Aereo’s Dissent
I’ve been waiting for the Supreme Court ruling on Aereo all week. When it came down yesterday, it felt a little bit like Groundhog Day. If the Supreme Court sided with Aereo, winter would be over; if they didn’t, six more weeks of cold. Either way, I think Aereo will eventually have its own spring… but now it will take a while. So here’s the bad news: the Supreme… Read More-
Please Join Us For The 9th Annual August Capital Party In Silicon Valley
TechCrunch’s annual summer soirée is almost here. As in years past, August Capital will host TechCrunch and hundreds of local investors, founders and developers at its sunny office on Sand Hill Road. All are welcome to the August 1 event, but space is very limited. Read More -
Loyalty And Marketing Analytics Startup CrowdTwist Raises $9M More
CrowdTwist is announcing that it has raised $9 million in Series B funding. Since the company offers tools for creating online loyalty programs, co-founder and CEO Irving Fain said that a few years ago, CrowdTwist was sometimes “gravitationally lumped into the intense fervor around gamification,” but he pointed to the new funding is a sign that it has a bigger vision, one that… Read More -
Cooliris Launches BeamIt, Its New Photo-Centric Messaging App
Cooliris, maker of the photo-browsing app of the same name, is getting into the messaging business today with the launch of a new app called BeamIt. When co-founder and CEO Soujanya Bhumkar gave me a demo of the app earlier this week, he argued that there’s room for another messaging app, largely because popular messaging tools like the recently acquired WhatsApp are designed more as… Read More -
Monitise Acquires Markco Media For Up To £55M, Includes MyVoucherCodes And Last Second Tickets
What’s this? An exit for Mark Pearson’s Markco Media, best known for being the parent company of MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, but also a prominent investor in UK online marketing and e-commerce-driven startups, including most recently Last Second Tickets. Read More -
Agent Ribbit Delivers Monthly Science Kits For Kids
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember a childhood filled with explorations of the natural world: magnifying glasses, Sea Monkeys, leaf presses, ant farms, at-home chemistry sets, volcano science fair projects, telescopes and microscopes, and more. But today’s kids seem more keen to explore the world of iPad applications than the mysteries around them. A newly… Read More -
Tipcast Brings The Human Touch Back To Sharing
If you think social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram have taken the personal touch out of human interactions, you should check out Tipcast, because Stagename, Inc. CEO Josh Barkin wants to make sharing more personal again. Tipcast is a free iOS app that works in three steps. Read More -
Premium Restaurant Take-Out Platform Deliveroo Raises £2.75M From Index, Hoxton, And Others
A number of startups have cropped up which are attempting to reach parts of the market the likes of Just Eat don’t really cater for yet. Namely, in the case of Deliveroo, food delivery from premium restaurants that don’t traditionally offer a take-out service. Today the London-based company has closed a £2.7 million series A round led by Index Ventures, with participation from… Read More -
BlockScore Lands $2M In Funding For Making I.D. Verification Easier
In 2012, about 7 percent of all people aged 16 or older in the U.S. experienced identity theft, with their financial losses totaling $24.7 billion. Christopher Morton is familiar with the crime because in 2007, he had his identity stolen. Fortunately, the thieves were prevented from obtaining new credit cards, but Morton became interested in how identity verification systems work. With… Read More -
Bio-Tech Startup WISErg Raises $5M To Brings Its Food Waste Recycler To California
WISErg, a bio-tech company that recycles discarded food into organic fertilizer while harvesting data from the scraps, announced today that it has raised a Series B round of $5 million from private investors. This brings the total WISErg has raised to $7.75 million and will allow the Redmond, WA-based company to expand into California. Read More
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Google Acquires Mobile Testing Platform Appurify, Will Keep It Open On iOS And Android
Google just announced at I/O that it has acquired Appurify, a startup that lets developers automate testing and optimization of their mobile apps and websites. Appurify will stay open as freemium cross-platform service but get a big boost in distribution as it becomes integrated into the Google developer tool stack. Read More -
Victorious Launches To Build Mobile Apps For YouTube Stars
A startup called Victorious is looking to build mobile apps for “digitally-born stars”, creating hubs that bring together a creator’s content from YouTube and social media sites. There are a couple of former YouTube executives involved in the company, including Chief Creative Officer Bing Chen (previously YouTube’s global head of creator development and management)… Read More -
Aereo Says That SCOTUS Ruling “Sends A Chilling Message To The Tech Industry”
Aereo has issued a formal response to the decision passed down today by the Supreme Court, ruling that Aereo is illegal because the service is considered a public performance under the Copyright Act. In the response, Aereo calls this decision a “massive setback for the American consumer.” Chet Kanojia, Aereo CEO, also cites Justice Scalia’s dissent in the statement… Read More -
Swapt Launches Out Of Beta To Bring You Accurate Apartment Reviews
Despite the amount of money that is invested into our housing situation, renters actually have very little information about a place before they sign a lease. Is the landlord always this nice? Is the building well-maintained? Have there been any robberies or bug problems? Without a full investigative report (which no one has time for), there’s really no way to get at this information. Read More -
“Straight Talking” Payday Loans Startup Wonga Found Sending Fake Legal Firm Letters
Wonga’s unescapable TV advertising campaign, featuring cute ‘elderly’ puppets, carries the company slogan “straight-talking money“. But, following a ruling by UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK payday loans startup and great European IPO hope, has been found anything but straight-talking. Read More -
Aereo Loses In Supreme Court, Deemed Illegal
Today the Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling in the legal tussle between streaming TV service Aereo and major network broadcasters. SCOTUS ruled that the decision of the second circuit, which upheld that Aereo was within the bounds of the Copyright Act, shall be reversed. It was a 6-3 decision, with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito dissenting. Read More -
Wingify Launches A New A/B Testing Platform For People Without Coding Experience
A/B testing of sites and apps is usually the domain of developers and IT teams. With the relaunch of its Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), however, Wingify hopes to make A/B testing accessible for more people, even if they don’t have HTML or coding experience. This means that companies can open up A/B testing of their products to marketing teams and product managers, letting them see… Read More -
Forget.me Launches To Ride Coattails Of European “Right To Be Forgotten” Ruling
One company’s regulatory pain is another company’s pleasure. Following the recent European Court Of Justice ruling in which Google must respect an individual’s “right to be forgotten” and remove “irrelevant” and “outdated” information that contravenes an EU privacy directive, a new service has launched to help users file a request with… Read More -
Ex-CBSi Execs Get $3M For Sapho, A Smart Stream For Disparate Enterprise App Updates
As executives at CBS Interactive, Fouad ElNaggar, Peter Yared, and Charles Christolini were all too familiar with one of the biggest IT problems that big companies face: millions of dollars get invested into software for companies to work better, but getting people in the company to engage with that software regularly was nigh on impossible. Yared calls this “the dirty secret of… Read More -
Mobile Ad Startup TapSense Announces Support For Wearable Apps, Starting On Pebble
If you’re building apps for the Pebble smartwatch and other wearable gadgets, startup TapSense hopes to bring you into the wonderful world of mobile advertising. The company announced today that its mobile ad exchange will support wearable apps, beginning with those in the Pebble appstore. You can see a video demo of an ad below. Read More
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