Once, on a brisk autumn night months and months ago, I went for a run around a park and promptly lost my car keys in the dark. The next hour was spent Googling local tow services and hoping that my phone’s battery wouldn’t die, and the hour after that was spent sitting at a picnic table under an ancient oak tree trying to keep warm.
If only Tow Choice existed back then. I met with co-founders… → Read More
With an abnormally high population of Google Glass owners in one convention center and ShopStyle’s API open to participants at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, it should come as no surprise that a number of hacks combined the two. → Read More
It’s Friday, kids, so calm down and have a laugh. Do this: Stop caring about Apple and Microsoft and Google and the phone in your pocket and the platform of your dreams and all that. Instead, giggle at the following video clip in which Microsoft takes on Apple in a way that I honestly did not see coming. Microsoft knew that the clip would cause controversy, and they yanked it quickly, likely… → Read More
In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Spark Capital founder and general partner Bijan Sabet joined us in the studio to talk about investment syndicates and much more.
Sabet was one of the early backers of Twitter (which just filed its S-1 with the SEC for a public offering yesterday) in 2008 and served on company’s board from 2008 to 2011. Sabet also led investments in Tumblr (acquired by… → Read More
Need to do some homework on who you’re emailing? You could search their name on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but on mobile that’s a lot of taps, and it’s hard to know if you’ve got the right John Smith. So Ark has just launched a mobile email client that pulls in all the social profiles of the people you’re emailing with so you can quickly do research on business contacts or stalk your friends. → Read More
In an interview backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013, Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood said that the company is actively working on an Android version of the app, and mentioned that ephemerality may be involved in forthcoming “whiz bang” features down the line.
Mailbox doesn’t have the same “move fast” mentality as some other companies, most notably Facebook. The company was bought by… → Read More
Journalists and netizens have mixed feelings about a long-sought federal media shield law that is headed to a vote in the Senate. The Free Flow of Information Act of 2013 would protect designated journalists from revealing their sources against a subpoena. Dozens of established media outlets are thrilled about the law, which was derailed in 2009 after WikiLeaks ignited a global debate about a new… → Read More
Days by Wander launched back in May with a very difficult mission: to change the way you think about photo-sharing. While some think that pictures of your feet or coffee are too mundane for photo-sharing to Instagram or Facebook, Days asked you to share as many photos as possible, mundane or otherwise.
To help usher in this type of behavior, Days didn’t allow photo imports, as they wanted… → Read More
A little more than a year after Woot founder Matt Rutledge left the revolutionary daily deals company he sold to Amazon, he’s bringing the team back together to hack e-commerce once again. The new company, called “a mediocre corporation,” is being designed to build up and test out new ways of selling products to customers online. → Read More
Intel has made another international acquisition in its push into artificial intelligence technology: it has bought Indisys, a Spanish startup focused on naturual language recognition. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it is reportedly “north” of €20 million ($26 million). It comes just two months after news broke that Intel acquired Omek, an Israeli maker of gesture-based… → Read More
Seenth.is lets music fans hone their obsession by making it easy for them to track the most interesting social media updates from their favorite performers. The iOS app (an Android version will be released by the end of this year) aggregates and filters content from sources including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and SoundCloud accounts of musicians and fans and presents items based on relevancy… → Read More
Chris Kemp, a former NASA CTO is stepping down as CEO of Nebula, the company he founded to provide hardware and software systems for building OpenStack cloud services. Kemp will become the company’s chief strategy officer and continue to serve as a member of the Nebula board of directors. Gordon Stitt will replace Kemp as CEO starting September 23. Stitt is a veteran technology executive. He… → Read More
Technology makes it easy to turn the minutiae of our daily lives into useful data sets, but sometimes it feels bleak seeing every experience or memory broken down into pie charts and bar graphs. mem:o is a unique visualization tool that takes life-logging beyond spreadsheets by transforming data into striking images influenced by Dutch graphic design. The iPad app is free for download and includes… → Read More
Facebook launched its virtual currency Credits in June 2011 to simplify payments. In reality, Credits were a nightmare for international payments due to fluctuating exchange rates. But last night, the sun set on Credits and Facebook completed its transition to local currency payments. It will help developers make more money, smooth payments, and solidify Facebook as an international app platform. → Read More
Import.io participated in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt to show off its service, which makes data from a website more accessible by turning pages into spreadsheets for pulling relevant information.
Chief Data Officer Andrew Fogg explained that web pages are designed for humans to read. But machines need other ways to understand information. Using Import.io, the data can be queried… → Read More
Before the five startups taking part in this year’s San Francisco MediaCamp took the stage at Demo Day, the gathered investors, journalists, and tech/media industry folk were addressed by Turner Broadcasting CEO Phil Kent, who predicted big things for the startup accelerator.
Apparently this was the first time Kent has attended a demo day — which isn’t as bad as it sounds, since this is only… → Read More
Online education providers may very well disrupt the higher-education establishment, but first, these for-profit companies need to find a way to finance the mammoth technical infrastructure needed to support millions of students. It’s a challenge that all mission-based businesses wrestle with, and why many have wondered whether Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) providers will ever become big… → Read More
Life is hard for famous people. You’re trying to @ reply with your celebrity friends on Twitter, but the conversation gets drowned out by rabid fans and spammers mentioning you. So Twitter’s begun rolling out to people with verified profiles two new filters for the Connect tab. Filtered, which attempts to cut down spam, and Verified, which only shows interactions with other verified… → Read More
Today Microsoft announced that it has added IMAP support to its Outlook.com webmail product. Outlook.com has over 400 million active users according to Microsoft, making it not only one of the most popular webmail services around. Why IMAP? Demand, likely, and the fact that Microsoft wants developers to take a keener interest in its little email program. In a blog post announcing the move… → Read More
The official Arduino IDE is a dour piece of software designed for uploading code to the ubiquitous and super-cool micro controller. It is a standalone, non-networked app that isn’t very pretty to look at. But what if you want to share code and upload programs right from your browser? That’s where CodeBender.cc comes in. → Read More
Happy Post-Disrupt Day, super troopers. I trust you are rehydrated and back at work. A pity. While we were watching Zuckerberg knock the U.S. government for misbehaving while others managed to toss the Constitution out with the PayPal water, Microsoft put together and released a new Surface promotion: Trade in your iPad, get mad store credit. → Read More
Coder, a new project that’s coming out of Google’s Creative Lab, is an open source tool that allows you to easily turn a Raspberry Pi into a basic web server with a web-based development environment. The tool, which was developed by Googler Jason Striegel, designer Jeff Baxter and a small team in New York, is meant to be an environment for educators and parents to teach kids “the… → Read More
Oh, you thought virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift were already cool? The folks at Sixense are trying to take it to a whole new level, with a set of motion tracking controllers that bring your hands and feet into the game (and improves the Rift itself, while it’s at it.) → Read More
The iPhone 5S announcement this week was punctuated with a lot of specs and buzzwords. Much of it centered around the new Touch ID fingerprint scanner and the 64-bit processor. But the most intriguing to me was the camera advancements. Apple has been putting a major focus on the camera in the iPhone for a couple of years now. A recent Apple ad touted that more people take pictures with the iPhone… → Read More
Today Twitter confirmed that it has filed an S-1 with the SEC and is therefore on the road to going public. This is an important moment for Twitter, and for tech, as it shows that the IPO window is open. Here’s Twitter on its filing: We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.— Twitter… → Read More
In a test that could make News Feed more engaging and pave the way for video ads, Facebook’s mobile feed will start auto-playing user-uploaded videos in-line when they’re scrolled over for a small subset of US iOS and Android users. Videos play silently until tapped to full-screen, which feels slick. Facebook is expected to soon launch a new video ad unit, which might draw on this test’s feedback. → Read More
Big data is a catch-all term for describing any form of data analytics that requires the processing of data, be it by the gigabyte, terabyte or in the nose-bleed realm of petabyte-scale workloads. SAP’s big data push is embodied in a custom, decked-out tour bus that the company parked in front of TechCrunch Disrupt as part of its overall effort to promote its analytics offering and build out… → Read More
Russian startup Nettle, which is based in the Skolkovo Tech City area, is showing off a $28,000 holographic gaming set-up at TechCrunch Disrupt SF’s hardware alley. The Nettlebox rig consists of a 3D plasma display, with four fisheye lens infrared cameras sited at the corners to track the position of the gamer — who wears a pair of 3D glasses with two infrared lights on board. → Read More
Insightly has raised $10 million for its CRM service that integrates with GMail, Outlook, Office 365 and other services. Emergence Capital Partners, Sozo Ventures and TrueBridge Capital Partners participated in the Series B round led by Matt Holleran, founder and managing director of Cloud Apps Management. Insightly has now raised a total of $13 million. → Read More
Circa, a startup that offers quick and mobile news consumption, is expanding its services to the web by launching its online platform for following and sharing news. While the website doesn’t have the full functionality of the iOS app, the company aims to complete it later this year. The mission of Circa News, the startup’s iOS app, is to give readers the main points of each relevant… → Read More
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