May 20th, 2013

YouLike Is A Dating Site That Thinks The Key To Finding Love Is Hate

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YouLike, a startup backed by the founders of Turkish eBay clone GittiGidiyor (which in 2011 was acquired by the online auction giant for $217 million), describes itself as an interest-based social network and dating site that takes into account a user’s dislikes, as much as what they do like, when helping to find like-minded people to friend or date. → Read More

May 19th, 2013

YouTube Turns Eight As Platform Surpasses More Than 100 Hours Of Video Uploaded Per Minute

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YouTube turns eight years old today, reminding each of us in some odd way how young or old we really are. Remember, the company launched back in 2005, the same year that Michael Jackson was found not guilty of child molestation, and Lance Armstrong was winning his seventh Tours De France, and Arrested Development was still on the air.

A lot has changed since then, but YouTube’s growth remains… → Read More

May 18th, 2013

Hell No, Tumblr Users Won’t Go To Yahoo!

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We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “cool” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform Tumblr, but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale. → Read More

May 18th, 2013

How Hike, India’s Fast Growing Mobile Messaging App, Is Banking On SMS & Local Diversity To Beat The Big Boys

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It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its 5m registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200m+ monthly active users, and 600bn messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it’s 4… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Grubless? Online Takeout Giants GrubHub And Seamless In Talks To Merge [Confirmed]

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Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems.

As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Zynga Tells CupidWithFriends To Stop Using ‘With Friends’

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Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site’s name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga’s trademarks.

CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps Flock and Wednesday Night). The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Facebook’s Growth Since IPO In 12 Big Numbers

Facebook Growth

$FB is still stuck at $26.25, way down from its $38 IPO price, but it’s made important progress since going public a year ago. Daily users up 26%, mobile monthly users up 56%, and revenue up 38% are some highlights. It’s running out of people to sign up in the developed world, but with this growth and no serious competitor in sight, it’s survived its hardest year yet. → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Backupify Is Phasing Out Free Consumer Products; Drops Support For Facebook Personal Profiles, Blogger, Picassa And Flickr

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Earlier this week we reported on how Backupify was closing down TweetBackup, a free service to back up your Twitter account that it acquired in 2010; now we have confirmed that, as we’d heard, this is part of a bigger plan at the company to phase out consumer services altogether, as Backupify focuses its efforts on paid services for enterprise customers. From today, it will stop accepting new… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Social Trip Planning App Tripshare Converts Travel Inspiration To Bookings

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Tripshare, an iPad application for travel planning, is joining a crowded space. But its CEO knows a little something about the industry – Bob Dana was the former employee No. 1 and first CFO of Virgin America. He once wrote the business plan and feasibility study for Sir Richard Branson in 2003. And now he’s doing a travel startup. Dana tells us the inspiration for Tripshare was based… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

MessageMe Raises A $10M Series A Led By Greylock As It Gears Up For Money And Premium Services In Its Rich Messaging App

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MessageMe — a messaging app that launched in March with a little Facebook controversy thrown in — has raised another $10 million, according to an SEC filing earlier today. The Series A round was led by Greylock Partners; and as part of it, John Lilly, the ex-CEO of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock, will be joining the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

CrowdOptic Raises Another $1M To Build Experiences Based On Where Your Phone Is Pointing

ticketek friend spotter

CrowdOptic, a startup with technology for identifying where people are pointing their smartphone cameras, has raised another $1 million in funding.

When I’ve spoken to the team in the past, they’ve emphasized the ways this could be used to create new types of social interactions — if people are attending a live event and pointing their cameras at the same thing, they can start chatting and… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

FixYa’s New FixBoard Allows Companies To Track Customer Support Trends

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FixYa, a Q&A site where consumers can seek advice from product experts, is launching a new feature today called the FixBoard, which should make the site more useful to big consumer brands.

As the name suggests, the FixBoard is basically a dashboard of FixYa data. It shows, over time, the number of FixYa owners who reported a problem with a company product, the products that have the most… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Yahoo Partners With Twitter To Further Personalize Homepage Newsfeed

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Yahoo and Twitter have partnered to bring tweets directly into Yahoo homepage’s newsfeed on web and mobile, the company announced this morning. The move follows the February relaunch of the front page. At the time, the company debuted a redesigned site with an increased emphasis on personalization, as well as a more modern design. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Bloglovin Redesigns Its Fashion-Focused Blog Reader To Highlight Popular Content, Social Features

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Bloglovin, a site where readers can follow blogs about fashion and other lifestyle topics, is getting what CEO and co-founder Mattias Swenson said is its first major redesign.

Until now, Swenson said Bloglovin has been adding new features in a more incremental way. This time it’s getting a new look and new social capabilities that the Bloglovin team hopes will please both the hardcore users and… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

With PayPal-Like Ambitions For Bitcoin, BitPay Raises $2M Led By Founders Fund

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BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in what is a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPal Mafia. → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Twitter Archiving Service TweetBackup Hits The Deadpool As Owner Backupify Focuses More On Enterprise

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Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the Cambridge, MA cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down TweetBackup, a company originally founded in Sweden that Backupify acquired in 2010 for an undisclosed amount. Tweetbackup has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Google Unites Gmail And G+ Chat Into “Hangouts” Cross-Platform Text And Group Video Messaging App

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Today at I/O, Google rebranded “Hangouts” as a new unified, cross-platform messaging system. It lets people text, photo, and group video message across Hangouts’ Android and iOS apps, plus its Gmail and Google+ site integrations. Hangouts rolls out today, replacing Google Talk [GChat] and G+ Messenger. While it doesn’t support SMS yet, it could challenge Facebook Messaging and Apple’s iMessage. → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Google+ Redesigns Its Stream To Include Multi-Column Google Now-Esque Cards, Auto-Hashtags And More

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Google+, the social layer that Google introduced almost two years ago, has evolved quite a bit since its launch. Today, the company announced a complete redesign, taking cues from the mobile experience that has drawn positive feedback from those who don’t even use the service. In total, Google has launched 41 new features for Google+, including a completely revamped Photo product, Hangouts app and… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Georgia Tech Teams Up With Udacity, AT&T To Offer $6K Master’s Degree In Computer Science, Entirely Online

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If there was any question as to Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s resolve to re-imagine higher education in a more affordable, accessible virtual classroom — or their ability to actually make any real headway among the Ivory Towers of academia — we should probably just go ahead and put that to bed. This morning, Udacity continues to push forward with its plans to bring higher education online — and… → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Facebook Now Lets You Rate Movies, TV, And Books To Turn Graph Search Into A GoodReads For Everything

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Facebook is hoping to give developers a better way to get discovered and improve Graph Search. So today it announced it’s finished rolling out “Sections” for Timeline that show what apps you use, which people now add 200 million items to daily. New features coming alongside the rollout include the ability for users to rate different types of media and for developers to track traffic from Sections. → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Update Your Facebook Status And Comment Using Google Glass And Your Voice With ThroughGlass

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We wrote about an app for Google Glass that let you share photos to Facebook, but another one has come out that has a way more interesting feature, the ability to create status messages or comment on on the social network with the sound of your voice. → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Nokia’s Smart Devices Chief On Instagram, Android, Phablets & The Continued Lack Of A 41MP PureView Lumia

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Nokia has added another device to its burgeoning Lumia portfolio of smartphones today, with the introduction of the Lumia 925: a sleek, PureView-branded handset that will be its first flagship on T-Mobile U.S. At today’s London launch, Nokia executive VP of smart devices, Jo Harlow, sat down with TechCrunch to field a few questions. → Read More

May 14th, 2013

To Ease Small Screen Nesting, Pinterest Mobile Adds Search Suggestions, Mentions, And Notifications

Mobile Updates

Pinterest works best on the web, with its big images and pinning from other browser tabs. But mobile is the future and Pinterest needs to play catch up there. Today Pinterest mobile added search suggestions to make single screen pinning easier. Its iOS and Android apps also got basics like notifications and mentions. Pinterest will need to add value, not just port its website, to win on mobile. → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Everyme Co-Founder Oliver Cameron Launches Limelight, A Social App For Finding What To Watch Next

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With a new iPhone app called Limelight, Oliver Cameron (best-known as the co-founder of private social network Everyme) aims to answer the question, “What am I going to watch tonight?”

The app’s basic functionality is pretty straightforward. You can create lists of movies that you’ve watched (rating them between 0 and 5 stars) and that you want to watch. You can also browse lists of highly… → Read More

May 14th, 2013

To Test The Bitcoin Waters, Adam Draper’s Boost.vc Accelerator Adds Backing From Lightspeed, Beluga Founder & More

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As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding… → Read More

May 14th, 2013

With Oggl From Hipstamatic, Vyclone And More, Nokia Focuses On Camera Features (But Still No Instagram In Sight)

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Nokia is going big on the camera features in its new 925 and 928 Lumia devices, continuing on in its PureView legacy first introduced back when it was still making Symbian devices. Within that it is adding a few key apps to the device — Oggl from Hipstamatic, the slick video sharing app Vyclone and Cinemagraph — but there is still no sign of popular picture-taking and picture-sharing app… → Read More

May 13th, 2013

Wednesday Night’s Human Matchmakers And Coaches Take Some Of The Work Out Of Online Dating

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If existing dating websites aren’t working for you (or you’re too busy to try them out), you can get help from paid matchmakers and dating coaches on the just-launched service Wednesday Night.

According to the startup, users connect their Facebook accounts and are then given three recommendations. (You can see a mock-up of a recommendation email below.) If they’re interested in dating one of… → Read More

May 13th, 2013

Akimbo Lands $850K From Rackspace Co-founder & Others To Bring Prepaid Debit Cards Into The Social, Mobile Era

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With the proliferation of smartphones, we’re now able to use these mobile, mini computers to do just about everything we would do on our desktop while on the go. Yet, in spite of this evolution, mobile payments seems to be lagging behind. We use our phones to capture pictures and video, and share them instantaneously, but the average smartphone carrier is less comfortable with the idea of paying… → Read More

May 13th, 2013

Facebook Kills Social Roulette, The App With A 1/6 Chance Of Deleting Your Facebook Account

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If you want a digital detox, you’re going to have to pull the trigger yourself. Social Roulette is an app that would delete one in six users’ Facebook account data, but its founder confirms it’s been blocked by Facebook so it no longer functions. While there’s no specific policy prohibiting apps from deleting your data, Social Roulette is clearly counter to Facebook’s mission and business model. → Read More

May 13th, 2013

“Myspace For Millionaires” ASMALLWORLD Pivots Into A $105-A-Year VIP Travel Club

ASMALLWORLD

ASMALLWORLD launched its invite-only social network for the rich and famous in 2004. Today it’s becoming even more exclusive and pivoting away from its advertising model, as its relaunching as a subscription travel club where the elite meet to enjoy perks around the globe. With $105 a year and an invite, ASMALLWORLD (ASW) helps you make friends with its trusted 250,000-member community wherever… → Read More