The team behind the Ouya Android game console clearly paid a lot of attention to its looks — they nabbed Yves Behar to design the thing, after all — but not every component has passed muster with the masses. Thankfully, after hearing some discontent from early backers and developers, Ouya has taken some crucial feedback about the console’s controller seriously and has decided to make some… → Read More
Order Mapper, which makes apps for ordering a variety of goods (starting with pizza) from any business, just announced that it has raised a $550,000 round led by Vegas Tech Fund.
The company’s flagship product is Order Pizza, an app that allows users to order pizza from any pizzeria that you choose. The app submits orders automatically, via phone call, email, fax, or website (depending on what… → Read More
Coaster launched a few months ago with a mobile drink ordering app, allowing consumers to place orders and pay for their drinks at select bars without having to wait in line. Since launch, the startup has been slowly adding local venues to the app. But it couldn’t reach them all, so it just released a self-serve iPad app that bars can install on their own. → Read More
Yandex begged Facebook not to shut down its social search app Wonder that launched this morning. But the explanation Yandex’s lawyers sent us for why it’s compliant with Facebook’s policies didn’t stop Facebook from blocking all API calls from Wonder, Yandex confirms. Facebook tells me it’s now discussing policy with Yandex. The move follows a trend of Facebook aggressively protecting its data. → Read More
America’s “Happy Warrior”, Vice-President Joe Biden, was as entertaining as ever in his Google+ hangout on gun reform today. “If you want to keep people away during an earthquake, buy some shotgun shells,” he said, in response to a question about assault weapons bans. We’ve compiled the best of Biden’s Hangout, with special attention to his video game… → Read More
Microsoft announced today its financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2013, and it was an overall strong showing for the company.
The Redmond, Washington-based software giant posted revenue of $21.46 billion and net income of $6.38 billion, with earnings per share of 77 cents. That’s largely in line with what Wall Street had been expecting, though a bit lower on the revenue side and… → Read More
AT&T shared its Q4 2012 earnings results today, reporting overall quarterly revenues of $32.6 billion (an increase of 0.2% year over year), and earnings per share of $0.44, The highlight of AT&T’s quarter is likely its record smartphone sales, however, as the carrier sold 10.2 million smartphone devices, of which 8.6 million, or 84%, were Apple iPhones. → Read More
“In The Studio” continues this week by welcoming a former Oxford PhD student who, upon completing his long education, ended up in San Francisco, toyed with a few web ideas, eventually was so inspired by an idea, based in part to his experience in a PhD program, that he found his passion and founded his first real startup.
Richard Price had an interesting path to be on this show. After launching… → Read More
Thanks to an easy editing tool, Videolicious been adopted by enterprise customers who are using it for internal and external communication, sales, and marketing. With that in mind, Videolicious has just released a new version of the app to provide businesses with more tools to provide branded videos and to better manage them in their publishing workflow. → Read More
140 Proof is expanding its social ad technology today with the launch of a new format called Native Ads for Social Sites, which allows 140 Proof advertisers to run campaigns on blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr.
The company started out by using social data to determine user interests and then use those interests to target ads in social networking apps. The new native ad units also… → Read More
Distil.it, a cloud-based platform that aims to help businesses quash web scraping and other nefarious web-born fraud, announced today that it has landed $1.8 million in seed financing. Investors in the round included ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund Partners, CIT, Piedmont RIA, Cloud Power Fund and TechStars. What has investors intrigued? Distil.it co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid believes that… → Read More
There might soon be a super simple way to download copyrighted movies, music, and software: the Caribbean island of Antigua is reportedly set to host servers that allow users to download content as revenge for a U.S. trade blockade. → Read More
Having launched two years ago into an extremely crowded travel vertical, Hipmunk has carved out its own niche. The site was built out of the need for ease of travelling by its founders, and the company has done a lot of things right since then. Hipmunk has raised $20.2 million to date, and has recently launched a new Deals product, which allows people to find the best places to go based on the… → Read More
WordPress.com parent company Automattic has acquired Simperium, the startup that runs a data syncing platform and is also well-known for Simplenote, the personal note-keeping app that’s been described as “a lightweight version of Evernote.” → Read More
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but the mobile app economy continues to grow like gangbusters — like it stole something. Research2Guidance found that revenue from the top five app stores hit $8 billion in 2012 (up 27 percent from the year prior), while about 26,000 applications are submitted to iOS’ App Store each week. As a result, AdEven expects Apple to add at least 435K apps to its… → Read More
OLO, the New York-based online and mobile ordering platform for restaurants, has raised a $5 million Series B round of funding from PayPal and existing investors, David Frankel, RRE Ventures, and Core Capital Partners. The company had previously raised $8.75 million in outside funding. Exactly a year ago today, as it turns out, the company announced reaching the milestone of 1 million customers… → Read More
Advertising technology companies are not exactly the most well-known names to the average web user, but they can certainly garner serious attention from those inside the industry — particularly investors. Case in point: AppNexus, the New York City-based company that runs a real-time bidding platform for ad networks, said today it has closed on $75 million in funding. → Read More
Facebook founder and business celebrity Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting a high-profile fundraiser at his Palo Alto home for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a.k.a “The Boss.” The two allegedly became political BFFs after appearing on Oprah together with Newark Mayor, Cory Booker, who received an extraordinary $100M donation from Zuckerberg to improve the city’s schools. The fundraiser is especially… → Read More
President Obama will reportedly name former attorney general for the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White, to the top spot at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Technology startups have been eager for the SEC to approval rules for “crowdfunding” (raising capital from family, friends, and other non-accredited investors) but the process was stalled by a mini-scandal with the… → Read More
It’s no secret that Intel is gunning to gain some mobile traction in emerging markets, and the chipmaker doesn’t seem to be wasting any time in 2013. Kenyan wireless operator (and Intel partner) Safaricom has just officially revealed Africa’s first Intel smartphone, the Android-powered Yoloat an event in Nairobi.
Yeah, you read that right: the Yolo. → Read More
For the latest episode of my Foundation series, I headed over to the Path office to sit down with founder Dave Morin.
Dave talks about getting his start in student marketing at Apple, and reflects that focus is one of the most important things he learned there. He goes on to describe his time at Facebook, where an intense focus on product utility set the product up for long-term growth. Dave… → Read More
Tell me what a server is these days. Applied Micro Circuit CEO Paramsh Goti says that it’s on an ARM chip, a tiny microprocessor that does what the big old servers would once do on PC-style machines.
Goti has the company’s sights on Intel and AMD, which have dominated the data center market for the last several years. → Read More
Yandex — the so-called “Google of Russia” — has confirmed today that it is launching the social search app Wonder, combining its own proprietary search algorithms with data from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, along with voice recognition from Nuance, in an iOS app. Yandex is launching the app in the U.S. only, and as a “pure experiment” — although it will… → Read More
Banjo, the location-based social network for sharing images and content tied to specific real-world locales, today unveiled its new native iPad and Android apps. This marks the first time Banjo has made the leap to tablets, and I spoke with Banjo CEO Damien Patton about why the time was right to bring Banjo to the bigger screen: It’s mostly about riding the second screen wave, Patton says, and… → Read More
By default, the in-store scans are time sensitive, offering customers 30 minutes to redeem their prize, like a free or discounted appetizer, drink, dessert, etc. The drive-thru codes, meanwhile, give users around four days to redeem their code. Sean tells us that the company is now working to bring its QR codes to Facebook as well, where they can be used directly on businesses’ Facebook timelines… → Read More
If you’ve ever wondered why birthers, inside jobbers, and other conspiracy theorists won’t simply take the truth at face value, two researchers at OSU have found that we tend to ignore – and reject – instant corrections to data. → Read More
Twitter has officially launched its Vine video sharing app in the App Store, as announced on the company blog.
With Instagram taking the world by storm, and subsequently selling to Facebook for $1 billion, the question on everyone’s minds has been who will be able to do the same thing with video?
Twitter’s been thinking this through for a while, proven by the acquisition of video-sharing… → Read More
When Google experiments, it can have earth-changing consequences. That might be the case with its latest project: the building of a wireless network on-campus at its Mountain View headquarters, reported by WSJ on Wednesday. The small-scale network wouldn’t have much range, and it would be incompatible with most current-generation iOS and Android mobile smartphones and cellular-capable tablets… → Read More
It’s a brand new year, and a brand new class for the Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator is only fitting on this cold, January morning.
The accelerator announced back in October that this January 2013 class of ten startups will be receiving a $15K boost to their seed funding, a total of $40K per startup. According to Jon Axelrod, managing director at ERA, “We really believe that extra… → Read More
In an effort to make its Dashboard a “smaller and more streamlined experience,” the social blogging platform Tumblr is today overhauling the way users create posts on its website. Instead of the larger, full-screen experience which makes writing or sharing content on Tumblr feel more like blogging, the new post screens seem to be taking a page from Twitter in their design. → Read More
The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards
San Francisco
New York City
