Talkbits, a Russian startup making a social-discovery voice-based mobile messaging app tied to where you’re using it, has attracted $2 million in funding from Russia’s Runa Capital early stage VC firm. The app, which is currently in closed alpha, allows users to leave geotagged voice messages for others to discover, or ask questions that others in the area might be able to answer. → Read More
Yesterday we saw the funding announcement of HandyBook, and it appears this whole area of booking labour fast is really starting to take off. PeoplePerHour, a sort of ‘European E-Lance’ emerged in 2008, scored a seed round then secured VC round from Index ventures. Now it’s announcing a further £2M ($3.2M) investment from Index, and boosting its management team with new appointments including CFO… → Read More
As the holiday shopping season approaches, startups and retailers are gearing up for a very mobile holiday. Location-based shopping app Shopkick, which is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, and SV Angel, is the latest company to update its offerings in-time for the season. The startup has released a new version of its mobile app which adds digital catalogs, the ability to save product lists and… → Read More
Hailo, the company that began life as an app for easily hailing and paying for black cab service in London less than a year ago, has now officially kicked off service in Boston, its first U.S. city. The app-based taxi service got its sea legs in Europe first in London, and then with an expansion to Dublin, and then moved across the pond with a launch in Toronto a little less than a month ago at… → Read More
The board of switchable battery makers Better Place have quietly removed CEO Shai Agassi and replaced him with Better Place Australia CEO Evan Thornley. According to Globes.Co.Il, the company lost $490 million since its founding in 2007. They raised multiple rounds including a $350 million round in 2010. → Read More
Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” gaffe at last night’s debate set off a viral firestorm of gender-themed parodies, including a Tumblr, a Facebook page with over 200,000 likes, a string of Twitter jokes, and was the 3rd most searched term on Google for the debate. → Read More
Netbiscuits, the mobile development platform that has worked with the likes of eBay, Google, Coca-Cola and 15,000 other developers on their mobile web services, is ramping up its game as smartphone usage continues to accelerate worldwide. The company today is announcing that it has raised $27 million in a Series C round. This also marks the first time that Netbiscuits, which says it hosts over… → Read More
“Never give up, never surrender” is the pull out quote from Galaxy quest, and it’s an actual phrase Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim used to describe the re-launch of the re-launch of the pivot of cloud-based ‘social aggregation service. Ok, OK, that’s unkind and you’ve got to give the guy a hand – he he keeps going. This is a mission-focused entrepreneur if ever you’ve seen one. But it’s fair to say… → Read More
We’re now hearing from a source close to Apple’s supply chain partners that the company plans to hold a conference in Shenzen for its MFI program partners on November 7 and 8. We’re also hearing that Apple will strictly regulate sales of Lightning connectors for MFI partners, and that the cost per part for those components, while not unreasonable, is high compared to other standards like USB. → Read More
Braintree, an online payments gateway provider for online and mobile platforms, has raised $35 million in Series funding led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from existing investors including Accel Partners, RRE Ventures and Greycroft. This brings Braintree’s total funding up to $70 million. → Read More
It looks like Apple acquired Justin Timberlake-backed web apps company Particle last month — maker of social video service robo.to, and a design UI/UX and HTML5 web app consultancy whose clients include Google, Motorola, Sony and Zynga. CNET called the acquisition today, citing “sources with knowledge of the deal”. There’s no word on the acquisition price. → Read More
GoPro, the Half Moon Bay-based camera company that’s etched out a very big niche for itself in action sports, just unveiled its latest line-up of Hero cameras.
The company, which just turned 10 years old last week, has come a long way from its very lowly beginnings making camera straps for surfers. They’ve sold 3 million cameras since late 2009, when the company had about a dozen employees… → Read More
OpenTable is continuing its drive to push more people to its restaurant-booking service. Fresh from a partnership with Lastminute.com and another with FourSquare, the company has moved its attention to getting more restaurants on board its platform — by offering free mobile-optimised websites to eateries that sign up for OpenTable before February 1, 2013. → Read More
WonderVoice, a Tel Aviv-based startup I first ran into at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley, is today launching its brand-new iOS application which allows you to listen to content from Facebook while on the go. Yes, it’s another audio-based virtual assistant of sorts, joining an ecosystem that’s been booming since the debut of Apple’s Siri. And like most of these voice-activated alternatives… → Read More
It’s that time of the year for one of the Israeli startup community’s staple events, TWS. This year the event’s founder, and Pops CEO, Yaron Orentstein is collaborating with Israel’s most popular tech blog, Newsgeek.co.il to showcase some up and coming Israeli early-stage startups (and a couple from Europe).
Here are the startups presenting on-stage in Tel-Aviv this morning:
Overwolf adds… → Read More
Today, AirPR is officially launching its Match.com for startups and PR, peeling back the curtain on its PR marketplace for the first time. Essentially, AirPR has created a tech platform that aims to increase PR performance and remove the barriers that stand in the way of startups discovering and recruiting top PR talent to help them carry out specific projects.
It does this through a… → Read More
Internet Explorer suddenly became one of the most widely available Internet TV browsers today as it starts rolling out to Xboxes. And early reports say its joystick-based interface is awful. Whatever. It’s v1. What matters is that Microsoft has united the world’s most popular motion sensor tech and one of the world’s most “popular” web browsers.
Wave hello to the future of the Internet. → Read More
We are just getting into reporting season, where some (but not all) handset makers tell us how many handsets they’ve sold in the last three months, but Strategy Analytics has taken a punt to say that Q3 will be the quarter that we have hit a major milestone: there are now more than 1 billion smartphones in use worldwide — 1.038 billion, to be exact. It’s taken 16 years to pass 1 billion, but the… → Read More
MacHeist 4′s puzzles have been keeping members buzzy this year, but now the curtain gets pulled back and the entire software lineup is revealed. After delivering four missions and four nano-missions, the MacHeist bundle now offers a full 15 apps for the low price of $29, with 25 percent of all proceeds going to charity. The company raised $850,000 with its MacHeist 3 bundle in 2009, and it’s… → Read More
Placed is announcing the launch of Placed Panels today, giving its customers a way to constantly collect location data from a limited panel of users.
Previously, Placed allowed publishers to collect location data about whenever someone was using their mobile website or app. That gives publishers valuable information about where their content and services are being accessed — but data… → Read More
AdRise hopes to bring more video to connected devices, by building cross-platform apps that can be watched on multiple platforms. It’s also built an ad delivery service for monetization. With that in mind, it’s raised a $2 million funding round led by Foundation Capital to expand its personnel and go after the burgeoning streaming video market. → Read More
In his six years at Facebook, Ari Steinberg sired the Platform, ran the news feed, and started the Seattle engineering office, but he’s decided to move on, TechCrunch has learned and Facebook as well as Steinberg confirmed. Friday will be his last day working for the social network.
Steinberg verified that founding a travel startup is first on his post-Facebook itinerary. → Read More
Kixeye CEO Will Harbin is lashing out at Zynga for suing the vice president of product that the gaming startup poached earlier this month. Shortly after former Cityville general manager Alan Patmore left for Kixeye, Zynga sued him for theft of trade secrets and breach of contract. → Read More
You get an email, and it’s a pretty important one. If you’re using Gmail, there’s a lot of things you can do with it to make it stand out. Basically, so you don’t lose it. You can filter it to have a label, give it a star or mark it for your priority inbox. Once you open the email though, it’s important that all of the information presented to you is useful and concise.
Today, Google shared… → Read More
David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of marketing and business relationships, just offered a new statistic on the Facebook Offers program: He said that among the 100 most popular offers on the social network, three-fourths of the claims came not from the people who had been initially targeted with an offer, but instead from someone they had shared it with.
In other words, Offers seems to be… → Read More
Tap for Tap, a Victoria, B.C.-based startup is changing course with a new initiative just over half a year into its existence, based on feedback received from its initial crop of developers. The ad network will now focus on letting developers earn credits towards ad placement in other apps, based on the value of the taps they drive through ads placed in their own software. → Read More
Now that Microsoft has officially announced pricing and availability for its long-awaited Surface tablet (albeit a little early), the time has come to get people worked up about it. Of course, commercials and brief tours of the studio that spawned the device can only offer so much insight — now Surface GM Panos Panay and the rest of the team have taken to Reddit and implored users to ask them… → Read More
Mobile photo-printing and greeting card startup Sincerely wants to encourage users to vote this election season, and to do so, it has partnered with artist Shepard Fairey on the creation of an exclusive new card. Best known as the creator of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster, Fairey’s new card has a similar style and color palette, but offers a non-partisan plea: it just says “Vote!” To get users… → Read More
Intel just reported its third quarter 2012 earnings with revenues of $13.5 billion, flat compared to the prior year. Intel’s net income was $3 billion, up 5.1% compared to last year. Operating income was $3.8 billion, flat compared to a year ago. Its diluted earnings per share were at $0.58 cents per share, a 7.4% increase from last year. Analysts expected Intel to report earnings of $0.50 per… → Read More
IBM just released its Q3 2012 financials. Big Blue’s GAAP earnings came in at $3.8 billion, up 3% from the last quarter. Non-GAAP earnings were $4.2 billion. Overall, the company reported revenue of $24.7 billion, down from $25.8 billion in Q2. → Read More
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