Category: Tech news

BREAKING: SXSW is about to get even more interesting than normal. Secret, the app which lets you share anonymously amongst friends and friends of friends, has announced a web feed of SXSW ‘secrets’ that are posted from there or mention it. You can check it out at secret.ly/sxsw. We’ll have more info in just a moment… Suffice it to say some of the more interesting gossip at SXSW is going to… Read More

Facebook plans to reveal new ways for developers to grow and monetize their apps. Today it announced it will hold its F8 developer conference on April 30th in San Francisco. It will have been almost three years since Facebook’s last F8 when it unveiled Timeline and the Open Graph platform in 2011. The audience at SF’s Design Concourse will include “More than 1,500 mobile and web… Read More

Despite what many are led to believe, great startups rarely move linearly “up and to the right.” They zig, they zag, they take detours and often “pivot” several times to get to a positive outcome. The BlueKai story is a great example of this point, which I make often to entrepreneurs. Read More

Dropping my phone into a blender on purpose seemed like a terrible idea. But I did it anyway.

While it isn’t the most fully featured fitness band, the Vivofit is certainly the most motivating one we’ve used.

For New York City’s startup community, the future venture capitalists have hoped for may be taking place right now. Over the past two days New York startups have announced nearly $200 million in funding, so the question may not be “When will New York be a venture hub in its own right?” but instead “How soon is now?” The city is already on pace for the best first… Read More

“We want to enable straight playback from Spotify on other services”, CEO Daniel Ek tells me. It’s part of why his company just acquired The Echo Nest, the top music personalization and discovery API in the industry. EchoNest’s CEO Jim Lucchese explains “We’ve both invested in platform approaches to music. To combine those creates such a cool opportunity for developers anywhere that music… Read More

Bloodhound, a company previously focused on providing software tools for the conference space, today released Android and iOS applications focusing on mobile lead capture. In short, Bloodhound built a set of tools for event planners and attendees. Part of that suite was the ability to quickly take down the information of someone you just met, and then follow up with them quickly. Lead capture, in… Read More

Is this man really the father of Bitcoin? After a full day of wild speculation and anger, the LA press has finally tracked down Nakamoto and he’s receiving a grilling. According to reports, Nakamoto and an AP reporter went to a sushi restaurant earlier this afternoon while the rest of the press followed along. Finally, the 64-year-old man went to the AP offices where he conducted his only… Read More

Shopping search and comparison engine TheFind, which launched its iPhone application last fall and has now grown its iOS footprint to over 1 million users, today launched its service on Android. Like its iOS counterpart, the new app lets you type in keywords or scan barcodes in order to search across over 500,000 stores and 500 million products, then find coupons, store locations, and price… Read More

Jack Tretton has left the game. The longtime Sony executive is stepping down from his role as President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America where he was essentially in charge of the state-side PlayStation division. The news comes from a late-day press release that doesn’t reveal any details about the departure. It simply states that “this is a result of a mutual agreement… Read More

Iddiction, an app developer and marketing platform backed by $4 million in funding, just launched a new app discovery network called Xplode. It’s a bottom bar that sits in apps across the network. When you tap it, a menu of other apps pops up. The company, which had been running an App-O-Day product that promoted one app at a time, is shifting into this new model. They’re not charging… Read More

You may not know the name Lumus now, but expect to be hearing a lot from them in the future. When we first met the Lumus rep Ari Grobman two years ago he showed us some amazing technology. It was basically an augmented reality display embedded into a standard lens that could fit into a standard pair of glasses. The 720p model displayed a binocular image at near HD quality right in front of your… Read More

On the heels of the news that Founders Fund has raised a massive $1 billion for its fifth fund, the venture capital firm is slimming down its top ranks, with now-former partner Sean Parker stepping down. While the split is perhaps surprising given that Founders Fund is more than able to line up capital to invest, according to the firm, Parker’s exit is neither immediate nor… Read More

At this year’s Dx3 digital business expo in Toronto, one of the highlights was a Seattle-based company called Hointer that’s aiming for nothing short of a complete revolution in the way we buy clothes in stores – and it’s using robots to make it happen. If you ask the average guy about their least favorite part of the shopping experience, a good chunk of them are probably… Read More