Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Ashton Kutcher took the stage with Guy Oseary to talk about their A-Grade fund. Arrington started right away about a rumor that the fund is raising money at a $100 million valuation. The two partners confirm the rumors, saying that they are raising “enough money.” It means that financial institutions and companies will invest a certain amount of money in… → Read More
Silicon Valley didn’t believe in actor-investors, just a few years ago. Then Ashton Kutcher stepped in and started making a bunch of smart, well-informed bets. He has money in Skype, Foursquare, Flipboard, Airbnb and Path, as well as less consumer-y startups like Optimizely and MemSQL. He’s continued into a solid range of earlier-stage startups via his own investment fund, A-Grade Investments. → Read More
The Hunt, a site that helps you find items to buy from photos posted on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and elsewhere, is today announcing $700,000 in additional funding, on top of the $2 million it had previously raised from Javelin Venture Partners and others. The new round involves several high-profile investors including Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary’s (Madonna’s manager) A-Grade Investments, … → Read More
Method actors are known to go to extreme lengths to understand the character they’re portraying. Natalie Portman dropped a whopping 20 lbs to play a ballerina in Black Swan.
Ashton Kutcher’s preparation for playing Steve Jobs in the biopic jOBS was so extreme it left him in the hospital. According to USA Today, he spent two days in the hospital after trying to stick to Steve Jobs’ fruitarian… → Read More
As you may have heard, Steve Jobs will be getting the Ashton Kutcher treatment in “jOBS”, the first biopic to be released since the Apple co-founder passed away last year. Not to be confused with Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s biography, jOBS reportedly covers the forty “definitive” years of Jobs’ life, beginning in 1971. → Read More
“IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry?” Steve Jobs asks us.
“No,” we cheer in unison.
“The entire information age?!?” He asks again, “Was George Orwell right about 1984?” Before we have the opportunity to answer again, the Apple CEO introduces the crowd to the famous 1984 commercial… → Read More
OpenTable for hair stylists and other salon professionals StyleSeat is announcing a raise of $775K this morning, from enviable angel investors Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade, Founders Fund (!) and actress Sophia Bush.
The round will be added on to the company’s previous $700K from another Valley “Who’s Who?” list of investors including Jeff Clavier, Chris Sacca Dave Morin, … → Read More
If you weren’t paying attention to anything but important news today you might not have noticed that Ashton Kutcher had turned over his tweeting privileges to the social media division of his company Katalyst Media. “But why?,” you ask, because it’s late and you’re wasting time on the Internet even though you’re super busy or should be sleeping.
Well because Kutcher, who has about eight million… → Read More
Tech investor Ashton Kutcher took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today to talk with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to talk about his investments and participation in the technology community. Interestingly enough, Kutcher’s art is actually imitating his life, he will be playing tech investor Walden Schmidt in CBS’ “Two and a Half Men” — Schmidt, like Kutcher, is also a tech investor, a dot com… → Read More
Whose tweets lead to more actual sales, Ashton Kutcher’s or Kevin Rose’s? The answer is not immediately obvious. Kutcher boasts 7.3 million Twitter followers to Rose’s 1.3 million, but a recent promotion run by design shopping site Fab.com suggests that raw numbers don’t always translate to more sales.
Both Kutcher and Rose recently tweeted out a link that gave their followers $10 off any… → Read More
According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.
That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and… → Read More
Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in Airbnb (whose CEO Brian Chesky was … → Read More
DNA, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s foundation for sex trafficking awareness, has launched its social media campaign this week, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls.” If you get past the absurdity of their ads (and they are absurd on so many levels) and visit the DNA Facebook page you’ll encounter some shocking statistics about the prostitution industry. For example, over 12 million people are at risk for… → Read More
This list is in. Time has released its annual Time 100 list, honoring the most influential people in the world. There are a lot of interesting names including Sarah Palin and President Obama, but let’s focus on the names from the tech sphere.
Moot (the creator of 4chan), Jeff Bezos, The Twitter Guys, Sam & Dan Houser, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Nathaniel Silver, Nandan Nilekani, and Shai Agassi… → Read More
The race between actor Ashton Kutcher and CNN to a million Twitter followers at first seemed to be little more than an exercise in online vanity. But then it transformed into a race to help out a cause, Malaria No More, in a meaningful way. But really, why does anyone need a race to do that?
With that in mind, tomorrow, Kutcher, with his nearly 1.4 million followers, and Digg’s Kevin Rose, with… → Read More
Ashton Kutcher stopped by TC50 to represent and show off blahgirls.com. The Blah Girls are an animated clique of girls that comment on entertainment and celebrity gossip. Landing somewhere between South Park and the Powerpuff Girls, the humor is delivered in the form of a blog and a video that is updated twice weekly. → Read More
We here at CrunchGear are no strangers to frivolous lawsuits (Peter Ha, for example, married then divorced two sisters in one family and that still hasn’t gotten sorted out. Crazy bigamy/incest laws!), but this one takes the cake. A gentleman named Richard Figueroa is apparently representing an image of Ashton Kutcher that used to show up on Google when you searched for the Punk’d… → Read More
While we’re spending our time pushing our Destroy Your Landline Contest, wherein you the readers are implored to destroy your traditional landline phones, something comes up that makes us want to perhaps hold on to ours. Ooma is a new Vonage-like VoIP service that tweaks the formula just enough to perhaps survive where companies like SunRocket have failed. The VoIP ideal has been around, and… → Read More
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