Leena Rao
Leena Rao is currently a Senior Writer at Fortune Magazine.
Leena had a brief stint at Google Ventures as an Operating Partner.
Leena’s first role out of journalism school was at TechCrunch which she joined in 2008. She rose through the ranks becoming the Managing Editor for TechCrunch and a voice at TechCrunch Disrupt.
She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City.
She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was the captain of the women’s varsity tennis team. She has also contributed technology content for Oprah.com.
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Latest from Leena Rao
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IBM Unveils Real-Time Streaming In The Cloud
Today, IBM rolled out the availability of its cloud computing software, called IBM System S, that enables massive amounts of data to be analyzed in real-time. System S is designed to help clients become more “real-world aware” by accessing live data and responding to changes across complex data systems. IBM, which is making System S available as a trial at no cost to help clients… Read More
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CBSNews.com Goes From Cluttered With Information To Cluttered With Pictures
CBSNews.com is undergoing a major overhaul and redesign of its sites to make them easier to navigate, more visually compelling, faster and more focused on driving users to content. The new home page features a rotating list of top stories on the left, next to the list of the latest and most important headlines. CBS News programs, as well as the latest videos, photo galleries and blogs, are… Read More
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Google Cloud:1. MS Office: 0.
Since Gmail’s birth in 2004, Google has steadily built a powerful cloud-based email platform that’s chock full of innovative features including offline access, chat, search, mobile access and more. Google saw the opportunity to integrate Gmail and apps, like docs and calendar features, into the enterprise space and rolled out premier editions of Apps catering to the business community. Read More
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Mo'Minis Finds Mo Money For Mo Games
Mo’Minis, an Israeli-based startup that provides developers a platform to create mobile games and entertainment applications, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding from BRM Capital. The company says that the funding will be used to improve the current development platform, strengthen its community of developers and close strategic partnerships with distributors operating… Read More
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Skydeck Mashed Up With Google Voice Could Be The Perfect Combination
One of the few necessary evils that accompanies the uber-cool recently launched Google Voice service (which was officially released in March) is the necessity to convert all of your numbers (cell, landline, office) to one number. It can be an annoying and daunting task to change your cell phone number, especially if you are reliant on your cell for business and personal communications. Read More
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IDC Reports AMD Gains Market Share On Rival Intel
We recently reported of Advanced Micro Devices’s (AMD) uphill battle to challenge rival Intel’s dominance in the micro-processor market. According to the technology market research firm IDC, AMD could be catching up to Intel sooner than everyone thought. The IDC released a report today that indicated that AMD may be gaining ground in the fight to surpass Intel. In the first quarter… Read More
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F**ked Company And Adbrite Founder Launches Twitter Dating Site Flirt140
Philip “Pud” Kaplan, founder of FuckedCompany and Adbrite, is adding another Twitter application to his name. He recently created both Tweetname, a domain name registering site and Fast140, a Twitter speed typing game. Now Pud is launching Flirt140, a flirting and dating site for Twitter. A free service, Flirt140 allows you to search for Twitter users by gender, geographic area… Read More
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Calling All Dudes: Break.com Wants Your Fratastic Videos
Just when it appeared that Web 2.0 may be abandoning the UGC ship for premium content, Break.com, a social video site for guys, is upping its budget to add more user generated content to the site. Through Break’s “stimulus package,” the site is increasing its investment in content purchased from its users and other amateur filmmakers by 50%. Break.com, which had 3.8… Read More
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Disciple Is A Real-Time Player-To-Player Fantasy Battlefield For Adults
Casual head to head games, also known as synchronous or real-time games, are becoming increasingly popular on the web. Geewa, Zynga, and Playfish all offer real-time synchronous social games where you can play against another player live, not against the computer. Resistor Productions has merged a synchronous game with role-playing, blood, guts and gore aimed at adults called Disciple. Known as… Read More
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Issuu Adds New Features In the Race to Catch Up To Scribd
Issuu, a company that lets you upload a PDF or other document and then flip through it easily on a dedicated Webpage or in a small embedded widget, is adding features to its service and site with the aim of becoming a more engaging destination for users. We’re big fans of Issuu—when the company first launched, it was one of the first services of its kind whose interface and… Read More
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Babble Raises $1 Million For Hipster Parenting Site
Babble, a magazine and parenting community site aimed at urban hipsters, has secured $1 million in Series A funding from Greycroft Partners. This round adds to the $2 million Babble raised earlier from Village Ventures in December of 2008. (This is an extension of that round at the same valuation) Spun off from sex and dating community Nerve Media, Babble takes a more modern view on… Read More
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Ten Free Tickets to Google I/O Developer Event
Google has given us 10 free tickets for TechCrunchIT readers to attend for the upcoming Google I/O developer event on May 27-28 in San Francisco. Google I/O will be held at the Moscone Center and will cover the following topics: the Android, App Engine, Chrome, GWT, and AJAX APIs, with a special focus on the enterprise. Last year’s event saw one of the first demonstrations of… Read More
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FTD's Mother's Day Mishap
Twitter is abuzz with angry complaints about FTD not delivering flowers to recipients on Mother’s Day. Apparently a number of Moms didn’t receive their FTD flowers even though the senders made the orders early in the week. Here are a few sample tweets about the FTD mishap: “FTD.com still hasn’t delivered the flowers I ordered Wednesday to my mom in the hospital, and… Read More
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Get The Real-Time Twitter Scoop With Twitscoop
Twitscoop, a real-time visualization tool that lets you see hot trends and buzz on Twitter, is getting a makeover and adding several useful features that may help you “mine the thought stream.” These features will roll out this morning. Twitscoop’s algorithm identifies tags and keywords in the Twitter stream and then ranks them by how frequently they appear versus normal usage. Read More
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InsideView Now Crawls Twitter For Business Information And News
InsideView, a service that mashes up social data for enterprises to increase sales productivity, is now integrating Twitter into its feed. The company’s flagship product, SalesView, crawls through more than 20,000 web sites, social networks and databases including Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers, Reuters, and SEC filings, to give businesses valuable information that will aid sales… Read More
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Calling All Coders: Journalism Schools Want You To Save The News Industry
As newspapers struggle for viability, and media managers attempt to shift presence to the web, a need has arisen for talent with the technical skills of a programmer and the creative skills of a journalist. Over at TechCrunch, we are fortunate to have talented developers who have poured their blood, sweat and tears into making the site what it is today. Northwestern University’s… Read More
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Animoto Gives Procrastinators A Last-Minute Mother's Day Gift
Mother’s Day is just around the corner and those of you who are on top of your game have probably already sent a card and arranged to give your mom a thoughtful gift of flowers, candy, or a gift certificate to a spa. For those of you out there who have done none of the above, Animoto, a startup that automatically generates high quality slideshow/music videos from a set of photos, offers… Read More
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Xangati Helps Employees Visually Explain Trouble Tickets Through DVR Feature
It can often be difficult for an employee to express an IT troubleshooting problem to the IT help desk if the employee has little familiarity with the complexities of a company’s IT infrastructure. Application management provider Xangati is hoping to solve this problem by offering a feature, the Visual Trouble Ticket (VTT), to its customers that allows employees to take a DVR-style… Read More
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Show Your Mom You Care On Facebook On Mother's Day — Then Unfriend Her
In celebration of Mother’s Day, Facebook now lets you list and connect to your family members in the “Basic Information” part of your profile. Starting later today and through this weekend, you will see a new “Family Members” section within the Information tab on your profile. You can enter your parents, children, sisters and brothers and can list family members… Read More
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Tech Jobs Still Scarce But Layoffs May Be Slowing Down
April proved to be a dismal month for technology sector jobs and overall employment, but there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Granted, this morning brought sobering news of the U.S. unemployment rate hitting its highest mark since 1983: 8.9%. In the past month, 700,000 jobs were lost in the U.S., bringing the total number of U.S. jobs lost since December, 2007 to 5.7 million in… Read More
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