What’s a tech startup’s most valuable asset? It’s not the seed money. It’s not the workspace. And it’s definitely not the espresso machine or Ping Pong table. The priceless heart of a promising startup is its intellectual property (IP) — the disruptive idea, the brilliant invention, the genius breakthrough. This hot commodity needs to be protected by… Read More
There is no shortage of Q&A platforms on the web. But today, a new startup with fresh funding is looking to repurpose the Q&A format into something more valuable for the asker, the answerer, and the general viewer. Meet Wiselike, which has just picked up $1.25 million in seed funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from 500 Startups, GREE and more. Here’s how it… Read More
AOL is announcing another acquisition — Kanvas Labs, maker of mobile social apps. An AOL spokesperson told me that the company will continue to offer the existing Kanvas Labs products. Those include photo editing app Kanvas; Kanvas Keyboard, which allows users to include GIFs and stickers in their mobile conversations; and Kanvas for Messenger, which integrates the startup’s… Read More
Early in a startup’s life, the main focus is building the right product for the right market. For most B2B startups, this is the period when you start winning your first 10 customers. These 10 customers are unlike any others you’ll have over the course of your company. Read More
“Brace yourself, Marco…we’ve just been removed from the App Store.” With those words, I visualized everything we’d slaved over for months crumple itself into a ball of trash and — ironically — flinging itself into the bin beside me. But it hardly came as a surprise. Despite stellar traction at over 4 million users and 15 million flings opened per day… Read More
Josh Tetrick, the charismatic founder of Hampton Creek, a food startup in Silicon Valley, bills it as one that uses science and technology to change the way the world eats. However, Tetrick has repeatedly found himself in trouble over company claims. The most recent accusation comes in the form of an official letter from the FDA that alleges Hampton Creek’s “Just Mayo”… Read More
While hip hop may have ‘too many mc’s and not enough mics’, in tech, there are too many startups and not enough seasoned technologists. Over the last seven years, hopeful entrepreneurs have flooded the market, looking to cut their teeth in the hopes of building the next billion-dollar business. Read More
One of the magical innovations of the Web 2.0 era was when the bigger social platforms opened their doors to third-party app developers. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter widely touted ,and profited from, the concept of allowing consumers to plug their social graph into other applications. We saw the meteoric rise of games, apps and business tools that leverage the ability to quickly insert… Read More
Welcome back to another episode of CrunchWeek. We’re very glad that you are here. This time ’round, our fearless Matthew Lynley headed the ship, while our own Josh Constine and your humble servant were on hand to help out along the way. We dug into the very turbulent global markets, and what that means for technology shares, along with a dive into the latest from Facebook, and,… Read More
Andre and Sandro De Moraes must really like to see people compete. The brothers previously created GoldMic, a now-defunct social network for hip hop battles. Now they’ve launched a new iOS app called SocialBattles, where users compete to post the most popular photos. Read More
Uber has hired the duo behind a spectacular hack earlier this year that involved taking remote control of a Jeep Cherokee. Wired writer Andy Greenberg experienced this firsthand — he wrote that he was driving on a St. Louis highway when Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek used a laptop 10 miles away to make the radio, air conditioning and windshield wipers go haywire. Then they cut the… Read More
We’ve heard from sources that Mobcrush, which streams mobile games much in the same way Twitch is known for streaming popular eSports desktop games, has raised around $10 million in new financing, though the number could have gone beyond that. Mobcrush’s bet is that mobile game streaming will be as big — if not bigger — than some of the competitive game streaming… Read More
Service marketplaces have recently become Silicon Valley darlings. The marketplace model has been a popular way for VCs to efficiently tap into the local economies at scale, specifically the $800 billion home services space. It’s a model that dates back to the initial concept of Yellow Pages in 1883. And it makes sense — giving homeowners a convenient way to find local… Read More
The battle between yellow cabs and Uber cars is about to get that much spicier. According to Crains New York, a new app called Arro is being beta tested among 7,000 yellow and green taxis in the NYC area, allowing potential passengers to e-hail a regular cab instead of an Uber. The app should roll out fully in a couple of weeks and spread to all 20,000 green and yellow taxis in the city.… Read More
Namely, a startup that does all the heavy HR lifting for you, is today announcing two new strategic hires in the form of Radhika Samant and Teresa Dietrich. Samant was previously CFO at EnterpriseDB, where she led human resources and operations and was integral in raising $60 million in funding, as well as growing out the team. Dietrich, on the other hand, was SVP of technology operations… Read More
Using a mixture of algorithms and human stylists, London-based Thread works on the premise that a lot of men hate clothes shopping, however much they like stylish attire. Read More
Consumers in their twenties to early fifties are usually considered the most attractive age demographic because of their spending power. Unfortunately, this means that older people are often underserved by companies even though they make up more than 16 percent of the world’s population. Aging2.0 wants to change that. Read More
Vine, the six-second looping video app from Twitter, has today announced a significant feature update that brings more attention to the audio in users’ videos. Starting tomorrow (Friday), Vine users will have more control over their vines with the ability to add music to their content. While it was previously possible to add music to vines by using a separate device to play the music,… Read More
The ancient Romans had a word to describe the most precious artistic works of the time: sincere. A technique made popular at the time involved inserting wax into a sculpture’s cracks as it aged to preserve its life. From a distance, a work treated in this regard was remarkably indistinguishable from its original. Read More
PicsArt is announcing that it has hired Eric Edge as its vice president of marketing. Edge spent the past last four-plus years at Facebook (where he led the company’s marketing efforts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa), then at Facebook-owned Instagram (where he worked on brand strategy). He told me he hadn’t been planning to leave, but when he learned about PicsArt, he… Read More
Splash, the event page service that lets anyone create beautiful event landing pages, has announced an integration with Giphy, the betaworks-backed GIF search engine. This makes Splash the only event site platform with a direct Giphy integration. Through the partnership, Splash users will have full access to Giphy’s library of millions of GIFs direct from the Splash Dash, where event… Read More
While companies like iCracked have extensive repair networks allowing you to get a phone or tablet repaired in just hours, getting a laptop repaired normally requires making an appointment, dropping your device off, and eventually picking it up days later. Techy (a recent winner of our TC Radio pitch-off) solves this problem by providing an on-demand platform for laptop repairs.… Read More
Workflow, the clever if somewhat geeky app aimed at iOS power users that helps you automate frequent tasks you perform on your iPhone or tablet, like ordering an Uber to your next event, making a GIF from your photos, creating reminders that alert you when you arrive at a particular destination, playing a favorite album, and much more, is out this morning with a notable update. The app now… Read More
Two-and-a-half years ago, Rose Broome had a moment that most San Franciscans are all too familiar with. She passed a homeless woman on the streets, but didn’t know what the best way to help her would be. Most people might brush that thought aside, but Broome didn’t. “People are frustrated and confused. Then people who are homeless feel invisible or they feel like people… Read More
When it comes to politics, the Internet, it seems, has been a great disappointment. 