A new report from 9to5Mac and its usually well-connected sources today adds a little more color to what we’ll be seeing from the big iOS 7 redesign rumored to be making an appearance at WWDC this year in June – and what we’ll apparently be seeing is a lot less color. The visual overhaul not only emphasizes so-called “flat design” (avoiding complicated textures in favor of bold, solid tones), but… → Read More
Netherlands-based hardware initiative Fairphone began around three years ago as a project designed to highlight the use of conflict minerals in the construction of consumer electronics, and then evolved three years later into a full-fledged hardware startup, with the aim of turning its knowledge into action with the building of an ethically sourced, built and distributed smartphone. Now, it’s… → Read More
Google is the latest suitor to be reportedly circling around social sat-nav smartphone app Waze. Bloomberg reports ‘people familiar with the matter’ who say Mountain View is considering an acquisition, and that Waze is “fielding expressions of interest from multiple parties and is seeking more than $1 billion”. However sources contacted by TechCrunch have poured cold water on the Google rumour. → Read More
We’re all familiar with the bill shock associated with roaming abroad with our cellphones. There are plenty of players that allow you to swap out your SIM card and use cheaper traffic, including Cubic Telecom. However, that process is tedious. So Cubic has secured new funding to enable a range of tablets and notebooks to have their technology built into partner devices. To do this they’ve raised a… → Read More
Pandora has had a busy quarter. In March, the social radio company saw its long-time CEO Joe Kennedy abruptly step down, leaving the board to scramble to find a replacement. On the bright side, Kennedy’s exit, while likely a result of stress, followed relatively good times for Pandora. And it’s continued to push forward since. → Read More
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
More signs today the HTC First might also be the last smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed: UK carrier EE confirmed today that the first Facebook Home phone won’t be launching in the UK soon as planned, as Facebook has decided to concentrate its efforts on making improvements to the Home software before looking to add international markets. EE says it will soon be contacting… → Read More
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
After the aesthetic elegance of Dots, prepare for another injection of minimalist puzzle game beauty. Blip Blup is the new game from London-based design house and app studio ustwo — maker of Whale Trail, a mobile game that snagged an e-book deal, plus a raft of other interesting apps including most recently Rando (random photo-sharing) and Honk (visual messaging). → Read More
Jawfish Games, a Seattle-based startup run by a former professional poker player and the engineering team that built the Fult Tilt Poker site, launched a gaming platform that can host more than 100,000 simultaneous players in real-time tournaments across iOS, Android and the web. While asynchronous, turn-based games have done well on mobile platforms and Facebook over the last five years, pure… → Read More
No, we still don’t have any word from Amazon on where it stands with a smartphone, but it’s definitely making its mobile ambitions clear anyway. Today, the e-commerce giant took two more steps in its strategy to scale up its Kindle Fire tablet business. It announced that it will now sell the two higher-end versions of the device, the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, in 170 countries. And it… → Read More
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has hit 10 million channel sales one month after its release. The company announced its latest milestone today just eight days after confirming that it had shipped over 6 million units of the S4 since its international launch on April 26. According to Samsung, this is the fastest ever sell rate for any of its smartphones. → Read More
Fresh from closing its purchase of newsreading app Pulse, LinkedIn has made another acquisition to dive deeper into the mobile space. TechCrunch has found out, and confirmed, that the social network has aqui-hired Maybe, the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui — the man who set up, ran and then sold mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750 million. → Read More
GiftCards.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch. → Read More
Another step for Adobe in its bid to become the go-to place in the cloud for those working in design and other creative industries: it is acquiring Thumb Labs, a bootstrapped, New York-based mobile app design agency. Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs along with Rich Kern, tells TechCrunch that financial terms of the Thumb Labs acquisition are not being disclosed. The news follows… → Read More
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
For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’ It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience. But that’s a stereotype that… → Read More
As Foursquare evolves, it wants to help you find either new places to check out or lead you to places where your friends have already been. Mixed in with that is recommendation technology to show you places that you might be interested in based on where you’ve been before. Today, Foursquare updated its iOS and Android apps with an advanced search option that lets you control how the service seeks… → Read More
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
Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of “handpicked” developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 600 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with other directory services. → Read More
Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with… → Read More
SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an 11th European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and Russia, giving it a larger geographical footprint than other European rivals including iZettle and Payleven. → Read More
Chalk this up as one to watch closely in the world of consumer fintech. Numbrs, a mobile-first banking app founded out of Swiss company builder Centralway, has raised 7.5 million Swiss francs (~$7.7 million) from its parent, capital it will use to build on its pending German launch, with the UK and Swiss markets up next, followed by Singapore and Hong Kong. → Read More
The Saturday Evening Post has a prominent spot in the history of American magazines. It’s where artist Norman Rockwell made a name for himself, and it has published classic American authors like Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But if you had no idea that it was still around, you’re not alone — the magazine’s technology director Steve Harman said that many people “are surprised we’re… → Read More
OK Go (the band behind hit music videos like “This Too Shall Pass” and “Here It Goes Again”) launched its very own game for iOS and Android earlier this month.
Titled Say The Same Thing, you play the game with one of your friends or with a randomly chosen player. (If you sign up now, you can also participate in a temporary promotion where people are randomly selected to play with a band member)… → Read More
In November, Jive Software acquired Bay Area cloud-based, collaborative task manager, Producteev, to boost its social business platform. Going forward, as Alex wrote at the time, Salesforce.com and Jive will increasingly butt heads as they compete for mindshare in the enterprise. With Producteev’s multi-platform task-management system, which allows users to create tasks from emails and collaborate… → Read More
Virtual private networking is a great way to accomplish a number of things, including making sure that your secrets stay your own, protecting against malware attacks, and getting around the geoblocking of audio and video content from networks, labels and basically anyone who wants to restrict your sweet, sweet access. It’s understandable, then, that as computing increasingly goes mobile, VPN would… → Read More
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
Smart watches are all the rage, and judging by the turnout and level of enthusiasm at the recently year one meetup for Pebble Kickstarter backers in San Francisco which I attended last week, there’s at least a passionate niche audience for the things. So it isn’t surprising to see them continue to pop up on Kickstarter. A new one called Agent has a few unique tricks, however, which its creators… → Read More
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
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