Startup Battlefield News
  • TC

    Cake Financial Acquired By E*Trade

    Jason Kincaid

    Social finance company Cake Financial has just been acquired by E*Trade. The company launched in 2007 at the first TechCrunch50 conference (when it was still TechCrunch40). Cake Financial has just posted a note to its homepage announcing the deal and to inform users that the site will no longer exist as an independent service. Instead, its features will be incorporated into E*Trade’s website. We’re hearing that there was a bidding war for Cake, and that The Motley Fool was also in the running. CEO Steven Carpenter declined to comment on the details of the deal. We’ve included the full text of the notice below:

    To All Members and Users of Cake Financial- I am excited to announce that as of today, Cake Financial is now a proud part of E*Trade Financial Corporation and aspects of the Cake service will be incorporated into the E*Trade website. As of January 14, 2010, the Cake Financial website will cease operation as an independent service. We are honored to be a part of the E*trade family and believe that E*trade can make the vision we had for all investors a reality.

  • TC

    RedBeacon Wins The Top Prize At TechCrunch50 2009

    Erick Schonfeld

    The 50 startup presentations are over, the judges votes are in, Michael and Jason chewed over the top contenders, and the winner of this year’s TechCrunch50 is RedBeacon. The startup aims to help consumers find local service providers such as plumbers, bakers, and contractors. As we described in our initial write-up:

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    TC50: LearnVest Is A Personal Financial Guide For Women

    Leena Rao

    Now more than ever, personal finance education and help is crucial to anyone’s financial health. Mint.com, a former TechCrunch 40 company who won the top prize at the conference, has grown incredibly since its launch and was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million. TechCrunch50 startup LearnVest is serving a different purpose when it comes to online finances; the startup focuses on helping users, particularly women, organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like the online version of financial planner Suze Orman. When you first log in to LearnVest, the site will ask you a series of questions about your financial health (i.e. how much credit card debt do you have), you life stages (i.e. do you rent, are you planning a family soon, do you own a house) and your financial education level (i.e. have you checked your credit score lately). LearnVest will use all this information to diagnose your financial health and education level and will then give you a snapshot of what you need to learn and improve.

  • TC

    TC50: CrowdFlower Crowdsources Mundane Labor To The Cloud

    Leena Rao

    For any business, from a startup to a large company, mundane, yet time-intensive tasks like transcribing video or removing spam comments from blogs, can be a waste of employee time. TechCrunch50 startup CrowdFlower CrowdFlower provides Labor as a Service (LaaS) by letting clients access an always-on, scalable workforce. Unlike traditional methods of outsourcing and hiring, CrowdFlower’s web offering lets businesses instantly access thousands of workers without picking up the phone. Here’s how it works. If a company has a transcribing task, the administrator can fill out a task form on CrowdFlower. Once all the fields are filled out, CrowdFlowers will price the task based on the amount of time it takes to perform the assignment per unit. The startup will break the task into units that can be performed by a single person and price the task accordingly.

  • TC

    TC50: DemoPit Winner oDesk Launches A Real-Time Work Stream For Your iPhone And Desktop

    Jason Kincaid

    Each year we see hundreds of impressive applications to TechCrunch50 — unfortunately, we always have a number of great companies that deserve attention but don’t quite make the cut as finalists. That’s why we have our TC50 DemoPit, where we invite a few dozen other strong startups to demonstrate their wares in the conference building’s main hall. Each conference attendee is given two TechCrunch50 tokens — one for each day — which they use to vote on their favorite startups in the bunch. We then tally up the votes and give the top two companies the chance to present on stage. The first winner for today is oDesk, which is today launching a new iPhone application that allows project administrators to monitor the work stream of their team members while they’re on the go. The stream features photos of your team’s workplace, keystroke events, and lets you know when your workers are checking in and out. Alongside the launch of the iPhone oDesk will also be bringing the new stream functionality to the desktop with a desktop app.

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    TC50: SeatGeek Is The Farecast For Sports And Music Tickets

    Robin Wauters

    Lots of people purchase tickets for events like sports games, rock concerts, etc. on secondary markets like eBay or StubHub, where they can often be picked up at huge discounts. Of course, it’s a bit of a challenge to know when to make a move and buy tickets exactly. The main problem with buying tickets on secondary markets is that you have no clue if they reached their lowest price already or if you should be well off exercising some patience and let the price drop a bit more. Enter SeatGeek, launching at the TechCrunch50 conference today, which offers a service that basically forecasts ticket prices on secondary markets so you can make educated decisions on when to break out your wallet.

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    TC50: Clicker Wants To Be TV Guide For The Web

    MG Siegler

    More and more television content is making its way online. But because of different deals by various networks, it’s all over the place. Even the huge sites like Hulu, only skim the surface in showing what is out there. Clicker, a service launching today at TechCrunch50, wants to be the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web. While there are no shortage of video search engines out there, Clicker believes its offering is superior because it creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.

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    TC50: TrueCar May Keep Car Dealers More Honest

    Mark Hendrickson

    TrueCar joins GoodGuide in helping consumers obtain more information about the products they buy – information that sellers don’t necessarily want them to have. In TrueCar’s case, that information is simple yet elusive: just how much you should pay for a new car. TrueCar aggregates data from a variety of (mostly unnamed) sources to determine how much money other people have paid for new cars around the country. It then places its findings at your disposal so you can determine whether or not that dealership down the street is offering you a good deal. The outcome, hopefully, is that you save not only hundreds and possibly thousands on your new car but the time it would have taken to comparison shop as well.

  • TC

    Yammer Takes Top Prize At TechCrunch50

    Erick Schonfeld

    Three jam-packed days, and 52 startup demos later, we finally have a winner for this year’s TechCrunch50. Every day, the presentations just seemed to get stronger and stronger. There were so many strong contenders this year that we are awarding five jury selection prizes, in addition to the top prize. But there must be a winner, and that winner is…Yammer. Yammer is Twitter with a business model. Created by an existing company, Geni, to scratch its own itch, Yammer takes the familiar Twitter messaging system and applies it to internal corporate communications. There is such a huge demand for this type of service that 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the first day it launched on Monday. Anyone with a corporate email can sign up and follow other people in their company. But if a company ants to claim its users, and gain administrative control over them, they will have to pay. It’s a brilliant business model.

  • TC

    TC50: Swype, Truly Gesture-based Data Entry

    John Biggs

    Swype is an amazing gesture-based data entry system that truly blew our collective minds at TC, CG, and MC. To type, you simply connect letters together using a stylus or finger and predictive text to pick letters and words out of seemingly unintelligible squiggles. Above is a video of two of the judges trying out the technology for the first time. (VC Josh Kopelman, who tries it first in the video, doesn’t grok it quite as quickly as Twitter founder Evan Wiliams).

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    TC50: FitBit, A Fitness Gadget That Makes Us Want To Exercise

    John Biggs

    The first “gadget” we’ve seen at TC50 is the FitBit, a wireless 3D pedometer and diet monitoring system that will cost $99 and connect online to upload activity levels and food intake. The device clips to almost any piece of clothing and is almost invisible. When you pass by the wireless base station the FitBit transmits all of its collected data and transmits it to the website where it is processed. You can also add food eaten and other data and it also tracks sleeping patterns.