The latest from TechCrunch
- My First Customer Is Now Dead
- New iMac Teardown Reveals Dual Microphones, Hard To Reach RAM
- SkyDrive Assets Hint At Web-Based Streaming Music Player Coming From Microsoft
- Security Is Hard, But That Doesn't Mean You Should Ignore It
- Apple Gains On Samsung In U.S. Mobile Phone Market Share, Lands Second Overall For The First Time
- HTC Won't Sell The Entry-Level Windows Phone 8S Smartphone In The U.S.
- For A Stranger In Silicon Valley, Success Isn't Only About Who You Know
- Language Learning Service Verbling Launches Google Hangouts-Powered Classes, Adds Support For 9 New Languages
- Why Did Google Buy BufferBox? Because The Entire Mail And Package Delivery System Is Broken
- Enterprise Apps Are Moving To Single-Page Design
- The Weekly Good: Gurbaksh Chahal, BeProud.org And Putting An End To Hate
- Backops Outsources Your Startup's Back Office Using The Best Enterprise Apps, Raises $1.5M
- Settle Down, Facebook Users, 'Cause You're Not Getting $1M For Sharing A Pic Of A Fake Lottery Ticket
- Court Rules Yahoo Must Pay $2.7 Billion For Mexican Yellow Pages Breach Of Contract
- Apps Like Rockmelt Ditch Social-Only Signup, Add Email So Privacy Buffs Can "Try Before You Pry"
- Review: Squier By Fender Strat Guitar With USB Connection
- Cinemagram Raises $8.5M Series A Led By Menlo Ventures To Make Mobile Photo Sharing More Animated
- Paul Maritz To Lead New Group At EMC That Merges Greenplum With VMware's Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, And Gemstome
- Productivity App Evernote Gets Another $85M, ~$64M In Secondary Financing, Led By London's AGC Equity
- Update: Facebook Website Experienced 20 Minutes Of Downtime, Mobile App And Website Were Still Working
| My First Customer Is Now Dead | Top |
 Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. I was lonely and I wanted money. I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, NYC in 1995. I knew nobody in the area. I would write my phone number on two dollar bills and tip waitresses with them. Nobody called me. | |
| New iMac Teardown Reveals Dual Microphones, Hard To Reach RAM | Top |
 As you might have expected, the new iMac redesign that introduces a much slimmer case also has some negative consequences for overall device repairability and DIY upgrades, iFixit's teardown of the machine has revealed. The site's traditional peek under the hood of Apple's latest all-in-one also shows off some impressive feats of engineering to fit all that good stuff in a much sleeker package. | |
| SkyDrive Assets Hint At Web-Based Streaming Music Player Coming From Microsoft | Top |
 Microsoft is doing a lot lately to unify services across its platforms, and Xbox Music, a scan-and-match cloud music locker that's planned for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 is a big part of that. Now, it looks like that service might also become part of SkyDrive, making it available from any browser, according to a new report. | |
| Security Is Hard, But That Doesn't Mean You Should Ignore It | Top |
 Six weeks ago I was out drinking in a Kipling-themed bar in Rangoon, Myanmar--as you do--and happened to find myself next to a table of high-powered international telecommunications consultants, overhearing juicy lines like "Skype and Viber are going to kill us." Needless to say I told Twitter right away. Then an old friend who's also a genuine International Man Of Mystery got in touch and asked if we could chat about Myanmar's proposed ban on VOIP. Securely. He has his very good reasons to insist on secure communications. But to my embarrassment and dismay, given that I'm a software pro with scads of hacker friends, I was largely unprepared for that request. | |
| Apple Gains On Samsung In U.S. Mobile Phone Market Share, Lands Second Overall For The First Time | Top |
 For the first time in the history of comScore's MobiLens U.S. mobile market share report, Apple has come in second overall among handset OEMs. Apple grew its U.S. market share by 1.5 percentage points from 16.3 to 17.8 percent in the three month period ending October 2012, according to the report. During the same period, Samsung also saw its share grow, but only by 0.7 percentage points, from 25.6 to 26.3 percent. | |
| HTC Won't Sell The Entry-Level Windows Phone 8S Smartphone In The U.S. | Top |
 The HTC 8S is a Windows Phone 8 handset that's lightly specced compared to its more powerful sibling, the HTC 8X. The 8X is HTC's flagship phone based on Microsoft's mobile OS, and apparently the only one the U.S. market may ever see, according to an official statement from HTC issued late Friday afternoon. The budget 8S won't make it to U.S. shores, an HTC official told Engadget, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise. | |
| For A Stranger In Silicon Valley, Success Isn't Only About Who You Know | Top |
 Editor's note: Cherian Thomas is founder and CEO of Cucumbertown, a recipe-publishing platform. Cucumbertown raised its first round from the Valley a month ago and during the course of this journey, I realized that, as a first-time entrepreneur without any solid Valley footing, my run toward raising funds as a non-American co-founder was somewhat unique. | |
| Language Learning Service Verbling Launches Google Hangouts-Powered Classes, Adds Support For 9 New Languages | Top |
 Learning a new language can be tedious and frustrating. Thankfully, a new generation of startups are leveraging advances in mobile and web technologies to make that process more enjoyable and rewarding. Today, companies like Livemocha, PlaySay, Voxy, italki, MindSnacks and Duolingo provide increasingly viable alternatives to traditional language-learning software -- the Rosetta Stones of the world. Another recent entrant into the space is Y Combinator grad Verbling, a venture-backed startup that wants to help turn language learners into polyglots by using video chat to connect them with real, live native speakers. | |
| Why Did Google Buy BufferBox? Because The Entire Mail And Package Delivery System Is Broken | Top |
 Today, Google bought an Ontario-based company called BufferBox. In a way, it kind of came out of left field. Since it's a Google Ventures company, one can guess that those on Google's campus were very familiar with the service, which provides an easy alternative to waiting around for packages at your house. Not only is package delivery a bummer, because things get lost, hitting up your mailbox when you get home isn't that much fun either. The worst is when you don't even have a mailbox and you come home to twenty pieces of junkmail slipped under your door. The mail delivery system is broken and old. It's ripe for...disruption. | |
| Enterprise Apps Are Moving To Single-Page Design | Top |
 Editor's note: Alexander Aghassipour is chief product officer and co-founder of Zendesk, and Shajith Chacko is lead software engineer at Zendesk. Our traditional app had been serving our business and customers quite well. Yet we recently decided to shift from an HTML browser-based app to a modern JavaScript-fueled single page application. We're here to tell you why and how. | |
| The Weekly Good: Gurbaksh Chahal, BeProud.org And Putting An End To Hate | Top |
 Sometimes, it's not political powerhouses who have the power to change the world, sometimes it's true-blue entrepreneurs who live to solve problems. One such person is Gurbaksh Chahal, who has launched BeProud.org, launched after the shootings at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in August 2012, with some pretty impressive backers. The point of the multi-million dollar campaign is to put an end to hatred, and to encourage self-pride. Using the web to help bring attention to this is a fantastic idea. I had a chance to chat with Chahal on his background and the future of the BeProud initiative. | |
| Backops Outsources Your Startup's Back Office Using The Best Enterprise Apps, Raises $1.5M | Top |
 Early-stage startups die if they don’t nail their core products quickly. But like all companies, they also need to process loads of paperwork required for basic operations, from crunching numbers in Quickbooks to churning out piles of human-resource forms for new hires. So, as any startup executive knows, the balance between product development and rote paperwork is a constant frustration — which is where Backops comes in. The company, which has just closed a $1.5 million seed round, combines 15 or so modern business productivity tools with crowdsourced labor from stay-at-home workers. Startups get a simple dashboard that shows them what’s happening across the organization, from accounts received to job offers accepted. If the exec wants more detail than the dashboard’s accounting summaries and human resource statuses provides, they can request custom reports or data dumps from Backops. So, sure, there are a few established office outsourcing businesses out there already, like TriNet for human resources, but a closer look at Backops plans shows why it’s such a smart new idea. The first is the overall “consumerization of IT” trend. A wave of well-designed online business software has been gradually rising over the past decade, sweeping away expensive legacy systems for accounting, HR, content management, customer relations, and more. The result is that workers can learn new systems and produce results more easily. This fits in well with the other trend that Backops takes advantage of, which is crowdsourcing labor from people who work from home. A long list of companies, like Amazon and its Mechanical Turk, have created marketplaces for workers. Perhaps pushed by high unemployment and underemployment, more and more workers are looking for additional income through online jobs. Backops does a few other smart things to capitalize on these trends. On the software side, it’s staying nimble, swapping in new productivity apps as they become available. Right now it’s using Expensify to help process expenses, Bills.com for bill processing, and popular accounting software like Quickbooks. It doesn’t disclose the full list of vendors, but cofounder Mark H Goldstein tells me that they just brought in a new HR system over the weekend. That adaptability is in sharp contrast to the time it would take a business to change its own internal software, or the time it would take a traditional vendor. Even if business software is getting easier to use, experienced workers can do a better job | |
| Settle Down, Facebook Users, 'Cause You're Not Getting $1M For Sharing A Pic Of A Fake Lottery Ticket | Top |
 In today's edition of Facebook scams comes the story of Nolan Daniels and his $1M lottery ticket picture. "Looks like I won't be going to work EVER!!!! Share this photo and I will give a random person 1 million dollars!", says the Facebook pic. Of course this is legit. It's on Facebook. Never mind that the numbers on the ticket are out-of-order. | |
| Court Rules Yahoo Must Pay $2.7 Billion For Mexican Yellow Pages Breach Of Contract | Top |
 Yahoo says it "will vigorously pursue all appeals" of a non-final judgement by a Mexico City court ruling Yahoo must pay $2.7 billion for breaching its contract with Ideas Interactivas and its parent company Worldwide Directories. The web giant seems to have had a partnership to work with Interactive Ideas to release a printed Yellow Pages of business telephone numbers for Mexico. | |
| Apps Like Rockmelt Ditch Social-Only Signup, Add Email So Privacy Buffs Can "Try Before You Pry" | Top |
 Rockmelt's recently released iPad app only offered signup through Facebook and Twitter, leading 50 percent 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 |
 The 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 |
 Cinemagram, 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 |
 Paul 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 |
 Evernote, 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 |
 People 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. | |
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. |
No comments:
Post a Comment