When Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare, visited the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year, he told me he spent a lot of time explaining Foursquare to the operators and vendors that are the main visitors at this event.
This year, he said the stack of business cards he was handed was “like this,” making a big C-shape with his index finger and thumb. Why the change? “I think we… → Read More
Wow. Reviews site Yelp just saw a huge pop in early trading of its stock on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. Yelp opened at $22 per share, after pricing at $15 last night. Shares, which are listed under the symbol ‘YELP’, are trading up 60 percent from last night’s pricing, putting Yelp’s valuation at over $1.3 billion. UPDATE: Yelp’s stock closed at $24.52, up over 60 percent from the… → Read More
Samsung says it has sold over 2 million Galaxy Note superphones globally.
Now, it’s only fair to remember that this number includes international sales, so even though the Note only became available on February 19 here in the States, it’s been on Asian shelves since October and U.K. shelves since November. → Read More
Now this is an interesting, if potentially flawed, concept. It’s called CoupFlip and it’s essentially a secondary market for Groupons, Amazon Deals, and the like. Say, for example, you buy a Groupon to the local stoat grooming place and you realize you don’t have a stoat. Before CoupFlip you’d have to hunt down the local chapter of the Stoat Lover’s Club and possibly sell your deal at a slight… → Read More
The Galaxy Note from Samsung has been a tough one for us to figure out. Is it a phone? Is it a tablet? Wait! Is that a stylus?
There was plenty to wonder about. But after spending quite a bit of time with the superphone, which you can relive with me here, John and I decided to chat out what all the fuss is about. → Read More
For better or worse, it seems as if Windows 8 will be available in nine separate editions. That’s up three flavors from Windows 7. The unofficial news comes from a registry key found within the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. If this key is to be believed, Windows 8 will be available in the six editions of Windows 7 with the addition of Windows 8 Professional Plus, Enterprise Evaluation, and ARM… → Read More
Former Disrupt winners Soluto love them some Windows. It’s their OS of choice and their products aspire to make it work a little better. Needless to say, they’re pretty excited about Windows 8 and to celebrate their unbridled joy they created this cute little commercial lampooning Apple’s original 1984 bit. → Read More
It may have taken longer than even its own creators might have guessed, but it’s finally come to pass: Brizzly, the Twitter/Facebook client that was bought by AOL as part of Thing Labs in September 2010, is shutting up shop at the end of March, with the news announced last night on Brizzly’s blog by Grant Shellen, and co-signed by Zachary Taylor and Jason Shellen, Brizzly’s and Thing Labs’… → Read More
There’s an old saying in London. You wait an hour for a bus and then three come along at once. Thus, for the last few years people have been asking me when London would get a large technology conference which catered for startups. Admittedly I had a good go with GeeknRolla, which has now been replaced by the London Web Summit on March 19. But now London is being spoiled by yet another event: Le… → Read More
Here are some recent posts from TechCrunch Gadgets, including a contest: → Read More
ForgeRock, the open source vendor behind the I³ Open Identity middleware platform, has raised $7 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners.
ForgeRock offers one unified platform approach to solve enterprise company’s secure Identity management challenges. The I³ Open Platform allows customers to manage Authentication, Access Management, User Entitlements, Federation, Identity lifecycle… → Read More
Barely two weeks ago, Erick was on hand at a news conference in which Barry Diller and company presented IAC’s latest media-tech investment — a startup called Aereo. Simply put, Aereo streams broadcast TV through the browser and provides a DVR in the cloud by “miniaturizing TV antennas and packing them in equipment that sits on the network,” as Erick wrote at the time. The cloud-based service… → Read More
With the social travel space taking off right now, and competition increasing, it really behooves the bigger players in the space not to do too much smelling of the roses. Social travel planning startup Gogobot would be a good example. The site found some early adoption and buzz, after winning a Crunchie for Best Design and was named one of the best 50 websites of 2011 by Time.
Initially… → Read More
It looks like Twitter has promoted three of its directors.
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment for this story, but the promotions aren’t exactly a secret. Both Elad Gil (pictured) and Joel Lunenfeld have updated their LinkedIn profiles to reflect their new titles — vice president of corporate strategy and vice president of global sales strategy, respectively. Gil joined Twitter after… → Read More
Tomorrow morning comes the moment Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman’s been waiting for seven years. According to the NYT, Yelp will drop on the NYSE under the YELP ticker tomorrow morning.
Yelp will be offering 7.15 million shares at $15 dollars a share, wanting to raise about $107.25 million in its IPO. The deal is said to be heavily over subscribed, and I’ve heard that some Yelpers were… → Read More
Say the Mayans are right, and a meteor or some other catastrophe strikes the Earth sometime later this year. Assuming we’re not all wiped out by the impact, emergency services worldwide are going to need to do some serious canvassing to assess damage, resources, and form a picture of the disaster.
DARPA is running a little game, called CLIQRQuest, to look into how such a network of people might… → Read More
There are few terms more overused these days than “social media expert.” Now Unified wants to actually certify those experts, through a new program called Unified University.
Unified calls itself “the first social operating platform” — it offers tools for planning, purchasing, and analyzing social media advertising campaigns. Even though CEO Sheldon Owen says he wants to build a big… → Read More
Boxee has slowly but surely been building out the adult content offered through its streaming service, and now there is one more in the mix: Pornhub (NSFW link) — which informally calls itself the YouTube for porn, offering a mix of user-generated and more professional content — is now also coming to the service.
But although adult material has long been one of the dead-certs in the world of… → Read More
Vocre was one of the more popular battlefield companies at Disrupt SF 2011; the automagical quality of the app and their excellent on-stage presentation made them one of the frontrunners. They haven’t been idle since then, though, and they’ve taken the advice of some critics who suggested their pay-per-use model was going to turn off users.
They’re releasing a new version of the app today with… → Read More
Users are tuning out of Google Music, the search engine’s foray into music cloud storage, streaming and sales. A high-ranking digital music executive told The Music Void that Google Music is losing users week after week, despite its preferred access to over 200 million Android installs,. Seems its lack of marketing, the missing Warner deal, and competition from iTunes Match and Spotify are taking… → Read More
Zynga is now officially launching its own web site for social games, and the move has got investors buying its stock. Shares are up nearly 10 percent as of market closing today towards $15 — or 50 percent of the $10 price it went public at back in December. Why? The obvious reason is that this is a way for Zynga to lessen its reliance on Facebook.
But Zynga is still using Facebook exclusively… → Read More
There are a number of companies that offer carrier billing for companies in the mobile space — that is, services that let people buy content on their devices and charge it right to their carrier — but there is only one that has secured deals with Facebook, Amazon and RIM to do it: an unassuming, Cambridgeshire, U.K.-based billing and analytics company by the name of Bango.
And while you may… → Read More
Kiip is making a big effort to recruit independent game developers today — it’s launching the self-serve version of its advertising platform, and it has also created a $100,000 fund to help developers build and market their Kiip-integrated games.
The startup has always pitched its rewards (such as free Pop Chips or Amazon Gift Cards) as a smart alternative to traditional mobile advertising… → Read More
Tumblr is clarifying its sticky position regarding the new policy to ban certain blogs from its network. You may remember last week, when the company took the bold stance that blogs promoting self-harm, including anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation and suicide, would no longer be allowed on its network.
Today, the company is following up on the policy change to explain that it’s not banning… → Read More
After filing for bankruptcy, Kodak is announcing that it will be selling off parts of its online photo services business Kodak Gallery for $23.8 million. The buyer? Online photo sharing platform Shutterfly.
Basically, the terms of the agreement include the transfer of all Gallery customer accounts and images in the U.S. and Canada to Shutterfly. Kodak Gallery allowed users to upload photos and… → Read More
In September, social game developer Idle Games launched on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, declaring that they were on a mission to become “the Pixar of casual games.” The startup’s first title, Idle Worship, is a throw-back to Peter Molyneux and EA’s Black & White, except, instead of finding it on a PC, Idle Worship will make its home on that social network everyone’s talking… → Read More
The new iPad, if rumors are to be believed, has an extremely high-resolution screen — better than most monitors and packed into a quarter of the display space. The result? iPhone 4-like Retina goodness. But it’s actually kind of hard to visualize this, since most pixel-dense displays are small, and we’re used to a certain level of aliasing on our bigger displays.
After a month long trial period, startup Graphicly is throwing the doors open to its digital publishing platform.
Since incubating at TechStars in 2009, Graphicly has shifted strategy. Co-founder and CEO Micah Baldwin says the company was first conceived as an “iTunes for comics” — the place where existing comics publishers could sell the digital versions of their titles. However, Baldin says… → Read More
A tug of war between innovation and monetization as Facebook grows could dilute The Hacker Way, says a paywalled piece from CNN Fortune. But a plan hatched since it filed its S-1 to IPO. Rather than sacrifice the user experience for revenue or vice versa, Facebook is merging the two. Content is being transformed into ads, and those ads are being blended into blank spaces and feeds where they’re… → Read More
Microsoft’s official Win8 Twitter feed has confirmed the inevitable: Win8′s Consumer Preview, a beta version of the new operating system, was downloaded 1 million times since launch. To put this into perspective, Microsoft sold seven copies of the software a second in 2010, and, yesterday, gave away 11 copies a second. → Read More
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