Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest wireless and Internet provider, said it will buy Mountain Cablevision and some wireless spectrum licenses from Shaw Communication for about $710 million USD ($700 million in Canadian dollars), reports Reuters. → Read More
Social advertising startup Moontoast just announced that it has raised $5 million in Series B funding.
CEO Blair Heavey told me that the company currently works with about 50 clients. It’s not an enormous list, but one that includes names like Universal, Lexus, Nike, Ford, Lady Antebellum, Time, and Simon & Schuster. Advertisers use Moontoast to create custom, interactive ads for social… → Read More
Video conferencing is fast becoming a popular tool for communications among a growing number of businesses. But few want to invest the money in deploying the hardware necessary to make enterprise-class video conferencing and collaboration. That’s why Polycom is teaming up with AT&T to roll out a new managed offering to its business customers. → Read More
Apple announced today that the Wi-Fi and cellular versions of the iPad mini and the fourth-generation iPad with Retina display will be available in China this Friday. iPad mini and the fourth-gen iPad are currently available in more than 100 countries, including China, the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. → Read More
InstallMonetizer is an ad network for desktop software developers, a group that co-founder and CEO Vince Mundy says he once belonged to himself.
“We looked really really hard to find legitimate sources of income [from free downloads],” Mundy said. “We found that there were other developers facing the exact same problem, so we created InstallMonetizer.” → Read More
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it one bajillion times. If you’re going to start a business accelerator, don’t clone Y Combinator or TechStars, find a niche. With the glut of new accelerators today, the most successful are building vertical-specific approaches that bring together seed capital with meaningful industry partnerships to create real business (and learning) opportunities for their… → Read More
CryptoSeal, a Y-Combinator company from the summer class of 2011, has launched its VPN as a service to help companies protect all that back-end administrative information from intrusions. → Read More
SigFig, the startup that tracks your financial assets and provides detailed visualizations of your investments and recommendations on how to manage them, is now officially playing in the big leagues.
SigFig tells TechCrunch that it just crossed $50 billion in assets on the site’s platform. For comparison, that’s in the ballpark of decades-old financial planning stalwarts such as Edward Jones… → Read More
After a break for the holidays and CES, Ask A VC is back with two all-star investors, Venrock’s David Pakman and Kleiner Perkins’ investment partner Ted Schlein. Remember, Ask A VC allows you to ask the hard questions and put VCs in the hot seat → Read More
Today, Facebook’s mobile apps look like its website shrunk down. Soon, that could change. I’ve seen first-hand the employee-only iOS app build of an evolved form of Facebook’s mobile news feed, which ditches the empty blue and white chrome for full-screen photo tiles and overlaid text. Reminiscent of Flipboard, Google+ for iPad, and Microsoft Metro, the fresh design could make Facebook’s feed… → Read More
To meet the demand for interactive experiences between the phone and TV, social TV startup Kwarter has raised $4 million from Deutsche Telekom venture arm T-Venture, as well as Kinetic Ventures, to help grow its platform and expand the number of partners it works with. → Read More
If you own a Wii, you were probably a little bummed out to hear that Amazon would be serving up Instant Video to the Wii U and not to your older console.
But fret no longer, as Amazon has just announced that its library of streaming video content is now available to Wii owners.
Amazon’s Instant Video library is home to over 145,000 titles, and if you’re a Prime member you have automatic… → Read More
You know a mobile app store is still young and needs more content when the company behind it still writes its own blog posts when interesting new apps appear in it. With 150,000 apps, the Windows Phone store isn’t actually quite as empty as the Windows 8 store, but Microsoft could sure use some marquee apps for its mobile platform. To get developers and consumers a bit more excited about it, the… → Read More
The US District Court in Massachusetts has dismissed the case against Aaron Swartz. Swartz committed suicide on January 11 after an investigation into his involvement in the theft of digital documents from JSTOR, a journal archive. → Read More
As someone who just wants to run away to the desert with a tent and a paperback book and live on a mesa somewhere, solving the problem of information overload is near to my heart. If you’re like me, then the non-profit Information Overload Research Group’s Overloaded Conference should be up your alley. → Read More
Ron Hirson, the co-founder and president of mobile payments company BOKU, is stepping down from his full-time position at the company. Hirson is leaving to take on entrepreneur-in-residence roles at two separate venture capital firms, Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund, according to an announcement issued by the company today. → Read More
The National Rifle Association must have a media mole inside its executive team directing the organization to conjure up the most incendiary policies imaginable. Today, the NRA released a mobile first-person shooter game for Apple’s iOS, suitable for children as young as 4 years old. Just in case that didn’t offend enough people, children can purchase military-grade assault weapons for the price… → Read More
Nik Cubrilovic points out that people were significantly less enraged by Aaron’s legal troubles just a few months ago. → Read More
“I wish you could play this game in real life.”
Those words have been muttered by almost everyone who’s ever played the game Mario Kart — and if you’ve played games at all in the past couple decades, chances are you’ve encountered this classic title.
Well, the folks from National Instruments at Waterloo Labs have just answered the prayers of two generations worth of racing… → Read More
Dell, the Texas-based technology company that helped make the desktop personal computer mainstream, is reportedly in talks to go private with the help of private equity firms, according to a report issued by Bloomberg news citing sources familiar with the situation. → Read More
Google just launched the latest beta version of its Chrome browser (version 25) for the desktop and Android and this one is chock-full of new tools for developers. The most important update – and the one that Google chose to highlight – is the inclusion of the Web Speech API in Chrome. This, says Google, will allow developers to integrate speech recognition into their web apps so that “in the near… → Read More
So I’m giving the Surface RT another go. I took it down from the shelf, blew off the dust and loaded some movies on it for several trips this month. But during our CES meeting concerning the Surface Pro, I committed to giving Windows 8 a real college try. Why not, really.
This brings us to the TechCrunch Windows 8/RT app. We have one. It just launched and no one told us here at TechCrunch. → Read More
Is this the beginning of the end for PicPlum, the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing and printing startup that debuted in summer 2010? Today, co-founder Paul Stamatiou announced via blog post that he has joined Twitter full-time, while PicPlum’s other co-founder Akshay Dodeja, Stamatiou noted, has since moved on to a job with new Live Nation Labs. PicPlum’s service will be actively… → Read More
Hardware journalism – the process of writing reviews, news, and opinion about gadgets – is a dark art. Early on – very early on – you have to sell your objectivity in order to gain access, and once you have access the manufacturers won’t stop calling you to gasp over their products and you can become an old curmudgeon like me. When done right – and it’s done right 99 percent of the time – it… → Read More
Twelephone is a new service for making calls right from your Twitter account. The service is one of the first to use the new WebRTC standard, which allows for real-time communication in the Chrome browser via JavaScript APIs. The enterprise will serve as Twelephone’s business model. The idea: a customer with a problem with a product or service gets reached through Twitter. The consumer gets… → Read More
Pulse, the popular news-reading app for the Web and mobile, just announced that it is going beyond the standard news sources it currently features and is adding authenticated social feeds from social sites like YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr and Facebook to its app. → Read More
Beyond its on-demand black car service, Uber is going a step further in trying to corner the transportation market by launching its e-hail taxi service in D.C. as well. The launch of UberTAXI will give users the choice of hailing one of Uber’s sedans at a premium, or hailing a cab at about the same rate that it would usually cost. → Read More
Netflix isn’t all about movies, as you know. The company has been adding more television to its on-demand service and today announced multi-year licensing agreements with both Turner Broadcasting and Warner Bros. Television Group. The agreement includes episodes of shows from Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. Animation, Adult Swim, and the show Dallas from TNT. The deal, which will only make… → Read More
Audiobooks.com, a one-year old subscription service that competes with Amazon’s Audible.com, is today dropping its prices. Previously, the company had charged users $24.95 per month for unlimited access to its catalog of some 25,000 titles. Now it’s offering two plans to cater to perhaps less voracious listeners, with plans starting at $14.95 per month instead. → Read More
TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based startup that runs an online marketplace for outsourcing errands and tasks, is beefing up its executive team.
The company has hired Stacy Brown-Philpot, who worked for nine years in various management roles at Google before joining Google Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence in 2012, to serve as chief operations officer. → Read More
The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards
San Francisco
New York City
