based on Facebook profile data. But while other mobile apps, including those in the recently trendy “ambient location” space often do the same, the… → Read More
Bootstrapping founders, Jeremy Greenfield and Kayvon Olomi, have taken a non-traditional route to marketing their new photo aggregation and sharing application, Divvy. They’ve hopped into a 1973 VW camper bus and are on a cross-country road trip to tour colleges around the U.S., in an attempt to get the word out about the privacy options their app allows. They left April 1st from Tulsa, and… → Read More
Foursquare recently announced it has grown to 33 million users, but another, albeit older, location-based app called Life360 just crossed a milestone of its own: 34 million users. Yes, this family locator utility is now bigger than Foursquare – at least in terms of registered users. To be fair, the companies don’t disclose their actives. → Read More
Blink, a new mobile application for ephemeral messaging, is debuting today on the Apple App Store allowing users to text, plus share photos, and soon videos, with other friends as well as with groups. The app represents a spin-off from the same technology which also powers social friend finder, Kismet. Though the company says it has no plans to shut down Kismet at this time, its current focus… → Read More
Square has announced the hiring of a new Business Lead, Francoise Brougher, and she comes straight from spending eight years at Google. For the past three years, Brougher held the title of SMB Global Sales and Operations for the online advertising unit at Google. Although Square has grown its footprint considerably, in part because of its high-profile partnership with Starbucks, the company has… → Read More
Chicago-based loyalty platform Belly is expanding into the enterprise with a rebuilt platform designed for corporate and multi-store businesses. The company, which began by focusing on the small-to-medium sized merchant, is now working with more than 100 enterprise-level accounts with more than 600 locations, says co-founder and CEO Logan LaHive, noting this now represents 10 percent of… → Read More
While the time spent in apps may be starting to challenge television, mobile analytics firm Flurry examined today what it takes to reach a TV-sized audience on mobile, comparing U.S. app usage to traditional media as well as to other online audience measurements. During “primetime,” which for apps also includes those “after-work” hours of around 7 to 10 p.m., app usage… → Read More
Amazon doesn’t share details on how well its Amazon Appstore apps sell, but according to mobile app analytics firm App Annie, the app marketplace is seeing growing traction among developers. The company surveyed over 1,500 developers, and found that 22.5 percent of them were now publishing to the Amazon Appstore, and half of that group (50 percent) cited the game category on the Amazon… → Read More
TinyTap, a Tel Aviv-based platform that allows children to create their own mobile games and “playable” books, is now expanding from the iPad to the iPhone, as it also launches its own social marketplace for apps. Here, users can sell their TinyTap creations to others, or just share them for free. The move comes roughly six months after the company announced its half a million dollar seed round… → Read More
Verious, the mobile component marketplace which launched out of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011, is today debuting a new service which it calls a “code recommendation engine” for developers. The service aggregates the code and content from 10,000-plus sources, including around 3 million dev and design resources. This means that the engine scours a much larger database than the 2,000 mobile app… → Read More
Tumblr has updated its iOS application for iPhone and iPad with new sharing options and other features – a move which follows yesterday’s launch of Tumblr for Windows Phone. Unfortunately, however, the iOS version didn’t get the fancy new, almost Path-like animations the Android version received earlier this month. So yeah, the Android version is currently the better application. → Read More
Because sometimes it’s the companies you don’t hear about constantly. FastSpring, founded in 2005 as an all-in-one e-commerce solution for companies selling desktop software and downloadable games before heading into the Software-as-a-Service space in 2011, has received a significant but undisclosed new equity investment from L.A.-based Pylon Capital. This is the first outside funding the… → Read More
The AP Twitter hack which sent the stock market briefly crashing was caused by a phishing attack, according to the AP. The news organization now says the attack on Twitter was “preceded by a phishing attempt on AP’s corporate network.” The Twitter attack, which has now become another high-profile example of why Twitter may serve as a breaking news outlet, but not a trustworthy… → Read More
Kickstart Seed Fund (not to be confused with crowdfunding giant Kickstarter), has raised $26 million for a second fund to invest in Utah-based startups, along with others in the “Mountain West” region of the U.S. Since its launch in 2008, with a $8 million fund raised by Managing Director Gavin Christensen, Kickstart has invested in 24 companies, including two exits with Panoptic Security in … → Read More
Despite the ubiquity of smartphones and the insane number of photos we now save and share, surprisingly, no one has yet to figure out how to shift more personal and private photo-sharing away from old school methods like SMS and email, and into a dedicated mobile application. A number of startups, however, are trying to do just that. Cluster is one of those companies, and with today’s… → Read More
Local business data provider Locu is announcing a partnership with Yelp today, in order to help update Yelp’s menus and other listings data with Locu’s real-time information directly from businesses. This will allow restaurants on Locu to distribute their menus and daily specials to Yelp, but it will also help Locu further expand into other verticals beyond restaurants alone. The… → Read More
Chicago-based social gifting service Boomerang, which has been inching away from its consumer-facing product over the course of 2013, is now expanding its B2B platform with today’s launch of Boomerang Rewards. An extension of its previously launched gifts platform for business, the new Rewards service now brings similar gift-card sharing options to publishers, including those on web and mobile. → Read More
The Archive Team, the same group who once saved around 900 GB of Geocities content before Yahoo shut it down, later releasing it in torrent format, is now focusing on archiving content from another Yahoo property preparing to hit the chopping block: Upcoming.org. The collective’s involvement in saving the index of the events database follows an impassioned plea from creator Andy Baio, who… → Read More
Timbuktu, an adorably designed educational and entertainment-focused iPad app for kids, has finally revamped its business model – a model which had previously been a terrible example of how children’s apps too often try to grow their revenue by tricking kids into purchasing in-app content. The company now admits that its virtual allowance mechanism was too misleading, and has moved forward… → Read More
Amazon is pulling a Netflix today, in the sense that it’s now touting the release of its original programming as the “most watched” TV shows on the Amazon Video service since launch on Friday. Netflix previously issued the same statement about its original show, “House of Cards.” But it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, here. When Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said that… → Read More
Seelio, an Ann Arbor-based startup that allows students to set up an online portfolio to showcase their work in advance of having real-world job experience, has raised $900,000 in seed funding. The company had first targeted students with a .edu email address when it launched last summer, but is now expanding its platform in order to sell directly to educational institutions through a new product… → Read More
Reddit’s involvement – whether good or bad – in the hunt for leads in the Boston bombings case does not appear to be the reason for ongoing site outages. For those who can access the service today, a banner is informing visitors that “site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.” → Read More
The newsreader business has undergone major shifts in recent months. Flipboard has emerged as the consumer’s preferred mobile magazine, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million, Google Reader is shutting down, and now another early entrant, Flud, has refocused on the enterprise market. The company began quietly testing the waters about six months ago after feedback from customers hinted at… → Read More
Alert.Us, a recently launched mobile family safety application, has some interesting ideas about the direction that these sorts of GPS tracking apps should go. In fact, says CEO Antoine Martin, the company’s goal is to have kids actually accept and recommend the app. That’s a bit different from the other parental control or safety apps on the market today which generally launch with the needs of… → Read More
Where is Twitter Music for Android? With today’s launch of Twitter’s new music discovery platform, the company has again made a move to sideline the install base of around half the U.S.’s smartphone audience by failing to deliver a native application for users of non-Apple devices. It’s a strategy that still remains prevalent among tech companies today, both large and small. The reasons these… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
