If you’re attending Google I/O this week, you will be a part of an experiment from the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. On its blog today, the team outlined its plan to gather a bunch of environmental information happening around you as you meander around the Moscone Center. → Read More
Apple’s Siri voice assistant on iOS devices retains information to help the company generate better and more accurate results in the analysis process that takes place at its remote servers. The company has never previously revealed exactly how long it keeps that data or how exactly it works, but now Wired has learned from an Apple spokesperson exactly how Siri IDs and store data, as well as for… → Read More
Gnip has found itself a sweet spot in partnering with startups who make data available via APIs. The company currently has access to Twitter and Tumblr’s firehoses, and has announced today that it will be making the publicly available data of Reddit, Instagram, bitly, Stack Overflow, Panoramio and Plurk available to its customers who rely on Gnip to do social reporting. Additionally… → Read More
If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City… → Read More
I keep seeing this topic push up about how data is affecting creativity. Some say we are losing our sense of narration and storytelling. It’s not this at all. We are just experiencing a shift that other civilizations have faced when the traditional means for storytelling transform to give a sense of the changing times facing society. That does not mean a rejection of the narrative form. The… → Read More
It’s often been said that we, as users, are “the product” of networks like Google or Facebook. But there is now a new wave of privacy centric start-ups seeking to give us back control of our personal data. One of these is Abine which boasts a suite of products that protect our online privacy. Data protection is the “new frontier”, Abine’s CEO Bill Kerrigan, who describes his startup as “the online… → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred and is ex-Electronic Arts.
I met Ryan Smith about nine years ago in a college apartment in Provo Utah. We were both attending school, and after asking him what he was working on he replied, “I’m building… → Read More
BrightBytes has been on a mission to “improve the way the world learns through data” — and, in turn, to help schools solve their technological woes. To do that, the San Francisco-based learning analytics startup provides schools with the tools and services they need to be able to more effectively measure the impact of technology on the learning process. → Read More
“Open” this, “open” that: It seems like everything is “open” these days. Well hello, people, Bill Gates’ gravy boat has run aground. It’s time to get out the Starship and fly in those open clouds. → Read More
AT&T announced on its consumer blog today that it will finally allow FaceTime over cellular available to all customers on a tiered data plan, after previously offering it first only to those with a Mobile Share plan and then later to those with both LTE devices and tiered plans. Took them long enough. → Read More
We told you about the super-simple and super-sticky voting app Polar for iOS a few weeks ago, and since then, the app has taken off quite nicely. When you use it, you’ll instantly see how people are exploring the platform to learn what they think about the things that they’re interested in. Sure, it’s a “polling” app, but calling it just that is selling it short. It’s quite addictive in a “Hot Or… → Read More
Today, we learned that Twitter made good on its promise to start letting its users download all of their tweets from the beginning of their history with the service. For many geeks, there is excitement about this. It means that Twitter is showing how truly “open” they can be when it comes to your data and information, finally catching up with companies like Facebook and Google, which both allow… → Read More
Singly, a startup aimed at simplifying the integration of third-party services in both web and mobile applications, is today launching its platform into open beta. Until now, the company has been in private beta testing with around 3,000 developers who are using Singly in some 250 applications, including TimeHop and Geekli.st, as well as Mural.ly, SalesLoft, Cloudmine, Farmstand, AdoptTogether… → Read More
Hot-or-not is a site that most of us who have used the web are familiar with. Sit down at your desk, look at pictures and profiles of a bunch of people, and respond to them with an easy voting interaction. That type of service has been popular over the years, but with the surge of mobile coming fast and furious the past few years, there are opportunities to take it to the next level.
Today, I… → Read More
For companies that want to use social data from services like Twitter, Gnip is one of the “resellers” if you will. The company has been a trusted partner of Twitter, WordPress, Disqus, and most recently, Tumblr, positioning itself as the go-to marketplace for social data to be used for marketing, analytics and sentiment analysis.
Today, Gnip announced a new partner program called “Plugged In To… → Read More
The founders behind Karma (no, not that Karma) think that there’s something fundamentally broken in the market for mobile providers. And they’re hardly alone. So, the TechStars grads set out to create a new format, one that eschews the traditional subscription model for a pay-as-you-go approach to mobile bandwidth.
In an effort to realize their vision of providing anyone and everyone with a… → Read More
At the Defrag conference in Broomfield, Colo., this week, three themes came in the forefront: APIs, identity and data. The themes reflect the tenor of the times, which can be summed up in the turmoil at Microsoft this week: Microsoft President Steve Sinofsky left the company. → Read More
Gnip is an interesting company. It might not be extremely sexy or one that gets a lot of attention in mainstream press, let alone tech blogs. But it’s one that provides data from social services for a cost. For example, Gnip is a partner with Twitter in sharing its firehose of data for customers who want to know what people are saying about their brand or company. → Read More
Clever, a graduate of Y Combinator’s most recent batch of startups, launched in late June to bring a bit of Twilio’s vision to education. During their time at Y Combinator, the accelerator’s co-founder Paul Graham challenged the team to integrate with 40 schools by the end of the program. Clever far-surpassed that goal, announcing this morning that over 2,000 K-12 schools have now adopted its… → Read More
Apple has reportedly begun work on a huge new data center facility in Prineville, Oregon, according to local reports from the Oregonian (as spotted this morning by Wired). The first phase of the project will reportedly cost $68 million, and this is just the latest in a string of data center initiatives. But Apple data demands are set to skyrocket, and the company needs to prepare. → Read More
Founded in 2010, Boston-based Healthrageous has developed a platform that helps individuals, employers, health providers and everyone in between, to prevent and manage chronic health conditions. The startup’s platform collects biometric data from users various health-tracking devices, which it combines with information on their personal preferences to assist in setting goals, action plans and to… → Read More
Locu, a Boston-based local business data provider born out of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s lab at MIT, is today officially launching its commerce dashboard for merchants. The company, which raised a $4 million Series A round led by General Catalyst in April, offers a proprietary system that can extract structured data about local businesses from their not-so-structured websites. Locu’s initial focus… → Read More
We don’t often try to get the word out about conferences put on by other blogs here at TechCrunch, but we’re about to. Because reasons. Namely: 1) We, as TechCrunch, will probably never ever ever, ever ever host a European cloud-computing conference and someone sure as heck needs to. 2) The folks at Gigaom are our friends, particularly founder, thought leader and king of the kind of industry… → Read More
Editor’s note: Gil Elbaz is an entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology. In 1998, he co-founded Applied Semantics, which developed contextual advertising products, including ASI’s AdSense. In 2003, Google acquired ASI, and after a four-year stint at Google, Gil found Factual in 2007. Follow him on Twitter.
The term data market brings to mind a traditional structure in which… → Read More
Editor’s note: Jeff Ma is the founder of tenXer, a startup that provides tools to help people better understand their performance, progress, and productivity at work. Previously, he helped start GolfSpan.com, CircleLending, and Citizen Sports. Follow him on Twitter.
The first thing you learn when you start playing Blackjack is something called basic strategy - a decision matrix that tells… → Read More
Everywhere you turned last week, there was another story about iOS 6 Maps. Some feel like it’s a great new direction for Apple, but people like me feel like we’re left with an ugly experience that shouldn’t have been introduced to the public in its current state. → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Weinberg is a staff attorney at Public Knowledge, an organization that preserves the openness of the Internet and the public’s access to knowledge; promotes creativity through balanced copyright; and upholds and protects the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully. Michael focuses primarily on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies… → Read More
One of the magical things about the Internet, and software in general, is that when you have a huge platform that is home to a large load of data, you can do cool things by opening it up a little bit. Genetic discovery company 23andMe has decided to open up an API to let developers build cool things on top of your genetic information.
It’s not as creepy as it sounds, because your data won’t be… → Read More
After Digg’s long fall, Betaworks acquired the site in July and put its News.me team in charge. Six weeks later, the new operators launched a complete overhaul of Digg. However, while interest in Digg had remained (a surprising amount, according to new CEO John Borthwick), the new site removed user access to old data, i.e. everything Digg users had ever posted to the old iterations of the site… → Read More
Waiting for the public markets to show a little more promise for tech IPOs, Openet has today announced that it’s completed a Series D round of funding totaling $21 million: $16 million in equity funds and $5 million in long term debt. Openet is a Dublin, Ireland-based developer of transaction management software used by 80 network operators in 28 countries — including AT&T, BT, Orange… → Read More
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