Last month, we took a look at some of the ways mobile technology is transforming the health industry. While there are many factors affecting this transformation, like artificial intelligence, big data, 3-D printing, social health networks, and remote communications, to name a few (check out Josh’s post on this here), unsurprisingly, change is coming at the hands of the growing ubiquity of cell phones, smartphones, and mobile devices. → Read More
Vonage has been battling Skype for many, many years, but they’re not letting up now that the latter has been acquired by Microsoft. The Internet calling company, which came dangerously close to dying a few years ago, this morning launched a new Vonage Mobile app for iPhone and Android, offering free calls and texts to anyone who also has the app installed (as predicted a few weeks ago).
This is hardly the first time Vonage has debuted apps for smartphone platforms, but this one is definitely worth checking out. → Read More
TastemakerX, an about-to-launch startup that will help music fans get credit for discovering the next big thing, has raised $1.2 million in Series A funding.
The company plans to launch its mobile app in early March, at South by Southwest — which seems perfect, given the event’s strong representation from both the music and tech worlds. Co-founder and CEO Marc Ruxin describes TastemakerX as “fantasy sports for music lovers,” a service where users can share their favorite music with their friends and where gaming elements encourage people to discover new musicians first. → Read More
There’s a reason why today’s news that Path was uploading its users’ entire address book to its database was stunning — all this time Path has been positioning itself as one of the good guys! … Sort of an alternative to Facebook … a kinder, gentler social network that only wanted to keep things between you and fifty of your closest friends, and then 150. And then …
It’s sort of jarring when a social network bills itself as private, and then quietly sucks up as much data as its leading — and notoriously data grabby — competitor. Still, even Facebook notifies you (via iOS notifications) that it’s grabbing your address book data. → Read More
LA-based, Science-backed startup Eventup launched this morning, providing people who want to rent or rent out spaces for events like parties and conferences with an easy-to-use platform from which to do so.
In the same space as Venuetastic, but with a wider array of venue options that go beyond bars to offerings like homes and even a farm ranch, EventUp wants to eventually control the entire events funnel from catering to invitations. Well that’s one way to corner a market, but what if Airbnb itself encroaches on your turf? → Read More
You have to love the accelerated development cycle that spins so fast in the tech industry’s echo chamber. Just as most Americans are starting to get comfortable with this whole “social revolution,” the tech industry has already exhausted every inch of “Social” (and social networking) to the degree that most are now tired of hearing about social. Case-in-point: A startup launching today, called Uniiverse, begins its pitch with this simple message, “Uniiverse is not a social network.” I advised co-founders Craig Follett, Ben Raffi and Adam Meghji to put that bit in caplocks going forward.
That’s part of the reason Uniiverse is resistant to being lumped in with social networks, as the Canadian startup is building an online platform that focuses on bringing value to our offline lives. → Read More
So yes, LinkedIn has bought contact management startup Rapportive, according to multiple sources we’ve contacted, as was first reported by Liz Gannes at AllThingsD.
The startup — which aggregates and displays the social networking accounts of the people you contact though Gmail — was backed for $1 million by seed investors Charles River Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, 500 Startups, Michael Zirngibl, Ashish Soni and David Cancel. → Read More
People really like Instagram. Founder Kevin Systrom recently appeared in a Best Buy Super Bowl ad paying tribute to mobile innovators, a testament to how far its come with a team of six. (Over 15 million users-far.) While Instagram is awesome (just ask Alexia) and offers a great tool for simple, hipster-elegant photo sharing, the startup hasn’t extended its reach to include mobile video. Yet.
After watching this formula bring Instagram more than a little attention, a number of startups have entered the mobile video sharing space, all clambering to become known as the real “Instagram of video.” → Read More
Yes, it’s another startup that wants to help businesses manage their presence on Facebook. Social Candy CEO Darin Kotalik admits that the’res no shortage of competition, but he’s hoping to differentiate his company by combining ease-of-use and breadth of features.
The company just announced that it’s expanding those features with by allowing businesses to offer coupons through their Social Candy-created Facebook pages. That’s an obvious way for Social Candy customers to drive traffic from Facebook into their stores — and to track exactly how effective those efforts are. Coupons can be set up in 15 minutes or less, and can automatically updated based on daily specials, Kotalik says. → Read More
Photo startup Snapjoy launched a clever promotional scheme this afternoon to lure users over from Flickr. And it succeeded — perhaps too well.
The Y Combinator-backed company aims to be an online repository where users can store all their photos, while also sharing them on a limited basis. That already made Snapjoy a competitor, of sorts, to older photo sites like (Yahoo-owned) Flickr and (Google-owned) Picasa, but the startup decided to make the competition more direct with a service called Flickraft, which promised to “rescue” photos from the “sinking ship” of Flickr by creating an easy way to transfer photos from Flickr to Snapjoy. → Read More
It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.
In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland. Maybe we should call it blow-dryer growth. → Read More
Silicon Valley investors have been going to Israel for decades to take advantage of its pool of hardcore tech entrepreneurs. But a new generation of consumer-focused companies has been emerging in the country over the last few years — and they’re facing a few challenges. One is that the local market is relatively small, which means that it can be harder for them to design and iterate products for mainstream users in large markets elsewhere. Another is that local venture funding has been skewing towards later-stage investments. Finally given the distance, access to potential partners and Silicon Valley knowledge network can also be difficult. → Read More
When we think about the distribution industry being disrupted, we tend to think about music and movies, whose physical media and vast shipment infrastructure have been rendered mostly obsolete over the last decade. To a lesser extent, we hear about print, and the effect of e-readers and web consumption on books and magazines. No one is making the change particularly gracefully, and the same can be said of the textbook business, which does millions of dollars of business every year selling incredibly expensive items to students — who likely consider them anachronisms.
Rice University, which has been pushing alternative distribution mechanisms for scholarly publications for years, has announced a new initiative, by which they hope to publish free, high-quality textbooks in core subjects like physics and biology via a non-profit publisher called OpenStax College. It’s the polar opposite of Apple’s iBooks textbooks, which, while they too help drag this dusty industry into the present, amount more to a new sales vector for the publishers than competition. → Read More
Say you, like me, wrote a book about the two Lithuanian lovers who find themselves trapped in a basement and have to solve mysteries and learn magic to escape the traps set by them by an evil wizard robot using their brawn, brains, and a little sultry lovemaking. How would you publish and sell it?
Presumably you would visit the Kindle, B&N, and Apple book stores and upload it, making it available on all of those platforms and raking in the dough. Now, however, you can just use Booktango.
→ Read More
For decades, Hollywood has been portraying machines that humans can converse with, delegate tasks to, and command. Remember the HAL 9000, KITT the car, COMPUTER from Star Trek, or even the brilliantly conceived and visualized Apple “Knowledge Navigator” from over 20 years ago? The day is dawning.
Hello Siri. → Read More
If you want to slay orcs and elves, there’s plenty of options, but the millions of car racing gamers out there have few places to chase the checkered flag. That’s going to change because today, Ignite Game Technologies closed a $5 million Series C round from private investors bringing it to $17.5 million in funding. It will use the cash to speed up development of its recently launched Simraceway freemium game, as well as its skill matching technology.
Ignite plans to hook users with high-profile licensed content, accurate physics, and addictive gameplay to get users paying to race or buy cars. → Read More
26 models of Trendnet webcams have been identified as vulnerable to a bug that lets anyone tap into the video stream with just an IP address. The flaw was noted a month ago and the company has been working to alert people and patch the devices. Unfortunately, the company has no way of contacting non-registered webcam owners, and so the devices may remain accessible if the users never suspect anything.
It’s a bit scary, but certainly not unprecedented. Although it’s not quite the same thing, two years ago a school was accused of spying on its students via the webcams in school-owned laptops (the district later settled). This time, it’s hackers who found their way in, and randoms on the internet who spent long hours watching the feeds. → Read More
Yahoo has its new CEO, Scott Thompson, and founder Jerry Yang stepped down from the company and the board a few weeks ago. But all along, people have been asking when is the rest of the Yahoo board going to resign?
Well, that day is today for four more directors, including chairman Roy Bostock. He was sticking around to try to oversee the disposition of Yahoo’s Asian assets. It doesn’t look like that is going so well. Today, in his letter to shareholders, Bostock disclosed that he would not be standing for re-election to the board, and neither would 3 other directors. Meanwhile, Yahoo elected two new board members: Maynard Webb and Alfred Amoroso. → Read More
Enterprise software company Jive has just reported fourth quarter results, which represent the company’s first earnings report as a public company. Q4 total revenue came in at $22.5 million, up 53% year-over-year. The company continued to take losses in terms of profit, posting a net loss of $12.7 million for the quarter (GAAP), compared to a net loss of $6.8 million for the same period last year. Non-GAAP net loss for the fourth quarter was $9.1 million, compared to a net loss of $5.7 million for the same period last year. Analysts expected a loss of $0.39 per share and revenue of $21.01 million.
Within total revenue, product revenue was $19.2 million for the fourth quarter, an increase of 61% on a year-over-year basis. Professional Services revenue for the fourth quarter was $3.3 million, an increase of 21% on a year-over-year basis.
→ Read More
What started as a bit of aimless tinkering for developer Arun Thampi ultimately unearthed something very surprising about life-sharing service Path. As a fan of the app, Thampi took it upon himself to look at the API calls that the app made to Path’s service and found that his “entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path.” → Read More
