Mindwork Labs, the startup behind discount website, MyDeals, has raised a new £1 million (~$1.6m) round of funding from serial entrepreneur, Mark Pearson, of MyVoucherCodes/Markco Media fame. Pearson is a previous backer of Mindwork Labs, having already invested £500k, and interestingly, the majority of the additional capital will be used to launch a completely new (slightly stealthy) platform… → Read More
Pakistan’s domain registry provider PKNIC has posted an explanation of what it says happened when visits to a number of high-profile websites last weekend redirected to another page — in many cases to one with a photo of penguins and a message from someone called Eboz claiming responsibility. It says that during a security upgrade, a vulnerability opened up, which let someone breach four user… → Read More
Microsoft will issue an update for Windows Phone 8 next month, to fix a random rebooting problem that can affect the OS, flagged up on user forums. “We’re continuing to investigate some reports of phones rebooting and have identified a cause with our partners. We are working to get an over-the-air update out in December,” it said. → Read More
Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $30 million in Series C funding round led by Accel Partners, with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures. The latest round brings the company’s total venture capital funding to $50.5 million. → Read More
More bad news for RIM: Nokia has won a tribunal ruling against the BlackBerry-maker regarding its WLAN-related patents. The ruling means RIM will have to pay royalties for handsets now considered to be in breach of a prior licensing agreement between the two. To enforce the tribunal’s ruling, Nokia said it has now filed actions in the US, UK and Canada. → Read More
Deezer, which earlier this year announced a $130 million round of funding to ramp up its music streaming business internationally. But to make sure that its service can compete against Spotify and others on the product level, today Deezer is also adding a bunch of new bells and whistles: it is launching a new app store called the App Studio and a set of APIs for others to embed the Deezer… → Read More
There’s no denying times are tough for smartphone maker HTC, with sliding revenues and shrinking margins — and no let up expected for Q4. But the company is aiming to put a new public face on its situation next year: it’s announced the appointment of a new chief marketing officer, Benjamin Ho, who will join in January — replacing current CMO, John Wang, who HTC confirmed will be stepping down. → Read More
Tapestry, the latest contender in the fashion-tech startup space, wants to connect a shopper’s digital identity with the physical products in the store they’re in by using barcode/NFC-scanning smartphone apps which shoppers use to build up a virtual collection/wish-list of items they might like to buy in future that are linked to the retailer’s ecommerce database. → Read More
Looks like Pakistan is not the only place where major internet companies’ domain names can get hacked hijacked. This morning, google.ro, was taken over, with the credit being taken by “Algerian Hacker” MCA-CRB, a serial website defacer. The site looked like the picture above for at least an hour, according to our tipster. → Read More
As funding dwindles across the life sciences industry, researchers at major universities are increasingly adopting the entrepreneurial models forged by the tech world. With help from groups like NYC TechConnect, scientists are taking their inventions and discoveries out of the lab and into the free market. → Read More
This evening at Andreessen Horowitz‘s offices in Menlo Park, founding partner Marc Andreessen sat down with William Janeway, recent author, to discuss “Capitalism in the Innovation Economy.” Janeway is a well-known investor, and theorist in the investment and software world.
It’s a very small event, but the conversation is lively. It’s Q&A style, and Andreessen is firing off questions… → Read More
Today, there seem to be more business accelerators than there are startups to fill their classes and cohorts. It seems that not a week goes by without the launch of another accelerator or seed starter fund. In fact, as Peter Relan said in a recent post (riffing on Chris Dixon), accelerators have become an industry segment in their own right. He also goes so far as to surmise that — just as it is… → Read More
A decade ago, the news cycle for a CE product worked like this: a PR person contacted a major title – Laptop, say, or PC Magazine – and offered an exclusive for a cover story. “Hey,” they’d say. “Hot new laptop coming out! It’s got that new Wi-Fi!” An early version of the laptop would arrive at the title’s office and someone would write a detailed review of it because, let’s face it, there was… → Read More
Does the Internet exist to inspire and inform society and therefore limits copyright holders ability to block information? Hidden between the lines of Google’s otherwise predictable “Defend Your Net” campaign in Germany, where the legislature may allow publishers to charge for snippets of content on Google search results, is a very intriguing argument: information on the Internet is a public good. → Read More
Mozilla just launched a special customized edition of Firefox for fans of Microsoft’s MSN portal. Firefox with MSN comes with MSN as the default home page and automatically opens msnNOW, the memetracker-like version of MSN as a Firefox app tab. And of course, this edition offers an MSN theme and uses Bing as the default search engine instead of Google, which is the standard for regular Firefox… → Read More
Two of the team of eight designers at Foursquare have recently left to focus on Sunrise, a calendar product to do more with your calendar, with data from Google Calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. They currently offer a daily email and are actively working on the next version. According to them, the calendar can be a very powerful tool and nobody has figured it out yet. → Read More
Microsoft just announced that it has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses so far. This is the first update the company has given since it announced that it had sold 4 million upgrades over the first weekend after Windows 8 went on sale earlier this month. According to Microsoft, “Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades.” → Read More
At The Pool, a Los Angeles-based social discovery network that aims to be the anti-Facebook (and anti-Twitter for that matter), today announced it has emerged from beta and is in the process of closing a $1 million seed financing round led by Clearstone Venture Partners. Also participating in the investment are a bevy of Los Angeles-based angels, including Buck Jordan of Canyon Creek Capital and… → Read More
Polyvore, the interactive fashion and style website that lets people create collages of apparel and accessories using images from any online store, has had solid growth since it first came on the scene back in 2007. Its monthly unique visitor count has steadily grown to more than 19 million, and, co-founders Jess Lee and Pasha Sadri tell me, the 55-person company’s operations recently went beyond… → Read More
A TechCrunch tradition: wasting time in the office by putting ourselves and coworkers into JibJab videos (and then posting them). They just released a Gangnam Style one, starring you as Psy. Get to it. → Read More
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to earn $1.5 billion in revenues this year, but overall the organization still remains under-appreciated as a core asset of Amazon.com. But that may change this week as AWS holds its first conference in Las Vegas. The event should give more attention to an organization that has had arguably the deepest impact on IT and the enterprise software market. → Read More
In a surprise shake-up at mobile app marketing company Tapjoy, CEO Mihir Shah resigned today while a former Disney executive Steve Wadsworth stepped in.
There was an all-hands meeting at around 11 a.m. this morning and Mark Leschley, who is now chairman of the board, introduced Wadsworth. Shah wasn’t present. Wadsworth had been at Disney for 17 years, working on the company’s digital media… → Read More
AppTrailers, an app that rewards users for watching videos that promote other apps, just released an update with a new “Free Today” section. The section will highlight one app per day — either a paid app being offered for free or a freemium app with normally a paid virtual that’s being provided for free. → Read More
The Internet has a hard time taking things seriously and will happily enact silly vengeance on websites daring enough to leave important tasks up to a vote. Time’s coveted “Person of the Year” poll has been hijacked by thousands of pranksters who have voted up the not-so democratic icons, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and Egypt’s Mohamed Morsey. The up votes could be legitimate exercise in satire… → Read More
In typical Microsoft fashion, the company just announced a number of momentum numbers for Outlook.com and also launched quite a few new features for its web-based email service at the same time. → Read More
Remember when entire companies were launched, primarily to work around the fact that Microsoft Exchange-based email systems had message size limits that impacted the size of email attachments you could send? How far we’ve come. Today, Google announced it’s integrating its online file storage and collaboration service Google Drive (formerly Docs) even further into Gmail, enabling emails to be sent… → Read More
A report today from Bloomberg claims that Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who took over control of Maps from Scott Forstall when that senior executive and iOS architect departed the company, has fired Richard Williamson, a manager who oversaw the Maps team. The move is part of Apple’s continued efforts to right the faults consumers reacted negatively to in Maps. → Read More
Dennis Albinus recently told me that it’s time for a new kind of job site, which is what the CEO is trying to build with Revl.
Albinus wants job seekers to build their profiles on Revl, which is coming out of beta today. Obviously, many people already do that on LinkedIn, but Albinus argued that the existing site mostly serves older, white-collar workers. He pointed to a Royal Pingdom report… → Read More
Apple’s iPod touch is arguably among the last of a dying breed, being a standalone media player that isn’t also a phone. But just because you’re among a species on the verge of extinction doesn’t mean you can’t shine, and the 5th generation iPod touch brings a lot of goodness to the table for a connected mobile device that can’t call anyone. → Read More
There is a lot of news this week in the platform-as-a-service market (PaaS), with companies like Apprenda extending its technology to offer on-premise and hybrid methods for deploying enterprise applications. → Read More
The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards
San Francisco
New York City
