Leena Rao
Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch.
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.
Disclosure: My husband, Suneel Gupta, was previously an employee of Groupon. We hold stock in Facebook. We also have investments in several mutual funds, some of which are technology-focused. And I hold a miniscule amount of shares in AOL, TechCrunch’s parent company.
My husband sits on the advisory boards of Adaptly and ToyTalk, and is a shareholder of both companies.
CrunchBase profile →Featured Picks from Leena Rao
Latest from Leena Rao
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BlueStripe Scores $8 Million For Virtualization Software
BlueStripe Software, a company that sells application service management software, secured a $8 million in Series B funding from Valhalla Partners and Trinity Ventures. The company secured $5 million in Series A funding in 2007 from Trinity Ventures. BlueStripe says it will use the funding to expand business operations, create new products and further sales and marketing efforts. Founded in… Read More
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Big Blue Takes Its Software To The Tracks
IBM is moving into the transportation industry by helping railway companies operate their trains and infrastructure. In particular, IBM is helping develop high-speed rail networks globally, and released a study called the “The Smarter Railroad,” highlighting how emerging technologies will help rail companies better instrument and manage rail networks. According to the report, the top… Read More
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Gmail Now Tells You Who You Want To Email
Not sure who else to add to that group email? Gmail Labs now has a useful "suggest more recipients" feature that suggests contacts that you might want to include in a group email based on the people you've grouped together as email recipients in the past. For example, if you often send family emails to your mother, father, husband, sister and brother, when you start composing an email to your… Read More
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TechCrunch Poll: How Much Did VC Investing Drop In The First Quarter?
VCs are feeling the heat from the recession. Money, both outgoing and incoming, isn't drying up completely, but the numbers keep going down. And now we are waiting to find out how much money VCs put into startups during the first quarter. Mind you that VC investing for the fourth quarter of 2008 already hit a low, with the total dollar amount invested in venture financings at $5.4 billion, down… Read More
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Um, Facebook. Your Developer Site Has Been Defaced
It looks like the mobile page on Facebook's developers wiki has been hacked. Take a look here. I guess that is the downside of putting your developer site on a wiki. The question is why hasn't anybody changed it back? Update: Someone is paying attention. Site is now back to normal. Read More
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McKinsey's Cloud Computing Report Is Partly Cloudy
McKinsey & Company released a report, "Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing," today that claims that large corporations could lose money through the adoption of cloud computing. The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. The study… Read More
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OpenX Market Opens For Business As An Alternative Online Advertising Marketplace
OpenX, the largest neutral online ad server for website publishers, is finally ready to take the wraps off of OpenX Market, a service that has been in the pipeline for quite some time and was anticipated to make some waves in the digital advertising industry. I have my doubts about its disruptiveness, but website owners and publishers already using OpenX (we use it at TechCrunch) or planning to… Read More
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Yelp's New And Improved iPhone App Officially Hits The App Store
Yelp's version 2.0 of its iPhone app has officially hit Apple's App store. We reported on Yelp's focus on the mobile space and its importance here. As we wrote recently, the new app gives consumers even more ease in automatically reviewing businesses via their iPhone and enhances its existing GPS capabilities. The updated version of the app now lets Yelpers write reviews directly from their… Read More
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Enterprise Wiki SamePage Now On SalesForce.com AppExchange
Social media features are becoming increasingly popular in CRMs. SalesForce.com recently launched Twitter integration and there are several collaborative enterprise software providers offering innovative wiki products in the enterprise space. eTouch System’s SamePage, an enterprise wiki, can now be deployed within Force.com AppExchange from SalesForce.com. SamePage’s wiki lets… Read More
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Microsoft Tries To Re-Energize Cashback By Plugging It Into Its Products Engine
Microsoft says that Live Search Products and Live Search Cashback have now been unified into a single experience. You can now access Cashback on Live Search Products page, which is Microsoft's comparison shopping vertical site. Microsoft has migrated Cashback from the Jellyfish platform (the social shopping site that Microsoft purchased in 2007) to the Live Search platform. Last year, Microsoft… Read More
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Fluid Uses Facebook Chat And Status Updates To Help Retailers Make Shopping Social
The integration of shopping and social networking features is not a new phenomenon. eBay launched eBay Neighborhoods a few years ago, Hearst acquired social shopping service Kaboodle, and there's Jellyfish, which was bought by Microsoft. Retailers themselves have half-heartedly embraced social networking as a marketing tool, adding branded Facebook pages, creating profiles on social networks and… Read More
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DIY Social Network GROU.PS Adds Ranking System To Assign Privileges To Contributors
GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration is launching a new tool, ActivityRank Pipelines. The feature is a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members' content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings. The moderators are able to activate the "ActivityRank" feature… Read More
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AOL Redesigns Shopping Search. But Is It Better Than Yahoo's?
In the midst of the recession, consumers are either cutting back on spending or actively looking to reduce expenses. And with retail sales plunging during March, decreasing by 1.1% compared to February, it looks like retailers are in for the long haul when its comes to the virtual drought in consumer spending. What better time for AOL to completely overhaul the design of its comparison shopping… Read More
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authorStream Lets Businesses Create Customized, Branded Channels For PowerPoint Presentations
authorSTREAM.com, a PowerPoint sharing platform, is rolling out a premium service that's ideal for enterprise clients. Similar to SlideShare, authorSTREAM is a web-based free platform for sharing PowerPoint presentations through blogs, websites, and on sites like YouTube or an iPod. authorSTREAM is giving one month of its Premium membership free to the first 100 TechCrunch readers who use this… Read More
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App Management System ExtraHop Scores $5.1 Million In Series A Funding
ExtraHop Networks has completed a $5.1 million Series A round of funding, led by the Madrona Venture Group, with participation from angel investors including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. ExtraHop's delivery assurance system helps enterprises manage applications and provides visibility for applications. Founded in 2007 by former engineers from F5 Networks, Extrahop uses fluctuations in switch… Read More
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NileGuide Wants To Be Your Personalized Travel Agent And Concierge
NileGuide, a one-stop travel planning site, is rolling out several new features to its travel booking and planning portal. You can see our original review of the site here. NileGuide has re-designed the site with a sleek interface, a few more bells and whistles, added more geographic coverage areas, and created several trip planning tools to enhance the planning process. The layout and general… Read More
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Microsoft PubCenter Producing Strong Results Via YieldBuild Online Ad Planning Program
Microsoft PubCenter, Microsoft's competitor to Google's AdSense and Yahoo's Publisher Network, is being beta tested through ad network and layout optimization service, YieldBuild, and receiving positive results. We recently wrote about the encouraging reports we received from beta testers of PubCenter, which is a a self serve third party ad publishers platform similar to AdSense and Publisher… Read More
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HD Cloud Puts Video Formatting In The Cloud
Producing and editing compelling video is only half the work involved in publishing video content to the web. Once finalized, video needs to be formatted and converted to the proper version, or transcoded, to adapt content to the proper format. Startup HD Cloud, a video encoding and transcoding business, wants to become the “the FedEx of web video” is offering automated, high-definition video… Read More
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Application Delivery Software Ravenflow Nabs $6 Million In Funding
Ravenflow has secured $6 million in an unattributed round of funding from existing investors Alloy Ventures, Palomar Ventures and the Roda Group, bringing the company's total funding to $20.7 million. Ravenflow's software helps enterprises deliver applications faster. Launched in 2004, Ravenflow lets business analysts gain better insight into application development projects, letting analysts… Read More
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Roger McNamee's Band Moonalice Gets 3000 Downloads From Twitter Concerts
It's no surprise that bands and musicians are trying to harness the viral power of Twitter. Music is a big part of Twitter's content, as we've written about in the past. But recently the Bay Area band Moonalice, whose lead guitarist is well-known venture capitalist and Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee, staged several concerts on Twitter and has seen some impressive results using Twitter… Read More
