Friday, November 30, 2012

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Apps Like Rockmelt Ditch Social-Only Signup, Add Email So Privacy Buffs Can "Try Before You Pry" Top
Email SigninRockmelt's recently released iPad app only offered signup through Facebook and Twitter, leading 50% of users not to sign in at all. So today it followed Pinterest and Spotify by moving away from social-only signup and offering email as a login option."Users don't want to add social up front and give access to their information", Rockmelt's Eric Vishria tells me. "People want a little dating before marriage."
 
Review: Squier By Fender Strat Guitar With USB Connection Top
scaledwm.IMG_1137The Squier Strat by Fender (or Squier by Fender Strat or however they want to name this thing) is one of the first guitars with a built-in digital signal processor. The guitar plugs right into any computer or 30-pin iOS device (Lightning cables are not yet available) so you can play directly into any sound editor including GarageBand and Logic Pro. It's a $200 guitar that's designed primarily to plug into a PC or Mac and allows you to almost entirely eschew a standalone amp.
 
Cinemagram Raises $8.5M Series A Led By Menlo Ventures To Make Mobile Photo Sharing More Animated Top
mzl.mkabytvj.320x480-75Cinemagram, a startup founded in Montreal that's now moving to San Francisco, today announced an $8.5 million Series A round via AllThingsD. The investment comes from Menlo Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Real Ventures and Atlas, and stands as an exception to the decidedly reserved climate for follow-on capital after a startup's seed round. So what's Cinemagram's secret?
 
Paul Maritz To Lead New Group At EMC That Merges Greenplum With VMware's Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, And Gemstome Top
maritz_paul_vmware_370Paul Maritz will lead a new platform group that will combine VMware's Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and Gemstone with Greenplum, EMC's big data platform.
 
Productivity App Evernote Gets Another $85M, ~$64M In Secondary Financing, Led By London's AGC Equity Top
evernoteEvernote, the personal data and productivity app that now has over 40 million users, is today announcing it has raised another $85 million, with 75% of that, $63.75 million, in the form of a secondary investment. We have heard that the raise was looking to be done on a $2 billion valuation.
 
Update: Facebook Website Experienced 20 Minutes Of Downtime, Mobile App And Website Were Still Working Top
fb-downPeople on Twitter are complaining that Facebook has been down for about 10 minutes at the time of writing this article. Many TechCrunch writers could confirm the issue. The mobile app and website are still working though.
 
With 1B Pageviews Under Its Belt, UGC Giant Wikia Raises $10.8M From IVP, Bessemer & Amazon Top
Screen Shot 2012-11-30 at 11.48.32 AMUser generated content company Wikia is breaking the news of its raise of over $10.8 million in Series C funding today in a press release soon to be sent out to tech media. The financing was led by Institutional Venture Partners with a follow on from existing investors Bessemer Ventures Partners and Amazon.com. The company, which is already profitable according to the release, will use the cash to bolster its mobile and video efforts. With the added financing, Wikia's total funding is now $25 million.
 
Kngine Aims To Build A Natural Language-Driven App That Can Answer Any Question Top
Kngine-for-iphoneKngine (pronounced kin-gin, short for knowledge engine) is one of those startups with a goal that's both straightforward and impressively ambitious — it wants to build an app that can answer any question. In fact, when you open the app, it prompts you to "ask me anything." When I watched the promotional video (embedded below), the first thing I thought of was Apple's Siri. And while Kngine co-founder and CEO Haymad ElFadeel doesn't shy away from the Siri comparison, he also said Kngine has a slightly different goal. One of Siri's big selling points is allowing you to access a lot of the iPhone's functions through voice, so when your questions are more fact- then task-based (i.e., Kngine's strong point) it relies on Wolfram Alpha.
 
Fab Has Its First Million-Dollar Day; Sold More Than $6.5M Worth Of Products This Past Week Top
fab-comDesign-focused e-commerce site Fab released a number of data this morning, and it's impressive to say the least. Fab has sold more than $6.5 million worth of product this past week, up from $1.7 million during the same period last year. That's up 300 percent from last year.
 
What Will Happen When The Surface Pro Isn't The Only Flagship Win8 Tablet In Town? Top
2012-11-30 13.58.43The Surface Pro launches in January, just after the holiday rush. It's a pricey bauble at $899 plus an extra hundred for the Touch Cover. But everyone is excited. This is the model most of the Surface sympathizers are waiting for. It has the full Windows 8 experience, a capable Intel chipset, and an ecosystem two decades in the making. But here's the problem: come January the Surface Pro could have serious competition from Asus, Samsung, Lenovo and maybe even HP. In short, what happens when the big guys finally catch up to Microsoft?
 
Foodspotting Launches A Pilot Rewards-For-Photos Program In San Francisco Top
foodspotting rewardsFoodspotting is launching a new feature today that allows restaurants to promote themselves to hungry locals — and also provides one of the first big opportunities for the startup to make money. Co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski said that the app's development has had three distinct stages. First, it needed to recruit the "foodspotters" themselves, namely the people who want to share photos of their favorite dishes. Then, with the redesign in February, the company tried to expand beyond the foodspotters to "food seekers" by making it easier to rate food and browse dish recommendations. Now the company is starting phase three — "connecting foodspotters and food seekers with restaurants."
 
Google Acquires Waterloo-Based E-Commerce Startup, Amazon Locker Competitor And YC Graduate BufferBox Top
BufferBoxOfficialGoogle today announced their acquisition of YC alumni BufferBox, a Waterloo-based startup that specializes in providing users with temporary lockers to receive delivery of packages from online e-commerce retailers. The company is led by a founding team of three University of Waterloo graduates, Mike McCauley, Aditya Bali and Jay Shah. The startup actually already shares a building with Google's Waterloo office, and is located in the Communitech accelerator offices in that city.
 
Flash Deals Site NoMoreRack Raises $12M, Hits 5.8M Members Top
screen-shot-2012-07-05-at-4-38-39-pmBack in July, we caught up with New York-based startup NoMoreRack, a flash sales site that, unlike some of the most popular players in the space, isn't relying on luxury products or fashion to drive traffic. Instead, the young startup offers everyday products at reduced prices -- an average of 70 to 80 percent off everything from consumer electronics to clothing -- in an effort to become the Walmart or Target of deals.
 
MyFiveBy Wants To Join The Conversation With A Unique, Browser-Based Microblogging Tool Top
Screen Shot 2012-11-30 at 1.15.09 PMEvery few years someone tries to unseat the big social networks by creating something unique and unusual. They often fail. However, I think MyFiveBy has a fighting chance. Built by a team out of Barcelona, the web-based app creates a sort of “workspace” for your microblogging exploits, allowing you to bring in outside content and post directly to the service. The UI is a bit complex and skeuomorphic, it does have a sort of weird charm. To begin, understand that the project is a labor of love. “We are not funded. We've dedicated all of our free time and weekends over the past year to build this of our own accord, because we believe in it,” said one of the founders, Harry Marshall. The team built the project over the past year and have just come out of beta. They’ve added a very cool feature – a sort RSS scraping – that will bring in all of your older content right into the system, ensuring that the community is vibrant right from the start. “We're coming out of the gate and don't currently have traction. We've built in a feature that should allow us to build content quite fast, to get started – users can type in the web address of their existing blog, if they have one, and myfiveby will automatically search for and add their RSS feed, syndicating their content,” said Marshall. “We were originally working on a very simple network to let people share the 5 principles they live their lives by. As we developed the site, we realised the structure we'd planned would be able to support a much wider variety of content. As it turned out, all of us had started and subsequently abandoned a personal blog, and so we started investigated this and speaking to others in similar situations to find out what had gone wrong.” Given the popularity of microblogging services like Tumblr and “writing services” like Wattpad, it’s clear the team is at least attacking an interesting problem. While I would disagree with some of their design decisions – it’s far too noisy as it stands – there is still plenty of room for better blogging platforms out there. “myfiveby is blogging for people who aren’t into blogging. Blogging should be as easy as owning a diary. You have a diary, you write in it, that’s it. WordPress and CMS-like blogging platforms
 
Facebook Enters Cloud Storage And Chows Down On Metadata With Rollout Of Mobile Photo Sync Background Uploads Top
detailFacebook can now save photos you don't publish, which effectively makes it a cloud storage locker. Today it starts rolling out its Photo Sync background uploads feature to all users after testing it on Android since August and iOS since earlier this month. It could get a lot more photos by eliminating upload friction, but it will also pull in lots of juicy photo metadata to aid its ads business.
 
Google Adds Key Facts About Medicines To Its Knowledge Graph Results Top
naproxenGoogle's Knowledge Graph is quickly becoming one of the key features of the company's search engine and today, the company added yet another area of information to the project. Starting now, users who search for medications will see a box with key facts about them in the right-hand sidebar of Google Search. This data, Google says, comes from the U.S. FDA, the National Library of Medicine and the Department of Veterans Affairs, among a number of other vendors.
 
Inside Shinola, The Detroit Company That's Building Gadgets Made In The USA (Yes, Really) Top
shinola watchIt's no secret that manufacturing activity in the United States has taken a nosedive in recent decades as globalization has made it more financially profitable to offshore the making of things to countries such as China and India. While there has been a bit of a resurgence lately of made in USA in goods like clothing, the lion's share of harder consumer goods sold in the US such as gadgets and electronics are completely imported. And, as the late Steve Jobs once reportedly said, many believe that those jobs are never coming back.
 
Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger's 8 Principles For Building Products People Want Top
Mike Kreiger Warm GUnMike Krieger, Instagram's founder thinks you can build apps that fit the real world by watching what people want, not guessing. He presented his eight core product design insights today at 500 Startups' Warm Gun conference. Here's the cheat sheet to his talk.
 
Dwolla Launches Guest Checkout Option For Merchants, Allows Shoppers To Pay With Dwolla Without Signing Up Top
DwollaPriceOnline and mobile digital cash network Dwolla is breaking down one of the barriers to entry to using its service with today's introduction of a new "guest checkout" feature for online merchants. The option will allow non-Dwolla users to pay with Dwolla on e-commerce websites, possibly even getting a discount on the item or service being purchased in the process.
 
Gift Guide: Victorinox Dive Master 500 Dive Watch Top
giftguide12-vicAs one of TechCrunch's resident watch fans, I was intrigued by the Victorinox Dive Master 500, a fairly unique automatic watch that brings the best of the Swiss mechanical along with styling reminiscent of some of the better divers. The build is solid, the 43mm case is well-polished, and the face is very legible. Interestingly, I'd actually recommend this for a fairly adventurous lady who is looking for something a little more rugged - and handsome - than the traditional sport watch.
 

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