Monday, February 27, 2012

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Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, And Obvious Put $4.5M In Sleek Social, Mobile Gifting Platform Karma Top
kKarma, a new social, mobile gifting service from the founder of TapJoy, has raised funding from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, The Obvious Corporation, Stephen Gillett, Felicis Ventures and other angel investors. While Karma declined to reveal the exact amount of the funding round, which was raised last summer, SEC documents reveal the startup has raised around $4.5 million. In addition to announcing its investors, Karma is also debuting its disruptive mobile, social gifting platform that could change the way people give and receive gifts. Founded by  Lee Linden, and Ben Lewis; Karma aims to give users the option to give friends gifts on the go via iOS and Android apps. While there are a number of mobile, social gifting apps on the market, Karma's service combines intelligence, social discovery, and the easy of gift giving in a sleek app that's definitely worth a look.
 
Jack Dorsey Will Field Your Questions About Entrepreneurship Top
TokBoxGet your questions ready because Twitter founder and executive chairman and Square CEO Jack Dorsey will be hosting a video-mentoring session (which you can watch and participate in here) as part of an initiative to foster entrepreneurship among high school students. Dorsey will be partnering with BUILD, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit that promotes college readiness via entrepreneurship education. Using TokBox's Dorsey will host the chat on BUILD's web site tomorrow, Tuesday February 28 at 4:30 PT, and is encouraging students and fledgling entrepreneurs to ask him questions via the live chat.
 
Brad Keslowski Makes NASCAR History With First In-Vehicle Tweet & Pic During A Race Top
AmtWD3yCMAAoLIaAs I'm writing this the Daytona 500 is under a red flag due to a bizarre accident. Juan Pablo Montoya's #42 car malfunctioned under a yellow caution and hit a massive race track jet dryer directly in the fuel center, causing a large fire on the track. Both the racer and the driver of the truck are fine. So what's a driver to do during a red flag? Well, Brad Keslowski just happened to have his iPhone on him from pre-race activities and is putting it to good use. He just tweeted a pic of track fire from inside his race car but is also fielding questions on Twitter (@keselowski) while waiting for the race to restart. Per the FOX sportscasters NASCAR race car drivers are now having holsters built for their phones for testing purposes. Apparently Keslowski still had his on him.
 
Why You Can't Dismiss Nokia's 41-Megapixel Phone Top
sensorMy first reaction upon hearing about Nokia's 41-megapixel 808 Pureview was that it was an absurdity, a perfect example of the very worst of consumer electronics, and a total miss. But the more I read, the better I understood that this phone isn't just some freak of nature with a ridiculously high number attached to it. It's just the slightly awkward first steps of a serious move by Nokia to differentiate itself. If you've only skimmed the news, there are some things you should probably know about this strange beast of a camera. First, the 41 megapixel figure is really misrepresentative, not to say untrue. It doesn't take 41-megapixel photos in any way, shape, or form. Even in the special high-res creative mode, it "only" produces 38 megapixels. Mostly it will be taking normal-size shots, between 3 and 8 megapixels. So what the hell does this 41 megapixel figure even mean?
 
Following Thefts, Luxury Car-Sharing Service HiGear Acquired By Rent2Buy Top
rent2buySan Francisco-based HiGear, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service for luxury vehicles, has been acquired. The news follows the company's decision to shut down operations last month, after a criminal ring targeted HiGear, resulting in multiple incidents of theft involving its members' cars. The criminals stole four cars totaling $400,000 by using stolen identities to bypass HiGear's background checks. Today, the company is announcing its assets have been sold to another peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace known as Rent2Buy. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
 
A Few New Bag Designs From Golla Top
IMG_6117I spent a good portion of my adult career as a graphic designer. I still look at the world through that lens, so I am always happy to stumble across some beautiful designs, no matter where they might be. Stumble I did, into the Golla booth at the Mobile World Congress today (2 hours of sleep and about 300 calories of food in the last 36 hours) to find a pretty killer lineup of beautifully designed bags for all your gadgets.
 
Yahoo Stabs Facebook In The Back, Says Pay For Its Patents Or Get Sued Top
stabAfter years of positive relations, friendly blog posts, and referral traffic, Yahoo may have just been biding its time waiting to declare war on Facebook. Today it suddenly accused its former ally of infringing on 10-20 of its patents. It demands a settlement from Facebook or it says it will sue. The betrayer only warned Facebook privately once the New York Times had publicly published details passed to it by Yahoo. Though dastardly opportunistic, this patent trolling could produce a big windfall for Yahoo's investors.
 
Well, That Was Fun Top
spinningThis is my 4,212th post on TechCrunch, and my last as editor in chief. The past few months have been a whirlwind for everyone at TechCrunch. We've had a lot of departures lately, but behind the scenes we've also quietly been building a new TechCrunch. For every departure there's been a new hire, we've been rolling out new features across the site (like the video and events hubs), and there is more goodness in the works including an awesome tablet app I am personally excited about. I didn't want to leave until TechCrunch was set up for the next few years. And now it is.
 
Poppin Seals $6M Series A From Shasta and First Round To Beautify Your Bland Office Top
Poppin LogoFugly offices kill morale and make every task a chore. But Poppin knows a happy employee is a productive one, and wants to keep yours that way with its online store full of colorful office supplies. With the ongoing talent crunch making employee retention more crucial than ever, Shasta Ventures sees a bright future in Poppin, so it's led a new $6 million Series A in Poppin. Joined by First Round Capital and several angels, the round will give Poppin the gusto to expand into furniture and other essentials, and spray rainbows over the supposed $300 billion office product market.
 
A Swedish Company Claims It Owns A Swipe Patent Used By Apple Top
Image (1) slide_to_unlock.jpg for post 87958Another front has opened in the multi-faceted story of patent battles: Neonode, an optical touchscreen tech company based in Sweden, says that it has been granted a patent in the U.S. that covers the touch-and-glide gesture that it claims is used on devices like the iPhone and iPad. The patent is notable not only because Neonode says the patent covers functions like the horizontal touch gesture that Apple uses between screens on its iOS devices, as well as in the slide-to-unlock feature. But also because slide-to-unlock is the same feature that Apple has been citing in its own patent lawsuits against Android device makers Motorola and Samsung.
 
Texas Instruments Announces New Partnerships For OMAP 5, But Wait…There's More Top
TI2Texas Instruments announced earlier today that they are partnering with Harman and iRobot to provide OMAP 5 as the core processor for new products being developed in these two companies. To understand what this means in TI's greater strategy, we need to back up a bit to take a look as some other initiatives they have going on and see where they all tie together.
 
Dude, You're Getting An Enterprise Solution Based On Best-Of-Breed Dell Technology! Top
Dell_DudeBarring a change of heart or a wild, consumer-driven financial upturn, it looks as if Dell is out of the consumer PC business and is turning its Sauron-like eye towards the enterprise - the one place where people upgrade their PCs at least once a year. According to PCPro, Dell will is "dramatically changing" their entire business with a focus away from "shiny boxes" and more focus on barebones server and fleet hardware. To be fair, the statement could portend far less than we should expect. Dell has been among the walking dead in PC hardware for most of this decade, producing little of interest (the Adamo was their big consumer play and presumably Alienware will remain a consumer-facing company) but there's still money to be made in selling commodity hardware for a few percentage points over cost. I doubt the outcry will be as vociferous as it was when HP threatened to pull its consumer business, mostly because Dell has no products of any interest to the enthusiast. The anger at HP was more about their destruction of Palm rather than the possibility that we wouldn't be able to by a handsome, staid PC in a black/grey case.
 
Goodbye Erick, Hello Eric Top
Screen Shot 2012-02-27 at 1.50.21 PMTechCrunch has been through a lot lately, and we need to focus on what truly matters: covering startups and innovation. So, this post is going to be short. But here is what's going on: Erick Schonfeld is leaving and Eric Eldon is replacing him as editor. What can you expect from TechCrunch now?
 
Office Wars Top
officewarsOffice represents an increasingly minor amount of screen time in my computing experience, while social computing is transitioning much of that work to stream-based objects. Google's forced march of Google + data into its social experience may be a good long term move for the search company, but it comes at the cost of meshing with Apple's accelerated Twitter interoperability. As Chatter builds out support for Customer Groups across Salesforce business customers and their partners, Twitter's direct messages and @mention authority model are being extended in this new form of collaborative communication.
 
Your Google+ Is In My RSS Feed! No, Your RSS Feed Is In My Google+ Top
Screen Shot 2012-02-27 at 4.36.28 PMIf there's one thing wrong with Google+ it's a lack of a real non-browser interface. There are workarounds and widgets, but there's never been a real way to pull your G+ feed into a more comfortable format. While many would complain that RSS isn't even close to a comfortable format, it's bettern' nuffin'. That said, a new free service called GPlusRSS allows you to create a public RSS feed of your G+ account. You can potentially share this feed with others (here's mine) or you can keep it for yourself. The feed consists only of public pronouncements so private messages won't show up.
 
AT&T's Latest Boondoggle Is To Let App Makers Pay For Users' Data Top
att-logoThe Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T is considering giving app makers the option of being charged for the data their users are gobbling up while playing with the app. Let me just start out by calmly saying that this is absolutely ridiculous, and I'd like to call for a People vs. AT&T overturn of the decision right here and now. See, a study emerged recently showing just how much data the average smartphone user consumes. It's between 3.2 and 3.9 GB per month. Now before we get into all the app dev data charge nonsense, there are a couple things that need to be clear.
 
French Birchbox Competitor JolieBox Acquires Spain's Glamourum Top
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAJolieBox, which is basically a French version of Birchbox, has just acquired the Spanish version of Birchbox, a service known as Glamourum. The acquisition comes a few months following the company's Series A with Alven Capital, and the acquisition of its U.K. competitor Boudoir Privé. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was for a mix of cash and stock, the company says.
 
Facebook Mobile Operator Billing Opens App Economy To The Credit Card-less Top
Facebook Mobile Operator BillingThe mobile web, not the smartphone or traditional web, is Facebook's most popular interface. Now those hundreds of millions of users, including prepaid mobile customers in emerging markets who lack credit cards, will be able to make in-app purchases and earn Facebook money thanks to its announcement of mobile operator billing for Credits virtual currency purchases. This is a big step towards Facebook's monetization of mobile despite smartphone platform domination by Apple and Google. For people without credit cards where Facebook Credits gift cards aren't available, operator billing won't just be a convenience, it may be the only way for them to participate in the Facebook mobile app economy.
 
Quietly Brilliant, But HTC Sure Made Some Noise At MWC Top
htc-logoWow. We expected a lot of news out of Mobile World Congress but who knew HTC would have so. freaking. much. I was having trouble keeping track of it myself, so for the good of the both of us, I thought it might be fitting to bundle all this news up into something a tad more easily digestible. And off we go...
 
Social Email Contact Manager Xobni Raises $10 Million From 'Commercial' Partner Top
xobniSocial email startup Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, has raised $10 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing. We confirmed the new round with the company. This brings the startup's total funding to $42 million. Xobni says that it signed a commercial agreement, and as part of that agreement, the partnering company invested money in Xobni. We've been told that the agreement will eventually be disclosed as the company rolls out products.
 

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