Monday, April 23, 2012

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

Netflix Beats Q1 2012 Expectations, Reports Losses Of $.08 Per Share On $870 Million In Revenue Top
NetflixBuilding4Netflix just released their Q1 2012 earnings report [PDF], and managed to beat analyst estimates by reporting losses of $0.08 per share on $870 million in revenue. In the weeks leading up to the release, analysts projected a net loss of $0.27 per share on $866 million in revenue thanks to the company's pronounced push for international growth. That works out to a $5 million net loss for the quarter, though the brass are preparing themselves for better days to come. According to their release, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells expect to return to global profitability next quarter, and are gearing up for their launch in a still-unknown new market in Q4.
 
Wajam's Updated Social Search Takes On Google's "Search, Plus Your World" Top
Wajam_logoEver since it launched earlier this year, Google's "Search Plus Your World" initiative has been heavily criticized for favoring results from its own social network over those from larger and more popular services like Facebook and Twitter. Even though Google's focus on Google+ is keeping the market open for competition, social search isn't exactly an easy field to enter. Wajam, however, a startup based in Canada, is determined to try to beat Google at its own game. The service integrates its social search tools directly onto the search result pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing and a number of other popular sites. Today, Wajam is launching a big redesign that makes it easier to use and integrates it into even more services.
 
Hands On With The Fitbit Aria Scale Top
scaled-1442Fitbit has consistently proven to be the best smart pedometer on the market. Competitors exist, including the excellent Striiv, but the ease of use and portability of this little pedometer clip beats them all. In short, Fitbits just work. With the launch of the Aria wireless scale, Fitbit has added another sensor in the panoply of health data available to high-tech health nuts. This innocuous-looking device takes both your weight and your body fat percentage and automatically sends it to the Fitbit website for later perusal. Like the mini-pedometer, these readings help you understand your current health status and remind you, ceaselessly and without mercy, of your - well, my - failures as a biological entity.
 
Facebook's Amended S-1: 901 Million Users, 500M Mobile, Paid $300M Cash + 23M Shares For Instagram Top
Screen shot 2012-04-23 at 12.15.45 PMFacebook has just filed a fourth amendment to its S-1 to IPO that notes that it now has 500 million mobile users, 901 million monthly active users, and that it paid 23 million shares at $30.89 a share plus $300 million cash for Instagram for a total of $1,010,470,000. Facebook also made $1.058 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2012, up 44.7% from Q1 2012 but down 6.5% from Q4 2011. So if Facebook maintains its current revenue rate, it would make $4.69 on each of its 901 million users each year. Read on for more on the performance of Facebook's ad business, and to see our embed of the full amended S-1.
 
Investors Who Gave Groupon, Like, A Billion Dollars Get Closer To, Like, Breaking Even Top
andrew-mason-groupon1Remember when Groupon raised, like, a billion dollars? We certainly do. Well, it looks like Groupon's slide over the past month is bringing its last round of venture investors ever closer to breaking even. The stock has rebounded slightly this morning to $11.49, but the number to watch is $7.90. That's effectively what several top-tier Silicon Valley venture firms including Kleiner Perkins, Greylock and Andreessen Horowitz paid per share when they invested $946 million in Groupon between December 2010 and January 2011. At that point, they bought Series G Preferred Shares for $31.59 each. These later converted into four shares of common stock on October 31 of last year, just a few days before Groupon's initial public offering on November 4.
 
Pinterest Rival Fancy Gets Fancier With "Match By Color" Visual Search Top
visual-search-fancy-redHigh-end design, fashion and travel-focused Pinterest rival The Fancy is rolling out several new features today, including a new slideshow option, the addition of four more languages, and a new visual search engine that allows users to search for items with similar colors. The latter addition, which brings to mind the "search by color" feature over on crafty community Etsy or the new color search option on Fab.com, is powered by image recognition technology built by The Fancy itself.
 
Now That's An Investor List: Viddy Backed By Biz Stone, Shakira, And Jay-Z's Roc Nation Top
viddyRight after racing to the top of the App Store charts, Viddy just announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a long list of celebrities — not just tech celebrities, but also the kind that non-techies have heard of. Here's who invested: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Omniture founder Josh James, Skull Candy chairman Jeff Kearl, Roc Nation (the record label and entertainment company co-founded by Jay-Z), Overbrook Entertainment (founded by Will Smith and manager James Lassiter), ShoeDazzle founder Brian Lee, professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, soccer star Gerard Pique, and (I'm quoting from the press release here) "pop culture icon" Shakira.
 
Rather Than Pay Off Yahoo, Facebook Built A Fortress 1400 Patents Strong Top
Facebook's Patent FortressFacebook had a choice to make: With just 56 patents to its name at the start of 2012 it could pay its way out of Yahoo's infringement lawsuit with gobs of money and remain vulnerable to other patent attacks, or make a long-term investment into an intellectual property portfolio it could protect itself with for years to come. Facebook has wisely taken the second path, upping its patent stockpile to over 1400 with today's $550 million cash purchase and licensing of 650 AOL patents from Microsoft today. These new patents cover email, instant messaging , web browsing, search, ads, mobile, and ecommerce according to a source with direct knowledge of the purchase. Surely, Facebook might have gotten better deals on this cache from Microsoft and the package of 75o patents it bought from IBM had it not been so desperate, but better late than never. Now with a healthy patent portfolio that I breakdown below, Facebook may be able to stop scrambling to buy IP, and can fend off the attack of any who would spoil and suck money from its IPO.
 
Gmelius Promises To Improve the Look and Feel Of Your Gmail Inbox Top
gmelius_logoGoogle started rolling out its new user interface for Gmail late last year. Not everybody is in love with it, of course, so it doesn't come as a surprise that a little cottage industry of Gmail enhancement tools has cropped up over the last few months. Google will soon migrate even those users who have, until now, resisted this change to the new version. Even if you hate the new Gmail design, though, you can reclaim some of your sanity - and screen estate - with a browser extension like Gmelius, which came out of beta today. Among the most useful features that Gmelius offers are the ability to customize Gmail's navigation icons to show both text and icons, for example, as well as tools to remove Google's people widget and Google chat from your inbox. Gmelius is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.
 
Official.fm Launches Its New Music Promotion Platform Top
4 - Official.fm - 6These days, it seems SoundCloud is the player to beat in the music platform space. It's been called (among other things) the "Flickr for audio" or the "YouTube for audio." Evidence of this lies in the fact that the company raised $50 million in January at a $200 million pre-money valuation -- they must be doing something right. Instead of competing with SoundCloud, Official.fm is taking things in a slightly different direction. Today Official.fm launched a new music sharing and promotion platform that aims to become the only music platform that professionals will need.
 
Keen On… Congresswoman Anna Eshoo: What Washington DC Can Learn From Silicon Valley [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-22 at 10.24.53 PMPersonal Democracy Forum CEO Andrew Rasiej told me that most American politicians don't know the difference between a waiter and a server. Perhaps. But one politician who certainly can distinguish between the two is Anna Eshoo, the Democratic Congresswoman for California's 14th District, which she has represented since 1993. As Silicon Valley's representative in DC, Eshoo not only knows her servers from her waiters, but is also well versed in complex technological policy such as spectrum, privacy and SOPA, as well as being a keen observer of the innovation that distinguishes Silicon Valley from the rest of the world.
 
Want FounderDating In Your City? Now You Can "Unlock" It Top
FDunlock_closeupFounderDating, which helps entrepreneurs with co-founders through online networking and offline events, announced a big geographic expansion earlier this year. But what if you don't live in a traditionally startup-heavy city like San Francisco, New York, or Boston? Do you have to slave away on your awesome idea all by yourself? Not necessarily. To figure out where to go next, FounderDating is launching an initiative called Unlock Entrepreneurship In Your City. Founder Jessica Alter says she and her team have been inundated with requests for new locations, with people claiming that Portland, Tel Aviv, and Detroit (for example) are all hotbeds of entrepreneurship. In essence, Alter is now responding, "That's awesome. Just show us."
 
Microsoft Takes On Dropbox With SkyDrive For Windows, Mac and iOS Top
Microsoft SkyDriveSkyDrive, Microsoft's online storage service, is one of the core elements of the company's cloud strategy. Today, Microsoft is taking the wraps off a number of new SkyDrive services, including a Dropbox-like desktop integration for Windows and Mac (OS X Lion only). With this, SkyDrive will function like any other folder on your machine and any file you save to it will be automatically uploaded to the cloud and synced to your other computers. For current Dropbox users, this is obviously nothing new and it's taken Microsoft quite a while to finally offer this feature. With this update, though, Microsoft is also reducing the amount of free storage it is offering new users from 25GB to just 7GB.
 
Facebook Buys AOL Patents From Microsoft For $550 Million In Cash Top
Facebook's Yahoo-Patented MessagesAlthough Facebook didn't buy AOL's patent portfolio the other week -- it was sold to Microsoft for $1 billion -- it's going to get a good portion of those patents anyway: Microsoft and Facebook today announced that Microsoft would be selling Facebook 650 of the 925 patents that it bought from AOL to Facebook for $550 million in cash. It will also get a license for the remaining 275 patents that Microsoft bought from the AOL portfolio, which Microsoft will continue to own. Microsoft also has a license for the 300 patents that AOL still owns. At this point, Facebook will not have a license for those patents still owned by AOL. The deal gives Facebook a much stronger position in the world of patents, where it had been weak up to now and has been facing lawsuits, most notably from Yahoo, over infringement.
 
Parking Spot Finder Parking Panda Raises Seed Round, Expands To D.C. Top
parking-panda-logoParking Panda, the startup that wants to make it easier for drivers to rent spaces or rent out their unused driveways, is expanding its regional coverage with today's public launch. The company has just arrived in Washington, D.C. - its second market outside of Baltimore, which served as the home for Parking Panda's beta testing. The team has also closed a $250,000 round of seeding funding and has secured partnerships with several parking garage companies, allowing it to serve up thousands of garage-provided spaces in both Baltimore and D.C., in addition to those rented out by individual parking spot owners.
 
Car Wars – BlablaCar And Carpooling Both Release New iPhone Apps Top
3167640108_d360f15391BlablaCar, a European carpooling marketplace that connects any driver who has empty seats with paying passengers, has now launched its iPhone app in the UK. The app connects drivers who have spare seats with paying passengers. At the same time its competitor Carpooling.com will release its new app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch this week.
 
NYC TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon – Workshops & Judges announced Top
Disrupt NYC HackathonWe're a month away, and are very excited to reveal our workshops & judges for the upcoming NYC TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, taking place on May 19th & 20th. This will be the second Hackathon TechCrunch has organized at Pier 94 in NYC. Last years event had over 300 developers and 100 teams present, and this years event promises to be even bigger and better. But enough about the past, let's chat about the future.
 
WPP Teams Up With Infosys To Launch Its First All-In-One Cloud-Based Marketing Platform Top
CloudsThe heat is on to migrate more digital marketing activities into the cloud, and while we have seen a lot of movements from smaller, fleet-0f-foot startups in this area, the big players don't want to be left out in the cold, either. Enter WPP, which today announced a partnership with the Bangalore-based outsourcing and IT specialist Infosys for a new cloud-based digital marketing platform. Called "BrandEdge," the two say the platform is the first of its kind in the industry, in that it brings together, into the cloud, a range of digital marketing activities such as creation and management of digital media across multiple locations and tools to manage campaing execution -- all running on a single platform.
 
BetterWorks Adds Groups And Permissions To Its Office Perks Platform Top
ForTC1_HiResBetterWorks, a startup that helps companies give their employees perks and rewards, is launching new features that should make it a better fit for big enterprises. The startup offers customers a dashboard for managing things like office catering, discounts at local businesses, and a rewards program called Bonus Bucks. For the most part, it has focused on small- and medium-sized businesses (between five and 500 employees) — after all, those are the companies that normally don't have the resources to offer these programs on their own. However, Director of Product Varun Krishna says that larger organizations, with 1,000 or more employees, are starting to show interest too.
 
Droid Incredible 4G LTE Appears On Verizon Promo Site With $299 Price Tag Top
incredible4gIt's been spotted in leaked press renders and blurry photos before, but Verizon has just recently (and perhaps inadvertently) made the new Droid Incredible nice and official. The Droid Incredible 4G LTE just popped up on Verizon's Droid Does promotional site, and while you can't have one just yet, it's comforting to know that it'll see the light of say sooner rather than later. In addition to a mildly unnerving robo-lady talking up the device's LTE radio and HTC's Sense UI, the site also confirms most of the specs that have been previously reported.
 

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.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)