After reports earlier this month that LinkedIn was buying contact management service Rapportive, the startup just published a blog post confirming that yes, it has been acquired.
For those of you who don’t use it, Rapportive is a Gmail plugin that shows you the latest social network updates from whoever you’re corresponding with. (I’ve gotten so used to seeing the Rapportive window next to my emails that I sometimes forget that it’s not a default part of Gmail.) And if you’re a Rapportive user who’s worried that the deal will follow the pattern of so many other startup acquisitions, it sounds like LinkedIn won’t be shutting Rapportive down. → Read More
There’s a new startup called Tugg launching today — it’s led by Nicolas Gonda, who was a producer on The Tree Of Life, and it promises audience members that they can create their own movie screenings at local theaters.
When I asked why theaters would want to do this, Gonda and his co-founder Pablo Gonzalez (they’re CEO and COO, respectively) said via email that the idea came from Gonda’s work with filmmakers — this is supposed to complement existing distribution methods. → Read More
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Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.
The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product. → Read More
ToutApp, the email productivity app that emerged as part of the 500Startups Summer Accelerator program last year, is rolling out a new feature that will let users track their emails right from within Salesforce. With the update, users will be able to see who viewed their emails, when they were viewed, where they were viewed, what the recipient clicked on, and how long they read the email.
Creepy? OK, maybe. But for serious CRM users, it’s kind of great, too. → Read More
If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?) → Read More
140 Proof, a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup.
Like the company’s existing 140-character text units, the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads. Users should be able to click and watch the video without leaving the page, rate it, and bring up a feed of all the tweets mentioning the advertiser’s hashtag. → Read More
Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.
Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself. → Read More
New York City startup InVision has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to help companies answer an important question: Are we building something that people will actually want to use?
The funding comes from FirstMark Capital. Managing director Amish Jani says he was excited to invest because, for one thing, co-founders Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel are addressing a real problem that they faced. InVision came out of the pair’s web design consultancy, where they say they were frustrated by the lack of tools for creating a design prototype that actually provided a reasonable stand-in for the finished product. → Read More
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Storify has become one of the main ways that people can create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. And now you can do that curation from your iPad.
The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially curated timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with its tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can create those stories on a mobile device, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad. → Read More
If you’re a big website, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems.
Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to co-founder and chief executive Nitzan Miron, as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system. → Read More
There’s a lot of noise in our social media channels. I’m busy clogging up your Twitter feed with my deep thoughts, your friends are sharing their millionth baby picture on Facebook, and Scoble is filming startups in your living room on Google+. There is an unfathomable amount of data being produced every second, as social networks, apps, chat, etc. now facilitate real-time communication and sharing — making email feel like the Pony Express. This makes it nearly impossible for people (and their businesses) to stay on top of — among other things — the real-time communication happening between their customers. → Read More
Following its recent raise of $2 million in seed funding, the still invite-only mobile payments startup Zipmark is today announcing the launch of its developer program and API. The New York-based company, founded in 2010 by Citigroup alum Jay Bhattacharya and CTO Jake Howerton, leverages the existing check processing network to allow users to avoid credit card fees while also eliminating the risk of bounced checks.
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You may not know this, but Turkey has a fever. And the only prescription is more games. That’s right. Sifting through some of Pando Networks’ recent numbers on international gaming, we found that Turkey owns an increasing share of the global downloads of free-to-play games. Over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free games climbed to over 5 million, a 534 percent increase since 2010 — and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population. → Read More
Australian-based travel marketplace Jayride.com has lined up $400,000 AUD in seed funding for its ride-sharing service, which also aggregates transportation data. The angel funding was led by Andrey Shirben, one of the first investors in Kenshoo, a digital marketing software company. In addition to helping in the financing, Shirben will also bring his digital marketing expertise to assist the company, as well as connect Jayride with other players in the global travel sector.
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Entrepreneurs and small businesses are integral to the engine of job creation. According to the White House, companies less than five years old created 44 million jobs over the last three decades in the U.S. and what’s more, accounted for all net new jobs created over that time. In a struggling economy, the incubators and accelerators that help grow startups and SMBs, giving them access to the network and capital they need to grow, are essential to job creation and building a healthy economy. → Read More
OMGPOP, the social game-maker formerly known as iminlikewithyou, says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.
Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated (like a zombie), then their friends are supposed to guess what it is.
Players have already created more than 20 million drawings, Porter says. The game’s average load is now 50 drawings per second, and where the company took nine days to reach its first 10 million drawings, it’s now seeing 10 million new drawings every 24 hours. → Read More
Zynga’s Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal who led the company to a 233% increase in ad revenue this year is leaving to become COO of Kiip, which lets brands reward gamers with real world prizes. Anekal is a monetization rockstar who pioneered social game brand integrations, helping companies like McDonald’s offer FarmVille players in-game powerups.
But now he’s moving to Kiip’s greener pastures seeking a bigger impact with a startup that’s aiding developers and redefining brand advertising for the next big opportunity: mobile → Read More
Startup Rocket Fuel claims to apply “rocket science” to ad campaigns, and it sounds like that science is turning into real revenue. The company says it made $44.5 million in revenue last year, compared to $16.6 million in 2010 and $2.4 million in 2009.
In fact, CEO George John tells me that in the fourth quarter of 2011, the company was profitable for the first time. Not that he plans to stay profitable — he says it would be “weird” for Rocket Fuel to be profitable all the time, since it’s trying to grow. Instead, he plans to be “slightly unprofitable” until Q4 2012, when it will probably be profitable again, thanks in part to seasonal cycles. → Read More
Mobilisafe, the stealthy Seattle-based mobile security startup with $1.2 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Equity Partnership, is opening up access to its private beta program today (invite link below) for a handful of TechCrunch readers.
In addition, the company is revealing new insights it gained during its private beta period related to the penetration of mobile devices in the SMB market – the area which happens to be the startup’s current area of focus. → Read More
Forkly, the food rating app from Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May, just launched a major update dubbed “Forkly 2.0.” Along with a user interface overhaul which features a faster feed, bigger photos and an upgraded user profile design, the app update also includes improved menus and a “Discover” function to offer better, personalized recommendations. Hey, your Forkly “taste graph” just got useful!
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