Wednesday, April 18, 2012

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Spotify Details New Global Partnership With Coca-Cola Top
spotifyRight now I'm sitting in a room covered in Spotify and Coca-Cola logos. That's because Spotify and Coke have just announced a global partnership to help both brands expand their ubiquity. The folks at Coke explained that music has always been a huge part of Coke's marketing efforts, going all the way back to a series of ads featuring Ray Charles nearly 50 years ago. That said, the partnership will focus on four key pillars: global, technology, social, and a commitment to music. Spotify explained that Coca-Cola will be a huge factor in bringing Spotify to new markets and new corners of the world.
 
Forecast Takes The Hassle Out Of Ambient Check-Ins Without Draining Your Battery Top
forecast_logoThere are a number of different schools of thought about how useful Foursquare-like check-ins really are. Forecast, especially, is taking a very different approach from most of Foursquare's competitors by emphasizing where you are going to be later in the day over just checking in at a location when you arrive. Now, with the latest version of its iPhone app (an update for the Android app is coming soon), the company is taking this concept a bit further. Instead of just telling people where you will be, the app will also automatically check you in when you arrive at a location (assuming you opt in for this service) and let your friends know that you have arrived.
 
Analysis: Chinese PC Market Will Grow 12% In 2012 Top
chinaIf you were wondering where all the PC growth was, look East, young person. IHS, formerly iSuppli, expects that desktop sales will rise 8% and Ultrabook sales will take up 15 to 20 percent of notebook shipments. Windows 8 and Intel's Ivy Bridge are to be driving factors in PC growth this year. In comparison, IDC found that 2011 PC shipments shrank in Europe and the United States by 9%.
 
Internet Ad Revenue Reaches $31B In 2011, Mobile Up 149 Percent (IAB Report) Top
iab logoInternet ad revenue revenue grew 22 percent in 2011, to $31 billion, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report. That's an all-time high.The final three months were also the all-time best quarter at $9 billion, an increase of 20 percent from the same quarter in 2010.
 
It's Official: AT&T To Launch $199 HTC One X On May 6 Top
attonexWell, there you have it. After turning plenty of heads at this year's Mobile World Congress, HTC's latest and greatest handset now has an official release date for the United States. AT&T has just announced that the HTC One X will hit store shelves on May 6 with a $199 price tag (2-year contract included, of course), and that pre-orders for the hotly-anticipated handset will begin on April 22.
 
PowerInbox Goes Plug-in Free With Email Client API; Adds Apps For Instagram & Pivotal Tracker Top
2 - UnifiedInboxPowerInbox, the email platform that lets you run apps for Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Google+ inside your inbox, is today launching its new "Connect API" which allows its service to be directly integrated into third-party mail clients without requiring users to install the PowerInbox software. To kick off the launch, PowerInbox has partnered with a few lesser-known email brands (sorry, no Gmail), including UnifiedInbox, SMAK, and Fuser. In addition, the service has expanded its lineup of email apps to now include Instagram, Pivotal Tracker, and a Boston-based restaurant called Boloco.
 
Cloud Emailer Mailjet Hits 1 Billion Emails Sent, Launches Apps For Tracking Emails In Real Time Top
mailjet-mobileMailjet, a cloud emailing service for tracking marketing and transactional emails, has just launched a mobile application for its business customers offering real-time email tracking. Within the mobile application, users can monitor email deliveries, plus keep an eye on metrics like bounces, opens and clicks. The company, which just rolled out a new version of its platform a couple of weeks ago, is also announcing today that it nearing 1 billion emails served. For those unfamiliar with Mailjet, the startup is taking on more established and VC-backed players like SendGrid, Postmark, and Mailgun, to name a few. The service targets businesses who need to buy or rent SMTP email servers, by offering a cloud-based solution. Emails sent out through Mailjet are tracked in a number of ways, including through the use of specialized links, transparent images that tell Mailjet how many times it was displayed, through the analysis of SMTP exchanges for bounces and deliveries, and more.
 
Q&A With Bill Amend, Creator Of FoxTrot (And Certified Geek) Top
AmendHeadshotAs we noted yesterday, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three sets of his popular Foxtrot comic strips as $1.99 downloads. This move, prompted by the creation of Apple's iBooks Author software and, more important, the rise of the self-publisher, is probably one of the first times I've seen a "traditional" comic strip enter the e-book realm in this way. I wanted to find out what Bill Amend was thinking. Luckily, he played along. TC: What made you try this? How did this compare to the "traditional" book release system? Amend: The first time I played around with an iPad on launch day all I could think about was how awesome it would be to somehow get my comics on this thing. Unfortunately, the comic strip eBooks I'd seen all tended to be a little clunky for my tastes, so I assumed I'd need to build a custom reader app, which proved too big a task for me. And then iBooks Author came out and changed everything. You have no idea how much fun it was to make these things. I love working with the people at Andrews McMeel on my print books, but the finished product always feels like their creation more than mine. These iBooks are all my doing and it's a great feeling.
 
Calling All Startups: TechCrunch New York Just Posted Office Hours Top
OfficeHoursClipArt_0The other day, I had the idea to open up Office Hours here in New York. And when I say "I had the idea," I mean that I stole it from Mike Butcher who had the brilliant plan to do the same thing in Europe. There's no reason to get all long-winded, so I'll just hit you with the specs.
 
The Noteboard Is An Amazing $10 Foldable Pocket Whiteboard Top
headerTraditional whiteboards are great for nearly everything but portability. Scribbling down physics problems? Sure. Impromptu game of tic-tac-toe? Of course. Folding up and putting it in your pocket? Not really possible with a normal whiteboard. But the Noteboard isn't a normal whiteboard. It's a dual-side, foldable whiteboard that might just change the world (but probably not).
 
Uber Experiments With Lower-Priced Taxis In Chicago Through Newly Launched Labs Group, 'Garage' Top
uber-2Back when Uber launched in San Francisco, it was heralded as a service that would disrupt the taxi industry by providing black cars on-demand via mobile phones. Thus far, the service has gained a loyal following, and expanded to a number of cities including Seattle, New York, Paris, and Chicago. Today, we're seeing a possible evolution of Uber with a new experiment in Chicago—using Taxis. Here's how Uber works. The service allows you to order a black car to come to your location via an Android or iOS app. You can actually track your car as it comes to your location as the app tracks the car via GPS. Payments are handled automatically by charging the card you have on file (no swiping necessary and gratuity is included), and it costs at least 50% more than a taxi. But you can order comfortable transportation on demand, which to many, is well worth the premium.
 
Marketo Buys Social Marketing App Developer Crowd Factory Top
crowd-factory-pictureMarketo, a company that provides an on-demand marketing software that allows businesses to optimize their sales and marketing efforts has acquired Crowd Factory, a startup that creates white-label social marketing applications. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Crowd Factory's social marketing applications allows marketers to amplify and optimize campaigns, and view social-analytics and interactions. The platform allows marketers to add social applications and messages to every channel – Facebook Pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, landing pages, websites, banner ads and emails.
 
Backed With $1.5M, CircleUp Aims To Be The AngelList For Consumer And Retail Startups Top
circleupThe funding environment for technology-focused startups these days is getting to be a bit ridiculous, so some tech industry folks may need to use their imaginations for a second to understand this concept. There are a lot of companies out there in the consumer and retail space -- with real products, real employees, and, yes, real revenues -- who have a very hard time finding the investors needed to take them to the next level of growth. The truth is, it's even more difficult than you probably think to start the next Clif Bar, Burt's Bees, or American Apparel. That's where CircleUp aims to help. CircleUp is a San Francisco-based startup that has built an online platform to allow consumer product companies to raise money from accredited investors. Much like AngelList does for tech startups and the angel investment community, CircleUp allows both retail companies and the people who would potentially like to invest in them to evaluate each other and communicate in a private social networking setting.
 
Open Source Private Cloud Software Startup Eucalyptus Raises $30M From IVP, Benchmark To Take On VMware Top
eucalyptus-systems-incEucalyptus Systems, the developer of an open source, on-premise private cloud computing platform, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Benchmark Capital, BV Capital, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). To date, Eucalyptus has raised a total of $55.5 million in capital. Led by former CEO of MySQL, Marten Mickos; Eucalyptus helps companies create private cloud computing infrastructure on their own servers. Eucalyptus' software sits inside businesses' firewalls, using their own hardware. As Mickos tells us, IT administrators install the software on their servers, which sits on top of the severs, and are then are able to create private cloud.
 
Research: Only 6% of UK Consumers Care About TV Apps; 12% Want Mobile TV; 19% Want 3D Top
tvAttention TV world: consumers, it appears, are not as tech-friendly as you might think. According to a new survey out in the UK, the vast majority of the public is not interested in fancy new 3D or mobile TV services, and even less of them care about TV apps. What they would like are better players to watch on-demand content on their main TVs and better TV guides for discovering what is on where. These conclusions come from Freeview, the UK's subscription-free digital TV service, which canvassed opinion from some 2,000 UK consumers. Only 12 percent of consumers said they consider mobile TV an appealing service, and only 19 percent thought the same of 3D TV. And TV apps -- something that has become standard among producers and broadcasters -- fared worst of all, with only six percent saying these apps were appealing, and only eight percent thinking they were in any way "useful."
 
Online Education Startup Coursera Lands $16M From Kleiner & NEA, Adds John Doerr To Its Board Top
Screen shot 2012-04-18 at 1.26.31 AMIt has already been a year since Peter Thiel called public attention to the bubble growing in American higher education. Yet, the cost of receiving a college degree in the U.S. has continued to grow, as student debt in the U.S. today has pushed north of $1 trillion, with the average debt per student standing at more than $25,000. Mountain View-based Coursera is one of the many young edtech startups looking to help solve the rising costs in higher education by offering Ivy League-caliber courses online -- for free. To help steer it down this path, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $16 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). As part of its investment, veteran investor, KPCB partner, and education reform advocate John Doerr and NEA General Partner Scott Sandell, have joined the startup's board of directors.
 
The Game Is Not Over For Facebook, Google In Russia (But There Is Work To Do) Top
Image (1) russia.jpg for post 364461Russia, like China, is a market full of tech promise, but in the face of strong local competiton, it is one that has also proven to be tough nut to crack for big U.S. companies looking for international growth. But according to one IT leader in the country -- Alexander Turkot, executive director of the IT Cluster at Skolkovo, Russia's multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley-like work in progess, the game is not yet over for the likes of Facebook and Google. In a briefing this morning, he also had some good insights into what is happening in early-stage investing in the country, and what Russian startups need to be doing to get ahead.
 
A Sign Of The Hiring-pocalypse Top
finggOh San Francisco, has it really come to this? Are we now at the point where the disheveled men on street corners no longer ask for change, but rather developers? Apparently so. I walked out of the TechCrunch offices yesterday afternoon and passed this guy at the Caltrain station. He handed me a business card, cut out of cardboard with the URL fingg.com scrawled onto it in black Sharpie pen. "Find me a programmer and we'll buy an island together," he said.
 
DealAngel Helps You Find The Best Hotel Deals — Not Just The Cheapest Top
DA_Shot1Not all hotels are created equal. That's why paying $150 for a room at one hotel may be a rip-off at one hotel while it may be a great deal somewhere else — and that, in turn, is why DealAngel is launching a new way to search for hotels. When you go into DealAngel and select your dates, the site provides a list of hotels and prices for your trip. Each of those rooms is assigned "value" score — basically, how the offered price compares to what the expected market rate for the room, based on pricing data from both that hotel and surrounding locations. So if a room at a hotel on a given night would normally cost $300 is priced at $150, that's a great value — but you might not see it if you're searching purely based on price.
 
How RocketSpace Is Building A 'Hit Factory' For Tech Startups Top
Screen shot 2012-04-17 at 6.48.43 PMRocketSpace, the San Francisco co-working space for tech and new media startups, has attracted a strong set of tenants in the 14 months since it first opened its doors. Uber, Zaarly, Giftiki, Spotify, and GeekList are just a few of the more than 100 companies who have called RocketSpace home for a stretch of time in either in the past or present. So TechCrunch TV stopped by RocketSpace's four-story offices in San Francisco's SOMA district to get a first-hand look at how exactly its ship is run. In the video embedded above, you can see footage of RocketSpace denizens at work and watch our interview with its founder and CEO Duncan Logan.
 

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