Flash memory maker and storage system technologies provider SanDisk announced today that it has acquired FlashSoft, a company focused on caching software products. Going forward, SanDisk will sell FlashSoft’s products both as standalone software, as well as offer them in combination with its other products, including SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.
The company says that it expects the acquisition to be neutral to its earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013, but additional details were not provided. → Read More
MTV is unveiling an update to its Music Meter mobile app today. This is version 2.0, and also the first version to abandon the “beta testing” label, suggesting that MTV has worked out any early kinks — and is ready to make money.
The app first launched in March 2011 as the mobile equivalent of MTV’s Music Meter website. The goal is to track the online buzz for musicians, and to use that data to create a daily ranking that helps fans find new music. If you see an artist who interests you, the app offers songs, photos, and videos, as well as news and a brief biography. Senior Director of Product Development Mark Mezrich calls it an “artistic snacking” experience that should give you everything you need to get acquainted with a musician. Nor is that snacking limited to the daily list — Mezrich says there are more than 1 million artists in the system. → Read More
If for some reason you were to mosey on over to Amazon’s Chinese website and perform a search for the iPad, you know what you’d find? No iPad.
Now, you might think to yourself, “Wow, Proview pulled it off,” but that’s not the case at all. In fact, an Amazon spokesperson said that the Apple was the one who requested that the iPad be taken off the site. Proview hasn’t even requested an online sales ban.
Yep, this is tricky, so let’s parse through it together. → Read More
Has this happened to you? You’re trapped on a pirate ship with your pregnant wife and Bluebeard the Pirate wants you to walk the plank but after your wife has given birth to the baby boy that he will adopt as his pirate son and train in pirate ways. You want to tell your family – and an army of ninja warriors – about your new arrival so they can congratulate/save you but you’re only able to move one finger every hour because of some strange poison Bluebeard gave you. So you need a one-button way to notify the world of your child’s arrival (and maybe get saved and give old Bluebeard a taste of cold steel) as well as a method to let the in-laws know they can buy you the Quinny Buzz now.
BabyNotify has your freaking back. → Read More
When Groupon was gearing up for its IPO last year, there was a lot of talk about whether the company would be able to sustain its business on a diet that mainly consisted of daily deals. Today, a little sign of what Groupon might be cooking up for its next course.
Over in Germany, Groupon has launched a new site, Groupon Deals, an Amazon-like storefront that sells a range of goods, from boots to bodysuits.
Like its mainstay-daily deals, the products are being sold at big discounts, of up to 70 percent on some items. Unlike the daily deals, these products do not appear to have timeouts on buying them. → Read More
Popular sports startup Bleacher Report was announced as of YouTube’s new content partners late last year. Now it’s actually ready to debut its new channel and announce the initial slate of shows.
Bleacher Report allows regular sports fans to offer commentary on teams and games, an approach that leads to much more content than a traditional sports site — the company says it has 1,000 featured columnists and 6,000 contributors total. In some ways, it seems like a good match for YouTube, since it’s taking a similar approach to sports writing as the one YouTube took to video. → Read More
We first covered Sell Simp.ly in November last year, as it looked to capitalize on the increasing interest in social media as not only a place to advertise and build an online presence for brands, but as a platform for conducting social commerce. Most of that interest has surrounded Facebook, as a host of solutions and services have emerged that allow big brands and startups alike to create retail storefronts on Facebook, sell to customers, and to a certain extent, manage their transactions. → Read More
While the hand-wringing over the future of journalism, blogging, the nature of conflicts of interest, yada yada, has been deeply interesting (alongside the personal attacks – we all like a good public fight don’t we?), it’s worth recalling that the furore was kicked off by a fairly pertinent point. To whit: Path was uploading user’s address books without their explicit permission.
Yes it was a rare omission by Nick Bilton to not call out the 50 or so other apps that often do this by default. But his essential point remains correct, and it’s kicked off a wave of excellent reporting into which apps behave like this, and why Apple has allowed this to go on for so long.
But while we continue to point the finger at startups with smartphone apps designed to be social, I’d like to remind Silicon Valley about another business which, despite claims to the contrary, is deeply interested in our private affairs, and is unlikely ever to be as contrite as Dave Morin was just recently.
I speak of the sector known as Deep Packet Inspection. → Read More
From Redbox and Verizon teaming up to take on Netflix to Connected TV and Netflix’s premier of Lillyhammer, offering consumers video content where and when they want it is no longer just a second thought. Serving content across platforms has become essential for publishers and brands that want to grow their audiences and earn more revenue with online video.
Ooyala, the online video provider, today released its fourth quarter review of web video, in which it analyzes the viewing behavior of 100 million monthly unique users. (You can find the full report here.) → Read More
After announcing a licensing deal with Hasbro last week, Zynga is debuting another licensing agreement. The social gaming giant is teaming up with game developer Slingo to license casual game Slingo; and launch a social Facebook title Zynga Slingo today. This is the first time Zynga has licensed a game title to date, as the company has been churning out original titles over the past few years.
Created in 1995, Slingo is played by over 55 million people across free online games, retail, mobile, casino slots and other platforms. Additionally, over 50 million Slingo games have been downloaded and almost five billion games of Slingo have been played online. In case you aren’t familiar with Slingo, players spin and match numbers to fill the card to win the game. The goal, similar to Bingo, is to create Slingos which include five matched numbers in a row, column, or even diagonal.
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Kabbage, which provides working capital to online merchants, is announcing a big deal today. The Atlanta-based startup is debuting a partnership with shipping giant UPS where for the first time ever, they will allow and facilitate customers offering their shipping and transportation data to Kabbage for use in the capital underwriting process.
Kabbage is essentially a way for online merchants and sellers on marketplaces like eBay, Etsy and Amazon to get capital they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for at a bank. Kabbage uses technology to analyze online merchants’ sales and credit history; customer traffic and reviews; and prices and inventory compared to competitors. And merchants can proactively add information to their Kabbage account to immediately increase their access to capital. Kabbage makes cash advances available to eBay and other online marketplace sellers fairly quickly and is available in the U.S.
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FileTrek, a new cloud storage and file-sharing platform launching today, has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Anthem Venture Partners, Telesystem, and Ontario Emerging Technologies Funds.
Filetrek is designed to allow enterprises to add secure file sharing, project collaboration, and the ability for managers to track content and data across thousands of desktops and mobile devices. Using the application, consumers can share files directly from their desktop and access data anywhere from any device, whether they are online or offline. → Read More
Scripted.com, a marketplace for freelance writers, has secured another $150,000 in seed funding on top of the $700,000 it raised back in late November 2011. The new seed financing round was led by former Redpoint Ventures Executive-in-Residence David Wu. Additionally, Scripted.com has brought two new advisors on board: former LinkedIn chief scientist DJ Patil and 99designs co-founder Matt Mickiewicz. → Read More
We’ve seen handset makers like HTC, LG and Nokia all warning of declines in smartphone sales. But if there is a slowdown affecting some, it’s not because people are not buying smartphones; it’s because they’re all buying iPhones.
Figures out from Gartner today say that smartphone sales totalled 149 million units in Q4 2011 — 47.3 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago, led by none other than Apple’s iPhone, which its analysts noted “saved” the smartphone market after two quarters of declining sales. → Read More
OZON, often dubbed the ‘Amazon of Russia’, has acquired 100% of Sapato.ru, often dubbed the ‘Zappos of Russia’. I hope I don’t really need to remind you that Amazon acquired Zappos back in 2009.
The acquisition of the online shoe and accessories retailer, which had been whispered about for the past few days after e-commerce giant OZON was given the go-ahead for the deal by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) of the Russian Federation, was confirmed by early Sapato.ru investor Fast Lane Ventures in a press release issued earlier this morning. Sadly, financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
Here’s why I love TechCrunch; because I’m going to just post this a little before midnight, and I dare someone to take it down while I sleep.
I. triple. dog. dare. you.
Anyways today we hired a bunch of people (Hi Colleen! Hi Ingrid!) and made some existing people Super Ninja Princesses or something, but in the meantime we lost two crucial members of our team to competitors, Mobile Editor Greg Kumparak and Europe Writer Robin Wauters. It’s a huge loss.
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The problem that former Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz is trying to fix with his new startup is clear enough.
More and more people are having to care for older relatives or children with health issues as the US population ages. But, the current online methods for sharing such sensitive information aren’t always appropriate. Emailing caregiver information can lead to tastelessly targeted ads. Online project management software may be too bloated or insecure for sharing medical histories between just a few people. Offline documents — the most common form of communication in this area — are simply hard to share between all the people who need access. → Read More
Clear, the heavily-anticipated touch-based to-do list app, is launching in the iTunes App Store tonight. And by heavily anticipated, I mean this app was getting tech blog coverage based on demos, previews and teaser videos.
Why the big draw for what’s typically been a rather ho-hum app category, the lowly to-do list? Clear is pure eye candy, for starters. But it’s also representative of a major leap forward in smartphone app design, as it’s been built from the ground up for the touch interface. The app is based solely on the use of now-common gestures: swipes, pulls and pinches. There are no buttons with Clear, and yet, it’s surprisingly simple to use. In fact, that’s the point. → Read More
What a week! In the past seven days I’ve watched the fact that an iOS app was uploading your Address Book tear our industry a new one. Path’s “Find your Friends” feature has now ripped apart friendships, driven apart investors and founders and made Robin Wauters leave TechCrunch (okay, just kidding on that one). → Read More
Guess who knows what’s best for the future of Facebook? It’s certainly not public investors looking to cash in on “social” 8 years after Facebook started. That’s why those same investors should actually be happy about a warning from Institutional Shareholder Services noting that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg will own roughly 57% of the company after the IPO. He’s a lot more likely to steer the company to long-term mega-profitability than they are.
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