Thursday, November 3, 2011

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Kevin Rose's Oink Hits The App Store Top
oinkshotOink, the first app from Milk, Kevin Rose's startup lab is now available in iTunes. Oink is an app that lets you rate things at different places, and uses social reputation to help others figure out who to trust about what topics. Rose gave a preview of Oink a couple weeks ago at the Web 2.0 Summit. At the time, I wrote:
 
Keen On… Robert Levine: Is Google Killing Our Culture? (TCTV) Top
Screen shot 2011-11-03 at 1.00.31 PMAccording to Robert Levine, the author of the just published Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, the Internet is destroying the market for high quality culture. Blaming both the ideology of free culture and online piracy, Levine argues that the digital world is making it increasingly hard for professional writers, journalists, musicians and film makers to make a living selling their content. Levine, the former executive editor of Billboard magazine, isn't necessarily the first to make this argument – but Free Ride is probably the most credible and coherent book to date on the impact of the Internet on our culture.
 
Hands-On With The HTC Rezound For Verizon: Fat And Fast Top
HTC RezoundWith leaks galore and this afternoon's announcement, there's not much reason to rehash HTC Rezound deets. So I'll just cut to the chase and hit you guys with some first impressions.
 
Kicksend Grabs $1.8 Million From True Ventures, SV Angel & More For Dead Simple File Sharing Top
kicksend-large-blueIn August, Y Combinator grad Kicksend launched in beta to make sending and sharing large files easy as pie, especially for the non-technical crowd. (Read our initial coverage here.) Since then, founders Pradeep Elankumaran and Brendan Lim tell me that they've been heads-down fixing, tweaking, and developing some big new features. While those are not yet ready for broadcast, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $1.8 million in seed funding. The seed round was led by True Ventures, with participation from Digital Garage, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Milo Founder and CEO Jack Abraham. Kicksend will be using its new capital to grow its team and push out several big enhancements to its file sharing service.
 
LinkedIn Beats The Street; Q3 Revenue Up 126 Percent To $140M Top
linkedinIn its second quarter as a public company, LinkedIn posted Q3 earnings today. Revenue for the third quarter was $139.5 million, up 126 percent from the third quarter in 2010. GAAP Net loss for the third quarter was $1.6 million (or a loss of $0.02 per share), compared to net income of $4 million for the third quarter of 2010; Non-GAAP net income for the third quarter was $6.6 million (or $0.06 per share), compared to $6 million for the third quarter of 2010. Analysts expected LinkedIn to break even on an earnings on a per share basis with revenue expected to come in at $128 million. Members grew to 131.2 million, an increase of 63% from the third quarter of 2010. "LinkedIn had a strong third quarter, with significant, broad-based growth across all of our revenue streams, member engagement metrics, geographies, and sales channels," said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. "Our results underscore the long-term strength of our global platform and our business model."
 
Art.sy Raises $6 Million Series A From Peter Thiel, Thrive Capital, Wendi Murdoch And Dasha Zhukova Top
art-syNew York City's Art.sy, which wants to change the way people buy fine art, recently closed a $6 million series A. Peter Thiel personally led the round, with existing investors Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital, Wendi Murdoch, and Dasha Zhukova participating. The startup previously raised $1.25 million a year ago. Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, and Jim Breyer also invested in that seed round. Art.sy first appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in May, 2010, but the site still has not launched beyond a small private beta. The company is taking a long-term approach to digitizing the art world, striking deals with top galleries before it opens up so that it can launch with some of the best art in the world. So far, it has deals with 180 galleries in 40 countries.
 
Meet Verizon's New HTC Rezound Top
rezoundpressThe HTC Rezound (formerly the Vigor) has been on our radar for what seems like forever now, but we're here in New York City for HTC's big event, and they have just officially pulled back the curtains on their next Gingerbread-powered smartphone. Fear not though, Ice Cream Sandwich fans: the Rezound will ship ready for Ice Cream Sandwich, and HTC and Verizon are aiming to push it to the Rezound early next year.
 
With Growth Surging, Gogobot Raises $15 Million For Social Travel Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-03 at 3.02.28 PMGogobot, a social travel site that launched less than a year ago, is on a tear. The company has racked up accolades including being named one of Time's top sites of 2011 and winner of the 2010 Crunchie award for Best Design. They're seeing very strong growth. And today, they're announcing that they've raised a very large Series B funding round of $15 million. The round is being led by Redpoint Ventures, with Battery Ventures and CrunchFund participating. Redpoint General Partner Satish Dharmaraj will be joining Gogobot's board. This brings Gogobot's total funding to $19 million, after a $4 million Series A in June 2010. Given how young Gogobot is there's a chance you haven't stumbled across it before. But there's also a solid chance that some of your friends have: Gogobot founder and CEO Travis Katz says that the site is now the biggest social travel service on the web, and that its userbase has grown 10x in the last six months. Two weeks ago the company launched a mobile app, which is now a top-10 travel app in 31 countries on the App Store. And it's the biggest travel-related app on Facebook. The company isn't sharing any specific user stats yet, but it sounds like things are going very well.
 
Siri Experiencing Extended Outage Top
sirifaq_heroMaybe we need a new website, IsSiriDownForEveryoneOrJustForMe.com, because it looks like Siri is experiencing an extended outage, according to several tipsters, tweets, and our own internal tests. When you try to use Siri on the iPhone 4S right now, the usually perky virtual assistant just responds: "Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network" and does nothing.
 
Welcome TechCrunch's Newest Writers, Josh Constine And Eric Eldon Top
josh constineEver since I became Editor of TechCrunch in September, I've been looking for great writers to help fill out our coverage in Silicon Valley.  And now I am pleased to announce that I've hired not one, but two: Josh Constine and Eric Eldon Both come from Inside Facebook, where Eldon is the editor and Constine is the lead writer. But I didn't ask Eldon and Constine to join TechCrunch just to write about Facebook.  Their deep knowledge of the social web will help them write about everything from startups to Google.  They will be joining our editorial staff in San Francisco.  Constine starts Friday, and Eldon in two weeks.
 
Google's New Algorithm Update Impacts 35% Of Searches Top
googlelogoToday, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous "Caffeine" update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items.
 
ExtremeU: Facebook To Offer Product Strategy, Design Mentorship To Toronto Accelerator Top
Screen shot 2011-11-03 at 9.12.59 AMExtreme Venture Partners, the Toronto and Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm, today announced that it is launching a new-and-improved version of its accelerator program, Extreme University -- also known as "ExtremeU". Extreme Venture Partner's accelerator program has been up and running since 2009 and is aimed at becoming a training ground and valuable ecosystem for Canadian startups targeting the social, mobile, and local spaces. Extreme University graduates, like Locationary and Uken Games have gone on to raise millions in follow-on financing rounds. Jon Evans also recently wrote about Maide, a current ExtremeU participant that's turning iPads everywhere into 3-D controllers.
 
Do A Barrel Roll! In Google! Right Now! Top
do a barrel rollEveryone stay alert! Do a barrel roll! Or let Google do it for you. No, seriously. Go to Google and type in "Do a barrel roll" and watch, well, I won't ruin it for you. (LMGTFY link) Alternatively you could type "z or r twice", which is a reference to the maneuver in Star Fox.
 
Video Interview: The Founders Of Asana Declare War Against 'Work About Work' Top
asanaIn late 2008, news broke that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz was leaving the company to launch a new startup of his own, joined by early Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein. It was a move that led to plenty of raised eyebrows — Facebook's growth was (and still is) explosive, and there were clearly lots of exciting things going on at the company. The duo later revealed that they were working on a productivity app called Asana, raising a total of $10.2 million to fund the company. And yesterday, after two years in production and lengthy beta testing, the site held its public launch (you can find our full rundown on the launch right here). So why did Moskovitz and Rosenstein start Asana? Yesterday the founders stepped away from their launch-day battle stations for an interview on TechCrunch TV, where they outlined their motivations for starting the company, and what makes Asana different from the slew of productivity apps that are already out there. Check out the video above for their answers.
 
Intel Capital Leads $35.5M Round In TV E-Commerce Platform Delivery Agent Top
deliveryTV e-commerce company Delivery Agent has raised $35.5 million in new funding led by Intel Capital with strategic investors, Liberty Global, and Grazia Equity participating. The Series E raise includes re-investment from all current investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to date to $107.3 million. Delivery Agent helps TV networks monetize content through two distinct channels. First, the company creates online marketplaces for products and merchandise that are seen on television shows. Delivery Agent has signed on all the major networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV Networks.
 
Google+ Rolls Out YouTube Integration, New Chrome Extensions Top
plusoneGoogle is shipping more Google+ features today designed to increase user engagement and sharing. These include a YouTube slider that lets you watch and share YouTube videos with your Google+ friends and two new Google Chrome extensions for sharing webpages and tracking your Google+ notifications.
 
deel.io: Former Google Engineers Take On Dealmap With New Search And Discovery Platform For Deals Top
156201v4-max-250x250The daily deal space continues to be as active as ever. This means, on the one hand, there's a lot of innovation and experimentation with new models happening in the space, but, on the other, there's also plenty of derivative technology, clones, and noise. This is largely because the barriers to entry are so low, if not non-existent; everybody and their mother seems to have a daily deals site, or is using one. Of course, this generally results in deal overload, expiration, disorganization, and a thousand other pain points. Deal wallets, deal maps, secondary resale marketplaces, and more have popped up to address these issues. And today, another startup enters the space (in beta), called deel.io, which, simply put, wants to bring a bit of organization and simplicity to the wild and woolly deal space.
 
Web App Performance Solution Tracelytics Raises $600K From Google Ventures, Battery & Flybridge Top
tracelytics-logoApplication performance and analytics solution provider Tracelytics has just closed a seed round of $600,000 from Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Google Ventures, and several prominent angel investors. The Tracelytics solution, currently in a limited release, is a SaaS-based application performance management (APM) tool that's used to  provide visibility into complex, distributed Web applications written in PHP, Ruby or Python.
 
Euclid Elements Emerges From Stealth, Debuts "Google Analytics For The Real World" Top
euclid-logoA new startup called Euclid Elements emerged from stealth mode today to debut its customer-tracking solution for brick-and-mortar merchants it's calling "Google Analytics for the physical world." The name is an apt description for the new solution, which employs sensors and wireless technology to track customer behavior, as its founding team actually includes former Google Analytics engineers. Euclid also announced its $5.8 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Harrison Metal, Triple Point Capital and other angel investors.
 
Cost-Per-Action Mobile Ad Network Moolah Media Launches Ad Unit To Measure Actions Beyond The Click Top
moolah-mediaMoolah Media, a recently launched mobile ad network that uses a cost-per-action and cost-per-lead model, is rolling out a new performance optimized ad units for advertisers and publishers with the launch of its new SmartMoolah layer. The network launched last year allowing advertisers to drive inbound calls directly to a call center, collect signups and registration leads, while also tracking conversions. Moolah promises higher payouts and 100 percent fill rates for publishers, and ads can be placed within apps, on the mobile web or within text messages.
 

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