Frederic Lardinois
Frederic has spent more than five years covering news and providing analysis about technology, the industry and consumer tech related to the Internet with potential to influence industry direction. At TechCrunch, his focus spans from emerging technologies and niche startups to major product advances by industry titans – all innovation focused. Before he joined TechCrunch in 2012, he founded Silicon Filter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite).
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Latest from Frederic Lardinois
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Zillow’s Home Price Estimates Now Reflect Edits Immediately
Zillow now makes it easier for homeowners to edit facts about their homes and have those changes immediately reflected in its price estimates. Zillow’s so-called Zestimates are one of the key features of its service. For every house in the U.S., Zillow will try to estimate its current value. Currently, that’s about 100 million homes, the company’s chief economist Stan… Read More
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Google Expands Its Safe Browsing Service To Warn More Users And Webmasters Of Malware
Earlier this week, Google announced that it has expanded its Safe Browsing service, which prevents users from going to known malware sites. Chrome, for example, now shows you a warning before you visit a site that harbors known malware (instead of just popping up a warning when you are about to download it). Similarly, Google Search will now pop up a warning when you’re about to go to… Read More
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Twenty20 Raises $8M, Launches Crowdsourced Photo-Licensing Service
Twenty20, the startup formerly known as Instacanvas, today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by Canaan Partners. With this funding round, Twenty20 has also finalized its transformation from printing service for Instagram pictures to photo-licensing service. Indeed, with over 45 million photos from 250,000 photographers in its library, Twenty20 is now larger than… Read More
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Docker Launches Its Container Orchestration Tools
Last December, Docker previewed its plans to launch a comprehensive set of orchestration tools for its container platform and, starting today, developers will be able to download and use all of these tools. Together, Docker Machine, Swarm and Compose are meant to make it easier for developers and system administrators to create and manage their portable applications on top of the Docker platform. Read More
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Google Makes A Push For The Mobile Enterprise Market With Launch Of Android For Work
At a small press event in San Francisco today, Google officially launched Android for Work, a set of technologies that makes it easier for companies to adopt Android and allows their users to bring their own devices to work. The company first unveiled a preview of this technology during its I/O developer conference last summer, but as Google’s director for product management for… Read More
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Media Temple Expands Its WordPress Hosting Service
Media Temple, the popular GoDaddy-owned web hosting service, today announced an expansion of its dedicated WordPress hosting service. Media Temple first launched dedicated WordPress hosting almost exactly a year ago. At the time, it only offered a single $29/month plan. Starting today, the company is launching a set of new plans starting at $20/month that target individuals, as well as… Read More
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Polling Site Polar Not Dead (Or Acquired By Google) After All
A few months ago, TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal and a number of other publications reported that Google had acquired the social polling startup Polar and that its founders were going to join the Google+ team. The company’s spokesperson published a story about how he helped the team. Turns out, that story was only half true. Google only hired the Polar team, including well-known… Read More
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Google Publishes Chrome Experiment #1000
Google’s Chrome Experiments site, which highlights cool, developer-submitted interactive applications that run in the browser, has been online since 2009 — almost as long as Chrome itself has been around. Today, Google is publishing the 1,000th experiment on the site and it’s launching a redesigned version of the site that is meant to showcase Polymer, Google’s web… Read More
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Mirantis Partners With Google To Bring Kubernetes To OpenStack
Mirantis, a major player in the OpenStack ecosystem, today announced that it has partnered with Google to bring support for Kubernetes, Google’s open-source project for managing containerized applications, to the OpenStack project. This new project uses OpenStack’s Murano application catalog to make it easier to deploy and configure these new Kubernetes-based clusters and their… Read More
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Twilio Acquires Two-Factor Authentication Service Authy
Twilio today announced that it has acquired Authy, a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers two-factor authentication services to end users, developers and enterprises. The two companies declined to disclose the financial details of the transaction. Authy says that about 6,000 sites currently use its service to protect their users. These include Coinbase, MercadoLibre and CloudFlare. The… Read More
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Google Launches Invite Program To Bring Inbox To Google Apps For Work Customers
Last Fall, Google started its (slow) rollout of Inbox, its completely redesigned email experience for Gmail on the web and mobile. Even today, it’s still an invite-only service (but invites are pretty easy to come by these days). Until now, however, it wasn’t possible to use Inbox with Google Apps for Work accounts. That’s changing today. Google has now launched an… Read More
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Respoke Launches Its WebRTC-Based Platform For Voice, Video And Text Chat Apps
Digium, the company behind the popular open source Asterisk PBX software, today announced the official launch of Respoke, its WebRTC service backend for developers. Respoke joins a number of similar services like Bistri and Telefonica’s TokBox that also offer WebRTC-centric communications platforms. Using Respoke, developers can use a single API to add features like video… Read More
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Line Of Sight
You’ve probably heard that the FAA proposed its rules for commercial drones last weekend. There’s some good and some bad in those rules. The good thing is that drone startups finally know what kind of rules they will operate under once they are codified in the next year or so. The bad: many of the most interesting use cases for drones, including drone delivery, will be unfeasible… Read More
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Google’s Mobile Search Now Highlights Recent Posts From News Sources
When you use Google’s mobile search to look for your favorite news sources or more information about a hot news topic, you’ll probably notice there’s something different about the search results. Starting today, Google will not just give you a link to the publication, but it will also highlight that publication’s latest stories. Read More
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Google Launches Cloud Security Scanner To Help Find Vulnerabilities In App Engine Sites
Google today launched the beta of a new security tool for developers on its App Engine platform-as-a-service offering. The Google Cloud Security Scanner allows developers to regularly scan their applications for cross-site scripting and mixed content vulnerabilities. Google is obviously not the first company to offer a tool like this, but as it argues in today’s announcement, the… Read More
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Renaissance Learning Acquires UClass
Renaissance Learning, the Google-funded K-12 assessment and learning analytics service with a valuation north of $1 billion, today announced that it has acquired UClass, a cloud storage and content management service school districts can use to store, distribute and analyze their curriculum catalogs. The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. Read More
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ScienceLogic Raises $43M Series D Round Led By Goldman Sachs
ScienceLogic, an IT monitoring software provider, today announced that it has raised a $43 million Series D funding round led by Goldman Sachs. Current investors NEA (which participated in all of ScieneLogic’s funding rounds) and Intel Capital also participated in this round. Previously, the company raised $41 million. Read More
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Microsoft’s JavaScript Engine Will Soon Support Mozilla’s Asm.js
Over the last few years, Mozilla has developed asm.js, a subset of JavaScript that can be executed fast. Until now, asm.js optimization was only available in Firefox. But soon this technology will also be available in Microsoft’s Chakra JavaScript engine in the upcoming Windows 10. As the company today announced, asm.js support has long been one of the top 10 most-requested features… Read More
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Zillow Closes Trulia Acquisition, Cuts 350 Positions
As expected, Zillow today closed the acquisition of its competitor Trulia in a stock-for-stock transaction. The total price of the acquisition was $2.5 billion. When Zillow first announced its intentions to take over Trulia, the stock price still valued the transaction at $3.5 billion. Read More
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FAA Proposes Rules To Open The Sky To Some Commercial Drones, But Delivery Drones Remain Grounded
After a number of delays, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today officially announced its proposed rules for small commercial drones. Most of the proposed rules already leaked earlier this weekend. Overall, the proposed rules are pretty straightforward and more lenient than previously expected, but while they open up a number of use cases, they are still strict enough to make… Read More
