The latest from TechCrunch
- SocialShield Acquired By German Security Company Avira
- Don't Dread Tomorrow's Mandatory Switch To Timeline, Study Shows It's Good For 95% Of Facebook Pages
- Unroll.me Combines Your Favorite Email Subscriptions Into One, Lets You Kill The Rest
- Famigo Raises $1M For Its Kid-Friendly App Directory And Parental Control Software
- Mobile Taxi Network Hailo Raises $17M From Accel And Atomico To Take On Uber In The U.S.
- Personalized News App Zite Comes To Android
- FirstMark Capital Leads $7.5M Round In Social Shopping Startup Sneakpeeq
- ShoeDazzle, Now 10M Members Strong, Expands To Offer Women's Clothing
- How Do You Go Global Against Clones And Competitors?
- Dell Gives Up On Selling Smartphones In The U.S. (For Now, Anyway)
- Nielsen: As U.S. Nears Smartphone Majority, It's A Two-Horse Race Between Android and Apple's iOS
- Millennial Media Shares Pop 100 Percent In Early Trading; Valued At Nearly $2 Billion
- Bleacher Report Doubles Down On Personalized Content, Brings Team Stream To The Web
- Amazon And The NIH Team Up To Put Human Genome In The Cloud
- Wanna Access Your Windows Desktop Anywhere Before Windows 8? WorldDesk Says It Has The Answer
- TechCrunch Beirut Meetup This Friday #TCBeirut
- Former Zong CEO And Founder And Mobile VP David Marcus Named President Of eBay's PayPal
- Location-Based Shopping App Shopkick Adds Former Disney And Nike Exec To Board
- Snapguide Makes It Super Easy To Make And Share How-To Guides On iOS
- Google Ventures-Backed Kibits Lets You Share With Real-World Micro-Networks, Raises $1M
| SocialShield Acquired By German Security Company Avira | Top |
 Avira, a security company headquartered in Germany, just announced that it has acquired social monitoring startup SocialShield and will be adding the service to its lineup of free security products. "Avira is broadening our security focus from safe-guarding computers to now protecting the people who use them, and that requires us to look beyond viruses and worms and Trojans," Avira Products and Markets COO Sascha Beyer says in the press release. "The acquisition of SocialShield not only brings child safety technology into Avira's portfolio, but it also enhances our knowledge of social networking security and our awareness of the risks within the 'cloud.'" | |
| Don't Dread Tomorrow's Mandatory Switch To Timeline, Study Shows It's Good For 95% Of Facebook Pages | Top |
 On March 1st Facebook let the world feast its eyes on Timeline for Pages, and tomorrow after a month of voluntary migration it will force all Pages to switch to the redesign. But don't worry, 95% of Pages who've switched have seen more Likes of their posts and people talking about them, and it doesn't significantly impact the rate of new Page Likes according to a study that social marketing platform Wildfire gave TechCrunch an early look at. Only megabrands with over 10 million Likes have seen reduced engagement, but this was in part due to a lull following press exposure during the Timeline launch. There's more good news for smaller Pages. A study shared with us by enterprise marketing platform Hearsay Social shows local business Pages with fewer fans get 5x more exposure in the news feed, and 8x more of the fans reached will engage with a post. That means big brands with lots of local branches can get 40x the engagement by having a Page for each store. | |
| Unroll.me Combines Your Favorite Email Subscriptions Into One, Lets You Kill The Rest | Top |
 Suffering from inbox overload? Of course you are - everyone is. And now thanks to Google's Account Activity report, we can see exactly how much email we get. It's scary. From my personal email address, I received 9,000+ emails last month. (Haven't checked out my TechCrunch address, though...) It's reasons like this that draw me to email-improving startups, whether mobile apps, CRM tools, filtering products, etc. Email needs to get better. One such startup, Unroll.me (still in private beta), previously allowed you to unsubscribe from mailing lists from an online dashboard. But recently, it launched a tool that aggregates all your subscriptions into one daily "roll-up" email that contains everything you still want to read - for example, all those Groupons, your social media updates, newsletters, company news blasts, and more. And it's sent on a schedule you configure. | |
| Famigo Raises $1M For Its Kid-Friendly App Directory And Parental Control Software | Top |
 Famigo, the Austin-based startup building a directory of family-oriented and kid-friendly mobile apps, announced today that it has raised $1 million in funding led by Silverton Partners. Also participating in the round were Zilker Ventures, Liahona Ventures, and CapitalFactory. The company, which currently offers an online directory of apps as well as parental control software for Android, says it will use the new funding to help continue development of its platform and expand access worldwide. | |
| Mobile Taxi Network Hailo Raises $17M From Accel And Atomico To Take On Uber In The U.S. | Top |
 Hailo, a European mobile taxi network, is announcing a $17 million round of Series A financing led by Accel Partners. The company previously raised $3 million in seed funding from Wellington Partners and Atomico, who both participated in this round as well. Hailo, which has been operating in London since last year, is a mobile network that matches passengers and licensed taxi drivers (a differentiation from Uber, which uses private black cars). Here's how it works (check out the video below as well). The Hailo Driver Network can be accessed via iPhone or Android apps is designed to be a taxi driver's companion and offers social features, advanced, private stats, sharing of traffic and demand events relevant to drivers. These apps also allow drivers to accept credit cards as well, and includes a tipping functionality. | |
| Personalized News App Zite Comes To Android | Top |
 Zite, the newsreading startup acquired last year by CNN, is launching its Android app today. Co-founder Mike Klaas demonstrated the app for me earlier this week. The interface and features should be pretty familiar to anyone using the previous versions. You enter your Facebook or Twitter information, then Zite brings up a stream of stories that are likely to interest you. You can improve the app's understanding of your tastes by hitting the thumbs up or down button for each article. And you can import your account if you've already set one up on a different device. (Klaas says there's a fair amount of overlap between iPhone and iPad users, but he's not sure whether that'll be the same with Android — "The question is, what tablet do Android users use?") | |
| FirstMark Capital Leads $7.5M Round In Social Shopping Startup Sneakpeeq | Top |
 Sneakpeeq, a social shopping startup that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, has raised $7.5 Million in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Metamorphic Ventures. This brings the company's total funding to over $10 million. The startup aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store with a social twist. Similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, Sneakpeeq doesn't tell you the price instantly when you visit a product's landing page. You click a "Peeq" button to find the price. The site features daily boutiques that offer discounts on clothes, shoes, home accessories and more from 1000-plus brands, from well-known names like Kate Spade and Puma to smaller designers and purveyors. | |
| ShoeDazzle, Now 10M Members Strong, Expands To Offer Women's Clothing | Top |
 ShoeDazzle, the subscription service that sends out its own selection of women's shoe designs curated each month by celebrities and Hollywood stylists, has expanded its offerings to include women's clothing and lingerie. ShoeDazzle CEO Bill Strauss said in an interview (embedded above) that the expansion was inspired by the company's subscribers, who have been asking for clothing to match ShoeDazzle's shoes for months. ShoeDazzle, based in Santa Monica, Calif., was founded in 2009 and counts reality star Kim Kardashian as a co-founder and its "chief fashion stylist." | |
| How Do You Go Global Against Clones And Competitors? | Top |
 GoGlobal is Morten Lund's new venture. Earlier this month, Lund pitched GoGlobal live on stage at The London Web Summit. Despite a few people thinking it was a ruse, GoGlobal aims to be a platform to grow globally for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. Lund says wants to take three to four companies in to 40+ countries every quarter. Here is the problem I think he is looking to solve. As soon as an Internet startup shows signs of success, somewhere in the universe its business model is replicated with razor-sharp execution tactics. If the startup is under the radar, still, selling its products and services internationally is difficult without prior knowledge and business network. | |
| Dell Gives Up On Selling Smartphones In The U.S. (For Now, Anyway) | Top |
 I'd wager that only a few of you will remember that Dell sold their own smartphones, and still fewer of you have ever actually owned one. It should come as no surprise then that Dell, who entered the smartphone market less than two years ago, has announced that they have ceased sales of their last remaining smartphone lines: the Android-powered Venue and the Venue Pro Windows Phone. With those product lines getting the axe, Dell has (for now) put an end to their struggling smartphone business here in the States. | |
| Nielsen: As U.S. Nears Smartphone Majority, It's A Two-Horse Race Between Android and Apple's iOS | Top |
 New numbers out from Nielsen today point to just how close the U.S. is to having more smartphone than feature phone users: analysts say 49.7 percent of cell phone users currently own a smartphone, a big leap on the 36 percent who owned smartphones only a year ago. What's increasingly clear in that growth is that, at least in the U.S., no other platform is proving to be a contender against Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Currently, Android-based smartphones account for 48 percent of all smartphones owned in the U.S., while Apple's different versions of the iPhone account for 32 percent. Both of those shares have grown: in September 2011, Nielsen said that Android's share was 40 percent and Apple's 28 percent. | |
| Millennial Media Shares Pop 100 Percent In Early Trading; Valued At Nearly $2 Billion | Top |
 Mobile ad network Millennial Media just debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "MM," and saw shares pop 97 percent in the first trade of $25. The company initially priced its IPO at $13 per share last night, after increasing the range on Tuesday. At $25 per share, Millennial's valuation jumps to nearly $2 billion. Trading reached as high as $27.90 in early trading. Millennial which filed its original S-1 in early January, raised over $130 million in the offering, which is up from $75 million originally stated in earlier filings. | |
| Bleacher Report Doubles Down On Personalized Content, Brings Team Stream To The Web | Top |
 It's been fun to watch Bleacher Report grow from some random publishing site for amateur sports writers to a full-blown digital sports network backed by $40+ million in venture capital. Today, with 25 million unique visitors per month, Bleacher Report has become the fourth largest sports media property on the Web. Over the last year or so, the popular sports network has been doubling down on its team-specific coverage, convinced that this has become the preeminent way that fans follow sports. Since January, the startup's so-called Team Stream apps have lived on iPhone, Android, and the iPad, offering fans personalized dashboards with headlines, top stories, and tweets from their favorite teams. And today, Bleacher Report is bringing Team Stream to its home page. | |
| Amazon And The NIH Team Up To Put Human Genome In The Cloud | Top |
 Amazon and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that the complete 1000 Genomes Project is being made available on Amazon Web Services as a public data set. The announcement, made at the White House Big Data Summit, will make the largest collection of human genetics available to anyone free of charge. | |
| Wanna Access Your Windows Desktop Anywhere Before Windows 8? WorldDesk Says It Has The Answer | Top |
 With Windows 8, Microsoft is introducing more portable, cloud compatibility in the form of Windows To Go, but what about those seeking a solution today that works on devices running Windows 7? WorldDesk claims to have an answer. The Northern Irish-founded, now Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has launched a new virtualization platform that it says allows all Windows 7 users to carry their desktops around on any device, including some of the smallest portable devices of all, like a USB drive, a smartphone and an iPod. Written as a 64-bit platform, WorldDesk can also work via the cloud through a Dropbox integration it first announced in February at the release of a 32-bit version of the platform. | |
| TechCrunch Beirut Meetup This Friday #TCBeirut | Top |
 So ArabNet in Beirut is rocking, but we also wanted to make sure there was an opportunity for other startups in town to come say hi to TechCrunch while we're here, so we are throwing together a TechCrunch Beirut Meetup! The Meetup is organised in conjunction with entrepreneur platform Wamda, co-working space AltCity,and the Seeqnce tech incubator. Here are the details: | |
| Former Zong CEO And Founder And Mobile VP David Marcus Named President Of eBay's PayPal | Top |
 After former president Scott Thompson departed for the CEO role at Yahoo, PayPal has named David Marcus, the former CEO and founder of mobile payments startup Zong and PayPal Mobile VP, as President (PayPal acquired Zong last year for $240 million). Ebay CEO and acting PayPal president John Donahoe posted the news this morning in a blog post. From PayPal's blog post: [Marcus is] going to lead PayPal with that "founder's perspective," to bring start-up energy to PayPal's unmatched global reach and digital payment capabilities. With David at the helm, we will have an even deeper commitment at PayPal, and across eBay Inc., to be a leading technology-driven and customer-focused product innovation company. We'll continue to focus on accelerating product innovation, driving consumer engagement and creating a world where paying anytime, anywhere and any way is synonymous with PayPal. | |
| Location-Based Shopping App Shopkick Adds Former Disney And Nike Exec To Board | Top |
 Geo-coupon system and shopping app Shopkick is adding a well-known retail and branding exec to its board today—Andy Mooney, the former Chairman of Disney Consumer Products and CMO of Nike. He joins Greylock's Reid Hoffman and Kleiner's Matt Murphy on the company's board of directors. For background, Shopkick provides an in-store, location-based mobile shopping platform, Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called "kicks" to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions. | |
| Snapguide Makes It Super Easy To Make And Share How-To Guides On iOS | Top |
 Snapguide, which just launched on iOS, is rethinking the stodgy "How To" guide for a mobile generation. Thus far the consumption and creation of "How-To" guides on the web hasn't been particularly groundbreaking, with SEO-optimized, paid contributor-written fare like eHow.com dominating the market. In contrast Snapguide was built to be super simple, fast and take advantage of your phone: Think of services like WikiHow as Facebook and Snapguide as Path. "eHow was a pioneer in publishing content online," says co-founder Daniel Raffel, "but it is a lot of 'evergreen' [and impersonal] content. We want to be a place where people share what they're passionate about … " he explains, saying that he could even envision a partnership with eHow. | |
| Google Ventures-Backed Kibits Lets You Share With Real-World Micro-Networks, Raises $1M | Top |
 Does the world need another mobile social app? A new startup called Kibits thinks it does, and its investors (including Google Ventures and Charles River Ventures) seem to agree. The company's iPhone (and iPod Touch) app is launching today. At first glance, it may look like another variant on group chat, but co-founder and CEO Matt Cutler says that even though he's "an active user of multiple group messaging apps," Kibits is doing something different. For one thing, it's designed to "complement real-world interactions." That means you can form groups based on things like Facebook friendships, calendar appointments, and most interestingly, physical proximity. | |
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