Last Friday I visited the Aol* building on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. But instead of the stench of death and decay you would normally find at a dying company, I found joy and the hustle and bustle of youth. More importantly, I found startups, tens of startups with founders eager to show me around the various VC firms (SoftTech, Morado) and
Every time a dating site succeeds in making a match, it loses two users. To offset churn, Zoosk tells me that tomorrow it’s announcing a new business model that complements subscriptions with date discounts, expert relationship advice, gift ideas, holiday reminders, online scrapbooks. The products could convince users to pay even after
As you probably know, bistable or passive displays like the E-Ink ones in e-readers focus on battery life and readability rather than color and interactivity. The latest devices have been optimized for fast page refreshes and touch operation, but generally you’re still waiting a half a second or so for the screen to flip over to the next
HP just reported mixed first quarter earnings. The company posted non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.92, down 32 percent from the prior-year period (GAAP diluted earnings per share were $0.73, down 38 percent from the prior-year period). First quarter net revenue came in at $30 billion, down 7 percent from the previous year. Analysts
Aiming to become one of the giants of online advertising, ad retargeting startup AdRoll has hired Googler Suresh Khanna as its vice president of sales. In nearly six years at Google, Khanna held a number of roles. Most recently, he was director of new advertiser sales, where he says he led the North American team for acquiring mid-market and
Tabber is an upcoming Kickstarter project that essentially adds an LED light show to your guitar and, more importantly, allows you to learn to play chords and solos by following the lights on the fretboard. The idea is definitely not new. The Fretlight guitar beat these guys to the punch and I wonder what patent issues they will have to deal
Referral traffic is pouring out of Pinterest and Facebook’s Open Graph frictionless sharing. With Sociable Lab’s licensable EverShare you can snatch their functionality without any serious development work and soak up some page views. EverShare lets you host your own Pinterest-style product or content boards to give your users their
Here’s a fun fact: Batteries and cars require maintenance. The Tesla Roadster runs on batteries that require lots of maintenance. Out of the 2,200 Roadster owners, apparently at least five didn’t read the manual on their new toy and let the car sit off the charger for several months – or so says one regional service manager. This
It’s safe to say we’ve all been in a situation where a few extra pairs of eyes could come in handy, and the folks at Google know just how that feels. In an effort to give people that backup when they need it, they’ve just pushed out a useful new update to the Google Docs Android app. The update’s biggest draw is the addition
Firespotter Labs, makers of the food photo-sharing app Nosh (and more recently, the hilarious spoof app Jotly), is launching its latest creation today called NoshList, a new waitlisting application for restaurants. The app, designed for the iPad, ties into to the company’s consumer-facing Nosh mobile app, which allows users to rate and
The WinZip iOS app, which lets you crack open .zip files from your iDevice, has only spent a short time on the App Store (and by short, I mean, like, a week). But there’s already plenty to brag about. The app saw over 30,000 downloads on Day One, and nearly 150,000 on Day Two. As of last night, WinZip has blown by the 500,000 download hurdle
Upstart photo-sharing service 500px is bringing some significant changes to the site that should be going live right now (although they’re being hammered, so be patient). The site was already one of the frontrunners as far as design and user uptake, and these new features should help that right along. There’s a new curated and social
Everyone’s favorite way to share thousands of pages of sensitive information (and dump PHP code that you might use later) has upgraded to what it’s calling version 3.1. This new version, in addition to some cosmetic changes, includes one major upgrade: private pastes. The system currently supports public and “unlisted”
After reports earlier this month that LinkedIn was buying contact management service Rapportive, the startup just published a blog post confirming that yes, it has been acquired. For those of you who don’t use it, Rapportive is a Gmail plugin that shows you the latest social network updates from whoever you’re corresponding with.
While the early history of the Internet is littered with the corpses of music start-ups, not all digital music companies have failed. Take, for example, Gracenote. Founded in 1998, the Berkeley based company was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million and is one of the real pioneers of the evolving digital economy. Gracenote has built its business
Research firm eMarketer has put together a few interesting data points that show Google doing better in display ads than you might have realized. That is, by growing this business across properties and networks that it at some point acquired — YouTube, DoubleClick, and mobile (AdMob) — it’s set to pass Facebook’s own
There’s a new startup called Tugg unveiling itself today that promises audience members that they can create their own movie screenings at local theaters. It’s led by Nicolas Gonda, who was a producer on The Tree Of Life. When I asked why theaters would want to do this, Gonda and his co-founder Pablo Gonzalez (they’re CEO and
The Asus Transformer Prime was the great, grey hope for many Android lovers – until they realized that the bootloader was locked it was impossible to upgrade or install a new bit of firmware onto the device. Asus has finally relented, allowing folks to download an unlocked bootloader and install it over the “official” Asus
If you’ve ever shopped for a pair of prescription glasses, you’ve probably seen first hand how expensive a set can be. Warby Parker’s co-founders are right there with you. Both fed-up and puzzled over paying hundreds of dollars for a product that’s been around for hundreds of years, the Warby Parker team is shaking up
Job boards and company profiles on job sites can be fairly uninspiring, and bland. Usually there’s a boring description of a job, followed by a list of skills needed followed by a boring description of the company. Enter Y Combinator-backed The Daily Muse, which is a community for professional women. Today the site is launching company
Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round. The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news,
Back during the heyday of CrunchGear (now known as TechCrunch/Gadgets), we couldn’t get enough of Borderlands. The game masterfully combined the game play of a FPS with the best elements of an RPG. In a scene full of Call of Duty clones Borderlands is completely novel. Gearbox just released the launch trailer for the second installment and
For various reasons (groan) I’m not heading to SXSW this year, but then neither are millions of other people. But that won’t stop the 20,000 attendees from clogging up our Twitter feeds trying to find each other in the nearest bar, tweeting incessantly about some “awesome” panel session you are not at or generally
SAP dropped a whopping $3.4 billion on human capital management software company SuccessFactors back in December. Two months later, the deal has finally closed and SAP isn’t wasting any time in releasing a product roadmap for SuccessFactors now that the company is part of the SAP family. As the New York Times reported back in December, SAP
UltraViolet might sound too good to be true, but the service is growing. More Blu-ray titles are featuring the digital media option and consumers are at least trying the movie industry’s alternative to, well, piracy. iSupply just announced that there are now more than 800,000 household accounts, up from 750,000 at the beginning of 2012. But
Calling all developers: if you know your way around HTML5 and JavaSrcipt and have a great idea for an app, Mozilla wants to hear from you. The web-friendly nonprofit has just announced their intention to launch a new cross-platform app market later this year, and the submission process is slated to start next week at Mobile World Congress. The
I’ve enjoyed the PS Vita for a couple of weeks now. It’s a fun device, but as John describes in our review, it feels like the last of its kind. Single function devices are no longer relevant and as much as Sony tried, the Vita is still pretty much a dedicated gaming handheld. The company launched an app store for the Vita today, which
While Apple is busy fighting Proview over the iPad trademark in China, it has lost a separate trademark battle in Europe: Wapple, the mobile web developers, have won a suit filed by Apple over its name. The suit, originally filed in 2007, claimed that Wapple was trading on Apple’s brand association and name, although Wapple had filed for a
ToutApp, the email productivity app that emerged as part of the 500Startups Summer Accelerator program last year, is rolling out a new feature that will let users track their emails right from within Salesforce. With the update, ToutApp customers will be able to see who viewed their emails, when they were viewed, where they were viewed, what
When serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavky launched Fon in late 2005, his goal was to blanket the world with easily-accessible, crowdsourced Wi-Fi. While the service hasn’t quite made it everywhere yet, Fon has just announced that they now have over 5 million hotspots in operation across the globe. It’s a pretty impressive number considering
If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more
