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).
CrunchBase profile →Latest from Frederic Lardinois
-
Google Launches Maps Gallery To Make Public Data Maps More Discoverable
Google today launched the Google Maps Gallery, an extension of the Google Maps Public Data Program it announced last October. The new gallery is meant to showcase maps from the organizations Google is working with, including the likes of National Geographic, the U.S. Geological Survey and the City of Edmonton, and to make them more discoverable. As Google Maps product manager Jordan Breckenridge… Read More
-
NuoDB Raises $14.2M Round Led By Dassault Systèmes For Its Distributed Database Management System
NuoDB, a Cambridge, Mass.-based database company that specializes in distributed database management, today announced that it has raised a $14.2 million funding round led by Europe’s second-largest software company Dassault Systèmes. Previous investors Morgenthaler Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners also participated in this round. This new round… Read More
-
OpenID Connect Identity Protocol Launches With Support From Google, Microsoft & Others
Signing users in to a mobile or web app isn't necessarily hard, but keeping their credentials safe is something that's often best left to specialists. The OpenID Foundation today announced the launch of OpenID Connect, the organization's latest standard for authenticating users and building distributed identity systems. The standard has the backing of Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Deutsche… Read More
-
Microsoft Adds Full TypeScript Support To Visual Studio
About a year and a half ago, Microsoft unveiled its TypeScript language to help programmers write large programs in JavaScript. Starting today, with the arrival of the first release candidate of TypeScript 1.0 and the latest update to Visual Studio 2013, it's becoming a fully supported language in Microsoft's IDE. Read More
-
Google Expands Underwater Street View To New Locations
Google today added a couple of new locations to its underwater Street View imagery collection, including a number spots around Cancun and Isla Mujeres. Read More
-
Microsoft Announces General Availability Of Azure In Japan
Almost a year ago, Microsoft announced its plans to expand Windows Azure to Asia, with data centers in China, Japan and Australia. Today, the company announced that its two regions in Japan (Japan East and Japan West) have now hit general availability, and Azure users in Japan will now be able to store their data locally. As Satya Nadella noted a year ago (when he was still the president of… Read More
-
Atlassian Launches Git Essentials For The Enterprise
Atlassian, the company behind popular development tools like JIRA and Confluence, has long been focusing on Git as one of the main tools for getting enterprises to adopt the agile development methodology. Until now, though, it didn't offer a single product that combined its Git-centric tools like Stash for source-code management and Bamboo for continuous integration with JIRA and JIRA Agile. To… Read More
-
CloudFlare Acquires Anti-Malware Firm StopTheHacker
CloudFlare, the website security and content delivery service, today announced that it has acquired the anti-malware firm StopTheHacker. As CloudFlare founder and CEO Matthew Prince explains in today’s announcement, one of the challenges the company faces is to ensure that its network can’t be used to more efficiently distribute malware. “While CloudFlare is good at stopping new… Read More
-
Opera Launches Its Max Data-Savings App For Android
About a week ago, Opera teased its new Max data-savings app for Android and allowed users to pre-register. Starting today, Opera will roll out Max to these pre-registered Android users in the U.S. on a first-come, first-served bases. Pre-registered European users can also install it today (there doesn’t seem to be a cap for them). Opera Max effectively takes the compression technology the… Read More
-
Mozilla’s Partners Launch New Firefox OS Phones As It Looks To Expand To New Markets In 2014
Just ahead of the start of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mozilla today announced a number of new Firefox OS smartphones from partners like ZTE, Huawei and Alcatel, as well as a $25 reference design from Spreadtrum. When Mozilla announced its plans to build a phone operating system a few years ago, most pundits didn’t expect much would come of this. But in 2013, it launched phones… Read More
-
YouTube Gets Google’s Card Design And Puts Stronger Focus On Playlists
YouTube is rolling out a new design to its users today that takes its cues from the "card-like" design Google now uses on many of its other web and mobile apps. The aim of the redesign, Google tells me, is to emphasize playlists by putting them front and center in the left sidebar. Read More
-
Google Launches Project Tango Smartphone To Experiment With Computer Vision And 3D Sensors
Google today announced Project Tango, an Android-based prototype phone and developer kit with advanced 3D sensors out of its Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) hardware skunkworks group. Using its sensors, the phone doesn't just track motion, but it can actually build a visual map of rooms using 3D scanning. The company believes the combination of these sensors with advanced computer vision… Read More
-
YC-Backed Two Tap Wants To Fix Mobile Checkouts
Shopping cart abandonment is a massive problem on mobile, and the Y Combinator-backed Two Tap aims to improve this for merchants and affiliate sites. It's no secret that mobile checkouts are broken. Not only is putting your credit card info a major hassle on mobile, but many merchants don't even have acceptable mobile sites. As users now often discover products they want to buy on social sites… Read More
-
Chrome OS Doubled Its Share Of Web Traffic Since Last September, Now At 0.2%
Last we heard, Chrome OS was quickly increasing its reach in the business world, but despite its recent advances, a new study by ad network Chitika shows that it still remains a niche product. Chrome OS doubled its share of web traffic from U.S. and Canadian users to the roughly 300,000 sites on Chitika's network over the last five months. That's impressive, but the reality is that it still just… Read More
-
Online Real Estate Service Trulia Relaunches Its Mobile Apps
Just ahead of the spring house hunting season, the online real estate service Trulia today launched a major redesign of its flagship mobile apps for iOS and Android. The new design puts real estate photos at the center of the experience. The design team also moved to a flat look on both platforms and simplified the user experience to make things like saving houses significantly easier. In… Read More
-
Google Starts Making The New Google Maps The Default For Everybody
After just under a year in preview, Google today announced that it is now rolling out the new Google Maps to all of its users as the default option. Read More
-
Google Announces Plans To Expand Fiber To 34 Additional U.S. Cities
Google today announced that it is planning to expand Google Fiber to 34 new cities in nine metro areas, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Phoenix, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, and San Jose. The company says it has invited these cities to work with Google to "explore what it would take to bring them Google Fiber." Read More
-
Google Capital Invests $40M In Learning Analytics Firm Renaissance Learning At $1B Valuation
Renaissance Learning, one of the leading cloud-based K-12 assessment and learning analytics companies, today announced that it has raised a $40 million investment from Google Capital. This marks the first investment in education for Google Capital, the search giant's late-stage investment vehicle, and makes Google a minority owner of the company. Read More
-
Opera Opens Pre-Registration For Its Data-Savings Android App
Last December, Opera announced Max, a free app that would use Opera's servers to compress all the non-encrypted data to your Android device. At the time, it opened up sign-ups for a small private alpha test, but starting today, it will take sign-ups for its soon-to-launch Max beta. Read More
-
Duolingo Raises $20M Series C Led By Kleiner Perkins To Dominate Online Language Learning
The popular language learning platform Duolingo today announced that it has closed a $20 million Series C round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. As Duolingo's founder Luis von Ahn told me, the company plans to continue on its path to dominate the language-learning market. Read More
