In an interesting post-mortem release by the creators of the defunct anonymous marketplace Atlantis there is information that the former admins and users of the Silk Road are planning to resurrect the service. User RR writes: “We have SilkRoad v2.0 ready to launch and is now in its final testing stages. Our site has all the features of the original one and we have kept the same style of forum for… → Read More
In order to put our money where our hype is we like to take a closer look at Kickstarter products we’ve talked about on the site. Today we have the Bohemian Guitar Company’s “oil can” guitars, a Kickstarter project that raised $54,000 – $20K over their $32,000 goal. The company, based in Georgia, just started shipping their cleverly-designed gitfiddles and I got the chance to try one out. → Read More
Welcome to our continuing series featuring videos of robots that will, when they become autonomous, hunt us down and force us to work in the graphene factories of Mars. Below we see Wild Cat, a fully untethered remote control quadrupedal robot made by Boston Dynamics, creators of the famous Big Dog. This quadruped can run up to 16 miles an hour and features a scary-sound internal gas engine that… → Read More
Knowing what’s wrong with a car before you buy it could save you a lot of headaches down the line, and it could help you negotiate down the price of the vehicle. YourMechanic now wants to make it easier for used car purchasers to get vehicles checked out, with the launch of Pre-Purchase Car Inspections. → Read More
An anonymous, underground drug trafficking web site Silk Road has been busted and the founder has been arrested, effectively shutting down a $1 billion+ revenue business after two years. And in softer tech news, Instagram has revealed plans to put ads in the stream over the next couple months. Meanwhile, BlackBerry continues to be in shambles, with BBM for Android and iOS delayed and the Z30… → Read More
In the near future, anyone with an Internet connection and some lunch money will be able to invest in one of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies. But after big brother Facebook’s IPO debacle, should America’s armchair investors pin their hopes and dreams on Silicon Valley’s younger sibling? We help you compare in one easy chart. → Read More
After three years of offering co-working spaces to young startups and entrepreneurs, General Assembly has decided to shut down the co-working brand of its business in 2014, according to multiple sources as well as a blog post. According to the post, it simply makes more economic sense to shut down the co-working branch of the company and shift complete focus to the educational arm of General… → Read More
You wait ages for a lost item tracker hardware startup, and then loads and loads pile on at once. Meet Locca, an Austrian startup that has just kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for a pair of item trackers that pack in a range of location pin-pointing techs to enable item tracking even across international borders. → Read More
A new startup in Los Angeles called IRIS.TV wants to give video publishers the tools to make streaming video more personalized, and therefore keep viewers hooked for longer. The company is coming to market with $1.7 million in seed funding from angels in the media and finance worlds. → Read More
Here’s a novel way to spend some mandatory vacation time: serve your fellow co-workers top-shelf alcohol. The government shutdown has most of Washington’s public sector furloughed, so Tom Power — the White House’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer – decided to take up bartending. Washington D.C.’s shutdown is like a Catholic school prom: all that pent-up frustration has finally been set loose. → Read More
A startup called Loom, which begin its life as the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing startup Popset, is working to build a better iCloud for both consumers and developers. Currently, the company offers a cloud storage and syncing service, in the form of a mobile application for iOS and desktop app for Mac. And today, Loom is also announcing $1.4 million in seed funding to continue to build on… → Read More
A number of companies today are attempting to bring the photo album to the mobile era, often through apps which let you organize, then print and ship customizable photo books. The latest to attempt to break into this space is Palo Alto-based Kindred Prints, a mobile software company which offers photo printing apps for iPhone and Android. → Read More
M-Blocks are reconfigurable, modular robots with no external moving parts, built by research scientists at MIT. The cubes’ ability to move results from harnessing the momentum of an internal flywheel (which can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions p/m) — allowing them to climb over one another, make jumps, spin and roll around, and do so without wheels or legs. → Read More
MongoDB has raised $150 million from T. Rowe Price Associates with new investors Altimeter Capital and Salesforce.com. Existing investors Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat and Sequoia Capital also participated in the round. MongoDB has raised $231 million since the founders started the company in 2007. → Read More
Video apps are sprouting up like weeds, but Vine and Instagram still hold the majority share of video creation on mobile. However, there’s one thing that both of these services are lacking: a voiceover tool. But a new startup is looking to remedy that. World, meet JamCam. JamCam doesn’t let you use any old audio over your video. However, imagine this. You’re walking along the… → Read More
It’s a tale of two very different fortunes in the mobile-making market. HTC has today announced preliminary results for its Q3, recording a net loss of around $101 million on total revenues of $1.6 billion — the veteran mobile maker HTC’s first ever quarterly loss. With Samsung it’s the opposite story today: it says it’s expecting record profits in its fiscal quarter. → Read More
San Francisco-based startup Coin may not have launched yet, but it has created a hardware platform that others can use to build their own products in the process of developing its own. Today, Coin announced that it will offer up an Arduino Bluetooth Low Energy module that’s designed to be small and easy to integrate into hardware hacks and products of all kinds. → Read More
Founded by WeLab, a finance startup, WeLend is the first social lending platform based in Hong Kong. Since launching in early July, WeLab says it has received US$6 million in loan applications. → Read More
Microsoft has reached out to HTC to see if the company would be interested in adding Windows as a second OS to its Android handsets, a new report by Bloomberg claims. It isn’t clear exactly how the two operating systems would share the handset, in terms of allowing dual-booting or making a user choose a default at device setup, but it’s a sign Redmond may be thinking about pulling out all the… → Read More
In just a few weeks, we’re bringing TechCrunch Disrupt to Europe for the very first time — and with it, one of our big ol’ Hackathons.
If you live in Europe and have never had the chance to build at one of our events, now’s your chance. → Read More
Indian streaming music service Dhingana says it now has 9 million unique users per month from around the world. As music streaming services around the world face down the international expansion of Spotify and Deezer, Dhingana CEO Rohit Bhatia says the startup is hedging its bets on a mobile-first strategy as well as growth in international markets. Over 75% of its users access its one-million… → Read More
Cotap, a startup that strives to be the GroupMe of the business world, has launched its mobile messaging service designed for corporate customers.
The service, available as an iPh → Read More
Being a communication backbone of the web has its pluses and minuses. Twitter gets lots of content syndicated from other sites, but those contributors don’t necessarily visit Twitter or see its ads. That last part is a problem, especially since these blind tweeters count as some of Twitter’s 218.3 million active users. → Read More
If you’re reading Twitter’s S-1 filing to see where the business stands as it prepares to go public (hey, that’s what everyone’s doing at TechCrunch), you may have noticed a number that comes up repeatedly: “advertising revenue per timeline view.”
What does that actually mean? Twitter says that along with things like monthly active users, ad revenue per timeline view is one of the key metrics… → Read More
Ride-sharing startup Lyft has been on a mission to make its mobile ride app available in various markets around the country, recently launching service in places like Dallas, Indianapolis, and St. Paul. But its newest market is a little closer to home: Beginning Friday evening, riders in certain parts of Silicon Valley will be able to start requesting rides. → Read More
Oscar, the New York-based startup from Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, has finally launched. Their debut comes as the U.S. government unveils new health insurance exchanges where consumers can pick and choose plans. The startup, backed with $40 million in funding, is an insurer itself and is looking to make the consumer experience less opaque. They’ve launched four tiers of plans for… → Read More
It costs a lot of money to build a business of Twitter’s scale. The company raised $1.16 billion prior to its planned initial public offering, which could total $1 billion itself.
Here’s another figure: Twitter’s accumulated deficit to date is $418.6 million, a figure that will race to $748.2 million once it goes public and realizes $329.6 million in costs related to stock-based compensation… → Read More
Twitter’s international revenue is up massively year over year, with the company earning more in the first half of 2013 from outside the United States than it did in all of 2012. Twitter’s full-year 2012 international revenue totaled $53 million, while its first two quarters of 2013 saw $62.8 million in international incomes. According to its S-1 filing, Twitter has sold its… → Read More
Here are some accumulated statistics from our scouring of the Twitter IPO filing for your perusal. The overall numbers show a company with good but slowing growth in users, solid revenue in mobile but no profit yet to show. Twitter is absolutely a mobile-friendly company, with some 75 percent of its monthly active users coming on portable devices. About 65 percent of its ad revenue comes from… → Read More
The most pleasant surprise to come out of Dell’s press conference the other day wasn’t its line of new laptops or the silly Android tablets it’s trying to foist on weary consumers. To my utter shock it was the Venue 8 Pro, the company’s first pint-sized Windows 8 tablet. → Read More
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