Wednesday, February 1, 2012

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AOL Beats The Street, Q4 Revenue Down 3 Percent To $577M Top
aolAOL reported better than expected fourth quarter earnings this morning. The company, which owns TechCrunch, reported revenue of $576.8 million, which is down 3 percent from Q4 2010 revenue of $596 million. Earnings came in at $0.23 per share, or $22.8 million, which is down 66 percent from $66.2 million a year ago. Analysts expected $0.16 per share. AOL says total revenue decline was its lowest rate of revenue decline in 5 years. While global advertising revenue was 10%, subscription revenue declined by 18%. AOl also saw a 15% growth in global display revenue and a 20% growth in third party network revenue.
 
Ecommerce Platform Shopify Acquires Mobile App Development Studio Select Start Top
selectShopify, which provides a turnkey e-commerce technology that lets anyone create a storefront online, has acquired mobile app and game studio Select Start Studios. The acquisition will be used to further Shopify's mobile commerce initiatives. While all Shopify stores already include mobile optimized storefronts and checkouts, the acquisition of S3 will bring over 20 new mobile-focused engineers to the Shopify team to continue developing mobile offerings for merchants.
 
Mint.com Launches Android Tablet App Top
mint_spending_androidMint.com, the financial service we first mentioned at TechCrunch40 in 2007 (wow, that seems like a long time ago), announced that they have launched a new native app specifically for 9 and 10 inch Android tablets running Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. This new app, available in the Android Market, will join the previously available versions for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile phones. Curiously, there is no mobile web version (that I have been able to find).
 
The Birth Of An American Giant—Basic Clothing Sold On The Web Top
American Giant_LogoNothing is made in this country anymore. In terms of actual manufacturing, America is increasingly at a disadvantage. The logic of the global economy moves jobs overseas. Get used to it, we are told. Well, Bayard Winthrop thinks the conventional wisdom is wrong. He wants to bring manufacturing back to America, in the apparel industry, no less! His clothing startup, American Giant (gotta love the name), launches today. American Giant is starting small, with a line of basic sweatshirts made in Brisbane, CA. American Giant doesn't have any stores. It sells its sweatshirts only on the web, and soon will expand to other men's basics such as T-shirts, polos, and button-downs. While the cost of materials and labor would be cheaper in Asia, a much bigger portion of the cost of a shirt is distribution.
 
Facebook's Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior Top
Facebook Behavioral AdsFacebook has an answer to those wondering how it will justify its IPO price and keep revenues growing as it saturates key markets: a new behavioral ad targeting system. Facebook has been quietly rolling out the beta of "Open Graph action spec targeting" which allows advertisers to target users by what they listen to, where they travel, what they buy, and other in-app activity. These behaviors can more accurately denote conversion potential than a user's biography or interests, That means Open Graph action spec ad targeting could turn finding a needle in a haystack into shooting fish in a barrel. The targeting options could improve the ROI of Facebook ads, and thereby attract a new class of advertisers, get existing ones to spend more, and pull in dollars from search, display, and offline channels.
 
Wunderkit Launches Beta For Its Wunderbar-designed Productivity Platform Top
DashboardBerlin-based startup 6Wunderkinder has just launched their private beta for their productivity suite Wunderkit. This is an extension to their simple, yet well designed task list manager Wunderlist, which was acclaimed both by early adopters and users. With Wunderkit the startup is now taking a next step. They've stuck to the user experience that, while beautifully crafted on the one hand is surely tricky to get used to, and have taken their core task manager several steps further by wrapping a fully fledged social network around it. Whereas RememberTheMilk had been their primary competitor until now, the company is now directly competing with full virtual workspace apps such as Podio or Asana, all of them trying to re-invent peoples' work and organize their private and professional lives.
 
Best Overall Startup Dropbox Looks To The Future Top
dropboxDropbox took home two of the big awards at this year's Crunchies: Best Cloud Service and Best Overall Startup. Both times, CEO Drew Houston came backstage to talk about the company's growth and its future. When asked about what he's planning for 2012, Houston offered some very broad thoughts, saying that "one of the most exciting things that's happened" recently is the explosion of devices that peopel can use to access Dropbox from. So when he looks to the future, he says one of his big goals is to move further in that direction, working deeper into "the fabric" of people's everyday lives.
 
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner Says IPO "Didn't Really Change Anything" Top
jeff weinerLinkedIn's Jeff Weiner won this year's Best CEO award at the Crunchies, and backstage he talked about LinkedIn's big milestone from the past year — its IPO. "The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone," Weiner said. It's a common theme from Weiner's interviews before the IPO, when he would dodge questions about the timing and emphasize that it was just another step in the company's growth. This time, Weiner added that he's proudest of the fact that "for us, it didn't really change anything.
 
Videoplaza Secures $12 million For Ad Platform Led By Qualcomm, Innovacom Top
21905v8-max-250x250With the huge rise in the consumption of online video it follows that services to monetize that video are becoming hot properties. To that end, today Videoplaza, a 'sell side' ad management platform for video, has secured a Series B round of $12million led by Qualcomm Ventures and Innovacom. The company previously received rounds from VCs Creandum and Northzone, which also participated, which means VideoPlaza has received $18 million to date.
 
And The Crunchie Goes To…Pinterest, Best New Startup Of 2011 Top
Pinterest_winsOnline pinboard Pinterest, the hot new startup that's growing at a phenomenal rate, won the Crunchie for the Best New Startup of 2011 at this year's Crunchies. (This, despite the fact that it actually launched in 2010). The reason? Crazy, crazy traffic and growth. In November, the site had reportedly seen a 2,000% increase in pageviews, according to comScore. That wasn't year-over-year growth, mind you, but the increase Pinterest had seen since June. At 421 million pageviews, the site had already surpassed more established players, like Etsy, for example. But co-founder Ben Silbermann stayed tight-lipped on the hard metrics behind Pinterest. In an interview backstage after the win, he declined to provide the number of users or even the number of pins. (There were "a lot," he demurred.)
 
Daily Crunch: Fine Tune Top
1536Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: Peavey Builds An Auto-Tuning Guitar FlatFrog Offers Up A New Multitouch Table Self-Guided Bullet Could Strike Laser-Designated Targets From A Mile Away Years After Being Dropped, ZFS Finds Its Way Back To The Mac Apple Is Totally Serious About That Stuff They Put At The End Of Their Emails
 
Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter's Tweet-Level Censorship Top
jack dorseyAfter Twitter creator, executive chairman, and product lead Jack Dorsey accepted the company's award for Biggest Social Impact at the Crunchies, TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis asked him about a recent, controversial decision to block individual tweets on a country-by-country basis. Will that hurt Twitter's ability to make a positive impact on the future?
 
Imgur Wins Best Bootstrapped Startup, Sees 1 Billion Pageviews Per Month Top
Imgur-2Here at the 2011 Crunchies, Imgur, the photo-sharing site made popular by the Reddit community, won the category of "Best Bootstrapped Startup." And given the traffic numbers the startup is seeing, it's easy to see why. According to Founder Alan Schaaf, the site sees 30 million uniques per month and a billion pageviews. (Yes, a billion!)
 
Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Dropbox Is The Best Overall Startup Top
Dropbox CrunchieThis year's fifth annual Crunchies Awards have just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech's greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream, check out the full list of nominees and winners below.
 
Omniture Co-Founder's Business Intelligence SaaS Company Domo Lands $20M From IVP Top
DOMO __ HomeDomo, the SaaS business intelligence startup launched by Omniture founder Josh James, has raised $20 million in new funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). This round brings total investment in Domo to $63 million. Previous investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel, and Hummer Winblad. As you may remember, Omniture is a web analytics SaaS company that went public and was subsequently bought by Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. Last year, James debuted his next project, Domo, with $33 million in funding from Benchmark, and aimed to tackle the business intelligence space. Domo purchased a company called Corda, and started accepting customers on a selective basis to test out the platform.
 
Crunchies Introduction by Host Harris Whittels Top
introduction-by-host-harris-whittels
 
Watch The Crunchies Awards Live [Video] Top
We're live at The Crunchies Awards at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Once again we've partnered with fellow blogs VentureBeat and GigaOm to celebrate the best technology achievements of 2011. Those of you at home can watch the live stream here. The show starts at 7:30 pm.
 
What Recession? Razer's $2800 Blade Gaming Laptop Sells Out In 30 Minutes Top
rzr_blade_v12_cmyk_wbgFor months we've been waiting on Razer's Blade notebook, a $2800, 17-inch beast that we weren't sure whether to laud or mock. It's just that it's kind of a strange thing to see making a big debut when people are more cautious than usual with their money, and PC gaming (as ever) is being declared dead. But after our hands-on at CES, we were convinced that it was at the very least impressive and well-built, and apparently enough other people thought so that Razer sold out almost immediately.
 
Years After Being Dropped, ZFS Finds Its Way Back To The Mac Top
zevoTwo weeks ago, the excellent Building Windows 8 blog posted an in-depth look at the upcoming operating system's new file system, ReFS. It reminded me of the promise of so many years ago that OS X would be changing its file system from HFS+ to ZFS. Not a promise many remember or even cared about at the time, but it was, in fact, important. ZFS support was dropped amid development and legal problems, but Don Brady, who was heading up the file system transition team at Apple, left to pursue it independently. And now he's releasing a piece of software, Zevo, which finally adds ZFS support to any Intel Mac running 10.6.6 or later.
 
CFO Defends Amazon From Analyst Skepticism Top
amazon logoInvestors seem pretty disappointed with Amazon's fourth quarter results (as of 3pm Pacific, the company's stock is down 8.6 percent in after-hours training), yet for most of this afternoon's analyst conference call, that disappointment was largely hidden in the normal stream of numbers and financial terminology. Finally, a few minutes before the call ended, one analyst asked CFO Tom Szkutak to directly address the concern that earlier questions had hinted at — namely, that the company seems to be seeing "diminishing return" on its spending. Szutak's initial response? "I'm not sure how to answer that." Yes, he said Amazon is investing heavily (for example, hhe said Amazon had opened 17 fulfillment centers during the quarter, bringing the total to 69), but that's because the company is seeing so much growth — in its own retail business, in fulfillment for third-party retailers, in Amazon Web Services, and so on. As evidence, he pointed to Amazon's 46 percent growth in overall unit sales. (He talked in more detail about media sales earlier in the call.)
 

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