Edmodo, the collaborative learning network for teachers and students, is announcing today it has closed a $25 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by new investor New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), and included participation from Edmodo’s existing investors Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Learn Capital. To date, Edmodo has raised $47.5 million.
With the new round, NEA General Partner Tony Florence will be joining the company’s board. → Read More
When you write about different news apps and aggregators, the pitches can start to run together — “We do real personalization, we find content beyond the articles in your social feed, etc. etc.” Now, many of those claims may be true, but often I’m left wondering if all the touted back-end technology really leads to a noticeable improvement in user experience.
Well, startup Trapit is launching a new iPad app today, and judging from my whirlwind demo earlier this week, it offers a lot more than just a tweak of what you already find in other apps. → Read More
There’s no shortage of ‘social/mobile/location-based’ video sharing apps out there, which will let you take a video and maybe slap a filter on it and share what you’re doing with people nearby and show off how friggin cool you are. Think Socialcam/Viddy/Klip/etc. But how social is that, really?
Well how about this: What if you could actually make videos that were TRULY social, that combined elements from videos that you’ve shot, as well as those from your friends and other people nearby? What if you could instantly mash up, remix, and share those videos with people on other social networks? That’s the kind of experience that the makers of the Vyclone iPhone app have created. → Read More
During a December 2010 fireside chat, TechCrunch founder (and then-editor) Michael Arrington asked Marissa Mayer what she would do if she hypothetically ran Yahoo.
As you all know, Mayer was VP at Google at the time, but left on Monday to become the CEO of Yahoo. The oddly prophetic interview is even more interesting to watch now that Mayer has taken the Yahoo position.
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Hootsuite, the popular social media management interface, can now offer Google+ Pages access to all of Hootsuite’s nearly 5 million users. Since November, when Google allowed Hootsuite to offer Pages on its site, Hootsuite has been limited to only 200 pages. Google lifted that cap today.
However, it still cannot offer Google+ Profile support due to Google restrictions. → Read More
They don’t always get a lot of credit for their work, but it’s not easy to be the one in charge of communications for a large organization (or really any size for that matter). Depending on the complexity, age and structure within a company, developing communications strategies and maintaining consistency of brand and message across a variety of products and departments — while reporting directly to the Big Kahuna — can be anything but an enviable job. And it seems this may be especially true at Twitter.
Twitter’s Director of Communications, Matt Graves, announced via tweet this afternoon that he will be stepping down from his post and taking some time off. Graves has been the company’s comms director for over two years, joining the company from iMeem, where he was formerly VP of Marketing Communications. Prior to iMeem, he spent 6.5 years as PR Director of RealNetworks. → Read More
Apologies in advance to everyone I’m going to offend with this post, men and women included. If I appear to be moronic, self-centered, or sexist… it’s only because I am (I’m a guy). Still I believe my heart is in the right place, and unlike my head, hopefully it’s not in my pants. But whether you agree with me or not, I’d like to get past “talking” about gender issues and start taking action… action as in get off your butt and write a check for some startup who could really use the money.
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Design-oriented flash sales site Fab has raised $105 million in new funding, the company announced today. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and was subsequently confirmed by Fab CEO Jason Goldberg in a detailed blog post.
You can’t say we didn’t warn you: TechCrunch editor extraordinaire Alexia Tsotsis reported just over a month ago that Fab was raising some $100 million in new funds at a $700 million pre-money valuation. → Read More
It was May 2010 and all I wanted was an answer to my question, “What is Yahoo?” Then Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz wasn’t able to answer that question. But the conversation was…lively anyway.
TechCrunch wants to try this again, and newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and I have both agreed. I’ll interview her at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, coming up in just a few weeks. → Read More
This isn’t quite on the same level as Google’s Project Glass experiment, but Google today launched a set of five physical installations housed in London’s Science Museum. These installations, which users anywhere can control remotely, are meant to “inspire people around the world by showcasing the making that the Internet makes possible.” While Google doesn’t mention this explicitly in its post, chances are that the launch of this exhibition was timed to coincide with the Olympics in London. → Read More
And now, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming of mobile and social startups to bring you an urgent and breaking news announcement: a bass fishing startup.
Mystery Tackle Box, which launched last week, is an online subscription service that sends customers 3-5 unique lures per month. Customers can sign up for month-to-month for $15 per, or commit to as long as a full year at a lowered $13.75 per month. With around 200 subscriptions, the company has generated $3,000 in revenue in their first week with little to no marketing.
Why is it important? → Read More
TechCrunch is by no means a car blog, so test drives aren’t normally in our wheelhouse. But when it comes to Tesla Motors, the electric car company led by PayPal founder Elon Musk, we make an exception. Tesla is doing some groundbreaking things from a technology perspective, on both the “hardware” and “software” sides — in a lot of ways, its cars are just really big, really expensive consumer electronic gadgets.
So it was cool to have the opportunity to head down to Tesla’s Silicon Valley headquarters and take the new Model S sedan for a spin → Read More
In the business world, where male CEOs outrank females in both numbers and pay, the occurrence of a pregnant Fortune 500 CEO isn’t just a novelty, it’s a first. Unfortunately, the announcement of Mayer’s personal decision on her maternity leave (she’s taking just “a few weeks”) has also ended up becoming an inadvertent and sad statement about what it means to be female, successful and powerful in America today. → Read More
NewMe Accelerator, the startup incubator program aimed at under-represented minorities in the tech industry (namely African Americans, Latinos, and women), announced today that it has chosen seven startups to be part of its Summer/Fall 2012 cycle.
One thing that really sets NewMe apart is that it is a residential program, so the founders all move into one house together where they all “eat, sleep, and breathe” the startup building experience. → Read More
So it’s Day Two for new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and whew boy she’s got a lot of stuff to work through. We’ll give her some time to get her feet wet. In the meantime, Yahoo is still doing its Yahoo thing, which includes trying to decide whether its a technology or a media company.* The latest evidence that Yahoo is all about media, at least for now? An ambitious push to get people psyched up about the Olympics using its services.
Yahoo’s pushing its “Beyond Gold” coverage from the 2012 Olympics Games, with content available online and on various other apps and screens. The whole thing starts with Yahoo Sports, which will have a subsection called Yahoo Hub. That site will be available on PCs, mobile, and tablet browsers, and will feature breaking news, photos, highlights, reporting and analysis from the Games. → Read More
Smack-dab in the middle of earnings season, Microsoft has officially announced that the long-awaited Windows 8 operating system will be available to upgraders and new PC buyers alike come October 26, 2012. For those of you keeping count, that’s about 14 weeks from now.
Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that Windows 8 would be available in “late October” which was soon enough to be excited and vague enough to be an understandably unreliable timeline. But Microsoft has set a date, and that date is October 26. → Read More
eBay has just released its second quarter 2012 earnings report, in which the eCommerce giant outpaced expectations for yet another quarter. Revenue increased 23% to $3.4 billion, compared to the same period of 2011. Non-GAAP earnings came in at $0.56 per diluted share. Analysts expected earnings of $0.55 per share on revenue of $3.36 billion. Net income came in at $692 million for the quarter.
For reference, we can compare this to Q2 2011, when (excluding one-time items) eBay earned 48 cents per share with revenue posted at $2.76 billion — both of which were, at the time, above estimates. Now, as it was then, eBay continues to operate as one of the largest eCommerce companies in the world, so many look to the health of its principal businesses as an indicator of how eCommerce is faring overall. And although the economic pains over the last few years have wreaked havoc on traditional retailers and brick and mortars, eBay and online commerce seem to be weathering the storm. → Read More
IBM has just released its second quarter 2012 financials with second quarter earnings per share (EPS) of $3.51 beating market estimate with revenue of $25.7 billion, off $500 million from what analysts had expected.
Developing… → Read More
For decades, publishing consisted of two distinct landmasses separated by a deep, impassible chasm. On one side you had kids from Yale who became Associate Editors at the big six – the big houses – and then brought in their friends to write alternately blissful and horrible prose. Then, on the other side, you had everyone else. With the rise of the e-book market, however, a land bridge is growing between the two, built on copies of self-published techno-thrillers and religious self-help titles – and some great books are making it across. → Read More
“We’re not trying to be the best way to buy last minute tickets. We’re trying to be the best way to buy tickets”, says Donnie Dinch, founder of WillCall. That’s why today’s it’s launching a web version of its event ticket purchasing mobile app, plus adding more shows and cities with the $850,000 it just raised as part of a seed round from SV Angel, 500 Startups, RRE Ventures, RSE Ventures and several angels.
Previously, WillCall would send San Franciscans a push notification about discounted tickets or VIP packages a few hours before a cool concert started. But now the 500 Startups company will give you a head up on shows and which friends are attending up to 48 hours ahead of time. And it plans to have events listed every night so you’re never bored at home again. → Read More
