Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems. As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we’ve hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that “arch rivals” GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of course, any potential deal could fall through. Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what kind of synergies would take place, how management of the new entity would be structured or even what the new business will be called. The two companies would not confirm on the record on any of the above. Read more »
Facebook’s Financial Data Reveal It Doesn’t Need Zynga Anymore
One of the few bright spots in Facebook’s last quarterly report was a modest increase in how much money the company makes from payments (as opposed to the company’s primary source of revenue, advertising). Payments were up about 15% from a year ago, mostly due to Facebook Credits purchased to play games on Facebook. Historically, Zynga has represented the bulk of that revenue. You would expect that, as Zynga’s fortunes have declined , Facebook would see a corresponding hit in games revenue. But that hasn’t happened, notes entrepreneur and part-time Facebook analyst Jon Milani , who dug into Facebook’s latest quarterly report Read more... Read more »
From The Garage To 200 Employees In 3 Years: How Nest Thermostats Were Born
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind , a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs . I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs ‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies in the world. There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please read/watch our entire interview then reevaluate. He had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do anything (anything being to help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project” — seven days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? Read more »
Google Translate For Android Can Now Interpret 16 Additional Languages By Camera, Adds Phrasebook Support
One of the coolest features of the Google Translate for Android app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. Starting today , this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish. That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in its first release . Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work. Read more »
Progressive Groups Boycott Facebook Over Zuckerberg Political Ads
A handful of top progressive organizations are boycotting Facebook's advertising platform for at least two weeks over commercials funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's political group. Progressives United, MoveOn.org, CREDO, Democracy for America, the Daily Kos and the Sierra Club are among the groups taking part in the boycott. Sarah Lane, a CREDO spokesperson, told Mashable it would be impossible to quantify the dollar amount of the ads it would have otherwise placed on Facebook "because the money we would have spent on [the ads] largely depends on the performance of the buy." The groups' decision is a response to commercials which back two senators in part for their support of the Keystone XL pipeline and expanded oil drilling in Alaska. They were funded by subsidiaries of FWD.us, Zuckerberg's political group. FWD.us broadly supports "policy changes needed to build the knowledge economy," per a spokesperson, but is specifically pursuing immigration reform as its top goal. Read more... More about Facebook , Us World , Politics , and Us Read more »
Security Firm: “Syria Has Largely Disappeared From The Internet”
Page views served to #Syria via @ CloudFlare over a 15-minute period an hour ago: 6628. Page views served in the last 15 minutes: 3. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) May 07, 2013 War-torn Syria is reportedly experiencing massive Internet outages. Both Google’s transparency monitor and security firm Cloudflare are reporting near zero levels of traffic out of the area. This isn’t the first time the beleaguered nation has experienced Internet issues. Back in 2012, the Syrian government, in attempt to paralyze opposition rebels, cut the entire country off from the rest of the world . “Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” writes security firm, Umbrella, about the abrupt traffic stop today. Umbrella describes how such a cutoff is possible, “Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Read more »
Basico Gets $500K To Launch Luxury Apparel Basics E-Commerce Brand For Brazil
When it comes to quickly growing markets, it’s hard to beat Brazil, where an emerging middle class is driving strong demand for all kinds of products — particularly in the e-commerce sector. The latest startup primed to take advantage of this boom is Basico , which just raised $500,000 in seed funding led by Initial Capital , the Israeli/Brazilian VC fund headed up by investor (and frequent TechCrunch contributor) Roi Carthy , along with Brazilian angel investor Guilherme Soarez. Basico aims to essentially be Brazil’s answer to Everlane , by being the country’s first online-only premium basic apparel brand. The company, which has a full-time staff of seven, will use the new funding to gear up for its public launch slated for this summer, CEO Alexandre (Bio) Veiga tells me. Basico’s first line of products will include t-shirts, polos, tank tops, and underwear for both men and women. Basico’s apparel will be made in Peru, as that’s where high-end Pima cotton is grown, Veiga says, and t-shirts will cost the equivalent of $25, half the typical retail price for comparable Pima tees sold in Brazil Read more »
Fly Or Die: Samsung Galaxy S4
Haven’t quite gotten your fill of the Galaxy S4? We haven’t, either. First came the announcement , then the obligatory berating posts about the crazy launch event, followed by the review , which brings us to this fateful judgement day. Will the Galaxy S4 fly or die? The answer is clear, and still multi-layered. There’s no doubt that the Galaxy S4 — packed to the max with the best specs in town — will sell more than its predecessor, the Galaxy S III. Not only does it have a 5-inch 1080p display, a speedy little quad-core Snapdragon 600 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 13-megapixel camera, but it has a whole bevy of new software features that are sure to delight and surprise. But what does the GS4 tells us about Samsung’s greater strategy Read more »
Ask A VC: Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi On What To Look For In A Board Member And More
In this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi . Volpi, who makes investments in both enterprise software and consumer internet companies, serves on a number of boards, including Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple. We asked Volpi what his biggest challenge is as the board member of a startup, and what entrepreneurs should be looking for in a board member. He also had some interesting perspective on the latest buzz word du jour, big data, and where we’ll see the most innovation taking place in the enterprise data space. Tune in above for more! Read more »
Facebook’s Q1 Lobbying Spend Soars 277 Percent To $2.45M; Google Down 33 Percent
It’s no secret that the amount of time that tech companies are spending in Washington, D.C., is at a high . And money spent on lobbying has also been reaching peaks for a number of well-known technology giants, including Facebook. In the first quarter of 2013, Facebook spent $2.45 million on lobbying efforts, a 277 percent increase from $650,000 a year earlier. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Facebook spent $1.4 million on lobbying , so this is a big jump both on a quarterly and yearly basis. So what did Facebook spend on this quarter? International regulation of the Internet and freedom of expression; privacy and security policies and the education of these policies; education of online advertising; immigration reform; cyber security and data security; and discussions on tax issues and stock options. Read more »