While its roots lie in search, today, Google wears many hats. From self-driving cars and wearable technology to social networking and mobile operating systems, there are few industries where the search and advertising giant has yet to make its presence felt. Lately, however, Google’s expansion has taken a noticeable tack in a more singular direction: eCommerce. With the outsized success… → Read More
OSCON, the open-source conference, is in full-gear today and OpenStack is celebrating its third birthday there with lots of fanfare, self-serving platitudes and an infographic — the tell-tale mark of a “we are awesome” campaign.
While I couldn’t care less that an industry-funded foundation turned three last week and is still celebrating, OpenStack is an important effort enabling anyone to… → Read More
I’m getting sick of all the “[new startup name] is the [more prominent startup name] of [random industry]” descriptions that people like to throw around these days, but it’s hard to avoid that with a new startup called Stat. The three-person team demoed earlier today at Dreamit Ventures’ Health Demo Day in Philadelphia, and long story short, they’ve created something that’s pretty much an Uber for… → Read More
Critics claim that Facebook is losing its cool amongst kids and expect teens to start tuning out in favor of hip apps like Snapchat, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg says “Based on our data, that just isn’t true.” Zuckerberg noted on today’s earnings call that “we believe we have close to fully penetrated in the US teen demographic for a while”, and teens remained steadily engaged with Facebook this year. → Read More
Austin-based incubator Jutera Labs is putting even more of its weight behind Perk, a rewards-centric mobile web browser that blocks out ads when used on tablets. Perk, which originally started out as a way to give consumers coupons, discounts or airline miles while browsing the web, is now blocking ads. While companies like AdBlock have built up strong web-based businesses with more than 200… → Read More
Today Facebook reported its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $1.81 billion. Analysts had expected Facebook to earn $0.14 per share on a top line of $1.62 billion. The company’s revenue figure released today is an all time quarterly high for the firm. Facebook’s second-quarter revenue is up 53 percent on a year-over-year basis. Analysts had expected a 37… → Read More
In Q2 of 2013, Facebook grew to 1.15 billion monthly active users up from 1.11 billion at the end of Q1, 669 million daily active users from 665 million, and to 819 million mobile monthly active users from 751M. These totals don’t tell the whole story, though, as much of Facebook’s growth is coming from Asia and developing markets where it doesn’t earn as much money per user. → Read More
The sixth group of startups from the 500 Startup Accelerator program will be making their debut today in Mountain View, Calif. — and then going on to do demo days in San Francisco and New York City as well. But we’ll be live from the scene, writing up the most interesting companies we see here. → Read More
Addvocate has raised $2.39 million for its service that helps companies put some operations management behind its social media efforts. The round was led by Rogers Venture Partners and included angel investor Karen Riley.
A social media strategy is now a mainstream part of sales and marketing. But it has little infrastructure behind it. Addvocate provides a way for companies to have their… → Read More
Josh Fraser and Jon Fox founded Torbit in 2010 after becoming fed up with the amount of time they’d spent at past startups managing website performance optimization by hand. In 2012, the Sunnyvale-based startup launched its first product, called Insight, to make the tools they’d spent years developing available to anyone and everyone — without requiring a degree in computer science or 15… → Read More
Boston-based Mediaspectrum, a company that has a subscription software service catering to big media publishers like Gannett, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Post and more, just picked up $35.8 million in funding led by Insight Venture Partners. The roughly 100-person company helps these publishers manage their advertising and content across many platforms on the web and… → Read More
Michael Dell and Silver Lake have offered improved terms for their proposed transaction to take venerable computer OEM Dell private. Their former offer was derailed by activist investor Carl Icahn, who offered an almost bizarre deal that involved removing nearly all Dell shares from the market, but not taking the company private.
The new offer of $13.75 per share, is a mere $0.10 improvement. → Read More
Google launched its $35 Chromecast device today that allows users to stream their Chrome tabs and videos to their TVs from virtually every popular platform. In addition, Google is also launching the Google Cast SDK for developers on iOS, Android and Chrome, which will allow them to enable their apps to stream right to their users TVs. The new SDK, which is officially in beta (or “preview,” as… → Read More
Pluralsight, the online training resource targeting professional developers which announced its raise of $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners earlier this year, is now putting that funding to use. The company, whose corporate users include Microsoft, Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, Dell, HP, Intel, Disney, EMC and others, is acquiring PeepCode, a similar resource providing video tutorials… → Read More
Cloudscaling CTO Randy Bias wrote an open letter to OpenStack today. In it he outlines why the open cloud effort will only win if it accepts Amazon Web Services (AWS) and creates a compatible API.
He argues that AWS is the defacto leader. The solution: OpenStack should stop trying to build out its own differentiated APIs and accept the reality that AWS is the winner in the public cloud. If it… → Read More
A law to defund the National Security Agency’s Internet dragnet program is gaining surprising momentum. The House of Representatives’ vote today on Michigan Republican Justin Amash’s proposal has gained so much support that the White House is officially urging Congress to reject it. “This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. We… → Read More
Every year I’m given the best job a guy could ever want: planning hardware alley, a one day extravaganza of some of the best hardware I’ve ever seen. This event, which happens on the last day of Disrupt, is a crowd favorite and I’d love to feature your gear. → Read More
At its Android and Chrome event in San Francisco today, Google announced that it is bringing textbooks to the Google Play store so students will be able to purchase and rent their textbooks for their Android devices and for reading on the web. The company has partnered with five major textbook publishers to launch this service. These partners are Pearson, Wiley, Macmillian Higher Education… → Read More
A key secret to Silicon Valley’s success is its professional class of employees who help build hit startup after hit startup in its formative stages. This know-how in engineering, product design, growth, business development, sales and a range of other roles allow the founders of a hot company to hire fast and quickly mature their new ideas into big, real businesses. Josh Elman is one of the… → Read More
Meet the Chromecast. As the name suggests, it’s powered by Chrome and is designed to bring Google’s browser/OS to the biggest screen in the house.
The Chromecast is designed first to be a streaming device. It’s supposed to be the easiest way to get YouTube and Google Play and Netflix and Pandora and photos on HDTVs. Think Apple TV, but rather Google TV with another name (because, well, Google… → Read More
Tile, a connected objects startup that’s trying to fix the problem of finding lost property with a Bluetooth tags plus app combo, has raised a massive $2.6M via its Selfstarter crowdfunding campaign. The funding considerably beefs up to the $200,000 Tile gained from being incubated out of Silicon Valley mobile accelerator Tandem Capital. It’s also a massive 130x bump on its original funding goal. → Read More
Today at Google’s event, VP of Android Hugo Barra introduced the new Nexus 7, as well as Android’s newest version — Android 4.3. All of these devices will receive the over-the-air update today. Android 4.3 features new restricted profiles for kids, OpenGL|ES 3.0 for game developers, a redesigned camera interface, Bluetooth Low Energy support and general performance improvements. → Read More
Today the well-known and liked chief White House photographer Pete Souza announced that he has joined Instagram, taking parts of his work to a new digital realm. He confirmed in later tweets that he will only upload photos to the service that are taken with smartphones, though he appears unsure of what model his current handset is.
The content of the Instagram account will be separate from the… → Read More
Viki, a startup based out of Singapore that is vying to be the “Hulu for the rest of the world” with a combination of premium video supplemented by crowdsourced subtitles, is today announcing two new investors that should play a useful role in achieving that. → Read More
Android 4.3 isn’t an overly dramatic advancement over Android 4.2, but the new version of Google’s mobile OS announced today does bring a number of improvements that should appeal to both developers and end users. Highlights include the redesigned camera interface, general performance improvements for the OS including smoother animations, and long-awaited Bluetooth Low Energy support. → Read More
Google today unveiled its new Nexus 7 tablet at a special event hosted by Android and Chrome chief Sundar Pichai. The tablet isn’t a surprise, thanks to a handful of early leaks, but it is an impressive device nonetheless. The Android 4.3-powered tablet ups the ante on screen resolution in a big way with a 1920×1200 display, giving it 323 PPI pixel density, much greater than that of the more… → Read More
eBay is testing a new local service provider marketplace in the UK, called eBayHire. It appears that the test is first rolling out in the UK, and there isn’t a US-based site (yet).
According to the site, eBayHire is similar to Angie’s List in that the site will get you in touch with service providers. You can find traditional service providers like plumbers, movers, contractors, drivers and… → Read More
We’re live from San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, where Google has asked a couple dozen of us tech-minded folk to join them for the announcement of… something.
What exactly that something could be is still (kind of) a mystery — but we’re here to find out. → Read More
At one point or another, pretty much every small business needs legal help. But hiring the right law firm isn’t easy, and it can be expensive. But what if there were a platform enabling small businesses to find affordable, independent legal counsel? That’s what UpCounsel seeks to provide. → Read More
Fitness app and hardware accessory maker Runtastic launched version 4.0 of its product today in conjunction with Google’s special Android and Chrome event. This update offers new features tailored specifically to the Android 4.3 improvements Google has made, with a particular focus on Bluetooth Smart capabilities that work with its line of fitness hardware, which includes a heart rate monitor. → Read More
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