Shakil Khan, an angel investor and advisor to Spotify, just launched Coindesk , a Bitcoin resource and news site, amid a boatload of hype and VC interest in the crypto-currency. Khan says Coindesk was a project he conceived of about four weeks ago, around when Bitcoin was surging to an all-time high. It’s now trading at around $124.38, or about half as much as it was trading at a few weeks ago. “I was just sitting there and I literally had five e-mails that day from very seasoned entrepreneurs, asking me — what do you know about Bitcoin?” said Khan, who has invested in the space. He was part of a roughly half-million dollar round in Bitpay , which is trying to make it dead simple for merchants to incorporate Bitcoin as a payments method. “There’s a lack of transparent information Read more »
ProfitBricks Shows It Can Take On AWS With 2.0 Infrastructure
The infrastructure-as-a-service-providers (IaaS) market is starting to exhibit a deeper diversity. Call it the “Cloud 2.0″ era if you will. ProfitBricks is one of these companies showing its muscle in this new arena with the announcement of the world’s largest instance size. These large instance sizes scale to 62 cores and 240GB of RAM and reflect how the company is trying to differentiate against reigning cloud giant AWS. ProfitBricks pairs these giant, flexible instances with pricing granularity and super-fast InfiniBand networking technology. The new instances are designed for companies that run large databases and multiple compute nodes in a cluster, or those that are looking for compute power to help run big data implementations. ProfitBricks U.S. CEO Bob Rizika said it offers high-performance networking by combining the large instance sizes with the InfiniBand networking that can run at 80 gigabytes per second. Read more »
Times Internet Is Bringing Business Insider To India, Adding To Its Gawker Media Partnership
Today, Times Internet , the digital arm of Times of India, is announcing a strategic partnership with Business Insider , the online business news site founded by Henry Blodget, for the launch of Business Insider India. The move comes hot on the heels of a similar deal announced between Times Internet and Gawker Media in January 2013 , part of its Times Local Partners initiative. These local sites are due to launch in April 2013, the company says. The deal will give BI access to a new audience for its content, as well as access to local content written and approached in the same style of quick hits on financial numbers, fast and loose tech and business news, and some opinion and analysis. Times Internet says that partnership is exclusive but is not sharing the financial terms of the deal. BI has a readership of 15 million monthly visitors worldwide, says Times Internet, and expanding into India makes sense in a couple of regards: it’s a huge, English-speaking audience; and it’s a very tech-forward and business-oriented population, with technology being one of the country’s biggest drivers of its economic growth Read more »
This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: 3D Printing, Ouya, And The Facebook Fone
This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we celebrate episode number two of everyone’s favorite audio file! We also talk about 3D printing, the Ouya console, and the Facebook Fone AKA the FF. This week we are joined by our quiet intern, Michael Seo. We are slowly by surely working the kinks out of this process, so bear with us. However, we invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and appreciate all those who listened to our inaugural effort last week. 17,000 listens is nothing to sneeze at and we sincerely love you for putting up with us. Click here to download an MP3 of this show. You can subscribe to the show via RSS Read more »
Nook To Offer In-App Purchases “By The First Half Of April” Through Fortumo Partnership
The Barnes & Noble Nook isn’t doing amazingly well by most accounts, including a recently introduced giveaway program from the company itself that isn’t quite (but sure resembles) a fire sale. Now, B&N has made an announcement that is clearly designed to prop up developer interest in the platform, with the introduction of a feature that brings it up-to-speed with others: in-app purchases . In-app purchases aren’t coming to Nook right away; they’ll be rolling out gradually over the next few weeks and months, with availability beginning in April , thanks to a new partnership with mobile payments company Fortumo. Fortumo will be providing the software tools and resources needed to build in the in-app purchases, as well as a dashboard where developers can track their progress. It’s about time, too. In-app purchases have been available on iOS and Android for years now, and in fact have risen to become one of the most important revenue sources for developers on those platforms. Amazon, the Nook’s chief direct rival, took the beta label off of its own in-app purchase system back in April 2012. Read more »
The TechCrunch ‘Lean In’ Roundtable, Part 4: Are We Our Own Worst Enemies?
Welcome back for the last segment of our roundtable discussion of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In part one , posted Tuesday, we discussed the controversy surrounding Lean In as well as the element of fear and how it plays into women’s career paths. In part two , posted Wednesday, we discussed the emotion of guilt and the myth that women can “do it all.” And in part three posted yesterday, we talked about Sandberg’s advice on finding real mentors and partners who will support your professional and personal ambitions. We concluded the series with the discussion embedded above, about how women can be our own worst enemies when supporting each other in the workplace. Sandberg writes in the last chapter of the book, “It is the painful truth that one of the obstacles to more women gaining power has sometimes been women already in power.” Our roundtable consists of a small group of Generation Y female leaders that represent the Silicon Valley tech industry’s rising new guard: Leah Busque , the former IBM engineer who is now the founder and CEO of TaskRabbit , the startup that has built a platform for outsourcing errands, tasks, and deliveries; Ashley Mayer , the senior director of communications for cloud-based enterprise storage technology firm Box ; Megan Quinn , the Google and Square alum who last year made the leap into the venture capital world as a partner at Kleiner Perkins ; and Pooja Sankar , the Stanford MBA and former Facebook engineer who is now the founder and CEO of educational Q&A platform Piazza . In this last segment, we also asked our panelists for their impressions on the book, and the larger movement it is meant to spark — across the board, everyone found Lean In to be easy to read and informative. Busque is actually buying the book for each of her employees (both women and men) at TaskRabbit, and a couple of our other panelists are thinking about following suit Read more »
Betaworks Kicks Off Its ‘Openbeta’ Initiative To Turn Early Product Testers Into Design Partners
There’s something very thrilling about getting to play with something before everyone else does (that’s at least partially why I fell in love with tech journalism), but opportunities for that sort of early access can be hard to come by unless you’ve got an in. The folks at New York-based accelerator/app foundry betaworks are looking to change that, though. It announced a new initiative called Openbeta that will let average users play with their work-in-progress products. The idea is simple. In exchange for early access, Openbeta users provide their benefactors with feedback about their experiences. Read more »
Samsung Launches New Version Of S Health, Complete With S Band Step Tracking Wristband
Samsung’s S Band and updated S Health apps are new features added to the Galaxy S 4. The updated S Health app improves upon the S Health design that debuted in the Galaxy S III. It takes advantage of a new built-in pedometer for tracking steps, as well as ambient temperature and humidity, and the app also tracks food nutrition information from a database. The S Band is a brand new accessory that has its own pedometer to keep you tracking your steps even when you don’t have the phone on you. Everything also plays nice with third-party accessories and devices, meaning it’ll connect to heart-rate monitors and more to give you a much more comprehensive picture of your overall health. Read more »
Twitter Appoints Adam Messinger As Chief Technology Officer, A Role Left Vacant Since 2011
Twitter is preparing itself to be a company taken seriously. More importantly, it wants to be one that is a darling in the public marketplace. Today, AllThingsD reports that the company has appointed Adam Messinger as CTO, a position that has been vacant since Greg Pass left the company . This would make Messinger Twitter’s second CTO. Messinger spent over a year at Twitter as the VP of application engineering before making the jump. Companies like Google and Facebook don’t have an active CTO role, with some feeling that this position is that of a “front person,” but it’s clearly a role that Twitter felt like it needed to fill, especially if it’s indeed on the road to IPO. Read more »
Um, That’s What My Kid Watches, Not Me – With User Profiles Still In Testing, Netflix’s Social Sharing Feature Makes No Sense
Great news. You’ll now know the viewing preferences of your friends’ kids on Netflix, thanks to the service’s foray into social sharing via opt-in Facebook integration, announced earlier this morning . Because the company rushed to launch the feature ahead of a product release, which would allow family members and other shared account holders to set up their own profiles, that means parents will be inadvertently opting their children in to sharing their preferences for “Rugrats,” “My Little Pony,” and “Dora the Explorer.” Okay, that’s just what the TechCrunch’s staff’s children are watching, but you get the idea. It’s easy to see why Netflix was eager to make its social debut. It has lobbied for over a year for permission to share user activity on its site, as well as to Facebook where so many other companies already share today. You can’t visit a friend’s Facebook profile without news of what songs they’ve been streaming on Spotify, what YouTube videos they like, or what photos or videos they’ve captured, liked, or re-shared using a wide variety of mobile apps. It only seems fitting that Netflix should be able to get in on that action. The problem, however, was that outdated legislation from the 1980s prevented Netflix from participating on the social web until now Read more »