July 2012
Sonos Retina-ifys Their iPad App
One pet peeve I had with the Sonos system was the quality of the UI on high-res screens. While it is, after all, just a remote control, the app was…
Report: The Next-Gen iPhone Will Have A Thinner, Higher Quality Display
Yesterday, we got a glimpse at a leaked front-casing for what we believe to be the iPhone 5, showing a centered FaceTime camera hole. Today, however, we have but the…
Peter Thiel To Eric Schmidt: Admit It, Google Is No Longer A Technology Company
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel offered wildly differing views on the state of the technology industry last night at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. During…
Mobile Video Sharing App Socialcam Acquired By Autodesk For $60 Million
There’s been a race on over the last year among mobile video sharing apps, many of which have sought to replicate the same type of success that Instagram had with…
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: taking pics with a tablet is offensive to the human race. That said, viewing pics on a tablet is a very…
To Connect Campaigners With Housing, Tripping Launches Sites For Obama And Romney Volunteers
Every four years, millions of volunteers travel around the country in support of their candidate of choice, often setting up shop in battleground states. That means a whole lot of…
Egnyte Raises $16 Million From Google Ventures For Cloud File Storage Service
Egnyte has raised $16 million from Google Ventures for its cloud file storage solution. Exisiting investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Polaris also participated in the Series C round.…
Log Management Startup Loggly Raises Another $5.7M, Hires Charlie Oppenheimer As Its New CEO
Loggly, a startup helping companies like Intuit, Airbnb, and BBC track their application logs, just announced that it has raised $5.7 million in new funding. The company has new executives…
Samsung Lays Out $310M For CSR’s Mobile Business, And Crucially, Its IP
Samsung has acquired the mobile business of British chipmaker CSR for $310 million. CSR, a public company, has been hit by the falling fortunes of its customers such as Research…
Mobile Rewards Network Kiip Raises $11M Led By Relay Ventures, Plans Its Own ‘Kiipsake’ App
Kiip, a startup allowing brands to promote themselves in mobile apps through rewards and contests, has raised $11 million in Series B funding. The company sells its approach as a…
Group Buying In The Baltics: Cherry Media Claims Top E-Commerce Spot
Groupon-style group buying is alive and well in the Baltics it would seem. Cherry Media, the largest daily deals operator in the region, has put out some impressive numbers today:…
HootSuite Kicks Off International Expansion, Swoops Into London, Looking To Hire 50 By 2013
Social media management services are big business at the moment, with Oracle and Salesforce snapping up a number of properties in the last couple of months. And now, in their…
WAC Whacked: Telecom-Backed Alliance Merges Into GSMA, Assets Acquired By API Management Service Apigee
Apigee, the API management company that was most recently spotted powering that new “print to Walgreens” feature in half a dozen or so mobile applications, is now acquiring the technology…
Ambitious To Be The Next Online-Only Uniqlo, India’s Freecultr Gets $9M From Ru-Net, Sequoia
A lot of global clothing brands turn to India these days to manufacture their products. But today comes news of a $9 million funding round for an online clothing brand…
PR Done Right: Facebook Engineer Apologizes On Reddit For Blocking Imgur Links
Facebook software engineer Matt Jones has taken to Reddit to apologize to users for accidentally blocking popular image hosting site Imgur while working to catch malicious URLs. The image below…
The “Hail Marissa” Play
The Yahoo second quarter 2012 earnings call is tomorrow, which is why the news that Google star Marissa Mayer is taking over as CEO today is shocking but not, sort…
RelayRides Teams Up With OnStar, Makes Car Sharing Easier For Millions Of GM Owners
Car sharing is suddenly a hot topic and a number of startups like Getaround, Wheelz and JustShareIt are trying to capture a slice of this nascent market. Detroit-based RelayRides just…
The Semantic Web’s promise is about developing common frameworks that allows data to be shared and reused across applications and platforms. At its heart comes the understanding that applications are…
Marissa Mayer: The First Ever Pregnant CEO Of A Fortune 500 Tech Company?
Talk about a big news day. Marissa Mayer, who was just appointed to be the new CEO of Yahoo (her first day on the job is tomorrow), has announced that…
Facebook’s News Feed Sorely Needs A “Read It Later” Button, And That’s Where Spool Comes In
Here’s a common problem: you notice an awesome article, video, or song in the Facebook news feed but there’s no easy way to save it for later. So while Facebook…
Gift Card Payment Network Openbucks Raises $4.8 Million Series A, Led By Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang
Openbucks, a startup creating a gift card-based payment network (and a former TechCrunch Disrupt finalist), is announcing today it has closed $4.8 million in Series A funding, in a round…
Paul Maritz Out As VMware CEO And Mentioned As Candidate For Top Spot At EMC Or Cloud Foundry Spin Off
Paul Maritz is out as the CEO of VMware and will be replaced by EMC COO Pat Gelsinger. Maritz spent four years at VMware. It’s uncertain what he will do…
Augmented Reality Explorer Steve Mann Assaulted At Parisian McDonald’s
You deserve a break today, indeed. Augmented reality pioneer Steve Mann visited a Parisian McDonald’s with his family earlier this month. Mann has a system called the EyeTap physically installed…
Live Nation Labs, Rexly Co-Founders Explain Acquisition & Vision For Mobile
Live Nation Labs, the investing arm of music giant Live Nation, has purchased music discovery app Rexly for an undisclosed amount. The deal, which had been in the works for…
Dwolla Democratizing APIs With New Non-Technical Portal
An API is a “must have” feature for many tech startus. Mailchimp CEO Ben Chestnut went so far as to write that the company’s API is “probably the best marketing…
This morning Microsoft sent us a guide to the new Microsoft Office. It’s 53 pages. It reviews every feature imaginable. Read though the document and it’s evident Microsoft did what…
Yahoo’s Neglected Global Labs Network Might Hold Key To Revival
What a time for Marissa Mayer to take control at Yahoo. She’ll need all the smarts she can lay her hands on to revive an ailing Yahoo. Which is why…
Marc Andreessen Dances Around Facebook IPO, Says ‘The Public Market Hates Tech Stocks’
The debate over whether the Facebook IPO was or wasn’t a disaster is probably getting a bit tired, but at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, the magazine’s managing editor…
Donald J. Sobol, Creator Of Encyclopedia Brown, Dead At 87
Donald J. Sobol, author of the acclaimed Encyclopedia Brown series of children’s mystery books, died last Wednesday of natural causes. He was 87. The author released his first book in…
Marc Andreessen On Marissa Mayer Joining Yahoo: ‘It’s Great For The Valley’
Barely an hour after longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer was announced as the new CEO of Yahoo, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen praised the move while on-stage at the Fortune Brainstorm…
