Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

BitTorrent Tests New Ad Model (And Revenue-Sharing With Artists) In Its DJ Shadow Bundle Top
bittorrent_djshadow6b copyFor many readers, the name BitTorrent may be synonymous with online piracy, but there's plenty of legal file-sharing too — and the company says that it's actually experimenting with new business models that allow artists to make money. Today, for example, it's launching a new bundle created in partnership with digital marketing company Fame House and its client DJ Shadow. The bundle is supposed to include exclusive content from and inspired by DJ Shadows' archival release Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era (1992-1996), and yes, it will be available for free.
 
Payvment CEO Christian Taylor Leaves To Restartup 4 Years After Founding Facebook's Top Ecommerce Platform Top
Payvment CEO175,000 merchants rely on Payvment to power their Facebook Page ecommerce stores, but now the startup's founder and CEO Christian Taylor is leaving, telling me "I'm ready to work on my next big startup! (after a short nap)". Taylor will remain on Payvment's board of directors, but shop owners will have to rely on COO Jim Stoneham who is moving into the chief position. Taylor explains to me the move was "planned and self-made", while Stoneham says "Christian and I have scaled the team and business over the last 16 months I've been here, and he feels comfortable that he can move on to new adventures while I continue to run the business. We've got some great things coming. Will be reaching out next week."
 
As Facebook Political Campaigning Heats Up, NGP VAN Launches New Social Organizing Tool Top
SocialOrg - LoginDemocrat-oriented software developer NGP VAN (Voter Activation Network) is launching an updated tool today for the US 2012 election season, that uses Facebook to help stir up voter participation. Called Social Organizing, it lives on a campaign's website, has users sign in using Facebook Connect, then filters a user's friends on Facebook to match with their voter registration file. Users may also search the app specifically for people Social Organizing does not immediately locate.
 
Canadian Angel Boris Wertz Raises $15 Million To Launch Micro-VC Fund Version One Ventures Top
boris-wertzAfter years of investing his own money, Canadian angel Boris Wertz has raised $15 million and created a new fund that will enable him to make even larger investments in early-stage startups. The fund, which will be focused on consumer Internet, software-as-a-service, e-commerce, and mobile companies. Wertz was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, which was acquired by Amazon.com back in 2008. He had been cofounder of German company JustBooks, which was later acquired by AbeBooks in 2002. Over the past several years, he's been making investments in early-stage companies with his own money, and is also behind the GrowLab startup accelerator in Vancouver, British Columbia.
 
Publishers, We Need To Talk: Text From Dog Gets A Book Deal Top
new_back2Look guys and gals in publishing, sit down. You can bring in your Coco Water. Totally. Yeah. We have some gluten-free sandwiches coming in and I promise this won't effect summer hours. You can still not come in on Friday. Yeah, you can take off your loafers. Whatever. Ok. I know you're confused and hurting. Revenues are falling and ebooks are killing your old surefire model of shipping books in big boxes to big stores where they were remaindered and sent back for pulping. We had some good times. Remember all that money you made on cookbooks? Before the Epicurious app? Good times. That shit paid for your house on the Vineyard.
 
Active Endpoints Releases New Wizard For Making Mobile Apps That Respond To Voice and Touch Top
cloudextendThe next generation of application development is starting to emerge. Frameworks act as a catalyst for building applications. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is helping accelerate application development as it abstracts the stack that  a developer usually has to build themselves to push out apps. With integrated systems, the idea of application assembly is emerging with solutions such as IBM's PureApplication System. Active Endpoints symbolizes this trend with Cloud Extend Mobile, a platform with a wizard like "mind map" framework that is used to build and deploy mobile apps that respond to voice and touch.
 
Redbox And Verizon Announce Their Netflix Competitor, But Leave Out Details About Pricing, Content Top
verizon redboxRedbox and Verizon are getting a little bit closer to finally rolling out their streaming Netflix competitor, as the companies formally announced the new service and provided a few more details about the execs who will be running it. But the alpha launch of Redbox Instant by Verizon, as it's being called, leaves out several important details -- like for instance, how much it will cost and what content will be available through the service. Verizon and Redbox first announced the joint venture in February, saying that they would combine forces to provide a streaming service. But other than that, few details have been announced.
 
The $99 Vizio Co-Star Google TV Box Is Now Available To Pre-Order Top
vizio-co-starVizio pulled off a sort of coup with the Co-Star. This $99 Google TV box packs more features than Sony's latest model and is half the price. Plus, I think the novel UI looks better than the standard Google TV interface. The box, which was announced last month, is now available for pre-order. It costs $99 and will ship August 14th.
 
Kiip Debuts Standalone App To Find & Redeem Rewards From Over 400 Mobile Apps & Games Top
rewards-tabKiip, the rewards-based network co-founded by former Digg employees Brian Wong, Courtney Guertin and Sequence's Amadeus Demarzi, has just arrived on mobile. And here's a surprise - the company went Android-first with the new app. But the iOS app is in the works, and is only "a few days away" from launch, so chalk this one up to coincidental timing rather than mobile strategy. With the new app, you'll be able to track and redeem your rewards earned on Kiip, as well as access a list of games and apps which support the platform.
 
AOL Launches PLAY By AOL For The Kindle Fire Top
playKindle Fire, owners? Aol, TechCrunch's not-so-evil overlords, has a new app for you. Aol just released a retooled version of PLAY By Aol specifically for the Kindle Fire. This reskinned app is optimized for the Fire's 7-inch 600x1024 screen. Everything from the layout to the iconography to the cover art take was redone to look as good as possible on the Fire. Like the other versions of PLAY, this music app puts the device's on-board MP3 collection into an immersion environment. While it features a media player, the entire app is built to provide an experience not traditionally found in a simple player including social features and the ability to share songs on Twitter, Facebook, and the PLAY network.. Plus, PLAY features a SHOUTcast player with access to 55,000+ stations.
 
BandPage Unshackles From Facebook, Now Helps 500K Musicians Build Synced Sites and Widgets Too Top
BandPage EverywhereWith $19 million in funding but the Timeline redesign cratering its traffic, BandPage needed to diversify beyond Facebook. So today it launches BandPage Everywhere to let musicians build websites and embeddable widgets as well as Facebook Page apps. Rather than inefficiently trying to sync content, the half million artists hosted by BandPage can now upload streaming music, photos, videos, or tour dates just once and have them pushed to all their online presences. Since 2009, BandPage has focused 100% on building Facebook apps for musicians in need of a home after the fall of Myspace. But that was just the opening act.
 
StackSocial Raises Seed Funding, Launches Platform Publicly Top
stacksocial_hqStackSocial, a digital commerce startup that aims to match web publishers with readers, publicly launched its platform and announced an $800,000 seed round today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the funding round was over-subscribed.
 
Analyst: iPhone 5, iPad Mini Coming In September Top
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAApple's next-gen iPhone — and the much-talked about (but yet unseen) iPad mini — are some of the most hotly anticipated gadgets of the year. And according to a report by relatively on-point KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the new iPhone and iPad mini will launch in September. Thus far, we've heard that the iPhone 5 will have a larger 4.08-inch display maintaining the same width as current models, at 640 pixels. TechCrunch has also confirmed — along with Reuters more recently — that the new iPhone will replace its original 30-pin connector dock with a 19-pin mini port.
 
Amazon Finally Cracking Down On 3G Browsing Cap Top
scaled.itm_l_771There's a little-known stipulation in Amazon's 3G browsing, available primarily on their e-ink devices. Ostensibly, downloading items over 3G is completely free but browsing the web using the device's weird and slow experimental interface is capped at 50MB. Most users have never hit that cap and there haven't been many reports of actual notifications. That's recently changed. One user of the Kindle Keyboard 3G noticed the message when he was browsing the web in Canada. He received a message that said he could only browse Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and the Kindle Store. Wi-Fi access was unaffected.
 
Tenaya Capital Closes 'Oversubscribed' $372M Fund, Seeks A New Kayak Top
moneyTenaya Capital, the venture fund spun out of Lehman Brothers in 2009 with a history of backing companies like Kayak, Palo Alto Networks and Zappos, has just closed its latest fund totalling $372 million -- in its words, oversubscribed against an initial target of $300 million. Tenaya Capital VI is the company's first fundraise independent of Lehman's, with the two previous funds raised by the VCs for $300 million and $365 million. The fund will be used to make investments in tech companies across a broad range of areas -- from enterprise to consumer internet, as well as electronics and more -- in their initial stages of revenue growth. Tom Banahan, the MD of Tenaya, tells me that the aim is to keep the range diverse. The average size of initial investments, typically made as a B- or C-round, will be between $5 million and $10 million. Tenaya may potentially also make earlier or later stage investment in portfolio companies, so the total amount invested in the lifetime of a company will be around $10 million to $15 million, it says.
 
Microsoft .NET for Mobile Company Xamarin Gets $12 Million In Series A Funding Top
XamarinXamarin, makers of cross-platform frameworks for building mobile applications, today announced a $12 million round of funding from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate. Xamarin was founded in May last year after Novell laid off the staff working on Mono, an open source project that brings Microsoft's .NET development framework to non-Microsoft operating systems like Linux. Novell had been supporting the project since its acquisition of Ximian in 2003, but after the layoff the team founded Xamarin to commercialize the Mono project. Until now Xamarin has been bootstrapped.
 
Pearltrees Comes To The iPhone, Goes Beyond Bookmarking And Adds Photos, Notes, Offline Mode Top
pearltrees_ipad_logoFew startups make it through a year without a pivot or two these days. That really can't be said about social bookmarking service Pearltrees, however. The company has stuck pretty closely to its roadmap ever since its launch in 2009. After launching on the web, Peartrees is now available on the iPad and, starting today, on the iPhone. Ever since its launch, the company wanted to provide its users with a library of what they discover online and create a community of people based on their common interests. Until now, that mostly means sharing bookmarks, but the new iPhone app significantly broadens this concept to also include photos and short notes. In addition, the updated universal iOS apps now also cache a user's libraries for offline access (including the text on any website they bookmark).
 
Touch Publishing Platform Onswipe Moves Beyond iOS With Kindle Fire Support Top
onswipekindlefirecloseupSince fully launching a year ago, Onswipe has built touch-optimized experiences for iOS — starting with the iPad and, more recently, adding iPhone. Today it's taking its first step beyond the Apple ecosystem with the launch of support for the Kindle Fire. Onswipe's stated goal is to deliver native app-like experiences through the mobile web. Achieving that on the Kindle Fire was particularly challenging, says CEO and co-founder Jason L. Baptiste, because it's a relatively low-end device with an older operating system.
 
Noodlecrumbs Is A Crowd-Funding Platform For Thinkers, Not Doers Top
Lightbulb_ideaWith successes like the Pebble smart watch, crowd-funding is becoming more and more attractive to startups. But maybe you aren't even at the startup stage in your idea. Maybe all you have is an idea and a computer. That's where Noodlecrumbs comes into the picture. It's a new type of crowd-funding for those of us who don't quite know how much we need to make the dream a reality. In fact, Noodecrumbs could be used by someone who doesn't even want to build the actual product, but just wants it to be built. I have friends who pitch me ideas all the time, and I say, "sounds good, build it." Most of the time, they say they don't have time or don't know how, but they'd love to use the product. That's the perfect situation for Noodlecrumbs.
 
Dashlane Releases iOS App To Avoid Tedious Form-Filling On Purchases Top
dashlane-logoDashlane enables consumers to login, fill out forms and checkout of a purchase faster, removing the need for repeating the process across sites. Its personal data assistant aims to speed up access to websites through password-saving and online form-filling features. But this is not a password manager: it has instant logins and support for automatic checkout on e-commerce sites. Dashlane raised a $5 million Series A back in September last year.
 

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)