Twenty five year old venture capital firm Accel Partners is announcing two new funds today that add more than $1 billion to their war chest: Accel Growth Fund at $480 million and Accel London III at $525 million. The Growth Fund will focus on later stage investments information technology, internet, digital media, mobile, networking, software, and services. The London fund will continue to invest in early and late stage European and Israeli startups. Accel has over $6 billion under management. The firm’s current and past portfolio includes Baidu, Brightcove, Comscore, Etsy, Facebook, Walmart.com, Zimbra and dozens of other startups. Accel...
With iPhone app downloads having just blown through the 300 million mark, we jumped at the opportunity to talk to Ethan Lowry. As a founding member of the trio behind Urbanspoon, one of the most downloaded iPhone applications of 2008 , Ethan knows a thing or two about iPhone app downloads. Back in early November, Urbanspoon had just cracked 1 million downloads - 4 months after the application launched with the App Store in July. Shortly thereafter, Apple ran a TV spot featuring the application. During out interview, Ethan disclosed that the application had now surpassed 2.2 million downloads....
I feel like I've been anticipating this news forever — almost as much as Netflix coming to Macs — and I can finally say that the HP Vivienne Tam Special-Edition Notebooks are available to purchase on HP's US website! I know, you know, I'm a Mac girl, but when I saw this drool-worthy digital clutch on-board the Virgin America Gogo WiFi test flight, I was totally smitten. And with a starting price of only $700, I'm seriously considering saving up for one. Source...
The long-anticipated release of the Google Earth browser plugin for Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC) has arrived, about half a year after the plugin for Windows was announced and about 5 weeks after the introduction of the GE iPhone application. Linux users will still have to wait a bit for a compatible version. You can download by visiting any Google Earth Plugin app or visiting the GE API web site. Attention: the file is 47MB in size, because of the combined Intel and PowerPC compatibility. Go to EarthSwoop or 360Cities to see it in action. It will be interesting...
Make sure to look at the latest job listing on CrunchBoard. While doing that take a look at our new Crunchboard Service and Sales Directories. They are a great way to connect with the start-up community. Here’s some of jobs posted in the past week: User Interface EngineerFacebook - Palo Alto, CA Product DesignFacebook - Palo Alto, CA Killer Interactive DeveloperCrispin Porter + Bogusky - Boulder, CO or Miami, FL Web Project ManagerFOX News Channel - New York, NY Superstar Rails Developer Cerego - Tokyo, Japan Senior Java/Flash/Flex ProgrammerRoboDynamics - Santa Monica, CA TechCrunch is also still looking for...
After a tepid start, online holiday sales seem to be picking up a bit. Online sales on Cyber Monday as measured by comScore were a healthy $846 million, up 15 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday. Online sales since Thanksgiving are up 12 percent to $2.4 billion. But overall online sales in November of $12 billion are still down 2 percent. Can sales make up the difference over the next five weeks? As the chart above shows, holiday sales so far in 2008 (the red bars) are struggling to keep up with the levels we saw in 2007 (the...
The idea of making a comfortable living without leaving your home or putting pants on in the morning is an idea that makes many people drool all over their office clothes. No more commutes, no more company politics. There are negative aspects to freelancing—clients can be slow to pay or demand millions of revisions that decrease the quality of the product—but the positives by far outweigh the negatives. But, if you want to work for yourself and from home, you can do it. All you need is the right knowledge, the determination to make it happen, and the skills...
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John waxes lyrical about this bad-ass zip-up bookcase with a hidden compartment. Drool. Although I have since fallen into the German bohemian style of book storage which involves rooms lined with teetering piles of cracked, used paperbacks upon which half-empty beer bottles have been haphazardly stacked, I used to have a love affair with book cases, and this break-apart Platzhalter delights me. I believe that secret compartment in back is where I would store the books I don't like guests discovering: my disturbingly water damaged copies of Naked Came The Stranger and My Secret...
YouTube is trying to clean up its act by cracking down on sexually explicit videos that are just short of porn and spam videos with misleading titles and descriptions. (Porn has always been grounds for removal). On its most visited pages, YouTube will now apply a “stricter standard for mature content” and demote sexually explicit or graphic videos from its “most viewed,” “top favorited,” and other popular pages. Also, thumbnails will now be algorithmically selected. These new standards are not just about YouTube trying to class itself up. The more it polices itself, the less likely that Congress or...
If you thought Randall Stross’ attack on Tesla yesterday was in poor taste, wait until you read what Michael Wolff has to say about MySpace. In a dinner interview with BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine, Wolff says: …if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people. That’s just part of a much longer interview in which Wolff goes into detail on exactly why he thinks MySpace will go the way of AOL. He...
Black Mesa, a Source engine recreation of the original Half-Life, has sported an unwavering "in development" status for the past four years. After a while, we just started lumping it in with Duke Nukem Forever, Alan Wake, and the apocalypse as signs that God does exist -- but that He's one hell of a procrastinator. After checking out the latest Black Mesa trailer, though, we're belting out a different tune. Or at least, we're trying. The cascading tidal waves of drool blasting out of our mouths -- fire-hose style -- make it kind of difficult. Fortunately, the mod will apparently...
Earlier this year Vuvox, a startup that generates rich interactive slideshows, was acquired with little fanfare by eBay. Vuvox slideshows put the generic, thumb nailed images on eBay to shame, allowing users to include video, audio, and impressive photo collages into an embeddable Flash widget. But until recently users had to go to Vuvox’s homepage directly if they wanted to include a widget as part of their auction. Now, eBay is conducting a pilot program for its automobile auctions, presenting sellers with an option to include the enhanced slideshows for free. The results are very cool, allowing prospective buyers...
Pentax's K-m (or K2000, as it were) may be geared towards beginners, but that's not to say it's lacking in the performance department. The DSLR was recently apprehended and tested at PhotographyBLOG, and apparently they had a really tough time finding anything negative to say. In fact, it was deemed "another excellent addition to Pentax's DSLR range, seamlessly slotting in below the K200D." With the combination of ease-of-use, mid-range features and a low price, critics found themselves in awe of the value proposition. It was also noted that the small size was appealing to those appalled by bulky high-end...
The fifth annual Le Web conference in Paris on December 10-12 is approaching 1,500 attendees, says organizer Loic Le Meur, the most that have ever attended the event. Attendees are arriving from 26 different countries. We’re having a big party on the last night of the event. See you there, or watch for our coverage if you aren’t attending. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware....
When Crunchbase, our free database of startup and people information, released an API we started to observe some really interesting applications being built on it. But one of the most interesting could just be Crunchvision which puts on a map the startups indexed in Crunchbase. This service has been created in a couple of days by Mapeed, a french startup who provides tools for creating and serving Google maps that include a high volume of data. If Crunchvision was built on Google maps “manually” it would show an endless number of markers that would make the map unreadable. Mapeed is...
While everybody else was out battling the crowds on Black Friday, we at BGR, well at least one of us, was anxiously awaiting the arrival of Verizon’s latest and greatest smartphone, the Samsung Omnia. We unboxed this beauty and took a few quick snapshots of the Verizon branded Omnia for you to drool over. So far, the Omnia does not disappoint. It is responsive, has an excellent camera interface, and that optical mouse is just awesome. Joining the Omnia in our repertoire of current phones is the HTC Touch Pro and the Samsung Saga making it a Verizon Wireless...
Joost lost the video war a while ago, thinking a P2P app that imitated TV would be the way people wanted to watch TV and movies on their computer. They were wrong, and only recently rectified the mistake. It's probably too late for them. But their new iPhone app, which streams over 46,000 videos including full movies like Men in Black and Starship Troopers for free over Wi-Fi, is actually kind of exciting. It's kind of crashy, could use a better navigation UI and takes too long for movie streams to get going (and then when they do it's kind...
