News about <![CDATA[Video]]> News about en-us <![CDATA[Ooyala Sets Up R&D Center In Singapore To Chase Mobile Audiences In Asia]]> Video services provider Ooyala is setting up an R&D operations in Singapore, and is hiring researchers and data scientists for the facility. The company provides video technology to media companies and telcos, enabling them to stream their content online such as the Australian Open, or helping ESPN embed videos in tweets.It claims to have a collective viewership of about 200 million across 130 countries each month. Ooyala has had a small staff of four in Singapore since last year, but the new facility will bump up its presence here to about 20 when it’s operational in 2014, said CEO, Jay Fulcher. The center here will focus on researching localized products for Asia, as the company expands outside of the US. Ooyala will keep its core engineering team in Mountain View, where most of its 300 staff are. It also maintains offices in Sydney, Tokyo, LA, New York and London, with teams of about ten in each of them. Fulcher wouldn’t say how much the company is ploughing into the center here, but said it is making “significant” investments into its growth. Last year, the company raised a massive $35 million round, led by Australian telco, Telstra. It was its fifth round to date. The company isn’t profitable, but Fulcher said Ooyala can make its books positive “at any given point”, but is choosing to spend aggressively on expansion in the meantime. 45 percent of its revenue comes from North America, with Asia, Latin America and Europe after, in descending order. When I pointed out that it’s generally unusual for companies to have Asia as their second-largest revenue contributor, Fulcher said it’s because Ooyala landed a large client in the Times Group of India. “In fact, that was our first client ever,” he said. As Ooyala expands in Asia, it’s also chasing the growing audience watching video on mobile devices here. According to its latest video index report, Singapore viewers had the longest live viewing sessions at 52 minutes on average. 57 percent also watched online videos to completion, indicating that they were engaged with the content. And more viewers in the region are watching videos longer than ten minutes—considered “longform” for videos, said Fulcher. A third of viewers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand watch these longer videos. Other video networks focusing on mobiles are making an active play for the region, too. California-based Vuclip just reported that its mobile]]> <![CDATA[TC Cribs: Quirky, The NYC Startup Where Unique Inventions Are Brought To Life]]> More and more jobs deal in the virtual realm, and are done by people sitting down at desks at computers. Desk work can be made interesting in its own ways, but it's always fun to visit a company that's actually making physical stuff. So for this episode of TechCrunch Cribs, we jetted over to New York City to check out the headquarters of Quirky, a startup founded back in 2009 with the aim of "making invention accessible." Quirky is a company that crowdsources ideas for unique physical products -- gadgets, kitchenware, furniture, and the like -- and manufactures them at large-scale production so that they can be actually sold in stores. ]]> <![CDATA[Rounds Brings Co-browsing To Mobile To Let Friends Surf The Web Together During Live Video Chats]]> Rounds, the video chat app and Israeli startup backed by $5.5 million in funding from Verizon Investments, Rhodium and DFJ’s Tim Draper among others, has been slowly expanding across platforms. Originally built as a Facebook-centric experience, Rounds expanded to the desktop last summer, launched Mac and Windows apps to allow its users to send and receive video calls without using their browser or signing into Facebook. A few months later, Rounds went mobile, officially debuting its first native apps for iOS and Android. ]]> <![CDATA[TheLadders Debuts Its First-Ever iOS App, As It Aims To Make Being ‘Mobile Last' Also Mobile Best]]> The mobile wave has been cresting for several years now, so when a decade-old web company is only now debuting its first ever native mobile app, it's a little late to the game. The folks at TheLadders, which is launching its first iOS app this morning, understand that -- but they are angling to make their "mobile last" strategy work in their favor in the long run. It is indeed a beautiful app, and you can see it demonstrated by TheLadders' co-founder and CEO Alex Douzet in the video embedded above. ]]> <![CDATA[Get a Fresh Breath of Farm Air]]> <![CDATA[Paltalk: It Was “Flattering” To Be Included In The PRISM Slidedeck]]> The eyesore of a Powerpoint deck that contractor Edward Snowden had leaked had globally recognized names: Microsoft. Google. Yahoo. Facebook. Apple. AOL. Skype. YouTube. The NSA had allegedly collaborated with all of these Internet giants to request and access data on foreign users. But then there was also Paltalk. WTF? Even Stephen Colbert ribbed them last week. “You heard right. They’re monitoring Paltalk. Folks. You know what that means. We are that close to learning what Paltalk is….” Paltalk, a profitable group video chat site that’s been around for more than a decade and has about 5.5 million monthly uniques, officially says it had no idea what Prism was until the slidedeck was published — just like every other tech company. And then added — like every other tech company — that it doesn’t let any government agency have direct access to its servers, but that it legally complies with court orders. “First of all, it was flattering to be included in that list of top eight biggest tech companies in the world,” said Paltalk president Wilson Kriegel, who recently came over from Zynga and OMGPOP. “But we weren’t aware of Prism. We’re not giving backdoor access to the NSA and we comply with the law as the law states we should.” Unlike Apple and Facebook, which have recently shared more data about the volume of requests they receive from law enforcement agencies, Kriegel said Paltalk wasn’t disclosing the number of types of requests it had received. The company’s CEO Jason Katz is a lawyer by training, however, and Paltalk works with New York-based law firm Fross Zelnick to evaluate in-bound requests. “Zuckerberg and Sergey [Brin] have to make public statements because they have at least a billion users. Trust is a component that can erode quickly. But for us, I’m not sure if there’s anything to gain at the end of the day from sharing data like that,” said Kriegel, who added that none of Paltalk’s metrics, engagement figures and daily actives have seen any major impact from the Prism news. Kriegel said that he hadn’t been at the company long enough to know whether Paltalk had ever disputed a government request based on its constitutionality or whether it overreached. Other companies like Twitter have been more antagonistic with federal requests for user data. But Kriegel did share some insights into how or why the company might have held]]> <![CDATA[With $1.9M From Venrock And Others, Trumaker Wants To Bring Made-To-Measure To The Masses]]> When most men go out to buy a casual shirt, they think of sizing in terms of small, medium, or large. But a new startup called Trumaker wants men to start expecting more from the fit of their day to day shirts, by bringing personalized made-to-measure fitting to the world of casual men's shirts -- all at a price point that's in line with the current offerings from mainstream men's clothing companies. To help in achieving its mission, Trumaker has raised $1.9 million from a group of seed backers that include Venrock, RRE, and angels including Alex Bard, David Tisch, Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, Velos Partners, Eniac Ventures, and others. Trumaker founder and CEO Mark Lovas (who is himself a former Bonobos employee) tells me that the funding will be put toward building out its company and tech products, from the mobile apps used by its own team and its customer-facing website for reorders. ]]> <![CDATA[Living In The Future With The Form Labs Form 1]]> "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed," wrote William Gibson. He's right. Luckily, the future is mostly in my attic workshop. I've been lucky enough to have access to a Form 1 3D printer for the past week and have come away with a better sense of the platform, the way forward of 3D printing in general and Form 1 in particular. In short, the Form 1 is one of the simplest and most usable printers I've ever used and, barring a few minor peccadilloes, it is well worth the hype -- and price tag. ]]> <![CDATA[Shoot It Straight Video Contest]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[Apple's 2013 13-Inch MacBook Air Sweetens The Deal For One Of The Best Available Computers]]> The MacBook Air was the only new Apple hardware to be announced and launched at WWDC this year (besides the new AirPort Extreme), and while it isn't a big change from the previous version, it packs some crucial improvements that really cater to the Air's existing strengths. The 2013 Air is really Apple pushing the envelope with its ultraportable, and that has helped make one of the best computers in the world even better.]]> <![CDATA[New Beef Ad Campaign Launched]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[This Morning: More BBRY Upside, Apple Discloses, Netflix Jumps, Cable M&A]]> <![CDATA[Source: Instagram Will Get Video On June 20]]> We've been working on getting more details on a press event that Facebook is having this week. Earlier, we wrote it could launch a news-reading app, but we have since heard more details that point to something else entirely. On June 20, a source says Facebook will unveil that Instagram, its popular photo-sharing app, will begin to let people also take and share short videos. Call it the Vine effect. ]]> <![CDATA[Social Web Privacy Wonk Andrew Keen Weighs In On PRISM - With More Than Just ‘I Told Ya So' [TCTV]]]> Earlier this month many people were surprised to hear the revelation that a number of major web companies may have granted user data access to the U.S. government through a secret program called PRISM. But it’s fair to say that Andrew Keen was likely not exactly dying of shock as these allegations surfaced — he’s been arguing for years that the social web is not nearly as safe as many people presume, and that we give up important rights and principles when we become lax about our privacy. Keen talks about a lot of these ideas in his TechCrunch TV interview series “Keen On,” but I thought it’d be good to bring him to the other side of the table to hear a bit more about his thoughts on the NSA and PRISM and how people should view privacy in light of the news that’s just surfaced. Talking with Keen is always interesting, so I’d recommend you check it all out above.]]> <![CDATA[FRESH IN THE CLUB with 2.2 million Youtube views, goes Viral!]]> <![CDATA[2013 World Livestock Auctioneer Champion Dustin Focht]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[CrunchWeek: Path's $1B Valuation, Google's Waze Buy And The WWDC Recap]]> It's that time of the week for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days. Colleen Taylor, Greg Kumparak and I chatted this week about private social network Path's rumored $1 billion valuation and the company's growth to 12 million users, which has been questioned over the past few months.]]> <![CDATA[Ask A VC: Canaan Partners' Maha Ibrahim On Why There Aren't More Women VCs]]> In this week's Ask A VC epsiode, we had Canaan Partners' Maha Ibrahim in the studio to chat about her perspective on social gaming, and more. Ibrahim, who has worked at Canaan since 2000, invests in cloud, social gaming and digital media companies for the firm. We raised an interesting question to Ibrahim--why aren't there more female VCs in the industry? According to a recent report, of the 25 most active VC firms in 2011, only 8% of their investment professionals were women. Many of these firms don't have female investment professionals at all.]]> <![CDATA[Former WLAC Bailey Ballou Works for LMA PAC]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[Fly Or Die: Divvy]]> As photo-sharing truly hits its stride, an entire ecosystem is born around it. But what is creation without consumption? That's what Divvy is all about. We met the folks behind Divvy at the TC Meetup + Pitch-Off. At it's core, the app aggregates all your photos from Facebook and Instagram (Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox all coming soon) into one filter-capable stream. You can also save photos from Instagram, zoom in on photos, and share with groups or individuals. ]]> <![CDATA[Apple (AAPL) Eyeing iPhone ‘phablets’]]> News agency Reuters is reporting that Apple (AAPL) is exploring the possibility of building at least two bigger iPhones next year, one with a 4.7-inch screen and one with a 5.7-inch screen. The 5.7-inch device, which if build will be in direct competition with Samsung’s popular Galaxy “phablets”, would reportedly join a wider array of [...]

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]]> <![CDATA[Inside The Storenvy Pop-Up Shop, Where E-Commerce Meets Brick And Mortar [TCTV]]]> Some people are afraid that online shopping will lead to the death of brick and mortar retail (and a spate of empty storefronts on our streets.) But Storenvy, the online marketplace that lets independent merchants sell their wares in their own digital storefronts, is one of a number of web companies that's making a reverse commute of sorts -- bringing their web businesses into meatspace. Storenvy opened its pop-up shop in San Francisco with the intention that it would be a temporary 30-day thing. Four months later, it's become a pretty popular destination, and the company's CEO Jon Crawford now says that he is looking at opening more brick and mortar locations elsewhere in the U.S. in the months ahead. ]]> <![CDATA[BASF Growing Today for Tomorrow Video]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[Sizemore on CNBC Asia: “Japanese Equity Market at Extreme Risk”]]> <![CDATA[Social Gifting App Maker Wrapp Closes On $15 Million In Series B Funding]]> There is a very real "crunch" going on at the Series A and Series B levels of funding, as a number of startups that launched to great enthusiasm a few years back are having trouble getting more support from investors nowadays. That's especially true for companies with a heavy focus on the social web. But Wrapp, the social gifting service, has shown that it is not another victim. Wrapp is announcing today that it has closed on $15 million in fresh funding to continue to grow its business, which is jointly based in Stockholm, Sweden and San Francisco, California. The round, which serves as Wrapp's Series B, included participation from existing Wrapp investors Greylock Partners, Atomico and Creandum, along with new investors American Express, Qualcomm Ventures, and SEB Private Equity. This brings the total amount invested in Wrapp to $25.5 million.]]> <![CDATA[Tesla Motors (TSLA): Buy, Sell or Hold?]]> Tesla Motors‘ (TSLA) price target raised to $118 from $70 at Robert W. Baird drew heated sentiment from the CNBC’s “Fast Money” traders Wednesday. OptionMonster’s Jon Najarian was against a potential upside of 21% from the company’s current price. “I don’t know why you wouldn’t love this stock,” he said. “Look, in May the sales [...]

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]]> <![CDATA[Hublished Gets Funding From NYU Prof. (AKA FirstMark Capital's Lawrence Lenihan) During Spring Class]]> Hublished is still in private beta, so details are sparse on what the new content distribution platform (which reportedly helps content producers market their work through a webinar, e-book, podcast marketplace/network) is up to. However, we do know that the company has received over $150k in funding before its forthcoming beta launch next month. So where did this cash come from? ]]> <![CDATA[Comcast, Time Warner Holding Ground Against, NFLX, INTC, Says Baird]]> <![CDATA[Alabama-Based CMR Demos Programmable Magnets That Changes Polarity And Strength On A Whim]]> Magnets are pretty basic - some poles attract, some repel, and you can use them to hold stuff up on your fridge. However, what happens when magnets can be "programmed" to react in different ways? Huntsville, Ala.-based Correlated Magnetics Research has some magnets that can do some amazing - and slightly spooky - things. ]]> <![CDATA[Farmer Boys Head of Security?]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[Idomoo picks up $9M to tailor marketing videos to specific customers]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Take A Peek At The Inner Workings Of MakerBot's New Brooklyn Factory]]> Brooklyn-based MakerBot is a darling of the 3D printing community, and it recently moved into some brand new digs in Sunset Park so the crew can more efficiently build and ship their shiny new Replicator 2 and 2X printers. Call it a classic case of growing pains -- once demand for 3D printers started picking up, the Makerbot team soon found themselves aching for even more space to work in, and we got the chance to tour the new 50,000 square foot facility when it opened last week.]]> <![CDATA[Gillmor Gang: Cider House Rules]]> The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — absorb the WWDC keynote. iOS7, OS/10 Mavericks, Macbook Air refresh, and iTunes Radio were the big bullets, but underlying the event was the resurgence of Apple as the leader in setting the agenda. Not everyone buys this perspective, of course. @scobleizer sees this as the assignment of RIM and Microsoft to the dustbin of history. But wait, there’s XBox. @dbfarber provides the context, @kevinmarks the technopop view, and I watch from the comfort of my living room as Apple TV looms, the elephant in the room. 1080P HD straight into the living room, iOS7′s control panel makes AirPlay one scroll and click away. Apple no longer feels haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs; they’re having fun again in Cupertino. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor Live recording chat stream]]> <![CDATA[Keen On… Internet Access: Does American Broadband Suck?]]> For years, it's been taken for granted that the US ranks low in the broadband performance table. But a controversial piece by ITIF's Richard Bennett explodes the myth of poor US broadband. Not everyone, however, agrees with Bennett. So, to debate the ITIF Senior Research Fellow, I invited Public Knowledge SVP Harold Feld, who has a much less positive take on America's broadband reality.]]> <![CDATA[Gillmor Gang Live 06.10.13 (TCTV)]]> Gillmor Gang Live - Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Recording live today at 8pm Pacific time.]]> <![CDATA[The TechCrunch TV WWDC Wrap-Up: OS X Mavericks, iOS 7, Apple Steps On Pandora's Turf, And More]]> You may have heard that there was some Apple news today -- a lot of it, in fact. So to make sense out of all the news that came out of the WWDC keynote in San Francisco this morning, we brought in Greg Kumparak and Darrell Etherington, two TechCrunch reporters who were at the event in person, to tell us all about the biggest takeaways. ]]> <![CDATA[Benefits of Mintrex Cu on Pigs & Mode of Action]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[Hogtoberfeast Was a Feast]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[New Holland Genesis T8 in Action]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[Covestor profiles: CJ Brott]]> <![CDATA[EFF's Peter Eckersley On ‘Clever' PRISM Denials, Fighting FISA, And Why Privacy Matters [TCTV]]]> It's had to have been an interesting week for the people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The non-profit has been beating the drum about the importance of digital rights, privacy, and metadata for decades now. And in recent years, one of the EFF's causes has been to shed more light on the United States' National Security Agency (NSA) and specifically its use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to essentially spy on the telecommunications and web activity of millions of innocent Americans under the guise of keeping them safe.]]> <![CDATA[Gillmor Gang: Back in the USSR]]> The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — view the world through PRISM glasses. We, or me, couldn't help wondering what part of surpised we are at the idea we're being monitored and scraped within an inch of our metadata. It's hard to tell whether we're worried about losing our individual freedoms, or having to do the hard work of balancing the tradeoffs in a dangerous world of drones and the streams that feed them. ]]> <![CDATA[CrunchWeek: Zynga's Big Layoffs, OMGPOP Gets The Axe, NSA Spying Emerges With Verizon]]> Are you feeling like you're ready to kick off the weekend, but could just use three more opinions on the biggest tech news stories of the week before you really get the party started? Well you came to the right place, because it's time for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days. I'd be amiss if I didn't acknowledge that this episode is missing a big, huge, massive story. We taped this late Thursday afternoon, one day earlier than normal, so that Leena Rao and I could say our proper CrunchWeek goodbyes sayonara to Drew Olanoff, who is departing TechCrunch for the purple shores of Yahoo. ]]> <![CDATA[Where Exactly Do Central Banks Exit? And How?]]> Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic are pondering ways of unwinding their bloated balance sheets and easing out of extraordinary post-crisis monetary policy interventions. This column discusses the recent Geneva Conference on the World Economy that focused on ‘exit strategies’. Where exactly do central banks exit? And how? This column also introduces a [...]

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]]> <![CDATA[Who's Telling The Truth About PRISM? Computer Security Expert Gene Spafford Weighs In [TCTV]]]> Between the reports this week about that the U.S. National Security Agency has been mining personal user data from some of the world's biggest Internet players through a project called 'PRISM', to the government's defense of wide scale data collection for security reasons, and finally the outright denials from web companies that they had ever even heard of PRISM let alone cooperated with it, it's hard to know what's really going on. So we were pleased today to have the chance to speak with Eugene H. Spafford, aka "Spaf," a computer science professor at Purdue University and a noted expert in computer security and ethics whose C.V. includes time serving on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, to help elucidate what's going on here -- and perhaps point us in the direction of the truth here.]]> <![CDATA[Revitalizing New Holland Construction]]> Continue reading →]]> <![CDATA[Ask A VC: Redpoint's Chris Moore On What He Looks For In An Ad Tech Startup And More]]> In this week's Ask A VC show, Redpoint Partner Chris Moore joined us in the studio to discuss how he sources and spots promising startups, and more. Moore focuses on making investments for Redpoint in consumer internet, online marketing and SaaS companies, and has led Redpoint's investment in Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), Right Media (acquired by Yahoo), Auditude (acquired by Adobe), and IntoNow (acquired by Yahoo). Considering the many successful exits Moore has helped startups navigate through (especially in the ad tech space), we asked him how he knows when a company has the potential to go public vs. stay private, and accept an acquisition offer.]]> <![CDATA[Gillmor Gang Live 06.07.13 (TCTV)]]> Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording live today at 1pm Pacific time.]]> <![CDATA[This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Form 1 3D Printer, WWDC, And WWDC]]> If you've got that summertime sadness, look no further than this week's TC Gadgets Podcast. In it, we discuss the new Form 1 printer which is meant to compete with the likes of MakerBot, as well as all the upcoming WWDC goodness from Apple, including a revamped iOS 7, the new iRadio, and even some new MacBooks? Maybe? ]]> <![CDATA[Social Video Network Keek Passes 45M Users, Adding Over 24M Users Since Vine's Launch]]> Toronto-based social video network Keek has seen some tremendous growth recently, adding on 24 million users in just four months to bring its network to a total reach of 45 million registered members. The platform's growth is perhaps most interesting in that nearly half of it has taken place since the launch of Twitter's Vine video-focused mobile social networking app.]]>