Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

• Startup Weekend's Eventful Year: 260 Events In 202 Cities; Startups Raised $30M+
• Nobody Wins At CES
• Siri Sibling Trapit Raises $6.2 Million Series A From Horizons
• After 58 Years: Panasonic To Cut The Cord With JVC Kenwood
• Nokia Acquires Norwegian Mobile OS Company Smarterphone
• HTC's Growth Spurt Is Done (For Now)
• Sony Announces World's First XQD Memory Cards
• The Samsung Note Is Definitively Not Coming To AT&T As Far As You Know
• Bessemer Leads $6M Round In Q&A Platform For Students And Teachers, Piazza
• No Cable Killer After All: KIT digital Buys Assets Of Sezmi For $27 Million
• Samsung Posts Record Q4 Numbers, 35 Million Smartphones Sold
• Colbert Asks Steve Case About The 'Sharing Economy', Invents Toasterster
• Daily Crunch: Strive
• Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Put $1.4M In Real-Time Messaging Infrastructure Startup Flotype
• Animoto Learns To Play Friendly With Instagram, Now Pulls Photos In Directly
• Yammer, We Just Can't Quit You
• For The 5th Year In A Row, Apple Wins CES. Before It Starts. Without Showing Up.
• Millennial Media Files For IPO, Keeping Status As The Top Independent Mobile Ad Network
• You Can Now Post Full Size Instagram Pics To Facebook (And Timeline)
• LG Shows Off Its New Google TV Set Before CES

---

Startup Weekend's Eventful Year: 260 Events In 202 Cities; Startups Raised $30M+	Top
Startup Weekend, whose mission is to kickstart and foster startup communities worldwide through events and networking sessions, had a very lively 2011. According to internal statistics shared exclusively with TechCrunch, the organization held a total of 260 events in 202 cities, in 67 countries (you can find the obligatory accompanying infographic below). All in all, the 'startup weekends' attracted some 21,316 people, who collectively formed 2,817 teams. Startups that were incubated at its events raised at least $30 million in outside funding in the course of last year, although Startup Weekend CMO Joey Pomerenke tells me there were probably more fundraising rounds completed that they simply don't know about yet.
Nobody Wins At CES	Top
Rather than do a CES pre-round-up of exciting products I'd like to address this interesting slant on the whole "massive electronics trade show in the middle of the desert" concept that has kept the Gadgets crew here up for the past few weeks. MG said Apple won CES. He was being snide, but, in a way, honest because, in the end, nobody wins CES. The Consumer Electronics Show is, as its name implies, a show for consumer electronics. These include, but are not limited to, TVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players (if they still make those), and accessories. TV stands! TV brackets! Speakers! Remotes! In fact, there's an entire hall dedicated to the Asian purveyors of the components that make up those consumer electronics, a sort of Fishmongers Row to the CE industry where the smell is at least far more tolerable.
Siri Sibling Trapit Raises $6.2 Million Series A From Horizons	Top
Personalized web search tool Trapit, often called the sister to Apple's Siri because both were built on the same artificial intelligence project from DARPA and SRI, has just raised $6.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Horizons Ventures, the Hong Kong-based venture fund that manages the investments for Facebook and Spotify investor Li Ka-shing. Horizons also previously invested in Siri's B round.
After 58 Years: Panasonic To Cut The Cord With JVC Kenwood	Top
Panasonic has been partnering with Victor Co. of Japan, which in 2008 merged with Kenwood to become JVC Kenwood, since 1954. But yesterday JVC Kenwood announced [JP, PDF] that Panasonic, its largest shareholder and business partner, will go alone in the future. Big P is apparently ready to sell 24,225,400 of its shares, a move that will make the company the seventh-largest shareholder in JVC Kenwood.
Nokia Acquires Norwegian Mobile OS Company Smarterphone	Top
Nokia has acquired Oslo, Norway-based Smarterphone, a company that builds a mobile operating system for so-called feature phones. The news of the purchase, which was actually completed last November, comes straight from investment firm Ferd Capital, which pumped 6.5 million euros into Smarterphone since 2007.
HTC's Growth Spurt Is Done (For Now)	Top
HTC released their unaudited Q4 financials earlier this morning, and as expected, they indicate a disappointing decline for the Taiwanese hardware vendor. The company's net operating income was down to NT$12.9 billion ($426 million), a nearly $22 percent decline from their position this time last year. HTC's revenues were similarly impacted -- they only managed to pull in NT$101 billion ($3.35 billion), which represents a 2.49% year-over-year dip, and a nearly 25% decrease from their impressive Q3 figures.
Sony Announces World's First XQD Memory Cards	Top
Are you ready for yet another memory card format? Dubbed XQD, the medium was first announced by Sandisk, Sony and Nikon in November 2010. And after the the CompactFlash Association finalized the specifications last month, Sony took the wraps off the world's first XQD cards today. Two versions of the card will be available, in addition to an XQD-compatible card reader (USB 3.0) and an ExpressCard Adapter.
The Samsung Note Is Definitively Not Coming To AT&T As Far As You Know	Top
Remember the mini-slate Samsung released a few months ago? The Samsung Galaxy Note? Pretty cool little device. As we enter CES week, the press releases are flying fast and furious and this one caught my eye. It's for a small company that makes accessories for gadgets and I suppose (I can't find the original) it outlined Anymode's plans for Samsung Note accessories. The release also noted that the Samsung Note would hit AT&T this year. There were rumors of this, but Anymode essentially confirmed it. Until they didn't.
Bessemer Leads $6M Round In Q&A Platform For Students And Teachers, Piazza	Top
Piazza, a Q&A platform for students and instructors, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners with Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures also participating in the round. The company is also backed by Sequoia Capital and SV Angel. Piazza's platform helps classmates share their questions and answers in a format that's a mixture between a wiki and a forum. Each class gets its own hub for Q&A, and students can bookmark any questions if they're also eager to find out the answer. Multiple students can contribute to each answer in a wiki style but there's a version history that shows what each student wrote.
No Cable Killer After All: KIT digital Buys Assets Of Sezmi For $27 Million	Top
So much for Sezmi's ambitious plans to kill cable TV: the assets of the cloud-based TV delivery platform company were recently acquired by KIT digital for approximately $27 million in a mixture of stock and cash. Sezmi, founded in 2007 under the name Building B by the former CTO of Sony Music (and later CTO of Sony's US subsidiary) Phil Wiser and serial entrepreneur Buno Pati, reportedly raised over $70 million.
Samsung Posts Record Q4 Numbers, 35 Million Smartphones Sold	Top
Samsung has today posted record quarterly profits after selling 35 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, up from 27.9 million in the previous quarter. Operating profits have soared to 5.2 trillion won (US $4.47 billion), representing a 73 percent year-over-year increase.
Colbert Asks Steve Case About The 'Sharing Economy', Invents Toasterster	Top
Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL (which owns TechCrunch blah blah blah) and founder of Revolution, was on The Colbert Report yesterday to get interrupted by host Stephen Colbert after every other word he spoke while attempting to explain the 'sharing economy' to him and the audience. Fortunately for viewers, the interruptions were amusing, especially when Colbert lays out his vision for a new startup called Toasterster, which would enable New Yorkers to pick up and 'rent' toasters at a central location and return them there after using it for the couple of minutes they need it for.
Daily Crunch: Strive	Top
Here are some recent posts from TechCrunch Gadgets: Semiconductor Startup SuVolta Collects $17.6M In Second Funding Round Review: Nokia's Low-End Hail-Mary Pass, The Lumia 710 Marvell's ARM-Based Chipset Tapped For New Google TV Units Striiv Fitness Gadget Puts Personalized Challenges On The Menu The Logitech Cube Attempts To Redefine The Humble Mouse
Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Put $1.4M In Real-Time Messaging Infrastructure Startup Flotype	Top
Flotype, a startup that offers a suite of technologies that simplify real-time messaging for cloud and mobile applications, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Yuri Milner, Salesforce, and Y Combinator. Flotype, which was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2011 class, is announcing that its first product is Bridge, a technology that enables real-time communication between any server, any device, on any platform. Bridge is essentially an API that developers can use to avoid the complexity of building real-time messaging into their applications, and help push more data faster between servers, web browsers, mobile phones and other devices.
Animoto Learns To Play Friendly With Instagram, Now Pulls Photos In Directly	Top
It's not a bad day for Instagram. First came the announcement that they were 2011 Crunchies Finalists. Shortly thereafter, they finally figured out how to push fullsize Instagrams to your Facebook Timeline. Capping off the day, automatic video slideshow service Animoto has launched full, built-in Instagram support.
Yammer, We Just Can't Quit You	Top
Do you have a product or service you don't really like, always complain about, yet can't really stop using? Everyone knows someone who owns a car that always breaks down, or dates a girl that they're not particularly into but for some reason they haven't made the move to cut ties. You just kind of wave the annoyances away like, "Yeah, [whatever it is] sucks," but you don't want to go through the trouble of getting a new one because the switching costs (i.e. the time it takes to adapt to a new product/service/girlfriend) are too high.
For The 5th Year In A Row, Apple Wins CES. Before It Starts. Without Showing Up.	Top
Are you ready for CES? I know I am. The PR emails are flowing in and I'm going to respond to every single one of them. I can't wait to hear about Samsung's social media stuff. And Vizio's new thingy. I can't wait to get my hands on that one thing made by those guys who did that other thing last year that no one bought. It's gonna be fantastic. So pumped. ... No, I'm not going to CES. I've never been to CES. I doubt I'll ever go to CES. Why would I?
Millennial Media Files For IPO, Keeping Status As The Top Independent Mobile Ad Network	Top
As the second-largest mobile ad network, and the top independent one, Millennial Media is the first to try to get an exit the old-fashioned way. It filed its S-1 documents today as the first step in going public, having nearly achieved profitability. According to the filing, its revenues grew to nearly $70 million in the first nine months of 2011, a 138% increase over the same period in 2010; net losses, meanwhile, declined from $5.4 million to $417,000.
You Can Now Post Full Size Instagram Pics To Facebook (And Timeline)	Top
You know what's cool? When you subconsciously want something and a startup responds to your (unvoiced) requests. Well, mobile photosharing app Instagram has just made a very small tweak that has the potential for huge growth: You can now send your Instagram photos full size to Facebook, and they automatically display "beautifully" in your Facebook Timeline. Photos shared from Instagram will appear in your Timeline with the original caption that you posted on Instagram, as well as a link to the public Instagram URL.
LG Shows Off Its New Google TV Set Before CES	Top
In keeping with our prediction that Google TV would be seeing something of an expansion this year at CES, LG's first foray into the Google TV ecosystem has just been unveiled ahead of the show. As you can see in the picture, it's got a new interface but the guts are still Google TV. This is probably something that we'll be seeing more of: manufacturer-specific builds, like Sense and TouchWiz for your TV.

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions

You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.