Are you part of the lucky bunch that got offered a pair of Google Glass and had $1,500 bucks to kick down? Good news! The camera on your set just got a whole lot better.
Following up on their promise to update Google Glass every month, Google has just released a patch that brings two important photo-centric features to their robo-eyewear: HDR photography and on-the-fly photo captions. → Read More
Summer is just about here and the time is right for another episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the tech industry’s most buzz-worthy companies to see what it’s really like for the smarty pants people who work there.
This time we headed over to the San Francisco headquarters of Asana, the company that makes cloud-based task management and collaboration software. You… → Read More
Yplan, the London-based startup that’s building a platform for selling last-minute event-booking on mobile, has closed a $12 million (£7.9 million) Series A, led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Wellington Partners and Octopus Investments also participated in the round, plus a group of co-investors, including A-Grade, Kevin Colleran and David Morin’s SLOW Ventures Fund. → Read More
DC Entertainment is announcing two new technologies today that should give readers more opportunity to interact with their digital comics. The company is also sharing some numbers about the growth that it’s seeing on the digital side.
Co-Publisher Jim Lee told me that the new features are “the next evolutionary step in our digital publishing program.” There’s DC², which adds dynamic layers to… → Read More
Apple has been found to be in violation of a Samsung patent, which has resulted in a limited import ban on certain products, including the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, original iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G, all only for AT&T-specific models. More details are emerging about the ruling, but it’s likely this affects only older devices on AT&T because it relates to a specific component used before wider… → Read More
In September 2010, Atlassian acquired Bitbucket, the service for code collaboration, similar to GitHub. At the time, the service had 45,000 users. Today it has 1 million users, a validation that the market for developer tools in the enterprise is growing fast.
We know that GitHub has had tremendous growth. In January, the service passed the 3 million user mark. But with such growth also for… → Read More
Facebook’s board of directors and stockholders will convene on June 11th, and anyone will be able to virtually sit in as Facebook today announced it will webcast its first stockholder’s meeting. The move will likely set a precedent for webcasting future Facebook stockholders meetings, similar to how Google does, but in contrast to Apple’s un-streamed assemblies. → Read More
Google today launched its new Content Experiments API, a tool that allows developers to easily test their sites’ content with programmatic optimization. The new API is deeply integrated with Google Analytics, so developers can use all of Analytics’ power to measure their different optimizations. Indeed, as Google describes it, “this API makes Google Analytics a full-blown A/B testing platform… → Read More
Allowing for the legal ownership of ideas has some silly unintended consequences. “Dumbass patents are crushing small businesses,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban once told me. Roughly a third of startups have been threatened with patent violations, often by entities built solely to scare small businesses into settling (so-called “patent troll”). President Obama has decided to go after the… → Read More
Amazon has had an ongoing experiment for the past half-decade called AmazonFresh, which offers grocery service and delivery of fresh produce to customers in its home base of Seattle. That program is on the verge of a significant expansion, according to a new report from Reuters today. Amazon is looking to offer AmazonFresh-type services in markets outside of Seattle later this year, including LA… → Read More
Editor’s note: Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark and was the lead investor in Asana, Instagram and Quora among others.
Throw a dart at a map. There’s a pretty good chance it’ll hit near someplace hoping to become the “next Silicon Valley.” I’d bet on Berlin. I believe Berlin has the best shot in the Western world outside of Silicon Valley at becoming a place with a true tech… → Read More
Today Bose is announcing two new products to its lineup, with the introduction of the SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speaker and the QuietComfort 20 In-Ear headphones.
Both offer the same high quality audio Bose prides itself on, and the company claims that the in-ear headphone in particular required more patents than any headphone in history.
Let’s just get down to brass tax, then, yes? → Read More
As promised, Google today launched the latest version of Gmail for iPhone. Just like the new Android version, which rolled out yesterday, the iOS version now offers support for Google’s new auto-categorized emails for updates, promotions, newsletters and messages from your social networks. If this new feature has already been enabled for your Gmail account, you will now be able to see a… → Read More
As we noted a few weeks ago, Twitter introduced charts for its #Music product. The company’s intentions for the service aren’t known, and it seems like they’re taking somewhat of a public beta approach with it. Having said that, before the service launched, I noted that it could be the next “Top 40″ phenomenon. → Read More
Salesforce.com added more marketing power to its arsenal today with the purchase of ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. It is the company’s largest acquisition to date, second to Buddy Media, which it bought last year for $689 million. In 2011, the company purchased social-monitoring platform Radian6 for $276 million in cash plus additional stock. → Read More
Freelance writing doesn’t always have the reputation for being a hugely lucrative endeavor. But it looks like investors are seeing some bright spots there — at least when it comes to technology platforms in the space.
Scripted, the San Francisco startup that runs an online marketplace to connect freelance writers with companies who need written content, has raised $4.5 million in a new round… → Read More
Playtox, the Russian developer of free-to-play mobile browser-based games, has closed a $3 million Series A round of funding from VC firm Runa Capital. The company said it will use the funding to expand on the startup’s massively multiplayer online (MMO) titles “globally,” including the U.S., as well as in emerging markets. → Read More
Google will soon launch Google Web Designer, an HTML5 development tool for “creative professionals.” The service, Google says, will launch within “the coming months” and is meant to “empower creative professionals to create cutting-edge advertising as well as engaging web content like sites and applications – for free.” → Read More
Personal styling and retail platform Trunk Club is going mobile. After finding that around 40 percent of its website traffic is now coming from mobile devices, and around 75 to 80 percent of that comes from iOS devices in particular, the company is today introducing its first consumer-facing native application for iPhone. The app will allow users to access its personalized clothing service while… → Read More
Ijad Madisch started ResearchGate in 2008 to change the scientific method, and depending on where you sit, that either is or isn’t as ambitious as it sounds. Madisch isn’t on a crusade to overturn the techniques scientists use to investigate and systematically observe phenomena, so much as the tools. Today, there’s an incredible amount of scientific research taking place, whether it’s in… → Read More
As the dust begins to settle following yesterday’s massive, sweeping layoffs at Zynga, the extent of the damage is becoming more clear.
Remember when Zynga acquired OMGPOP last year for roughly $200M dollars? Yeah, OMGPOP essentially no longer exists. → Read More
It’s no secret these days that VCs are getting into data in a meaningful way. Firms can no longer afford to wait for companies, people and trends to come to Sand Hill Road. To start competing for deals, VCs have to be prospecting people, companies and trends well before events like Y Combinator’s Demo Day. Many VCs have built their own data-parsing platforms internally, but one startup launching… → Read More
Google’s Cloud Platform has long featured Cloud SQL, a zero-maintenance MySQL database that’s hosted on Google’s cloud platform. What it didn’t offer was an API to easily manage these databases without having to use Google’s admin interface. Today, however, Google is launching the Cloud SQL API. This new REST API will allow developers to programmatically manage their database instances and open up… → Read More
Google has just announced via its official Google TV blog that Redbox Instant by Verizon is arriving on the platform today. The newly launched app provides Redbox subscribers access to streaming movie and TV content, depending on their subscription package, as well as purchase and rentals from the Instant store and the ability to reserve physical discs for pick-up at the closest Redbox kiosk. → Read More
Daqri, a company that says it’s creating the “Photoshop of augmented reality,” just announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A led by Tarsadia Investments.
As with other augmented-reality companies, Daqri enables customers to enrich physical objects with additional media when those objects are viewed through a smartphone or tablet camera (and eventually other devices, too — the… → Read More
When Sunrise introduced its calendar app to iOS users, it was already a crowded space. Yet, the company just raised a $2.2 million seed round led by Resolute.vc and NextView Ventures. It fosters a different approach focused on design and the user experience and will continue to experiment in the calendar space. → Read More
Dollar Shave Club, the subscription razor service incubated by Los Angeles-based Science, Inc. and backed by firms like Venrock, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Andreessen Horowitz, is launching its second line of products today — butt wipes.
The idea may seem like something designed to provoke embarrassed laughter, but CEO Michael Dubin told me, “Nothing we do is an accident. It’s… → Read More
Microsoft is introducing a new pilot project today called ”Chip In,” which sees the Windows-maker offering to help students crowdsource laptop purchases ahead of next school year. Students with a .edu email address can crowdfund laptop purchases of qualifying devices through the official Microsoft online store, and Microsoft will subsidize 10 percent of the purchase price itself, plus offer free… → Read More
Remember the Wikipad? The Android-powered gaming tablet/hefty controller rig combo that was supposed to launch in 2012 before suffering delay after delay? Well, the wait is just about over — the company announced earlier today that the $249 gaming tablet will be available on U.S. store shelves starting on June 11, and that a global launch is being prepped for the summer. → Read More
Want a way to communicate with your team and are tired of doing so over email? Honey is a new communications platform that allows employees to have an internal message board for sharing interesting news stories or conversations and access them any time. Honey provides a SaaS-based tool for internal communications between employees within companies. → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
