It’s a great time to be a programmer right now, for many reasons — one of which is the wide variety of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that are available that allow developers to build applications with sophisticated features more quickly and easily than ever.
Codecademy, the startup that aims to teach people everywhere how to code, wants to help make those APIs even more… → Read More
In today’s fourth quarter earnings report, Demand Media (which operates sites including eHow.com and Livestrong.com, and which has been criticized for being a “content farm”) says it’s considering a plan to split into two publicly-traded companies, one focused on content and one focused on website registration.
In the earnings press release, chairman and CEO Richard Rosenblatt says: → Read More
MTV has officially acknowledged that early reports of their hacked Twitter account was, in fact, a prank. An hour ago, MTV’s twitter account began tweeting naughty comments about musicians (screen shots below) and fooled a few media outlets into reporting the prank. A spokesman for MTV tells TechCrunch in an email “the hack was pre-planned in the spirit of corporate camaraderie with our sister… → Read More
The small business world just doesn’t get the love that it deserves. Salesforce.com and the other giants sell to big enterprise customers that need a far different set of tools than their small-business counterparts. The gap is creating an opportunity for companies like Reamaze, which takes an approach that combines CRM with customer support. → Read More
Last night, Microsoft announced that it was taking its new webmail service Outlook.com out of beta and starting to transition its huge Hotmail user base over to the new interface and platform. That transition is scheduled to last until the end of the summer, when the old Hotmail interface will be retired and the currently optional upgrade will become mandatory. During the first twelve hours since… → Read More
Vine has just opened up a few new positions for the NY-based engineering team, as tweeted by co-founder Colin Kroll.
As it would appear, there are six positions available to work alongside the three-man team currently developing for Vine. Notably, one of the positions is for an Android developer, which could mean that we’ll see the video-sharing app on Google’s platform relatively soon. → Read More
It’s not often that a 20-minute Office Hours session with TC Staffers turns into a spot on the Disrupt Battlefield stage, but for Buyou, it just so happens to be the case.
The virtual mall app, founded in May 2012, is about as straightforward as possible. You download the Buyou app from the App Store, and you’re instantly teleported to a mall, complete with all your favorite brands and… → Read More
Twitter is testing a new ad unit that gives direct marketers a way to generate leads directly from tweets.
You can see an example of the unit in this tweet promoting Twitter’s small business guide. Not only is there a small image promoting the guide, but if you’re logged in, it also shows a “Get it now” button. When you hit the button, you don’t get asked for a phone number or email address —… → Read More
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new service called OpsWorks, which manages apps at any scale. But more interesting is the disruptive influence the move will have on the fledgling platform as a service market (PaaS) and the battles between Chef and Puppet, the two competing services that help DevOps pros manage their increasingly complex infrastructures. → Read More
What many people don’t realize is that Sand Hill Road VCs are not all sitting on the sidelines as seed and angel investors have their moment in the sun. Many of these firms have been very quietly getting into the seed and angel game in their own clever way: By hiring “scouts.”
And Sequoia Capital is bringing its four-year-old stealthy scout program into the open in a big way: By raising an… → Read More
Microsoft’s Lync, the company’s enterprise communications platform, doesn’t get a lot of hype, but it’s currently being used by 90 out of the Fortune 100 companies. The Lync ecosystem now includes more than 1,000 partners, and Microsoft has sold more than 5 million subscriptions to Lync’s voice service (up from 3 million just over a year ago). This week, the company is hosting a three-day… → Read More
Apple has revealed that it was attacked by the same group that went after Facebook in a recent attempt to break that network’s security. The company says a “small number” of its Macs were affected, but there is “no evidence that any data left Apple,” according to a report by Reuters. The company will be issuing software to prevent customers from being attacked in the same manner, Apple said. → Read More
Mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) platform StackMob is expanding upon its earlier launch of a marketplace for third-party services, with the debut of a marketplace targeted towards enterprise customers. Through a series of partnerships, the marketplace allows StackMob to promote its integrations with other software and platforms-as-a-service companies, API infrastructure providers and more… → Read More
Quixey, the app search startup that signed a deal to power app search results on Ask.com this December, is today announcing another high-profile partnership, this time with U.S. mobile carrier Sprint. The operator will use Quixey’s technology in its Sprint Zone and Sprint Digital Lounge, the former its branded app and media store, and the latter a portal for finding similar content via the web… → Read More
Mobile industry analyst Benedict Evans has crunched the numbers on newly-released tablet sales figures from Asus and arrived at an approximate estimate of total Nexus 7 tablet sales for 2012, which clock in at between 4.5 and 4.8 million units per his math. Google doesn’t release sales figures for its Nexus devices, so this is likely the closest we’ll get to a solid number on the 2012 totals, and… → Read More
Vengo, the maker of mini vending machines for bars, restaurants and offices, has raised $1 million in seed funding from a number of New York-area investors and others, including David Tisch (BoxGroup), Brad Feld, The Richport Group (chaired by Marc Anthony), Joanne Wilson, Gary Vaynerchuk, the NYU Innovation Fund, FunBars, RSL Ventures (Ronald Lauder), Mark Wachen, and others. → Read More
According to a somewhat self-congratulatory update that Google posted earlier today, it’s getting significantly harder for hackers to successfully compromise its users’ accounts. Google says it has “dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.” → Read More
An official, shadowy Chinese hacker group is reportedly responsible for more than 100 high-level attacks against major corporations and governments. The group, known as Advanced Persistent Threat” (APT1) was outed today in a 60-page report by security firm Mandiant, which has been tracking the army unit for six years. The company also released a technical, step-by-step video (below) of how one… → Read More
So, after months of leaks and speculation, HTC has finally revealed the HTC One. To say it’s an important device for HTC is an understatement given the rough seas the company spent nearly all of last year navigating, but the people here seem confident that they’ve worked up a winner. Just after the event wrapped I managed to get some extended hands-on time with the One, and the thing left some… → Read More
Jolla, the Finnish startup formed by ex-Nokians with the hope of rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of Nokia’s abandoned MeeGo platform — via its Sailfish OS — has secure an outside investment from a company based in Hong Kong. The company, China Fortune, formerly known as Fortune Telecom Holdings, has taken a 6.25 per cent stake in the startup. → Read More
HTC’s floundered of late, with a less-than-impressive 2012. Much of that can be attributed to Samsung and Apple, which chomped up even more marketshare last year than they did the year before. Plus, HTC put a lot of focus on Windows Phone 8 last year with the Windows Phone 8X and 8S, which put the Taiwanese handset maker even further behind. However, HTC’s insistence on packing its… → Read More
Success can be determined by measuring the length of our index finger in comparison to our ring finger, Bronson told me about the research behind Top Dog. But that’s not the only conclusion about success that Bronson revealed. Riffing off Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Bronson explained the science of winning and losing, thereby rendering the legendary intuition of venture capitalists redundant. → Read More
Now that the number of tablet and smartphone gamers outnumber console players, there’s a race to see who will establish the big franchises and gaming companies of the mobile generation. In the early years of the iOS platform, makers of basic simulation games experimented with making their apps free, giving rise to several nine-figure-a-year businesses. But other genres like first-person… → Read More
Thunderbolt expansion docks for MacBook Pro have been slow to come to get started with offerings from Matrox and Belkin only now coming to market after lengthy delays. And they’re pricey, too, at $299 and $249 respectively. A new Kickstarter project called the MacDock argues you can do almost as much for considerably less, and without adding Thunderbolt into the mix. → Read More
It’s been a long time coming, but Firefox now finally features a built-in PDF viewer. Previously available in the Firefox betas, the HTML5-based PDF viewer has now made it into the stable release with the launch of Firefox 19 for Windows, Mac and Linux today. This new PDF viewer, which is the result of a research project named PDF.js, makes use of the standard HTML5 APIs to allow the browser to… → Read More
So far, Netflix has been mum on viewership of House of Cards, preferring not to break out numbers for the number of subscribers who have watched it or how many hours they’ve watched. But research from financial services firm Cowen and Company suggests that Netflix’s original programming is already starting to pay dividends for the streaming service. → Read More
Hot on the heels of the announcement of Ubuntu on phones comes Canonical’s latest announcement: Ubuntu on tablets. This is, in many ways, a no-brainer: Android and iOS have already demonstrated that the same OS can work on both form factors. But the story is a little more interesting when you consider what Ubuntu offers. And developers can start playing with it on Thursday. → Read More
HTC has been struggling to get an edge against market leader Samsung when it comes to getting critical mass in Android smartphones, so during today’s launch of HTC’s newest HTC One flagship phone, the company took another route beyond hardware to promote itself, with introduction of Blink Feed, a new service that aggregates content into a single activity feed that appears on your homescreen as… → Read More
HTC unveiled its newest flagship phone, the HTC One at a special press event in NYC and London today, and the drastically different design marks a departure from a strategy of trying to beat other Android OEMs (read: Samsung) at their own game. Instead, HTC looks to be taking cues from Apple to better compete, in more ways than one. → Read More
There’s little question that HTC wishes 2012 had gone just a little better — the beleaguered smartphone company posted awfully disappointing results quarter after quarter, while rivals like Samsung and Apple continued to hit milestone after milestone.
CEO Peter Chou firmly believes that the worst is over though, and that the company he helms can truly turn its fortunes around. Now, here in New… → Read More
New York City
