Thursday, November 3, 2011

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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 its first 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.
 
EMI Presses Play On Digital Innovation; Opens Its Catalog To App Developers Top
emi_3-500x276The music industry industry has taken some questionable stances on digital technology over the years. To call it resistant to change probably wouldn't be stepping too far out of line. That's why, as music fans, we love to hear about cases in which the music industry demonstrates forward thinking and proactively constructs policy that takes new technologies and distribution media into account. Maybe it's unfair to paint the entire industry with a single stroke, but if this is true of any part of the industry, it's traditionally been true of the major record labels. The good news is that EMI, one of the big four, is taking some laudable steps to open its vault of music. The record label has teamed up with The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform whose technology powers a number of music apps from big media companies to indy developers, to create an initiative that will put thousands of its songs and other music-related content (video, photos, and artwork, for example) into the hands of more than 10,000 app developers.
 
Android Still Most Popular Smartphone OS, iOS Holds Steady In Second Place Top
smartphone-marketAccording to new data from Nielsen, Android has continued to pick up steam in the United States, and retains its crown as the most-used smartphone OS during Q3 2011. Google's mobile OS now accounts for 43% of U.S. smartphones, up from the 39% we saw back in July. Apple's iOS, on the other hand, has remained lock-steady at 28% this whole time, putting it at a distant second.
 
Fujitsu "K": The World's Fastest Supercomputer Is Now Even Faster Top
fujitsu kJapan took the top spot from China in the ranking for the world's fastest supercomputer back in June, when the International Supercomputing Conference said "K", a supercomputer made by Fujitsu, is outperforming China's Tianhe-1A. In August, the Japanese government said it is ready to pump another US$1.3 billion into supercomputer development, and today, K is faster than ever. As announced by Fujitsu, K is now the first computer in the world being able to handle over 10 quadrillion calculations per second, or 10 petaflops. To be more concrete, K's 88,128 CPUs (arrayed over 864 racks) ran continuously for almost 30 hours, achieving a performance of 10.51 petaflops (benchmark in June: 8.162 petaflops).
 
SoundCloud Debuts Its New HTML5 Widget, Looks So Much Better Than Old One Top
soundcloudThis morning, popular audio platform SoundCloud is debuting its brand-new HTML5 widget which will now be offered in beta format alongside its current Flash widget, but will eventually replace it. The completely redesigned widget allows SoundCloud users to embed their recordings and uploads on their blog or website, view information about the sound, its creator, the likes, comments and plays, and easily share the sound to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Also, it just looks way, way better.
 
Google TV 2.0 Review: A Brillant Interface, But Still Lacking Substance Top
google-tv-logo-v2-review-1It's with a heavy heart that I write this revised Google TV review. The product is teetering on a ledge between falling into an abyss of obscurity or sliding downhill into geekdom. There doesn't seem to be an exit path to the mainstream. Google TV, at least in this latest incarnation, fails to impress or resolve the major fundamental issues that doomed the first version. Oh how I wanted Google TV to finally be the bridge between cable and internet content. But it's still nothing more than a fancy Netflix and YouTube box. Hear this: The latest Google TV, referred to as Google TV 2.0 throughout the rest of this review, is a star performer. It runs like a champ and it's clear that Google engineers paid close attention to criticism of version 1.0. Most of the functions and design elements previously missing are elegantly included. However, most of the downfalls of the older version had nothing to do with user interface. Content is king and Google TV sill doesn't wear the crown.
 
Motorola Unveils The Xoom 2 And Xoom 2 Media Edition Top
hgalleryxoom2dynrhorizhomeemaramat800We've been seeing them in one form or another for months now, but today Motorola has officially unveiled the Xoom 2 and Xoom 2 Media Edition tablets. In most ways, the two tablets are nearly identical: they both sport 1.2GHz dual-core processors, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a 5-megapixel rear shooter, and a 1.3-megapixel front-facer. As expected, both run Android 3.2 (sorry Ice Cream Sandwich fans), and they both pack the same complement of Google apps out of the box.
 
Coraid Raises $50 Million For Next-Gen Elastic Data Storage Top
Screen shot 2011-11-03 at 5.04.56 AMCoraid, a developer of Ethernet SAN storage solutions, this morning announced that it has closed a sizable $50 million series C round led by Crosslink Capital. Coraid's existing investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Azure Capital Partners and affiliates of Silver Lake all participated in the round, as well as new investors including Seagate Technology and Kinetic Ventures.
 

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