Tuesday, October 2, 2012

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Sorry, Leno: Mark Zuckerberg Makes First Late-Night Talk Show Appearance — On Russian TV Top
Screen Shot 2012-10-02 at 9.23.19 AMMark Zuckerberg is really going whole hog on this Russia thing. The Facebook CEO is currently on a visit to Russia as part of a campaign to expand his super-popular social network there. As part of his visit, he's checked out Red Square, met with prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. And, in a remarkable show of "being a good sport," Zuckerberg also appeared as a guest on Evening Urgant, a late-night show that is comparable to the United States' Late Show With David Letterman or The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.
 
DocTrackr Secures $2M From Atlas, Polaris, To Help Secure Your Documents Via The Cloud Top
doctrackrSharing a document online has never been easier, but maintaining control over that document once it's left home, so to speak, is something different altogether. In the enterprise, that potential loss of control -- who can view it, edit it or even print it -- is a big deal. Therefore, making it easy for businesses to track and, if necessary, reign in those documents, especially once they enter the cloud, would seem like a startup opportunity too good to miss. To that end, docTrackr, which does just that, opens its doors today, along with announcing a $2 million seed round, led by Fred Destin and Chris Lynch's Atlas Venture, and Polaris Venture Partners.
 
Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Reviews Windows 8: Elegant, Innovative And Puzzling Top
BookA few days ago, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen quietly published an extensive review of Windows 8. In it, Allen - who resigned from the Microsoft board in 2000 but still consults for the company - calls Windows 8 "a significant evolutionary milestone in Windows development," but his praise mostly focuses on the tablet experience. On the tablet, he says, Windows 8 is "bold and innovative" and unlike many reviewers, he is "impressed" with "the clever integration of a bimodal interface to simultaneously support both desktop and tablet use in the same operating system." Despite all of this, though, he also calls some aspects of Windows 8 "puzzling."
 
Study: Apple's iPhone 5 Is The Wind Beneath The Samsung Galaxy S III's Wings Top
Localytics-sgsIII-iphone5Earlier today I posted about the comparative merits of Apple's iPhone 5 and Samsung's Galaxy S III, and in doing so it turns out that no matter what my conclusion, I probably helped Samsung move a few Galaxy smartphones. That's according to new info from analytics firm Localytics, which says that Samsung sees a GSIII sales spike whenever it gets compared with Apple's phone.
 
Gravity Raises $10.6M For Content Personalization And Marketing, Round Led by GRP Partners Top
Gravity logoGravity, the content personalization startup founded by a team of former Myspace executives, just announced that it has raised $10.6 million in Series B funding. When Gravity launched in 2009, it offered some content recommendation products for consumers, but its real goal was to convince publishers to use its "interest graph" technology to deliver a personalized experience for visitors — in other words, to show readers content that they specifically might be interested in based on their activity.
 
Facebook Redesigns Help Center To Suggest Answers, Completes Roll Out Of Support Dashboard Top
facebook-help-centerToday, Facebook is launching a redesign of its Help Center, with the goal of making it easier for Facebook users to find the information they need and get answers to their questions about the social network's product and policies. The update includes a new layout and design for the Help Center's homepage, improved navigation, and the addition of a list of popular questions and top Facebook Pages which users can like in order to stay up-to-date on the topic and related tips. The company also announced that another of its tools, the Support Dashboard, is now available to 100% of Facebook users worldwide.
 
Square Launches Code Camp Contest To Inspire Women Engineers Top
Square -Mobile payments company Square is hoping to inspire and find talented women engineers with its first annual Code Camp Contest. The company is hosting a three-day, expense-paid immersion program at Square's San Francisco headquarters called Code Camp. Engineering students can submit a resume and essays about why they would like to be a part of the program online and fifteen female winners will be selected to participate. Square says the three-day program will include conversations and mentorship sessions with Square leaders, hands-on workshops with teams from across the company, Q&A sessions, as well as tours around the beautiful and historic Bay Area. Contest winners will be flown to San Francisco and provided accommodations during their stay.
 
Video Discovery Startup Shelby.tv Is Back (Kinda), With A New Genius App That's Like Pandora For Video Top
shelbylogoOver the years, I've written about the need for a "Pandora for video" app -- something that will allow viewers to enter in a simple search term and then get offered up a continuous stream of related videos. And now, it looks like video discovery startup Shelby.tv has built just that, with the new Genius iOS app that it's launched today.
 
Twitter Says More Than Half Its Users Follow Six Or More Brands Top
joel lunenfeldIt turns out people really are interested in hearing what brands have to say on Twitter — in a presentation today at the IAB MIXX advertising conference, Twitter's vice president of global brand strategy Joel Lunenfeld said that 88 percent of Twitter users follow at least one brand, and that more than half of users follow six or more brands. Twitter also studied the reasons why someone follows a brand, and as you might expect, freebies and discounts are definitely a factor. But according to Lunenfeld, people also said they were interested in getting access to exclusive or promotional content.
 
Perforce Aims to Bring Git to the Enterprise Top
Perforce Git FusionIt's no surprise that the pace of technological innovation in the startup and web development world greatly eclipses the pace of technology adoption at most enterprise organizations. Enterprises are generally slow, risk averse, and demand long-term support for products in which they invest. Startups, web development shops, and open source enthusiasts move at a significantly faster pace. While some enterprises are just now moving from the venerable CVS version control system to something like Subversion, the bulk of developers today are using git (and GitHub). Enterprises looking to attract new talent would do well to figure out how to use git, since most new hires will come in with mastery of it and will find it annoying to use crufty older version control systems. Unfortunately, enterprises often have well-established released processes built around their existing tools, making it extremely hard to replace them with something new like git.
 
MeeGo Startup, Jolla, Zeroes In On China, Expects €200M Ecosystem Backing From Hong Kong Alliance Top
jolla_colorJolla, the plucky Finnish mobile startup that's largely comprised of talent cast off by Nokia as it slimmed down its own software development operations (in favour of leaning on Microsoft's), has announced it's setting up an alliance that will back its forthcoming MeeGo-based OS -- codenamed Sailfish and due to be ready for licensing in spring 2013 -- and help speed the growth of an ecosystem around it.
 
Copious, The eBay With A Social Backbone, Expands Into Menswear And Art Top
New Home Page for Men'sCopious, the a San Francisco startup that makes a socially-powered online marketplace for buying and selling things, has catered to a primarily female audience since it launched last year. But today, the company is stretching out a bit: Copious is expanding to offer menswear and art. As part of the expansion, Copious has also tweaked its design to be a bit more gender-neutral, co-founder Jonathan Ehrlich said in an interview this week.
 
Foundation Video: Matt Rogers, Co-Founder Of Nest, Demos New Learning Thermostat Top
Foundation Video_ Matt Rogers, Co-Founder Of Nest, Demos New Learning Thermostat | TechCrunchEditor's note: TechCrunch TV is very pleased to welcome a new show to our lineup, Kevin Rose's Foundation series. Kevin, a partner at Google Ventures, has been producing high-quality, riveting one-on-one interviews with some of the tech world's top entrepreneurs. I'm excited to announce that beginning today, TechCrunch will syndicate my Foundation video series profiling founders and product luminaries. Our latest episode features Nest co-founder Matt Rogers. Matt shows off the reinvented Nest Learning Thermostat, just announced today. Matt was also an Apple iPhone engineer. He also remembers his early days at Apple, including the next shipped click-wheel iPhone.
 
AT&T Snaps Up The HTC One X+ And One VX, Lines Up Launches "In The Coming Months" Top
onex+onevxAs it turns out today is a good day to be an HTC fan -- the Taiwanese company announced earlier this morning that the revamped HTC One X+ was in fact a real thing, and now AT&T has just confirmed that it will carry that new flagship device later this year. Interestingly, the One X+ won't be alone either, as AT&T has also announced that it will sell the lower-end HTC One VX alongside it when they both launch in the "coming months."
 
Google Announces New "Lightbox" Ad Format: Advertisers Only Pay When Users Expand The Ad Top
Anthro_Final_Blog2At Advertising Week, Google today introduced a new ad format called Lightbox, which is a standard ad unit that expands into a super-sized canvas takeover ad after a user hovers their mouse cursor over the ad. The company says that the ad will offer advertisers a way to pay only for engaged users, as advertisers will only pay when the ad is expanded, as opposed to clicked. For users, the ad is designed to minimize accidental expansions, as it requires the user to hover their mouse over the ad for two full seconds before the expansion occurs.
 
Atooma Is Like An IFTTT For Mobile And It's Insanely Clever Top
3During our CrunchUp in Rome last week - where which I was blown away by the amount of Italian startups that have emerged from almost nowhere in the last year - I came across an extremely interesting (and I don't use that phrase lightly) startup which deserves much closer examination. Atooma is an Android app [Google Play link] which is in itself like carrying around a mobile toolkit to create your own mini-apps - but without needing any coding skills. In fact, it operates almost like an App store inside an app store. But the closest thing it resembles is a sort of IFTTT for mobile, and some of its applications could well be insanely useful. Let me explain.
 
TripAdvisor Acquires Wanderfly To Continue Social Travel Push Top
tripadvisorTripAdvisor, a site that offers free guides and reviews for various traveling adventures, has just acquired Wanderfly. TripAdvisor has been slowly but surely integrating more social layers to its platform, with Friend of Friend reviews and a Local Picks Facebook app for restaurants. But the company's acquisition of Wanderfly is taking that social integration to the next level.
 
Does This Mole Look Weird? This App Will Tell You Top
Screen Shot 2012-10-02 at 9.49.31 AMAn app that tells you if your mole looks funny? That's stupid, right? But for folks who are walking around with little mole-shaped time bombs on their skin, understanding the difference between skin features and cancer is a pretty big deal. Doctor Mole allows you to scan moles (using an AR system that's reminiscent of Star Wars) and assess the Asymmetry, Border, Color, Diameter and Evolution (ABCDE). You can also store images of the mole over time and be reminded every few weeks to check the mole again, thereby ensuring it's not growing or changing.
 
Samsung Galaxy S III's Display Better Than iPhone 5′s On Paper, But Users Unlikely To Notice Top
sgs3vsiphone5According to a new report from research firm IHS, Apple's iPhone 5 display lags behind the Samsung Galaxy S III's on the important measure of color gamut, which creates a more vibrant, crisp image with better overall color saturation, but the difference in terms of how users perceive the margin could actually be negligible, and is unlikely to alter buying decisions.
 
Locu Launches To Merchants: Now Local Businesses Can Update Once To Publish Prices To Web, Mobile & Facebook Top
locuLocu, a Boston-based local business data provider born out of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's lab at MIT, is today officially launching its commerce dashboard for merchants. The company, which raised a $4 million Series A round led by General Catalyst in April, offers a proprietary system that can extract structured data about local businesses from their not-so-structured websites. Locu's initial focus was on restaurant data, which now accounts for around 80% of the data Locu has on hand.
 

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