It’s been nearly a month since Verizon officially spilled the beans on the QWERTY-packing, LTE-sporting Motorola Droid 4, and now we finally have a release date to go with it.
According to the nation’s largest wireless provider, the oft-delayed Droid 4 is due to hit sales channels on February 10 complete with a $199 price tag. → Read More
Microsoft announced this morning a new agreement with 24/7 Inc. , a company that designs intuitive customer experiences. As a part of the deal, Microsoft will merge its interactive self-service assets (meaning people, clients and technologies), into 24/7 Inc. The deal also includes an R&D partnership, long-term IP licensing and Microsoft taking an equity stake in 24/7, Inc.
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Remember that Bouncer Google put in the Android Market to act as a goalie for all potential malware attacks?
It would seem that Google’s Bouncer doesn’t catch everything as Professor Xuxian Jiang, the same guy who discovered dozens of other Android malware attacks, has found yet another exploit called RootSmart. → Read More
Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy.
“I don’t know who put the call out to put money into social media, but it is out there,” says CEO Frank Speiser. A year ago, Socialflow had two employees. Today, it has 34. “We have 5,500 leads active and qualified,” says Speiser. “I just need people to work the phones.” → Read More
If you’ve ever set up an automatic ‘Bill Pay’ feature on your bank account to pay off your utility and cable bills, then you’ve taken advantage of a nifty feature called an ‘interbank transfer’, also known as an ‘Automated Clearing House’ payment. Once they’re set up, they tend to be very convenient — the amount of the bill is automatically deducted from your account, saving you the hassle of having to write yet another check (or fill out another online form) each month. Merchants benefit from this system as well, because their fees are significantly lower than those that are charged by the credit card companies.
Thing is, this feature is typically only available for paying bills from big companies — it’s rare to see a smaller online merchant that’s offering these automatic transfers, because the process for them to set it up is complicated and costly. Until now. Y Combinator-backed startup GoCardless is launching today as a UK-based service that allows smaller merchants to easily set up interbank transfers for customers. → Read More
Because I live in Chicago, I tend to conduct a lot of demos and meetings with startups and companies over webinar products like GoToMeeting or WebEx. While they get the job done for the most part, the UI is clunky and slow. Today, MeetingBurner is releasing its sleek, fast, and easy-to-use remote meeting product to the public. And the first 200 signups here will receive a free MeetingBurner Pro account.
MeetingBurner, which is exiting beta today, offers a download-free interface lets participants join a meeting via a link sent to their email. Not only is it the load time fast, but the interface is simple and easy to use. Meeting attendees have the option of joining via phone or Skype. Administrators can record meetings, and share on YouTube with a click. → Read More
Good morning, and welcome to our Tuesday edition of People Suing Each Other. In the far corner, we have the number four PC maker in the world, Acer, based out of Taiwan; and in the other corner we have Acer former CEO Gianfranco Lanci, based out of Italy, who resigned in February of 2011 after being with the company since 2007.
The beef? Well, according to the Financial Times, Mr. Lanci signed a non-compete contract with Acer that was meant to last a full year after his resignation. However, Lanci instead hopped on the Lenovo train in September (about seven months after leaving Acer) as a consultant, at which point he was made the head of Lenovo’s Europe, Middle East and Africa businesses last month. → Read More
Here’s a roundup of recent stories on TechCrunch Europe:
— Internet publishing company Populis is expanding its network operations to South America with the acquisition of Cidade Internet, a popular Brazilian Web portal. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
— Moscow-based Heverest.ru, an online retailer of sportswear, leisure and travel goods, has scored $4.3 million in financing from an unnamed “large” Russian investment fund and previous backer eVenture Capital Partners, bringing its total raised to $6.7 million.
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In this economic climate, many small businesses do not qualify for loans based on the standards imposed by banks and financial institutions. For fledgling businesses, the establishment doesn’t have enough cash flow, revenue or credit to qualify for a loan. Many times, entrepreneurs have to put up personal assets as collateral for loans, which can be problematic and risky. The fact is working capital is difficult to get from banks unless a business has perfect credit.
Capital Access Network (CAN), a company that gives small businesses access to credit and working capital and helps solve the problem outlines above, is announcing this morning that it has raised $30 million from Accel Partners. As part of the transaction, Accel partner, Kevin Efrusy will join Credit Access’s board of directors, and Accel vice president, John Locke, will join as an observer.
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Jeff Atwood, the co-founder and CTO of Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites mostly about programming and gaming, and Stack Overflow, is stepping down from day-to-day operations at the beginning of next month. → Read More
Judging from every single TechCruncher’s inbox word on the street, there are job poachers amongst us. That’s cool, all’s fair in love and war and technology recruiting, right? Except when it’s not which, in a world filled with people who just want to win at any cost, is pretty damn often.
But let’s pretend for a second that you’re not as fantastic and amazing and desired as a TechCrunch writer. What happens if you want to be poached!? Well, If you’re actively looking to be recruited like the rare species of programming fauna that you are, look no further than Job Poacher, which allows people who are in the market for a new employer to advertise as such, anonymously.
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Traffic numbers provided by companies should always be questioned — I mean, of course each company is going to try to present the data in a way that makes them look as good as possible. Which is what New York Times finance writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has understandably done, going to town on Facebook for how it counts its active users, in an article out tonight called “Those Millions On Facebook? Some May Not Actually Visit.” → Read More
In the aftermath of the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, a long list of organizations have sent a letter to Congress asking members to “take a breath” before they trying to push through new piracy legislation.
The letter argues that the “wide variety of important concerns” that were expressed during the SOPA/PIPA protests cannot be addressed through “hasty revisions” to the bills. Instead, there needs to be more research and transparent discussion about the broader issues: → Read More
At CES, the AOL booth where we worked, did interviews, and ate lunch was just a few short feet from Samsung’s huge Galaxy Note booth, where they were giving out free shirts printed with your caricature, drawn, of course, on a Galaxy Note. There was a line around this thing the entire time we were there, scores of people waiting for hours for their free t-shirt.
Outside CES there were enormous banners in the most prominent and expensive ad spots on the convention center. Phone? Tablet? It’s Galaxy Note™!
And just yesterday, in a grandiose ad rather out of keeping with their well-received “next big thing” campaign, the Note was made out to be the end of all our troubles, ending the tyranny of using our fingers and letting us circle and cross out and all those things you wish you could do on your obviously-now-obsolete iPhone.
But I saw the Note at CES and formed my opinion in about five or six seconds: it’s weak. And that’s why this advertising blitz makes so much sense. → Read More
Yelp built its ad business by attracting users that know what they want, just not who to buy it from — exactly when ads are most effective. That’s why I find today’s VentureBeat piece by Rocky Agrawal titled “Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers” to be ridiculous. His sources say Yelp charges a $600 CPM, or 1,000-times the standard online CPM rate.
Yes, these ads are expensive, especially for low-end restaurants. But for lawyers, dentists, jewelers and mechanics with a high lifetime average revenue per customer, turning someone searching for their services on Yelp into a loyal customer is no rip-off, it can drive huge ROI. → Read More
There have been whispers in the past of augmented reality goggles or glasses, but generally we have been able to dismiss them as exaggerations or concepts. The technology, while it isn’t unrealistic, simply isn’t quite there yet.
Apparently that hasn’t stopped Google: a new report is appearing corroborating earlier ones that they are working on a pair of augmented reality glasses. They’d piggyback on your phone’s connection and overlay information like directions, news, and so on.
Whether you think it’s a good idea or not, this kind of thing is going to come eventually, so it’s natural that Google would want to start girding itself for the approaching augmented glasses wars of 20XX. → Read More
I love the smell of acquisitions in the morning! We’ve just heard that Groupon has acquired Adku, a stealth startup that uses big data in order to personalize the online shopping experience for people visiting eCommerce sites like eBay, Amazon and Zappos.
The company built their personalized targeting technology in three months, and have basically been in stealth since they launched at the Angelpad Demo day a year and a half ago. Adku is backed by Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures and True Ventures in addition to being an Angelpad startup.
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Deep in the skunk works of its Research and Labs divisions, secreted around the Seattle area, Microsoft is working on totally reinventing the way people interact with their computers. Very little is out in the open or in more than a prototype form, but the work is unquestionably being done.
Last week it transpired that Microsoft is working on building Kinect into the bezels of laptops, and after that, presumably, tablets and eventually mobile phones. But it’s not just about building out the install base for Dance Central 3. It’s enabling the next generation of awareness in our electronics. The iPhone ushered in an era where our devices know when we touch them. Microsoft is working on the next one, in which our devices will simply know us. → Read More
A few weeks ago we wrote about Backplane — a platform for creating interactive, highly visual communities — that counts Lady Gaga as one of its backers, along with plenty of the Valley’s most well-known investors.
Now the company is harnessing its star power to hold a unique (and potentially awesome) event at SXSW: the SXSW Managers Hack — a hackathon that will be judged by some of the most accomplished managers in the music industry, including: Scooter Braun, best known for facilitating Justin Bieber’s rise to fame; Jay Brown, President of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation; and Troy Carter, manager of Lady Gaga (Carter is also one of Backplane’s cofounders).
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Linux is the world’s largest collaborative software development project. People from all over the world have influenced the Linux kernel code, and it runs on everything from mainframe computers to wristwatches. Linux, and free software development in general, provides some tremendous insights into what makes a successful project. Can today’s startups learn anything from the history of Linux?
The history of Linux proves that collaborative development speeds true innovation. If Linus Torvalds were left to work on Linux alone, there’s no way it would be the success it is today. A great many of the things that Linux does today are a direct result of people scratching their own itches, and then contributing their work back upstream to Linus. Many people focusing on their own little (and not-so-little) problems have made Linux the powerhouse that it is today. → Read More
