Thursday, July 26, 2012

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Carpooling.com Picks Up $10M From Daimler To Take Its Ridesharing To The US: Let The Car Wars Commence! Top
carpool laneThe ridesharing-disruptive car service space in the U.S. is about to get a little more crowded: Carpooling.com, a ridesharing service out of Munich, Germany currently enabling million rides monthly, is today announcing a C-round of investment from carmaker Daimler, which it will be using to expand to the other side of the Atlantic starting in the fourth quarter of this year. Financial terms of the investment have not been disclosed but TechCrunch has heard from a reliable source that it is €8 million ($10 million). The deal makes Daimler a strategic investor in the company. Other existing investors include the European VC firm Earlybird, which has invested in the company's previous two rounds, as well as Carpooling.com's founders.
 
Record Profits Of $1.9B For News Corp's BSkyB As PayTV Co. Launches Triple Play In Ireland Top
sky logoBSkyB, the UK-based, News Corp-controlled pay-TV provider, today posted record profits for the year, rising 14 percent to £1.2 billion ($1.9 billion) in the 12 months that ended June 30. Full-year revenues were £6.8 billion ($10.4 billion), a rise of three percent on 2011. Earnings per share were also up: they are now at 50.8 pence ($0.79), a rise of 22 percent. While BSkyB has built its business on a satellite-based pay-TV service hooked on exclusive sports broadcasting rights, it's laying groundwork for how it will ensure it remains a dominant company even as people move to new platforms: BSkyB also revealed the value of its investment in streaming-box provider Roku, announced yesterday -- it's $10 million -- and gave a bit more detail on a £30-million plan for rolling out its service to Roku and other OTT services via its new non-sub Sky NOW TV product; as well as an update and expansion of its Sky Go service, its OTT play for existing subscribers, which now has 2.7 million monthly unique users. And BSkyB also announced today some international expansion: it will begin to offer its triple-play service of broadband, phone and pay-TV in Ireland.
 
Simple Is Now Available To The Public, Cofounder Alex Payne Moves On Top
Screen Shot 2012-07-25 at 10.11.08 PMThere is nothing more broken than the payments/banking system, which makes me and everybody else root for payments (and more!) startup Simple (formerly BankSimple). We all hate our banks and, especially if you are in SF, we constantly hope that the future will be better. And, again if you're like me, Simple is your great white hope: A Mint that won't sell out and actually is responsible for your money, a banking interface that actually makes interacting with the your lifetime quantitative value enjoyable and intelligible? Sure, count us in.
 
Roku Becomes Pay TV's Streaming Box Of Choice, Raises $45 Million From News Corp, BSkyB, And Others Top
roku 2 xsWhen Roku first entered the streaming video market, it was seen as a boon for cord cutters, who could watch streaming content from online distributors like Netflix and Hulu Plus on TV. But lately, it's begun courting app makers from traditional content producers, securing apps for premium networks like HBO and working with pay TV providers like DISH to bring their content over-the-top. With that in mind, Roku has raised a giant new round of funding, led by a couple of impressive strategic investors from the old media world. Roku's closed a $45 million Series E round, including money from News Corp and British Sky Broadcasting, as well as another unnamed strategic investor. Also participating are previous Roku investors Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital. In addition to the new funds, News Corp chief digital officer Jon Miller has joined the Roku board. Altogether Roku has raised a total of $77 million since being founded in 2008.
 
Stay Focused And Keep Shipping: What Is Facebook Thinking With Its Phone Folly? Top
displaymediaEarlier today, I wrote about Facebook designers asking, "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" Apparently, Facebook's answer is "build a phone."
 
AppFog Wants To Do For Developer Platforms What Google Did For EMail Top
app-fogAppFog is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider that wants to do for developer platforms what Google did for GMail. GMail launched in 2004 by giving its users  a distributed service with 2 gigabytes (GB) of free disc space. Search made it possible. It disrupted competitors like Hotmail that provided a measly 2 mb of free space.
 
With 50M Videos Indexed, Showyou Relaunches Its iPhone App With A New Back End And Easier Sharing Top
showyou-3.3-iphone-feed-1When the Showyou app first launched last spring, it was a bit of a revelation. The iPad app made discovering and watching videos on the iPad a breeze. And oh, are there plenty of videos to check out. With major partnerships at a number of the major video sites -- like YouTube and Vimeo -- it's indexed more than 50 million online videos to choose from. But while Showyou is best known for its iPad app, it's come out with a totally revamped app for the iPhone that it hopes will help people find and share interesting videos on the go. The use case for the iPad and iPhone are clearly different, and that's reflected in the engagement numbers: Showyou users on the iPad watch about seven or eight videos a session, which can average up to 35 or 40 minutes a piece. These people are watching during primetime hours, maybe in bed as a way to decompress at the end of the day. But iPhone users are typically video "snackers" -- they watch three or four videos at a time by comparison, and their viewing sessions tend to be spread more evenly throughout the day.
 
Ellen! Bieber! Seacrest! Stamped Revamps, Raises New Round From Celebs, Brian Lee, Tom Conrad, Eric Schmidt & Others Top
stamped-leadStamped, the ex-Googler backed startup for sharing your favorite things, is rolling out a major revamp of its product today, and is adding a buzz-worthy lineup of new strategic investors, including celebrities like Justin Bieber, Ellen Degeneres, Ryan Seacrest, NBA all-star Baron Davis, Bieber's manager Scooter Braun, as well as media companies The New York Times Co. and Columbia Records. Also going in on the round are notable tech industry names like Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (via TomorrowVentures), Brian Lee of ShoeDazzle, LegalZoom, and The Honest Company, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad (his first investment), CrunchFund, and Metamorphic Ventures. Not surprisingly, current investors Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures also participated, bringing the company's total raise to date to $3 million. But while the celebs will bring new eyes to the service, it's the app's redesign that will be the big draw once the celebrity shine wears off.
 
FundersClub Wants To Bypass VC And Let YOU Invest In Startups Top
FundersClub LogoFundersClub is going to change how companies get funded. Today it launches a website designed to let anyone with as little as $1000 make equity investments in startups and earn money if they succeed. For now you have to be an accredited investor with a net worth over $1 million or yearly earnings over $200,000 to use FundersClub. But an industry source familiar with the Y Combinator startup gave me an exclusive rundown of its whole roadmap, including that if the JOBS Act goes into effect or FundersClub pays to set up a mutual fund, literally anyone will be allowed to use it to invest and profit if a startup successfully exits. Put simply, FundersClub could utterly disrupt venture capital, democratize investment in private companies, and ensure any founder has easy access to enough funding to pursue a great idea.
 
Path Debuts Version 2.5: Bigger Photos And Videos, Book And Movie Sharing, New 'Nudge' Feature Top
Screen shot 2012-07-25 at 6.24.10 PMPath, the mobile-based social networking app aimed at helping people connect with their close circle of friends and family, is rolling out the latest update to its app: Path Version 2.5. The update, which will roll out tonight to the 17 languages Path supports on its iPhone and Android apps, doesn't have any groundbreaking new features, but there are some very clever incremental updates. It comes just as Path's new user growth is booming, CEO Dave Morin told me in an interview this week.
 
With $1M+ From Guitar Hero Co-founder & Others, Zipongo Is Building The Mint.com For Healthy Living Top
zipongoJason Langheier founded Zipongo in June 2011 to give families and parents an easier way to make healthier dietary choices by reducing the costs that so often get in the way. Through a web-based health community and iPhone app, Zipongo essentially combines the best of Mint.com and Groupon to create a service that gives users their own personalized wellness plans (and the ability to manage them), while offering discounts at the grocery stores they shop at the most. To help it gear up for a full-scale launch later this summer (Zipongo is currently in private beta), the startup recently closed a round of seed capital ($1M+) from a flock of superangels and healthcare, tech and food marketing veterans. Those names include Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake via Founder Collective, Wireless Generation co-founder and CEO Larry Berger, Peter Dolan, the Director of The Partnership for a Healthy America (and former CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb) and Guitar Hero and Blue Goji co-founder Kai Huang -- to name a few.
 
Greek Athlete Kicked Off Olympic Team For Tweet Top
largeVoula Papachristou, Greece's triple-jump champion, was barred from competing in the London Olympic Games by the Hellenic Olympic Committee after an offensive tweet on Monday. She tweeted, "with so many Africans in Greece, at least the West Nile mosquitos will be eating food from their own home."
 
Flurry Acquires Startup Trestle To Power AppCloud, Its New Mobile Backend Service Top
flurry-logoFlurry just announced that it's getting into the mobile app infrastructure business with a new service called Flurry AppCloud. To make that happen, the company acquired a mobile startup called Trestle. The terms of the deal aren't being disclosed, but Flurry's vice president of marketing Peter Farago says "all Trestle employees happily stayed on and form the core team driving Flurry AppCloud forward."
 
Oracle Pulls Ads After National Advertising Group Says It Made False Claims Against IBM Top
oracle1Oracle is stopping a marketing campaign attacking IBM in wake of a national advertising board's recomendation that the company made false claims when comparing its Exadata technology to competing IBM products. It's the second time in four months the National Advertising Division (NAD)  has taken action against Oracle for making false claims when comparing its Exadata products to IBM's technology. The NAD is an advertising industry group that falls under the umbrella of the Better Business Bureau.
 
Students Show Off Their Solutions To World Problems At Google Science Fair Top
baby geniusesWhat were you doing when you were 14? I'm willing to be it's a little different that what the students at the Google Science Fair are working on. Google brought 15 of the smartest 13 - 18 year old students from all over the world together, each working on a unique solution to a very big problem. One story in particular comes out of Africa, where two 14 year old boys are providing hydroponic farming methods to extremely poor cities.
 
Causes and "Not For Sale" Crowdfund REBBL Beverage Startup That Fights Slavery Top
REBBL drink30 million slaves in the world need help, but startups are more sustainable than charities. So rather than raise donations, Causes.com is crowdfunding anti-slavery group Not For Sale's new beverage startup REBBL. The company will employ freed slaves in the Amazon, and reinvest proceeds into projects that combat human trafficking. Two weeks in, REBBL is half way to its goal of raising $150,000 in a month, and today the first bottles of Organic REBBL Hibiscus Mint Tea are coming off the production line. If it can raise another $75,000 in the next 13 days, REBBL will prove that crowdfunding can launch not-for-profit startups, and remake the concept of charity for the digital age.
 
Court Grants Injunction Against Caterina Fake's Use Of The Name 'Pinwheel' Top
pinweel pinwheelIt looks like Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake may have to find a new name for her new product Pinwheel. A New York court has granted a preliminary injunction against Fake's startup 2bkco, which was requested by a startup called Pinweel. (When you look at the name, I think you can see where the conflict comes in.) The injunction was posted on Scribd by lawyer and blogger Venkat Balasubramani, and I've embedded it below. Fake sent me an email confirming its accuracy, though she declined to say what the company's response will be, because "we can't comment on pending legal matters." The Pinweel team sent a similarly terse statement, saying, "We can confirm that the federal court has issued a preliminary injunction that requires that Caterina Fake's company immediately cease their use of the Pinwheel name."
 
Facebook Designers Ask "What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid" Top
lab_1What would you do if you weren't afraid? That's the question Facebook designers Ben Barry and Rasmus Andersson are asking on a poster-creation site that went live today. They are encouraging people to go on the site, create a digital poster and "tell the world."
 
Path's Dave Morin And Benchmark Capital's Matt Cohler Will Join Us At Disrupt SF! Top
TechCrunch Mike CohlerWell, the agenda for TechCrunch Disrupt SF is shaping up nicely, really nicely. And today we've got another two Valley thought leaders we'd like to announce: Path's Dave Morin and Benchmark Capital's Matt Cohler will be taking the stage in September to impart their perspectives on the state of the tech now. Morin and Cohler will join our all-star speaker list which now includes: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Disrupt veteran Ron Conway, CEO of salesforce.com Marc Benioff, Ben Horowitz, founder of Khosla Ventures Vinod Khosla, Joel Klein, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, and The Honest Company's Jessica Alba and Brian Lee.
 
Cool: Google Glasses-Inspired Eyewear Translates Foreign Language Into Real-Life Subtitles Top
translationHere's an innovative, simple, and exciting application to Google Glasses: foreign language augmented reality that translates text like real-life subtitles. Technology MacGyver Will Powell assembled a working concept of the product from a list of consumer electronics, and demonstrated it in a video of himself in conversation with his sister. Check out the video below. We've also pasted his description of the convoluted process the product takes to translate, below the video.
 

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