Pinterest, the content discovery website that has achieved massive mainstream popularity by letting people clip and share their favorite photos and videos online with virtual “pinboards,” is making it very clear that it is much more than just a pretty face — it’s a big business.
Pinterest confirmed today that it has secured approximately $200 million in a new funding round led by new investor… → Read More
Gaikai’s Dave Perry took the stage at the PS4 event today to describe how Gaikai would be adding cloud gaming elements to the PS4, which will make it possible to jump in and try games in the PlayStation store, make sharing with your friends a snap, and also invite spectators and get friends to help you by remotely taking over your game. → Read More
You probably associate the idea of “comics” with things of a trivial nature, like the newspaper’s funny pages, or maybe Saturday morning SpongeBob marathons. But according to Kevin Cheng, the web exec and entrepreneur who is well known for helping steer the vision and strategy for products such as Yahoo Pipes and Twitter before founding his own startup, those colorful doodles can be more powerful… → Read More
Sony had an event today and as expected, it introduced the PlayStation 4. The next-gen platform is designed to shift focus from the living room to the gamer, Sony said, and overall, PlayStation’s approach is meant to make it possible for gamers to play wherever they want, whenever they want. The console has 8GB of memory and an impressive x86 CPU, but that’s not what Sony claims to be focused on. → Read More
Barriers to international manufacturing and high fuel costs have long made overseas production painful for small businesses. Now, an economic trend towards American manufacturing has created a timely entrance to the market for Maker’s Row. The startup, a finalist in last week’s Women 2.0 Pitch Competition, says it wants to become a go-to resource to create, well, anything. Co-founders… → Read More
Join us live at the 2013 PlayStation Meeting where Sony will hopefully unveil what’s next for their iconic gaming console. The event runs from 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific and I’ll be posting images and commentary in our liveblog below. → Read More
PernixData today launched its Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) for clustering flash to get higher levels of performance. It’s similar to how VMware aggregates CPU and memory to give customers more for its server infrastructure. → Read More
Mobile commerce startup PayDragon wants to simplify the process of purchasing various grocery staples via your mobile phone. The company already has one-click purchasing and two-day shipping for products that can be ordered on its mobile apps. Now it’s redesigned its app to provide easier browsing of its inventory. PayDragon has always been focused on making mobile commerce easy. Coming out… → Read More
Average boat owners only use their vessel 14 days a year. That’s why Boatbound is brilliant. It’s a peer-to-peer boat-renting startup that lets you book everything from kayaks to catamarans to yachts for a day at a time with a $1 million Lloyd’s insurance plan. In his first interview about Boatbound, founder Aaron Hall lays out his plan to make boating more accessible to everyone. Ahoy! → Read More
WebRTC, the plugin-free real-time video, audio and text chat protocol most browser vendors now support, is now activated by default in the latest bleeding edge Firefox Nightly release. While Mozilla has long backed WebRTC, it was only available as an option in the Nightly releases so far. Now that it is enabled by default, chances are that it will slowly make its way into the stable release… → Read More
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Piazza founder Pooja Sankar and learned how her struggles in school inspired her to build an online question-and-answer platform for students to learn together. During our discussion, Pooja shared her story of feeling isolated in her studies and how that empowered her to learn Ruby on Rails and build a prototype that she pitched directly to professors. → Read More
The war for your living room is about to heat up. While Microsoft is still keeping its own next-generation console under lock and key, rival Sony is gearing up to take the stage in New York City and show off exactly what it’s been working on for the past few years. Naturally, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing starting at 6PM Eastern/3PM Pacific tonight. → Read More
Mobli is launching a new version of its photo- and video-sharing app, pushing into the next generation of this competitive space with a new feed of stories that’s integrated with Facebook and Tumblr, a new way to auto-edit uploaded photos, and filters specific to cities and other locations. Although it’s going up against competitors ranging from Instagram to Vine, the Israeli and New… → Read More
In the deep and rich world of self-generated Internet content, there are few things as stark – and as starkly polarizing – as text on a colored background. Is it meme-cheating? Is it boring? Is writing “i hate mondays” in Helvetica over a field of taupe better than posting a picture of a cat hanging off of a tree limb with the same aphorism under her? Now we can find out definitively with … → Read More
Analyst Forrester is predicting tablet ownership in Western Europe will quadruple by 2017 — with the percentage of online adults owning a slate projected to increase markedly from less than a fifth (14 per cent) last year to more than half (55 per cent) in 2017. In 2011 the tablet-owner figure stood at just 7 per cent, underlining how quickly digitally connected consumers are adopting slates. → Read More
YouTube just announced that it has partnered with Gengo and Translated.net, two popular translation services, to give its users a more streamlined process to get their video captions translated by professionals. Publishers can start the translation process from the YouTube interface, get estimates for how long the translation will take and how much it will cost, but they will still need to… → Read More
Small businesses and new brands are mere sardines in the ocean of social media. But a school of small fish is much more powerful than a lone minnow, which is why Saber Blast, a new alliance marketing tool, has launched out of beta. The service lets any brands sign up and join forces with other companies and brands, by RT-ing and re-sharing social media content. The idea is that a service like… → Read More
TrustEgg, a Y Combinator-backed startup which lets parents set up trusts for their children is actually launching. That’s a milestone in and of itself, because, as a financial services company, it had been facing a lot of regulatory hurdles. The company has also recovered from the loss of its first co-founder, Gabe Krambs, who left CEO Jeff Brice to take a job that paid the bills. It has since… → Read More
Toronto’s Upverter is a startup that’s poised to effect change that could reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship. That’s not something you can say about most of the businesses we cover on a daily basis, whether or not they have good ideas. But it’s definitely true of Upverter, the company that’s hoping to build a cloud-based hardware engineering platform that can match and overtake its… → Read More
Handy, a smartphone rental service out of Hong Kong, has launched operations in Singapore. The company offers smartphones for rent to travelers at $9 (HKD 68) a day—$12 (S$15) a day in Singapore—and the price includes unlimited 3G data and international calls. The Handy brand comes under its CEO, Terence Kwok’s startup effort called Tink Labs, and is its first and only project thus far. The… → Read More
VCs like to go around asking the same questions: “What’s cool? What startups do you like?” Recently, the consensus answer to those questions is a startup called Vurb.
Vurb is a contextual content engine, a platform that connects and compiles relevant information from services like, but not limited to, Yelp, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Amazon and so on. Nothing quite like it exists on the market. → Read More
It’s South By Southwest time again, and you know what that means — it’s time for another round of apps to announce launches and updates to help make your mandatory fun time in Austin, Texas that much better. Today, social-local-mobile app Highlight is doing another round of updates to its app, allowing users to share photos and events with others around them. → Read More
Xamarin, the service that helps developers write cross-platform apps in C# for iOS, Android, OS X and Windows, launched version 2.0 of its platform today. This new version features updates to most of the core features of the platform, but the highlight for most developers is likely the fact that they can now use a Xamarin plugin for Microsoft’s Visual Studio to write iOS apps in C#. The new… → Read More
Over the past couple of years, TestFlight has become the standard choice for giving beta testers (and tech bloggers) early access to iOS apps. Today the service is launching for Android developers too — including cross-platform developers who already use TestFlight on iOS.
As an iPhone owner, I’m less familiar with the Android app ecosystem, but I have heard that there isn’t as big a need for… → Read More
GPS technology and the increasing ubiquity of smartphones has given rise to a plethora of mapping and other location-based services that work relatively well outside. But indoor positioning can still be very hit and miss. Hoping to solve this problem is indoo.rs, a startup that has developed indoor location and navigation technology to let developers build apps and services that are able to… → Read More
Citus Data has launched CitusDB for Hadoop, a service that can process petabytes of data within seconds. The offering shows once again that the new class of analytics databases that can analyze everything from data to entire libraries of digital books are the next big thing. → Read More
Twitter just announced via blog post that it has launched an advertising API, which will allow brands to run ad campaigns through the company’s API partners, rather than having to buy them through Twitter itself.
This confirms a report by TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden saying that Twitter would launch its ads API sometime in the first quarter of this year. At the time, Ingrid noted that Twitter’s… → Read More
WordPress.com just rolled out a new classroom vertical that is meant to help educators easily create good-looking websites for their classes. Over the last few months, WordPress.com, the fully hosted version of the popular open-source WordPress content management system, started introducing a number of verticals that focus specifically on certain types of sites, be they restaurant sites, homepages… → Read More
Only a month after its expansion into juniors, online and mobile clothing consignment service thredUP is now expanding into women’s apparel. This is the company’s first step out of the kids’ clothes market, representing a shift for the brand which has previously targeted parents — primarily moms. → Read More
Daily deals might be out of fashion, but that hasn’t stopped at least one company in the space from being able to attract more venture investment. Apparently LivingSocial sent a memo to employees this morning, announcing that has raised another $110 million. → Read More
New York City
