October 2013
Health Startup Noom Receives NIH Grant To Study Smartphone Tech In Eating Disorder Treatment
In the field of fitness trackers and apps, evidence of their efficacy is often anecdotal. The New York-based health startup Noom is looking to back their technology up with harder…
eBay Adds 200 “Trendsetter” Star Curators, More Social Features To Its Marketplace
The influence of social media continues to extend beyond platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and today, eBay is throwing its hat into the ring. It is unveiling a series of…
eBay Acquires UK Startup Shutl To Change The Ecommerce Game With One Hour Delivery
eBay has announced an agreement to acquire Shutl, the UK-based marketplace that uses a network of couriers to deliver local goods within a couple of hours of an online purchase.…
Cannonball For iPad Reorganizes Your Inbox Automatically, But It’s Not For Power Users
There’s no shortage of apps which are trying to build a better interface for managing email. The latest to join the melee is Cannonball, an iPad application which reorganizes the…
Live From Apple’s New iPad Announcement
It’s that time again! We’re live at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where Apple CEO Tim Cook is set to take the stage to debut everything the…
WunWun Triples Orders Since Launch, Partners With Dwolla For Payment
Hot on the heels of Dwolla’s big Dwolla Credit news, WunWun on-demand delivery service has some news of its own. Starting today, users of the service will be able to…
Video AdTech Startup Teads Closes $5.2M Series A, From Partech & Elaia, To Prep International Push
French video adTech startup Teads, which sells technology allowing publishers to embed video ads within articles that automatically play when they become visible on the user’s screen, has closed a…
Enterprise Software Company Blue Rooster Raises $3M, Opens Hong Kong Office
Enterprise software company Blue Rooster announced today that it has raised $3 million from PFU Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu. Seattle-based Blue Rooster said the funding is the…
Apply For The TechCrunch Boston Pitch-Off Now
We’re going to Boston and are looking for a few good startups to pitch. It’s been too long since we’ve had an event in Boston. So we’re doing it big…
Announcing New Hardware Battlefield Judges Slava Rubin, Brady Forrest, And Trae Vassallo
Another day, another great set of judges for this year’s Hardware Battlefield set to coincide with CES 2014. We are pleased to announce that Indiegogo’s Slava Rubin, Brady Forrest of…
InMobi Launches New AppGalleries, A White Label App Store For Publishers To Curate Apps, And Boost Mobile Ads
Just over a year after InMobi bought MMTG Labs, the mobile ad company is today unveiling the first big product to come out of the acquisition: a new version of…
Google Acquires Android Performance Startup FlexyCore For A Reported $23 Million
Google has acquired the French startup FlexyCore, which is best known for its Android performance boosting solution DroidBooster. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although France’s L’Expansion, which first reported…
BBM Finally Launches For Android And iOS, Years Too Late
If this was 2010, RIM launching BBM on Android and iOS would have been viewed as a nod to open communication and a platform-agnostic product strategy. If this was 2010,…
Apple looks to be readying a live stream of its event taking place at 10 AM PT today at the Yerba Buena center in California, according to updates that are…
Menlo Park-based startup Mainframe2 came out of stealth at last week’s DEMO 2013 and unveiled its new cloud solution that lets you view graphical applications on any device. Founded in…
After Silk Road Closure, And With Baidu’s Blessing, Bitcoin Breaks $200 Again
The value of a single Bitcoin has broken the $200 mark for only the second time. The cost of a single Bitcoin hit a high of more than $205 earlier…
Senator Charles Schumer, Location Analytics Firms Unveil Code Of Conduct For Tracking Shoppers By Cellphones
As companies like Apple and PayPal ramp up their in-store mobile commerce activities, privacy groups, location analytics companies and New York’s U.S. Senator Charles Schumer today unveiled a new code…
Former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy Joins Super-Secretive Payments Startup Clinkle As COO
Super-secretive startup Clinkle hasn’t had a lot to say about what it’s up to, but it’s announcing a big hire today that it no doubt hopes will propel it forward…
Nielsen: Old School TV Reigns Supreme At 58% Of Ad Spend, Internet Display Up 27% In Q2
As Nielsen continues to work closely with Twitter to track tweets about TV shows; Twitter continues to explore ways of using its platform to market TV content; and Internet portals…
Payments Network Dwolla Moves Beyond Cash With Launch Of “Dwolla Credit” In Partnership With ADS
Des Moines-based Dwolla, a company building web-connected infrastructure for managing digital payments, is today taking its first step to move beyond support for cash with the debut of “Dwolla Credit.”…
Berlin! Here Are The Judges, Prizes, Workshops, And Final Tickets For The First Ever Disrupt Europe Hackathon
Think you’re one of the best developers in all of Berlin? Here’s your chance to prove it — and maybe, just maybe, take home a nice stack of cash for…
Nokia Pledges Allegiance To Windows RT With The $499 Lumia 2520 Tablet
Microsoft is dead-set on keeping Windows RT with devices like the Surface 2, but now that it’s committed to shelling out $7.2 billion for Nokia’s devices business, the folks in…
Blogmutt, A Crowdsourcing Platform, Makes An Equity Offer To Its Bloggers For Hire
The SaaS model is now for blogging, too. A new breed of companies are crowdsourcing writers to do posts for small and large businesses. Blogmutt is a bit different than…
Instagram Finally Coming To Windows Phone, Nokia Confirms
It’s taken a lot longer than Nokia hoped it would but Windows Phone is finally getting an official Instagram client. The photo-sharing social network, which has north of 150 million monthly active users, has…
Nokia Unleashes Two New Phablets, The Flagship Lumia 1520 And The Budget Lumia 1320
Well folks, this probably won’t come as much of a shock, but those persistent rumors of a pair of Nokia Lumia phablets were true after all. Nokia officially pulled back…
Apple CEO Tim Cook Joins Board of China’s Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management
Apple CEO Tim Cook has joined the advisory board of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management (SEM), according to its website. Located in Beijing, Tsinghua is one of China’s…
Yahoo Is Ordered To Start Using Microsoft Search In Hong Kong And Taiwan
Signed in 2010, Microsoft and Yahoo’s ten-year Search Alliance was supposed to lift Google’s stronghold on search advertising. But the deal has steadily eroded since then, with the latest sign…
With $1M In Funding, Appsee Promises Mobile Developers Real Insight Into Their Users
Israeli startup Appsee says it’s taking a different approach to mobile analytics. I wrote about the company more than a year ago under its old name, UserVOD, when it focused…
YPlan has only been around for less than a year, but the company is rapidly covering new ground. After expanding from the UK into New York city last month, the…
LovelyHeroku Offers A Better Way To Manage Apps And Services
LovelyHeroku is a new breed of app that enables IT staff and developers to use their smartphones to manage their work on the Heroku platform-as-a-service (PaaS). It’s the kind of…