Useful feeds: June 2012

Codecademy Plans Global Code-Teaching Expansion With $10M From Branson, Milner, Kleiner, Index, Union Square

Posted by TechCrunch

Codecademy, the New York startup that wants to teach the world to code, has capitalized on widespread interest by raising a second venture round of $10 million from top investors — Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Yuri Milner — and serial entrepreneur Richard Branson.
It’s been at the right place at the right time.�Thousands of people now want to start their own tech companies, but haven’t learned the necessary technical skills. Millions more�are finding code useful for their other jobs, anything from setting up form emails to crunching data in spreadsheets.
The startup has evidence that this trend is global. It has racked up around 100 milli[...]

Aaron Levie, Box CEO: We Should Have Bought Yammer | Waze navigates users to exclusive discounts on gas | Zendesk Adds UK Government To Its List Of European Clients | Moped strips down and rebuilds Twitter direct messages | Uber Hires European Kees Koolen As COO, To Help It Scale Globally

Aaron Levie, Box CEO: We Should Have Bought Yammer

Posted by TechCrunch

It was clearly meant as a joke. Yammer is, according to many reports, just moments away from a big acquisition by Microsoft, so on stage at LeWeb in London today my colleague Mike Butcher asked Aaron Levie, the outspoken CEO of cloud storage player Box, if he had been interested in the enterprise social networking service. “Yeah, we should have bought Yammer, but they didn’t come knocking.”
But like all good jokes, it’s built on some kind of truth. Levie used the comment as a springboard to talk about the M&A potential for Box and the enterprise space in general, noting that deals like Vitrue and Taleo at Oracle, and Buddy Media at Salesforce, have contributed to[...]

Waze navigates users to exclusive discounts on gas

Posted by Gigaom

Waze, the crowdsourced traffic app, isn’t just trying to save people some time. It’s now in the business of saving people money too. The company is unveiling a discount fuel service that lets users receive five to 10 cents off each gallon they buy from more than 200,000 gas stations across the country. It’s part of a new live gas prices functionality that allows users to update each other on the latest gas prices at various stations they spot while on the road.
The new real-time gas prices features adds more utility to the Waze app, which is nice, but there are other apps that surface this information. Waze’s appeal is that it has crowd-sourced data, so it might be mo[...]

Zendesk Adds UK Government To Its List Of European Clients

Posted by TechCrunch

Plenty of news coming out of Le Web London this morning. Aside from Box announcing a new London office to scale it’s 15% annual growth in Europe, today we also have news that cloud-based CRM platform Zendesk has landed a UK Government contract for its recently launched new GOV.UK portal for government services.The usual Zendesk ticketing system will be used to alert the GOV.UK team to inbound customer enquiries allowing them to prioritise queries, and this also incorporates social media customer service. Zendesk has been ramping up the social side with Facebook integration late last year and a Twilio-powered VoIP system[...]

Moped strips down and rebuilds Twitter direct messages

Posted by Gigaom

Less is more, as one of the great design principles dictates. It’s a lesson that Twitter picked up when it launched its (initially) simple service, and now it seems to be guiding Moped, a startup that’s effectively taking one of Twitter’s secondary features, stripping it down and building it into a new product.
Direct messaging is the feature, and Moped reckons it can do it better. And it’s not just self-confidence either ? as well as launching with web and iPhone apps on Wednesday, Moped has also revealed a $1 million seed round with Earlybird, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and SV Angel taking part.
“Twitter’s DM is just a ‘feature’ of Twitter,[...]

Uber Hires European Kees Koolen As COO, To Help It Scale Globally

Posted by TechCrunch

Car service dispatch company Uber has hired a European Chief Operating Officer, making the announcement today at LeWeb London. �Kees Koolen, who scaled booking.com to $9 billion in revenue during his tenure, will now be “the number two” in the company, next to CEO Travis Kalanick. �Koolen, who is from Amsterdam, will be based half of the time out of Uber HQ in San Francisco and half the time will be traversing the globe spearheading the startup’s international expansion.
The company currently has offices in London and Paris. Will Amsterdam be next for the lifestyle-focused personal transportation startup?
“Why would you hire a European to be a COO?” asked profes[...]

Bluebox Raises $9.5M From Andreessen Horowitz & Others For A Stealthy, Disruptive Mobile Security Solution | Babysitting 2.0: credit-card payments and online bookings | Bright Unveils A Data-Driven Approach To The Job Search, Raises $6M | Enterprises to cloud: Ready or not, here we come | After Seed Labs, Cvent Snags CrowdCompass For $10M To Double Down On Mobile Event Apps

Bluebox Raises $9.5M From Andreessen Horowitz & Others For A Stealthy, Disruptive Mobile Security Solution

Posted by TechCrunch

San Francisco-based enterprise startup Bluebox has raised $9.5 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, which saw participation from SV Angel, Sun co-founder and early Google investor Andy�Bechtolsheim, Google board member and early investor Ram Shriram, and former CEO of SPI Dynamics (acquired by HP in 2007) Brian Cohen.�Bechtolsheim and Scott Weiss, general partner at�Andreessen Horowitz, have now joined Bluebox’s board as a result of the funding.
The company is still operating somewhat stealthily…ok very�stealthily -�as of yesterday, for example, the homepage was just a giant blue background with no text. Although the Bluebox team is not talking about the specifics of th[...]

Babysitting 2.0: credit-card payments and online bookings

Posted by Gigaom

For young, urban smartphone owners, there are few areas of life�that haven’t been changed by the mobile and Internet revolutions. We can book restaurant reservations through OpenTable, take a cab without swiping a credit card on Uber, or crash at someone’s house in a foreign city through AirBnB. Life has moved�online, and commerce is moving with it.
So when 30-year old Erica Zidel started looking for babysitters for her three-year old son around 2009, the young mom was�frustrated. Accustomed to booking things and paying for them online, she found the babysitter search process incredibly�archaic�by comparison. Zidel found herself calling friends and neighbors, looking at Craigslis[...]

Bright Unveils A Data-Driven Approach To The Job Search, Raises $6M

Posted by TechCrunch

Startup Bright has already built a popular job board. CEO Steve Goodman says that over the past 18 months, Bright.com has attracted 8.6 million job seekers who have posted 2.8 million resumes. However, that was just stage one of the company’s plans ? in Goodman’s words, it was “the largest scientific resume trial in the history of the industry.” Now Bright has collected a lot of data about what works and what doesn’t in the job search, and it’s ready to put those findings to use[...]

Enterprises to cloud: Ready or not, here we come

Posted by Gigaom

The number of diehards who resist the notion of running business apps in the cloud is dwindling. More than a third of end users polled recently feel that the cloud is safe for mission-critical applications, according to new research.
The 2012 Future of Cloud Survey, sponsored by North Bridge Venture Partners, shows acceptance of cloud computing for important business workloads is growing ? the overall percentage of respondents feeling comfortable with this notion was actually 50 percent, but that figure included tech vendors as well as end users and since most vendors have a vested interest in cloud computing, that may skew the numbers. According to last year?s survey, in which North Bridge[...]

After Seed Labs, Cvent Snags CrowdCompass For $10M To Double Down On Mobile Event Apps

Posted by TechCrunch

It’s been an active seven days for Cvent, one of the largest event management companies in the world you’ve never heard of. The company, which offers web-based software for online event registration, management and more, has been on a mission to go beyond B2B services. Since raising $136 million last year, Cvent has re-focused on more consumer-facing event solutions, especially on mobile. As part of this new direction, Cvent made its first-ever acquisition last week, scooping up Austin-based event app developer Seed Labs for $4.2 million.
Given its new consumer aspirations, venture backing and strong recent growth, we said last week that “it wouldn’t be surprising to[...]

Evernote By The Numbers: 34M Users, 1.4M Paying, And The Relative Merits Of Different Platforms | Now Wrapp goes head to head with Samwers in Germany | Burst Raises $3.5 Million For Private, Family-Friendly Photo And Video Sharing App | The Amazon API battle for the cloud rages on | Onefinestay Is Like A Super-Fancy Airbnb, And It Just Raised $12M

Evernote By The Numbers: 34M Users, 1.4M Paying, And The Relative Merits Of Different Platforms

Posted by TechCrunch

Phil Libin, the CEO of note taking app Evernote, is sitting on a $1 billion valuation and plans for an IPO, and while it may be a while yet before it follows through on going public�,�today at LeWeb in London he revealed new numbers for just how much the service is getting used, and how much money different platforms are bringing into the pot.
He said that the company now has 34 million users overall across all platforms — mobile and web — with the number of paying users now at 1.4 million: that’s a significant rise on the 25 million overall and 1 million paying users Evernote last reported as recently as May, when it announced its $70 million round.
He then did something a[...]

Now Wrapp goes head to head with Samwers in Germany

Posted by Gigaom

Social gifting service Wrapp is going where few others have succeeded before — by taking on the controversial Samwer brothers on their home territory.
Wrapp, which allows people to send each other gifts and gift cards through Facebook, announced on Wednesday that it was now live in Germany, the latest in a series of rollouts across Europe and North America.
Given that it’s already rolled out in the U.K. and US that might not seem like a big deal. But in the face of a clone, DropGifts, from the notorious copy shop Rocket Internet it’s not just a business strategy: it’s a statement.
The spat goes back to February, when I reported how the Samwers had crossed a line by cl[...]

Burst Raises $3.5 Million For Private, Family-Friendly Photo And Video Sharing App

Posted by TechCrunch

When it rains, it pours. Another new arrival in the private social networking space is Burst, a mobile video and photo sharing solution designed for families- or really, for anyone interested in an efficient way to privately share media recorded on your mobile phone.Founded by serial entrepreneur Bryant McBride, Boston-based Burst offers a handful of unique features for sharing clips from your child’s soccer game or school play, for example. And it even works for sharing things with “dear old dad” (OK, my dad) who’s still struggling to figure out his new-fangled smartphone, and wishes you’d just send him an email already[...]

The Amazon API battle for the cloud rages on

Posted by Gigaom

The battle over whether it?s productive for cloud providers to clone Amazon?s APIs will rage on this week. Amazon rival�Rackspace built its new cloud platform atop OpenStack and will not support the popular Amazon APIs while Eucalyptus, famously, will. Rackspace President Lew Moorman is not sure what that support buys Eucalyptus.
?API cloning does not get you to interoperability. The cloud is not a protocol. It?s a deep piece of technology that has to be replicated. If Amazon decided to open source its technology that would be a different story,? Moorman said in an interview going into today?s GigaOM Structure event where he will speak.
?There are big important proprietary stacks in this wor[...]

Onefinestay Is Like A Super-Fancy Airbnb, And It Just Raised $12M

Posted by TechCrunch

Onefinestay, a startup describing itself as “the world’s first unhotel,” just announced that it has raised $12 million in a Series B round of funding.The service allows people who are going out-of-town to rent out their homes to travelers. It may sound a bit like Airbnb, but onefinestay is trying to create a more high-end experience, with a curated list of luxury houses and apartments. So guests get a swanky local experience combined with some of the convenience of a hotel, thanks to onefinestay-provided linens and toiletries. There’s also an iPhone app with tips, free local calling, and access to guest services like cleaning and a private chef[...]

Hands On With The Sonos Sub | Structure 2012 live coverage | Stanford Teams Up With Piazza, Apple To Bring Social Features To Its iTunes U iOS Development Class | Is Peter Thiel warming to energy investing? | FB's Biggest Ecommerce Platform Payvment Lets Its 165K Sellers Easily Buy Taste Graph-Targeted Ads

Hands On With The Sonos Sub

Posted by TechCrunch

The Sonos Sub, not to be confused with the Five-Dollar Footlong, is a subwoofer that works wirelessly with the Sonos family of devices and adds considerable bass to any Sonos CONNECT:AMP, PLAY:5, or PLAY:3 device. It is a substantial device with two force-canceling speakers that outputs down to 25 Hz.
At $699 this isn’t your run-of-the-mill audio purchase. However, the difference in sound reproduction with and without the Sub is quite striking.
I have dual PLAY:5s pumping out audio in my living room and I thought they were more than sufficient for my needs. However, after adding the Sub I noticed a fuller range of sound as the PLAY:5s took over on the high end and Sub was able to add b[...]

Structure 2012 live coverage

Posted by Gigaom

Five years ago we started bringing together the best technical minds and�entrepreneurs�in information technology to discuss at Structure how the growing importance of the cloud was changing their worlds. Now, it?s clear the cloud has arrived: but what impact will it continue to make on the hardware, software, and services industries that help businesses across the world continue to reap the benefits of this historic shift?
Today and tomorrow at Structure 2012, we?ll host a comprehensive and compelling discussion about these vital issues, bringing together some of the biggest and best companies and executives in the field alongside scrappy startups just waiting to make an impact.
Our livestre[...]

Stanford Teams Up With Piazza, Apple To Bring Social Features To Its iTunes U iOS Development Class

Posted by TechCrunch

With over 700 million downloads, Apple’s iTunes U has been a massive success, but unlike other new online learning services like Udacity or Codecademy, it’s missing a social component where students can ask questions and learn from each other. Apple, Stanford University and the Palo Alto-based startup Piazza have now teamed up to bring Piazza’s social learning platform for students, TAs and professors to the next session of Stanford’s highly popular iOS development class on iTunes U. This is a first for iTunes U and Piazza and Stanford worked closely with Apple to get a link to the course’s Piazza site embedded in iTunes U.
As Piazza’s founder and CEO Pooj[...]

Is Peter Thiel warming to energy investing?

Posted by Gigaom

Last year investor Peter Thiel surprised a lot of people in the energy sector by calling cleantech investing “a disaster” and saying clean energy innovation has been a failure. However, fast forward about nine months, and Thiel just announced that he’s the largest investor in a new potentially $1 billion growth fund that will back companies across sectors including in energy and those tackling resource constraints.
The new fund, which already closed on $402 million, is called Mithril Capital Management after a type of metal described in�J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings. Investors Ajay Royan and Jim O’Neill will help co-manage the fund.
Best of luck to them. Ba[...]

FB’s Biggest Ecommerce Platform Payvment Lets Its 165K Sellers Easily Buy Taste Graph-Targeted Ads

Posted by TechCrunch

The “Taste Graph” is Payvment‘s secret weapon. Facebook’s top ecommerce platform has spent two years finding out�what Facebook users Like and buy, and starting today its 165,000 merchants can use it to auto-target ad campaigns. See many�businesses don’t have know how to A/B test, target, or manage Facebook ad bids, but now�they just set their total budget, and Payvment pre-populates creative from their store, optimizes bids, and show ads to people interested in similar products.
The result is ad campaigns that get 25% better click through rates than those bought through Facebook’s self-serve platform. By making Facebook ads easier and more effective for th[...]

Mensch Launches Menshn For US Elections ? A New Platform For Realtime Topical Chat | With $2.5M in new funds, Pathbrite wants to bring the resume to life | Ten Week-Old Llustre Is Acquired by Fab.com After A Blistering European Roll-Up | Khosla-backed SunBorne Energy raising $20M for Indian solar | ImpulseSave Wants To Make Saving Money A Habit, Opens Doors To The Public

Mensch Launches Menshn For US Elections ? A New Platform For Realtime Topical Chat

Posted by TechCrunch

The rise of social media has been like the emergence of a new and powerful drug. But the the Facebook newsfeed and Twitter stream, despite being addictive, don’t really serve the needs of people who want to keep a conversation on one topic. Have you tried following a decent conversation on a hashtag? Yeah, that. And the old fashioned topic-based bulletin boards are just not real-time enough and too anonymous.One person who knows this more than most is high profile UK MP Louise Mensch, who has masterfully used twitter both to propel her political views (at 60,000 followers she is in the top 10 of all UK MPs) but has also felt the full backlash of the Twitter trolls. It was experiences l[...]

With $2.5M in new funds, Pathbrite wants to bring the resume to life

Posted by Gigaom

Outside the classroom and, increasingly, within it, students use all kinds of media platforms to express themselves and learn. But when it comes to showing off their achievements, it?s usually still just about test scores and text.
San Francisco-based startup Pathbrite, however, aims to change that with a digital portfolio platform that lets students and professionals collect, track and share a range of content showcasing their accomplishments — from videos and photos to transcripts and recommendations.
The startup, which launched earlier this year (and was a pivot from an earlier startup called Rrripple), on Wednesday announced that it has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from[...]

Ten Week-Old Llustre Is Acquired by Fab.com After A Blistering European Roll-Up

Posted by TechCrunch

Online design sales site Fab.com has acquired Llustre, a�similar but much smaller UK design store. The latter company�was billed as a “trusted guide” to discovering good design, combined with flash-based sales (up to 70% off the recommended retail price). It now becomes Fab UK.The company was launched in November of 2011, but it only launched ten weeks ago — so it’s one of the fastest UK exits in recent history. Sources say the deal took less than a month to complete. Although terms were undisclosed we understand this was an all share deal. The team of twenty-four now joins Fab[...]

Khosla-backed SunBorne Energy raising $20M for Indian solar

Posted by Gigaom

SunBorne Energy, backed by Khosla Ventures, is looking to raise $20 million, and has closed on $5 million, according to a filing. The company develops utility-scale solar power plants in India and has been bidding in various state-run solar auctions.
There were only about 54 MW of solar installed in India 2010. But that is expected to jump to 3 GW by 2016, according to the researchers at Greentech Media. That?s hyper growth, and a variety of startups have emerged over the past couple of years to try to play in this potentially huge market.
There’s four types of solar project players in India: large power companies like Tata Power;�Indian conglomerates;�foreign solar developers like Sun[...]

ImpulseSave Wants To Make Saving Money A Habit, Opens Doors To The Public

Posted by TechCrunch

Companies and brands are always getting better at find ways to tempt people out of their money, and sometimes the siren call of those shiny new things are just too much to resist.
Massachusetts-based ImpulseSave has been helping to combat those urges for a few months now by trying to make saving money as frictionless and as gratifying as buying something. Now that service is poised to reach a larger audience, as the company has just announced that ImpulseSave is exiting its long-running private beta.
?People have this hardwired response to gather things, and we want to use it for good,? co-founder and CEO Phil Fremont-Smith said.
Of course, that?s much easier said than done. He feels that ot[...]

Facebook And GE's Newest App, HealthyShare, Points To How Open Graph Can Go Beyond The Web | Why CIOs are learning to stop worrying and love the cloud | Square Ventures Beyond Payments With Debut Of Customer Loyalty Punchcard Program | GigaOM Data Challenge: Predict which stories get read, win $10K | Second Screen App Yap.TV Gets Even More Social With Facebook Open Graph Integration

Facebook And GE’s Newest App, HealthyShare, Points To How Open Graph Can Go Beyond The Web

Posted by TechCrunch

The Open Graph has proven to be a major tool for Facebook to extend its reach beyond its own social network into the wider Internet, and today comes news of an app that could just be the first sign of how that might even go even further than that.�Today the company launched a new app called HealthyShare — a place for Facebook users to set health goals for others and help each other reach them. Developed in partnership with GE, the app is playing off the focus on fitness with this summer’s Olympics, and represents a moment for a brand to make an Olympics mark on the Facebook platform — even as Facebook is not allowing sponsorship into its own official Olympics portal[...]

Why CIOs are learning to stop worrying and love the cloud

Posted by Gigaom

The era of cloud computing has finally passed a long-running phase of �hype and hysteria and has now become a simple reality of today?s business life.
That was the �message from Joseph Coyle, the CTO of IT consultancy giant CapGemini, who was speaking at GigaOM?s Structure 2012 event in San Francisco.
Coyle said most CIOs are no longer asking whether they should embrace the cloud but are focusing on how to use it for cost-savings and on how and when to divest their IT operations.
While many companies are still questioning the safety and reliability of the cloud, Coyle says cloud operations are entirely secure. He notes that most cloud clients were not even aware of last week?s big outage in[...]

Square Ventures Beyond Payments With Debut Of Customer Loyalty Punchcard Program

Posted by TechCrunch

Mobile payments startup Square is introducing a heavily requested feature today with the launch of a customer loyalty punchcard program. New digital loyalty cards will be included in the updates to both the Square Register iPad app and the Pay with Square mobile application.
With the updates, Square customers will receive a digital version of the traditional paper-based punchcard for each Square merchant they frequent. Merchants, in return, will be able to better track their loyal customers and will be able to entice them to come in with special offers or discounts.
The program includes some features designed to attract new customers to the business, too, with the introduction of “firs[...]

GigaOM Data Challenge: Predict which stories get read, win $10K

Posted by Gigaom

In publishing, analytics matter a lot. There?s a constant struggle to determine who will read what posts or articles, what the ideal headline might be and when publishing makes the most sense. That?s why GigaOM is teaming with Splunk to help find that answer.
We?re hosting a competition on Kaggle?s data science platform to find the best models around likely readership across the WordPress (see disclosure)�ecosystem of blogs. Here are the details:
The challenge is to predict whether a particular user will like a particular WordPress blog post.� The data consists of eight weeks of posts collected by WordPress, along with anonymized user responses to each post.� This challenge is an interesting[...]

Second Screen App Yap.TV Gets Even More Social With Facebook Open Graph Integration

Posted by TechCrunch

Yap.TV launched in late 2010 in an effort to help capture the growing audience of users who tune in to TV with their iPads and mobile phones open in front of them. Since then, it’s held its own in a pretty crowded market of second-screen apps. But the latest version of the Yap.TV app could give it a boost, through a deep integration with Facebook that will allow users to see what TV shows their friends are watching and to connect with other users who share common interests.Once users log in to Yap.TV via Facebook Connect, the app imports all their Facebook TV “likes” and those of their friends as well. They can then compare their interests in various TV shows with their fri[...]

Ex-Googlers Launch MightyText, An iMessage For Android Users | [Updated] Microsoft Surface vs Apple iPad: the battle of the specs | They Work! Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Desktop Ads | Finally, a hot Android phone: Galaxy S III is hard to get | Watch Out Pandora, Spotify Just Introduced A Free, Streaming Radio Service In The U.S.

Ex-Googlers Launch MightyText, An iMessage For Android Users

Posted by TechCrunch

During their lengthy careers at Google in both senior technical and product management roles, Maneesh Arora and Amit Sangani were able to geek out on products like AdSense, AdWords, and the now-defunct Google Health. Arora tells us that, while his time at Google was defined by smart people and ambitious ideas like these, in development there was often a tendency to “over engineer” without thinking about “the average user.” He said that, while Google employees always had Gchat open and used Google Voice (or Wave while it was still alive), none of these products were able to effectively address the true value prop of communication tools for a mainstream audience: Syncin[...]

[Updated] Microsoft Surface vs Apple iPad: the battle of the specs

Posted by VentureBeat

[ updated June 19 with new specs ]
Yes, we know the spec is dead. It’s all about the user interface, the product ecosystem, the entire user experience of a product and a brand.
But still.
Here’s a comparison of the new Microsoft Surface and the Apple iPad. I’ve grouped the iPad WIFI and 4G models, as they are almost feature-for-feature identical. And I’ve added the Surface Windows 8 version here, but it’s almost a product in a different class, with a full desktop operating system, stylus support, and more.
I’ve kept the comparison to the device itself, but arguably should include the very slick keyboard cover that Microsoft unveiled.
Finally, please note:[...]

They Work! Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Desktop Ads

Posted by TechCrunch

How will Facebook monetize mobile? Its organic-seeming Sponsored Stories ad format may be the answer. Mobile Sponsored Stories are getting over 13 times the click-through rates and earn 11.2 times the money per impression (eCPM) on mobile compared to all of Facebook’s desktop ads, and 1.93 times the CTR and 2.65 times the eCPM of Sponsored Stories on the web in the two weeks since Facebook began selling them separate from web ads.
The data comes from new studies by�TBG Digital,�AdParlor, Nanigans, and�Spruce Media, three of Facebook’s biggest Ads API partners that help brands buy ads.�Since Sponsored Stories slip into content feeds so seamlessly, Facebook may actually be better e[...]

Finally, a hot Android phone: Galaxy S III is hard to get

Posted by Gigaom

Looking to buy a Samsung Galaxy S III in the U.S.? You do have a choice among five different carriers, but you’ll either be waiting for your phone or paying more than you thought. Due to inventory constraints the Galaxy S III is already experiencing stock shortages at two carriers and is priced much higher at another. While this says something about Samsung’s production�capabilities�and limitations, it also speaks to the idea of a single Android smartphone finally generating enough interest to rival that of Apple’s iPhone.
Sprint had planned to begin in-store sales on Thursday, but it is delaying due to “overwhelming demand,” according to Engadget. Those who pre[...]

Watch Out Pandora, Spotify Just Introduced A Free, Streaming Radio Service In The U.S.

Posted by TechCrunch

Music streaming service Spotify is rolling out a new feature for U.S. users today, which looks like a direct swipe at Pandora: it’s introducing a free mobile radio service. The update is only available in the iOS versions of the app at present (iPhone and iPad), but gives free users access to unlimited music from Spotify’s catalog of 16 million songs.
The feature provides a different way to listen to Spotify, which before was very much about mirroring the iTunes-like experience via cloud-streamed music. You would locate songs you liked and organize them into playlists, for example, as opposed to the more passive “I’m just listening” feeling that radio music apps[...]

VHX Raises $1.25 Million From Lerer Ventures And Angels To Democratize Video Distribution Online | Look out Pandora: Spotify brings free radio to iPhone & iPad | Facebook takes the like button to mobile partners | Tencent Acquires Minority Stake In Epic Games, Maker of Infinity Blade, Unreal Engine | Codecademy gets new money from Index, Kleiner Perkins, & Richard Freaking Branson

VHX Raises $1.25 Million From Lerer Ventures And Angels To Democratize Video Distribution Online

Posted by TechCrunch

For years, independent video producers have waited for the time when it would finally make economic sense for them to cut out the middle man and distribute their content directly to their fans. Then a funny thing happened: Louis CK sold an hour-long comedy special online for just $5, DRM-free — and it was a huge hit. Since then, a few others — like fellow comedians Aziz Ansari and the indie producers behind Indie Game: The Movie — have decided to try their hands at the same model, forgoing traditional delivery platforms and going straight to the consumer.It’s a trend that is slowly gaining steam, and one that New York City- and San Francisco-based startup VHX is looki[...]

Look out Pandora: Spotify brings free radio to iPhone & iPad

Posted by VentureBeat

Streaming music startup Spotify has added a Pandora-like radio service to its iOS applications, finally giving free Spotify users in the U.S. a reason to download the Spotify app for their iPhones and iPads.
Spotify has offered its own radio service inside the Spotify desktop application since mid-May. If you used Spotify and Pandora, it would most likely make you want to drop Pandora to make your music-listening-life simpler.
Now Spotify is bringing that radio app to the iPhone and iPad, and both free and premium Spotify users can take part. Previously, free Spotify users had virtually no reason to use the mobile app because only premium users who pay $10 a month get access to streaming mus[...]

Facebook takes the like button to mobile partners

Posted by Gigaom

Facebook�announced Thursday that mobile developers using the company’s API will now be able to cleanly integrate Facebook’s iconic like button into their design, allowing users to perform the equivalent of a “like” within another app and then cross-posting that action to Facebook.
The development, announced in a press release on Facebook’s blog, makes sense as the company has grown and begun�acquiring�other mobile apps such as Instagram, and the tech world doubles down on mobile as the most exciting area of growth in social technology.
While it seemed like only a matter of time before an Instagram “heart” turned into a Facebook “like” pos[...]

Tencent Acquires Minority Stake In Epic Games, Maker of Infinity Blade, Unreal Engine

Posted by TechCrunch

Chinese social networking giant Tencent took a minority stake in Epic Games, the maker of the very high-end Unreal gaming engine and smash hit mobile game Infinity Blade. It’s yet another toe in Western waters for the Shenzhen-based company, which boasts more than 700 million users on its platform in mainland China. Last year, Tencent acquired Los Angeles’ Riot Games. Tencent didn’t disclose how much it paid for the stake in Epic. We had heard from multiple sources that they were competing with Warner Brothers over the deal. Tencent says that Epic will continue to operate independently and the deal should close in about one month[...]

Codecademy gets new money from Index, Kleiner Perkins, & Richard Freaking Branson

Posted by VentureBeat

Sir Richard Branson: When he’s not figuring out commercial space travel, he’s making it rain on the kids from Codecademy. Gotta love the guy.
Branson is just one of a whole school of big fish who’ve chipped in on Codecademy’s newest round of funding. The team took home $10 million in toto, and the round also brought in Silicon Valley firms such as Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins as well as Russian entrepreneur/investor Yuri Milner.
Codecademy, the drop-dead simple site that teaches you how to code, also saw participation from all its previous investors (Tim O’Reilly, Mike Arrington, Ron Conway, and a few others), a good sign, to be sure.
Codecademy certainly[...]

On The Heels Of Its Funding, Yext Gets A New Interface And Review Monitoring | Bunchball launches 10 apps to quickly "gamify" websites and enterprises | iPad not for creation? Martha Stewart disagrees | U.S. Sen. Schumer Asks Google And Apple About Their "Spy Planes" - Afraid They'll Catch Sunbathers | Mystery enterprise security startup Bluebox gets $9.5M from Andreessen Horowitz

On The Heels Of Its Funding, Yext Gets A New Interface And Review Monitoring

Posted by TechCrunch

Last week Yext, a service that helps businesses synchronize their listings across the Web, announced a $27 million round of funding. (We heard it was at a $270 million valuation.) Today, it’s launching a new version of that service, aptly dubbed “The Next Yext.”Co-founder and CEO Howard Lerman says there are three main additions to the new version of Yext. First, there’s a new overview screen, which includes counters showing �the total number of listing updates for a business, as well as suggestions for expanding their profiles[...]

Bunchball launches 10 apps to quickly “gamify” websites and enterprises

Posted by VentureBeat

Bunchball is announcing 10 new apps today that will “gamify” (make non-game apps and processes more game-like) websites and enterprises in a quick and painless fashion. The Spark Series of apps will make it easy for companies to adopt gamification and thereby increase customer engagement or energize employees.
That’s a big advance that could make gamification, which could generate a lot more revenue for companies, much easier to adopt. Often, past efforts have been tougher for companies, sometimes requiring weeks of custom work and handholding. Bunchball built its Nitro gamification platform for companies to adopt, but the Spark apps are a subset of the capability, geared f[...]

iPad not for creation? Martha Stewart disagrees

Posted by Gigaom

CraftStudio closely mimics the act of making a card or any other papercraft: sans the actual scissors, construction paper, glue or glitter.�Instead, you do your crafting via�the iPad’s interface �– tap, swipe, zoom, rotate. For adding glitter, for instance, you trace where you want the glue to go, pick your glitter color and physically shake the iPad. At that point you’ll see the glitter fall down like a snow globe onto your card or project.
The app takes design cues from Apple: it capitalizes heavily on real-life nostalgia. Much like the leather-stitched calendar of Mac OS’s iCal, you click on the vintage film camera in your craft tray and you get the option to impor[...]

U.S. Sen. Schumer Asks Google And Apple About Their “Spy Planes” – Afraid They’ll Catch Sunbathers

Posted by TechCrunch

As Google and Apple step up their mapping efforts, they are apparently raising some eyebrows in Washington. Today, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer wrote a letter to Google’s CEO Larry Page and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. In this letter, he asks the them about their “highly sensitive photography equipment.” In order to avoid that his constituents in Buffalo have to worry about Google and Apple catching them barbecuing on their back deck, Schumer is asking the two companies to include a number of privacy and security provisions. Schumer is also worried that criminals and terrorists could use these detailed images to “create more complete schematic maps of the power and[...]

Mystery enterprise security startup Bluebox gets $9.5M from Andreessen Horowitz

Posted by VentureBeat

At the helm of Bluebox is CEO and co-founder Caleb Sima, a serial�entrepreneur�who considers himself an old man in the�security�industry�even�though he’s just thirty-one.
According to Sima, Bluebox was born out of the realization that, while mobile use is growing rapidly in the enterprise, security�is not. “When you are looking at mobile, security is one of the top critical concerns in terms of adoption,” Sima told VentureBeat.
The problem? It’s been product first and�security�second. “None of the big players are giving to the�security�guys what they are looking for,” he said.
“Our goal really is to create a unique solution that does not exist today[...]

Crushpath Gets $2M To Help Salespeople Seal The Deal: Charles River Ventures And More Are Backing | Square builds new loyalty features into its Register and Pay-with-Square apps | How collective intelligence is reshaping systems management | Amiando Founder Departs After Earn-Out, As Eventbrite Eyes-Up European Growth | Kabam acquires indie maker of Realm of the Mad God web game (exclusive)

Crushpath Gets $2M To Help Salespeople Seal The Deal: Charles River Ventures And More Are Backing

Posted by TechCrunch

With all of the M&A activity going down with CRM leviathans Oracle and Salesforce, a timely launch from a new startup looking to disrupt the sales process once again. Crushpath, founded by former executives from Jive Software and Socialcast, is offering a platform for salespeople to control a deal from lead to close, with social elements added into the mix, and it has closed a $2 million round of seed funding led by Charles River Ventures to do it.
Other investors include Chamath Social + Capital Partnership, the former VP of Facebook, Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, Jive CEO Dave Hersh and Box’s CEO Aaron Levie. Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, is also joining Crushpath’s board[...]

Square builds new loyalty features into its Register and Pay-with-Square apps

Posted by VentureBeat

Mobile payments startup Square has added new loyalty features to its Square Register and Pay-with-Square apps to get more people to keep coming back to Square merchants, the company announced this morning.
Last week, Square announced that it now has 2 million merchants accepting payments through its service. On top of this core payments business, the company is working on other ways to change how consumers and businesses deal with transactions. The Register app for iPad helps companies ditch their cash registers and the�Pay with Square app on iOS and Android makes it possible for consumers to pay at Square merchants without pulling their wallets (or phones) out of their pockets.
Now those ap[...]

How collective intelligence is reshaping systems management

Posted by Gigaom

Big data has always had a place in the world of systems management, but it might have found its sweet spot in the cloud. While there are plenty of tools available for analyzing data on how your physical resources are operating in your data center, it’s still a lot of work and it’s not easy to truly figure out what’s going on. You could think of it like a Yakov Smirnoff joke: In data center, you discover insights. In cloud, insights discover you.
What that means is that companies providing cloud computing and cloud services can tap into the experiences of all their customers to give everyone a sense of what’s going on. Nand Mulchandani, co-founder and CEO of SaaS start[...]

Amiando Founder Departs After Earn-Out, As Eventbrite Eyes-Up European Growth

Posted by TechCrunch

Well, that’s that. Prominent German entrepreneur Felix Haas, who started ticketing company Amiando and sold it to XING (Germany’s LinkedIn), has finished his earn-out period and is, as the phrase goes, out of here. Speaking exclusively to TechCrunch from Le Web London, he said “I’m going to fly planes for a bit. Then I’ll decide what to do.” (Haas flies light aircraft for fun). In his stead comes Norbert Stockman, a seasoned manager in the ticketing industry, who becomes the new MD, and Julian de Grahl, currently a VP at XING.Haas leaves in September with the other founders Dennis von Ferenczy, Sebastian B�rhold and Armin Bauer also off to “seek new[...]

Kabam acquires indie maker of Realm of the Mad God web game (exclusive)

Posted by VentureBeat

Kabam has acquired Wild Shadow Studios, the maker of popular online combat game Realm of the Mad God. The deal shows that Kabam, a maker of hardcore social online games, continues its quest to pick up titles that are played by hardcore gamers regardless of platform.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Kabam was drawn to the game because so many of its own employees were playing the action-packed, web-based game, said Andrew Sheppard, president of Kabam’s Game Studios, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Sheppard describes the game as a “massively multiplayer bullet hell” game where you gather a bunch of pixellated characters and open fire on the big bad guy, letting as many b[...]

Vungle Creates $1M Fund To Lure Top Mobile Developers To Its New App Promotion Platform | Nokia's 41MP 808 PureView coming to U.S. for $699, meant for rich eccentrics | Twitter was down: sporadic outages persist Thursday morning | LocalResponse: Our Ad Network Has 7 Billion Impressions Per Month And Is Almost Profitable | China's Tencent nabs a minority stake in Epic Games

Vungle Creates $1M Fund To Lure Top Mobile Developers To Its New App Promotion Platform

Posted by TechCrunch

Vungle is all about taking a unique and aggressive approach to promotion. That’s because the startup is on a mission to give mobile developers a better way to promote their apps — and an alternative to banner ads — by helping them create short, HD video trailers that can be shown across other apps in its network. But alternative advertising isn’t just for their customers, Vungle’s co-founders have employed it themselves.
After reading TechCrunch’s post about AngelPad, Co-founders Zain Jaffer and Jack Smith bought targeted search and Facebook ads to reach the accelerator’s founder Thomas Korte and his friends. The ads said they had an urgent message f[...]

Nokia’s 41MP 808 PureView coming to U.S. for $699, meant for rich eccentrics

Posted by VentureBeat

Nokia’s killer new camera phone is finally coming to America, but unless you’ve got $700 to burn, we recommend holding off.
Nokia announced today that the 808 PureView, which is now infamous for its 41-megapixel camera, will soon be available for $699 on Amazon for U.S. customers. You’re paying a pretty penny, since you’re buying the phone off-contract, and you’ll have to provide your own AT&T or T-Mobile SIM card (it’s 2G-only on T-Mobile).
We’ve covered extensively why the 808 PureView’s camera is so remarkable. It packs an astounding number of pixels into a tiny sensor, allowing you to zoom into photos in extreme ways. But the phone also[...]

Twitter was down: sporadic outages persist Thursday morning

Posted by Gigaom

We’re updating this post continuously as we learn more.
Twitter appeared to be experiencing a widespread outage on Thursday morning, users discovered, taking their complaints to other sites around the web while waiting for the company to respond.
“Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” said Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman, in response to a request for comment on the outage. The company posted a brief message to the same effect on the Twitter Status blog.
The outage, which began around 9 a.m. PT, appears to be affecting both twitter.com as well as the various clients that users employ to get their[...]

LocalResponse: Our Ad Network Has 7 Billion Impressions Per Month And Is Almost Profitable

Posted by TechCrunch

LocalResponse, a network that targets ads based �on social network data (such as check ins), is sharing some news about its growth. The big number: It says it’s serving more than 7 billion impressions per month.To be clear, it isn’t actually filling all of that inventory, or even close to 100 percent, as CEO and co-founder Nihal Mehta admits. However, he says that if LocalResponse could fill even half of it, say at a $6 CPM (the rate for each thousand impressions), it would still be a big business[...]

China’s Tencent nabs a minority stake in Epic Games

Posted by VentureBeat

China’s most valuable Internet company, Tencent, is continuing its invasion into the U.S. gaming market in a big way today. Epic Games, maker of popular titles like Gears of War, announced today that Tencent has made a strategic minority investment in the company.
Tencent already had a preexisting relationship with Epic as a licensee of its Unreal Engine, the most popular 3D gaming engine on the market.� The deal is expected to close within one month. Terms were not disclosed.
The investment follows Tencent’s $400 million investment in Riot Games last year, a U.S.-based online game company. With the Epic deal, it’s clear that Tencent is aiming to get its fingers into even m[...]

China Mobile Backed OS Meant to Rival IPhone Falls Into Obscurity | Google+ streams coming to Flipboard, but what about Google Currents? | Texas firm says Facebook, Microsoft violate spam filter patent | Keen On... Vibhu Norby: Why Privacy Is Better And How It Defines EveryMe [TCTV] | Fab celebrates its first birthday by buying a UK clone to rule Britannia

China Mobile Backed OS Meant to Rival IPhone Falls Into Obscurity

Posted by PCWorld

China Mobile's effort to support its own mobile operating system to compete with the likes of Apple's iPhone appears to be falling by the wayside, mired by its failure to attract developers and enough backing from handset manufacturers.
The operating system, originally called the Open Mobile System, but better known as the OPhone OS, began appearing on China Mobile smartphones in 2009. The operating system is based on Google's Android, but was localized for the Chinese market, and incorporated features to connect to the carrier's services.
China Mobile, which now has 672 million customers, had wanted to offer a wide-range of OPhone devices at a time when the country was just beginning to off[...]

Google+ streams coming to Flipboard, but what about Google Currents?

Posted by VentureBeat

Popular digital magazine app Flipboard is getting some attention from Google in the form of Google+ API support, the company announced today at the Le Web 2012 conference in London.
The support will give Flipboard users access to content streams from the search giant’s social network. The stream will give you access to things like Google+ updates/posts, photos, videos, and other data without having to visit the social network directly. Google+ is hardly the only social network to integrate with the digital magazine — support for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and others is already available. The news of the Google+ stream does comes as a bit of a surprise, though, because[...]

Texas firm says Facebook, Microsoft violate spam filter patent

Posted by Gigaom

A greedy patent troll that has already bagged Apple, Cisco and many other Silicon Valley firms is heading back to Texas to demand Facebook and others pay up for including a spam filter in their email systems.
The company first made headlines in 2010 when it sued 36 companies over US Patent�6018761, claiming that�”E-mail as we know it would essentially stop working if it weren’t for [the] invention.” Like others of its ilk, the firm has a name — “InNova” — that conveys technology even though it is just a shell company that does nothing but file lawsuits.
The patent itself was issued in 2000, four years before Facebook launched, and covers a�?System fo[...]

Keen On… Vibhu Norby: Why Privacy Is Better And How It Defines EveryMe [TCTV]

Posted by TechCrunch

If 2012 turns out to be the year when the online privacy economy really takes off, then the “private social network”, EveryMe is likely to become one of the big new stories in Silicon Valley. Formed a year ago in Menlo Park out of the Y Combinator stable, EveryMe now boasts $1.5 million in start-up capital and over 500,000 users of its “circles” (heard that one before, eh?) product which is available as both Android and iPhone apps. As co-founder Vibhu Norby told me when he came into our San Francisco studio, EveryMe was originally founded as an address book company but “pivoted” to a private social network when it became obvious that the world was “[...]

Fab celebrates its first birthday by buying a UK clone to rule Britannia

Posted by VentureBeat

What do you get for the site that sells everything? A UK expansion via acquisition, of course!
Yes, design flash-sale phenom Fab.com is celebrating the end of its first full year in business, and part of that celebration is the purchase of Llustre.com, a bold-faced Fab clone in the UK. You’ll now find the Llustre team doing business as UK.Fab.com.
If you’re feeling a bit of deja vu, you may recall that Fab recently expanded into Europe in much the same way when it acquired German Fab clone Cassandra.de just a few months ago.
We’ve long known that international expansion was a big part of Fab’s plans for 2012. So, when we saw on Facebook that Fab.com founder Jason Gold[...]

Cisco Upgrades Quad Enterprise Social Product, Renames It WebEx Social | After Printing Over 1M 3D Objects, Shapeways Raises $6.2M Round Led By Lux Capital | iFixit tears down MacBook Pro's new Retina display - and it breaks | Livestar builds a mobile search engine for recommendations | New Android Malware is Disguised as a Security App

Cisco Upgrades Quad Enterprise Social Product, Renames It WebEx Social

Posted by PCWorld

Cisco Systems is extending the functionality of its Quad enterprise social networking (ESN) software through integration with Microsoft Office applications and with email clients, including Microsoft Outlook, the company is announcing on Tuesday.
Cisco is also re-branding the ESN software, dropping its Quad name and calling it WebEx Social, as the company seeks to give its social collaboration products a uniform brand using the WebEx name.
"Creating a consistent [collaboration] brand and experience under WebEx is a necessary thing for them to do," said industry analyst Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.
Cisco is also placing under the WebEx umbrella its Callway clo[...]

After Printing Over 1M 3D Objects, Shapeways Raises $6.2M Round Led By Lux Capital

Posted by TechCrunch

3D printing company Shapeways today announced that it has raised a $6.2 million Series B funding round led by New York-based Lux Capital, with participation by existing investors Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures. Shapeways also announced that it has now printed over 1 million 3D objects and currently powers over 6,000 shops on its platform. The service now has over 150,000 members (up from about 100,000 last November) who can upload and print their own 3D creations through the site and sell them to other users[...]

iFixit tears down MacBook Pro’s new Retina display — and it breaks

Posted by VentureBeat

The assessment that the MacBook Pro with Retina Display is the “least repairable laptop ever” is holding true. The repair experts at iFixit have torn down the Retina display and found it ridiculously fragile.
Despite calling the Retina display an “engineering marvel,” the iFixit team actually broke the display when trying to take it apart. Instead of putting a LCD panel between a back case and a front piece of glass, Apple has used the MacBook’s aluminum case as the frame for the Retina panel and the LCD as the front glass. Impressively, Apple has packed in four times as many pixels into a slightly thinner display, but you better be careful not to drop it.[...]

Livestar builds a mobile search engine for recommendations

Posted by Gigaom

Fritz Lanman was doing just fine as Microsoft’s senior director of corporate strategy and acquisitions and also had a nice budding angel investing career with investments in Square and Pinterest. But 18 months ago, he quit Microsoft to tackle a big problem that he felt had yet to be fixed in a satisfying way. Lanman was frustrated by the state of recommendations, which relied too heavily on stranger reviews or complicated algorithms and wasn’t well served on mobile.
The result of Lanman’s work is Livestar, a new iPhone app (Android coming soon) that makes it easy to find the two kinds of recommendations that matter most to many users: friend suggestions and professional rev[...]

New Android Malware is Disguised as a Security App

Posted by PCWorld

The new Zeus malware steals incoming text messages and sends them to command-and-control servers operated by the attackers[...]

Cloud Failures Cost More Than $70 Million Since 2007, Researchers Estimate | Google Finally Launches A Native iPhone App For Google Offers | Job searches suck, but this startup thinks it can make them sexier. And shorter. | Like Netflix, Facebook is boosting its edge network | RIM Loses One of its BlackBerry Manufacturers

Cloud Failures Cost More Than $70 Million Since 2007, Researchers Estimate

Posted by PCWorld

A total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 well-known cloud services since 2007 had an economic impact of more than US$71.7 million dollars, said the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) on Monday.
The average unavailability of cloud services is 7.5 hours per year, amounting to an availability rate of 99.9 percent, according to the group's preliminary results. "It is extremely far from the expected reliability of mission critical system (99.999%). As a comparison, the service average unavailability for electricity in a modern capital is less than 15 minutes per year," the researchers noted in their paper.
It is the first time that the group, formed in March 2012 by T[...]

Google Finally Launches A Native iPhone App For Google Offers

Posted by TechCrunch

Google today launched a native iPhone version of its Google Offers app. Unsurprisingly, the app is very similar to the Google Offers Android app, which the company launched last November. With the new iPhone app, Google Offers users in the U.S. will be able to buy deals right from the app and find nearby deals while they are on the go. They can also use deals they have already bought right from their iPhone without having to print their coupons. Google, of course, always offered a mobile web version of Google Offers, but using the native app is significantly faster and also offers a number of new features.
Given that Google just launched its Groupon Now-like free offers a few weeks ago, offe[...]

Job searches suck, but this startup thinks it can make them sexier. And shorter.

Posted by VentureBeat

Bright is launching today with a tall promise: It wants to find you a job. Not just any job: the job. The right job for you, the perfect match for your abilities and interests.
Ideally, if you’re only looking at the jobs that are right for you, you’ll be able to find a better job much faster — meaning looking for a job might not end up being the full-time, back-breaking pain in the butt it is right now.
In addition to serving up the right job for you, Bright also says it can “remove all the barriers that have restricted you from getting interviews for the jobs you want.”
The company accomplishes this through computer wizardry developed by its �team of nuclear ph[...]

Like Netflix, Facebook is boosting its edge network

Posted by Gigaom

Updated: Facebook is building out its own content delivery network edge network to help speed up the delivery of its photos according to Frank Frankovsky, a VP at the social networking company. Frankovsky outed his plans onstage at the GigaOM Structure 2012 event in San Francisco as part of a conversation about how the network plans to continue scaling out its infrastructure. His announcement comes just a few weeks after Netflix announced it was building its own CDN.
Update: To clarify, Facebook says it is not pushing out its CDN partners, but is placing its own servers inside points of presence owned by ISPs to speed to delivery of its content to users in places around the world.
When asked[...]

RIM Loses One of its BlackBerry Manufacturers

Posted by PCWorld

Contract manufacturer Celestica said it would phase out manufacturing services for Research In Motion, as the struggling maker of the BlackBerry smartphone attempts to cut costs amid slowing demand.
The Canadian manufacturer said in a statement on Monday it will wind down its manufacturing services for RIM over the next three to six months. Further details will be provided in the company's second-quarter results press release and conference call, scheduled for July 27, it added.
"We do not normally comment on specific supplier relationships," RIM said in an emailed statement. "As we outlined in our Q4 earnings call, we are making changes to our supply chain as part of wider efforts to improv[...]

Eucalyptus Moves to GitHub | General Assembly Expands In New York, Has Sights Set On Educating The World | Here's what really happens when you report a rude or spammy Facebook post | Microsoft's Nadella: We will democratize big data | Free Wi-Fi Threatened by Porn Maker's Lawsuit

Eucalyptus Moves to GitHub

Posted by PCWorld

Eucalyptus Systems has updated its IaaS (infrastructure as a platform) cloud computing software so that computing jobs may be started more easily.
The open source Eucalyptus 3.1, to be released June 27, will also be the first version to be available on the GitHub online repository of open source software, providing a central place for developers to work on the code.
Developed by a University of California researcher, Eucalyptus is a cloud software platform that reproduces the Amazon Web Services API (application programming interface). With this software, organizations could duplicate AWS internally, allowing them to move jobs easily between Amazon and an in-house system. In March, Amazon an[...]

General Assembly Expands In New York, Has Sights Set On Educating The World

Posted by TechCrunch

(Photos by John Ha for TechCrunch)
New York is an interesting place for startups. Not because they’re technologically driven or that they’re chasing after the Valley but because New York has something to offer everyone. It’s a town filled with over eight million people across every industry known to man. And it’s in that spirit that General Assembly�has grown over the last year and morphed into what it is today, an education driven startup looking to impact the local startup community and help them grow.
Having outgrown the previous space at 902 Broadway, which is sandwiched between the Flatiron and Union Square, the team at GA has moved up the block to a larger campu[...]

Here’s what really happens when you report a rude or spammy Facebook post

Posted by VentureBeat

Think twice before you start throwing shade on Facebook, ladies and gentlemen; you’re being watched, especially when it comes to bullying, threats, insults, and spam. In fact, you might even attract the attention of law enforcement.
Some time ago, Facebook started allowing users to report rude or aggressive posts, tags, and comments. Over time, the social reporting system has evolved to give folks more and better tools for putting a stop to content they don’t want to see.
In a new blog post, Facebook staff have revealed the man behind the curtain when it comes to that flagging process and what happens when you’re done clicking and typing — and it’s one heck of a[...]

Microsoft’s Nadella: We will democratize big data

Posted by Gigaom

Microsoft plans to bring big data to the little guy, said Satya Nadella, president of the Microsoft Server and Tools group and the executive directing the company’s gigantic Windows Azure cloud effort.
The company’s decision to make Hadoop a first-class citizen of Azure is a huge piece of the puzzle, but linking that technology to mere mortal end users with Excel is what will make big data broadly applicable, he said.
“We need to connect those petabytes of data to humans in a workflow. We put the Excel user in the feedback loop. We have to democratize how users can gain insight with our big data strategy,” Nadella said at Structure 2012 Thursday morning.
“There[...]

Free Wi-Fi Threatened by Porn Maker's Lawsuit

Posted by PCWorld

The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns of a slippery slope from a bogus copyright action involving two roommates[...]

Amazon to Sell Nokia's 41-Megapixel Camera Phone in the U.S. | Google Launches Custom Themes For Gmail, Lets You Choose Your Own Background Photos | 250K beta testers later, MightyText launches possibly the best texting app for Android, ever | If AWS is the Walmart of cloud, is OpenStack the Soviet Union? | Google+ Enterprise Version and Flipboard Integration on the Way, Says Exec

Amazon to Sell Nokia's 41-Megapixel Camera Phone in the U.S.

Posted by PCWorld

The unlocked ad unsubsidized Nokia 808 PureView with Carl Zeiss optics will cost $699[...]

Google Launches Custom Themes For Gmail, Lets You Choose Your Own Background Photos

Posted by TechCrunch

For a while now, Gmail users have been able to choose between various themes to personalize their inboxes. Starting today, you will be able to add even more of a personal touch to Gmail, as Google now allows you to set your own background images in Gmail. Google actually offered a similar option for Gmail before it launched its redesign last year, but this time around, Google – of course – also offers a deeper Google+ integration and allows you to upload your own photos directly or select your backgrounds from your Google+ photos[...]

250K beta testers later, MightyText launches possibly the best texting app for Android, ever

Posted by VentureBeat

iMessage is coming for Mac users in July. But Android smartphone owners can get something better, for free, right now. It’s called MightyText, and it’s launching from public beta today.
MightyText is a very simple product with a killer value prop: text anyone, anywhere, from whatever device you happen to be using. And yes, that very specifically means both your computer and tablet.
To use it, Android users install one app onto their phone, and one extension into their browser. Once done, they’re able to SMS anyone in the world from their computer. And the text will come from their mobile number. Your messages are stored in the cloud for as long as you want, and all texts ar[...]

If AWS is the Walmart of cloud, is OpenStack the Soviet Union?

Posted by Gigaom

The stage was set for a lively debate between public cloud rivals at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco Thursday ? representatives from Citrix, Eucalyptus and the OpenStack project certainly delivered. Nebula CEO and OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp didn?t even get past the introductions before he challenged his fellow panelists on their ?closed? cloud implementations and embrace of Amazon Web Services? API, which he compared to the Walmart of infrastructure.
?It?s reasonably fast, reasonably priced and reasonably secure,? Kemp said, which is why it has the lion?s share of the cloud business today. But AWS will never be incredibly fast or incredibly secure, Kemp said, and while AWS may be emer[...]

Google+ Enterprise Version and Flipboard Integration on the Way, Says Exec

Posted by PCWorld

Google has high hopes for its Google+ social network in the enterprise, with a more corporate-friendly version on the way as the company also continues to slowly[...]