The latest from TechCrunch
- Study: U.S. Consumer Spending On Virtual Goods Grew To $2.3 Billion In 2011
- Researchers Propose "Computational Sprinting" To Speed Up Chips By 1000% – But Only For A Second
- New Samsung Sensor Captures Both Light And Depth Data
- Mobile Payment Solution LevelUp Now Seeing $1M Per Month In Transactions; Launches API
- 5 Startups to Watch from Seedcamp's 2012 US Demo Day [TCTV]
- Ben Parr's "Intelligent Information" Startup Is Called The Peep Project (For Now)
- DigiMo Cracks The Code: Mobile Payments With No Point Of Sale Changes
- Analytics Startup Mixpanel Is Tracking 4 Billion Actions Each Month — And It's Cash-Flow Positive
- Fly Or Die: Windows 8
- Business Data Reporting In 5-10 Minutes, Not Days. Facebook Rolls Out Real-Time Insights
- It's A Mighty Hard Road To App Store Success
- Foursquare Is Doing Big Things, So Existing Investor Spark Capital Buys $50M Of Employee Stock
- Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 16% Of Your Friends
- Tasted Menu Takes On Foodspotting With New iPhone App
- Enterprise Social Networking Platform Yammer Raises $85M From DFJ Growth, Khosla, And Others
- Keen On… Cary Sherman: How Should The Democratic Process Function In The Digital Age? [TCTV]
- Self-Improvement Marketplace Betterfly Raises $1.5M, Gets A New CEO
- Slowly But Surely Software Will Eat Mobile World Congress Too
- DreamIt Ventures Launches A New Minority-Focused Accelerator, DreamIt Access
- CoderDojo Partners with GitHub to Create a New Generation of Hackers
| Study: U.S. Consumer Spending On Virtual Goods Grew To $2.3 Billion In 2011 | Top |
 It's not exactly a secret that gaming has found new life on the web, social and mobile platforms. Of course, with it, especially the rise in free-to-play gaming, developers need to find ways to monetize their apps, or their browser-based games. Beyond mobile or banner advertising, there is the option of in-app or in-game purchases -- the old in-game freemium model. Give your game away for free, sell new levels, armor, weapons, life for a buck or two. Lots of games have incorporated virtual marketplaces to hawk virtual goods of all kinds. | |
| Researchers Propose "Computational Sprinting" To Speed Up Chips By 1000% – But Only For A Second | Top |
 A research team with members from University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania has been investigating the feasibility of what they call "computational sprinting," a technique by which existing chips could be made to operate at hugely increased speeds for short periods of time. They have concluded that "it is indeed possible to engineer such a system." Not the best of news to readers who were hoping for these sprinting chips to hit the market next year, but the news shouldn't be set aside just because at the moment the implementation is theoretical. It could change the way you use your devices. | |
| New Samsung Sensor Captures Both Light And Depth Data | Top |
 Samsung, or rather Samsung's Advanced Institute of Technology, has created what they claim is the first CMOS sensor that can collect both visible light data (which you'd use for a normal digital image) and depth data (like a Kinect). It's accomplished by mixing in depth-sensing pixels with the RGB photosites normally found on such sensors. It was presented at ISSCC 2012 and reported by Tech-On. The technology could be extremely influential: a small sensor that is able, with one lens, to determine the distance and size of objects it sees — the applications are extremely diverse. It could power autofocus, track gestures or individuals, or help determine the device's position. | |
| Mobile Payment Solution LevelUp Now Seeing $1M Per Month In Transactions; Launches API | Top |
 With increasing smartphone adoption and with users in turn becoming more and more comfortable using their mobile devices to do things traditionally reserved for the Web or desktops, every industry is going mobile. But, when you consider the effect mobile technology has still yet to make on transactions -- ye olde exchange of money/goods -- there is a huge opportunity for disruption. Carriers, OEMs, startups -- everyone knows this. Three, five years from now, mobile payment solutions has the potential to be a massive business. Yet, as things stand right now, carriers and mobile OSes are still finding it hard to come to terms, with users suffering as a result. | |
| 5 Startups to Watch from Seedcamp's 2012 US Demo Day [TCTV] | Top |
 Seedcamp, the European seed funding network and startup accelerator, came through San Francisco this week as part of its annual multi-city trip to the US. All 18 companies were solid -- you can find the full list here -- but I pulled aside five of the most compelling startups for one-on-one interviews to get a bit more insight on what they do. | |
| Ben Parr's "Intelligent Information" Startup Is Called The Peep Project (For Now) | Top |
 Former Mashable editor-at-large Ben Parr is ready to share a few details about his new startup. He's raising a small seed round, so he created a posting on AngelList, and he also talked (vaguely) with me about what he's been up to. The company is listed as The Peep Project, but it sounds like that's just a temporary stealth name. The listing describes the product as "your intelligent assistant." Now that's probably a description you've heard before, so the posting also says, "We are not building Siri." | |
| DigiMo Cracks The Code: Mobile Payments With No Point Of Sale Changes | Top |
 DigiMo, is a mobile payments platform that actually makes sense to me. When I sat down with CEO Yossi Yarkoni and VP of Marketing Nir Shimony at the Mobile World Congress to hear about their concept, which is piloting in Israel right now, the first thing I thought was "wow, why didn't somebody think of this before". It's a pretty good idea and solves many of the problems that plague mobile, face-to-face payments. It actually works with existing infrastructure and requires no Point Of Sale hardware changes by merchants. Really. No NFC terminals to buy. No new card readers needed. This is a major sticking point for merchant adoption of new mobile payments platforms. | |
| Analytics Startup Mixpanel Is Tracking 4 Billion Actions Each Month — And It's Cash-Flow Positive | Top |
 Mixpanel, the analytics startup backed by Sequoia Capital, hasn't yet succeeded in its goal of unseating established analytics services like Omniture — but momentum is building. Let's start with the biggest number that co-founder Suhail Doshi shared with me this week. He says the company is now tracking 4 billion actions every month. Back in July 2010, that number was "only" 1 billion. He also says there are more than 2,500 organizations who are sending Mixpanel data every month (I guess that's Mixpanel equivalent of an "active user"). And that customer base was built through word-of-mouth because, Doshi says, "We basically do almost no marketing" the startup's total monthly marketing spend is between $3,000 and $5,000. | |
| Fly Or Die: Windows 8 | Top |
| If you were only allowed to read one piece of tech news today, I'd bet you'd read up on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The beta became available today, though we were lucky enough to go hands-on with the OS for the past week or so, and people can't stop talking about it. Windows 8 is a merging of old with new. A Metro UI offers up live tiles much like Windows Phone, but there are still some apps that require the old-school XP interface, sending you directly into the past when you least expect it. | |
| Business Data Reporting In 5-10 Minutes, Not Days. Facebook Rolls Out Real-Time Insights | Top |
 Facebook has just confirmed my scoop from last week, announcing its business performance metrics tool Page Insights will start reporting data with a latency of 5-10 minutes, not two or more days. It will open new tactics for marketers such as amplifying a well-performing post's reach with ads, or deleting one receiving negative feedback before it can trigger Unlikes or a PR crisis. Insights Product Manager David Baser tells me real-time Insights will roll out globally over the next two weeks, and I think the way it ties to Sponsored Stories ads could boost Facebook's revenues. Impressions, clicks, negative feedback instantly. Data wizards rejoice! | |
| It's A Mighty Hard Road To App Store Success | Top |
 A bit of news that squeaked out during the Win8 festivities was the launch of the Microsoft app store. In the version of the software I was using, the app has always been there but it wasn't available until today. To be clear, the app store here is still in its absolute infancy and is, at best, a hall of demos for various app providers. The real test of Windows 8 will be the adoption of the OS's new design paradigms. While everyone will eventually have to fix their apps to reflect Win8's major architecture changes, there is going to be a lot of hand-holding until the Win9 (potentially) destroys all vestigial Windows cruft. For example, Windows 8 still uses a legacy version of the registry inside Windows 8, a necessary evil required by many applications. Many apps won't be able to update to Win8 UI standards and many more apps won't trickle over to the Microsoft app store. It's this disconnect that will challenge Windows 8 in the first few years of life. | |
| Foursquare Is Doing Big Things, So Existing Investor Spark Capital Buys $50M Of Employee Stock | Top |
 Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley spent this afternoon in Barcelona, explaining his location company's potential to Mobile World Conference attendees. Someone else didn't need to hear the presentation, though. Existing investor Spark Capital is buying $50 million worth of its stock, according to sources, in a deal to provide at least some employees with liquidity. The result is a valuation north of of the already-impressive $600 million from its last round, I've heard. This is even though the company continues to focus on product development instead of trying to maximize revenue. | |
| Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 16% Of Your Friends | Top |
 You're not unpopular, it's just the nature of the news feed. Amongst all the business-related news at FMC, Facebook revealed that the average news feed story from a user profile reaches just 16% of their friends. Your actively shared links, photos, and status updates probably reach much higher than 16% of your friends, while more inane auto-generated posts about new friendships, wall posts, and articles you read may only be seen by your closest buddies. Overall, this is actually a good thing, because the reduced visibility of irrelevant content makes room for what you want to see. But don't be alarmed if your all your friends don't like that awesome concert photo, they may just be offline. | |
| Tasted Menu Takes On Foodspotting With New iPhone App | Top |
 The team behind startup Tasted Menu thinks it has the technology to help you find the exact dish you're looking for. The company is launching its iPhone app today (its website was already live), and it's also expanding from its hometown of Boston into Austin — just in time for South by Southwest. Of course, there's already a popular iPhone app for food recommendations — Foodspotting, which said in January that it has nearly 2 million app downloads. However, Tasted Menu CEO Alex Rosenfeld argues that Foodspotting and similar apps "effectively amount to check-in apps for food," whereas Tasted Menu helps the vast majority of people who aren't interested in that, but "would love a product that helps them make better ordering decisions and discover new dishes and restaurants." | |
| Enterprise Social Networking Platform Yammer Raises $85M From DFJ Growth, Khosla, And Others | Top |
 Enterprise social network and communications platform Yammer has finally closed that big round we and PandoDaily heard about earlier this year. The company has raised $85 million in new funding, bringing the total investment in Yammer to a whopping $142 million. DFJ growth and Social+Capital Partnership (who led Yammer's last round) led this round. Other investors joining the round include Meritech, Khosla Ventures, Capricorn (the investment arm of Jeff Skoll), as well as existing investor Charles River Ventures, Founders Fund, USVP, Emergence Capital Partners. Founder and CEO David Sacks tells us that the company had over $30 million of insider investment in the round. We've heard the company's valuation for the round was around $500-$600 million (Yammer wouldn't comment on this) Sacks says a number of angel investors also participated in the massive round including Sacks' old PayPal colleague Max Levchin, as well as CrunchFund, Bill Lee, Ronnie Lott, and a few others. Randy Glein from DFJ Growth will take a board observer seat. | |
| Keen On… Cary Sherman: How Should The Democratic Process Function In The Digital Age? [TCTV] | Top |
 Earlier this month, Cary Sherman, the RIAA's CEO, wrote a controversial op-ed in which he raised questions about the impact of Google and Wikipedia on America's "democratic process". So when I Skyped with Sherman earlier this week, I leveraged social media's democratic process to ask the RIAA CEO some direct questions from my Twitter community about piracy, the music industry and American democracy itself. | |
| Self-Improvement Marketplace Betterfly Raises $1.5M, Gets A New CEO | Top |
 Looks like it's self-improvement time for Betterfly, a startup that, as the name suggests, allows users to "better themselves" by signing up for classes on everything from belly dancing to web design. The company just announced that it has raised a $1.5 million Series A from previous investor Lightbank, the Chicago firm created by Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. Betterfly is also naming Todd Sullivan as the company's new CEO — founder and former CEO Joshua Schwadron will remain as chairman of the board, and the startup says he will still be "active in day to day operations." | |
| Slowly But Surely Software Will Eat Mobile World Congress Too | Top |
 As 60,000 people flooded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, multiple bars and restaurants were suddenly hit by wave after wave of men (it's mostly men) in blue and grey suits. The suits at MWC are there to do one thing. Sell mobile base stations to each other, get carrier partnerships for their new Latin American MVNO (or similar), and generally be those mobile corporate drones that flood the Fira conference centre annually. This year some companies have gone all out with their trade stands - Alcatel's looks like a cross between MacDonalds and a scene from Logans Run. The irony that socialist troops paraded on the same ground during the 1930s is lost on most. But amid all this razzmatazz and hype about the future of mobile, one can't help wondering: Has Mobile World Congress outlived its usefulness? The signs are there. Carriers are losing their position as the centre of gravity in mobile. It used to be the case the that big stories were about Verizon/AT&T/Vodafone/Whichever signing some big deal. That's no longer the case. Today it's all about software and handset operating systems like Windows Phone and Android (Apple never exhibits, but now and again you can spot their executives wandering around). These days the conversation around mobile is all about apps and platforms. Angry Birds launching on a handset or tablet is the news, not some carrier deal. | |
| DreamIt Ventures Launches A New Minority-Focused Accelerator, DreamIt Access | Top |
 DreamIt Ventures, the startup incubator with programs in place in New York, Philadelphia, and, most recently, Israel, is announcing a year-long minority accelerator program called DreamIt Access. The program, launched with Comcast Ventures as its first investor, plans to launch 15 minority-led startups over the course of the next 12 months, starting with five companies participating in DreamIt NYC during summer 2012. | |
| CoderDojo Partners with GitHub to Create a New Generation of Hackers | Top |
 On Saturday afternoon a group of 30 pint size wannabe hackers gathered at the GitHub offices in San Francisco for the first CoderDojo in the United States. Irish teen sensation, James Whelton had traveled to San Francisco to take his highly successful social hacking education platform to the United States. CoderDojo began in Whelton's final year of high school when he convinced the administration to lend him a room to begin a computer club after school. What Wheton thought would be a handful of geeky friends getting together to share their coding skills surprisingly brought 40 participants to that first session in Cork, Ireland. Thus began a whirlwind of then 18 year old Whelton's next 9 months. CoderDojo quickly gained popularity in Cork and was drawing folks from across the country to meet with Whelton's group. With the help of SOSventure's Bill Liao, CoderDojo quickly expanded to Dublin and Whelton found himself traveling around the country and surrounding isles starting up new dojo groups. The philosophy behind CoderDojo is one of... | |
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