phone interview
Startup takes on cloud over-provisioning
gigaom.com
Cloudyn, an Israeli startup, says its new SaaS service can help businesses stop buying more public cloud services than they need. As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud infrastructure, many pay for more services than they need because it’s hard to track how many...
Flingo raises $7m to make your TV smarter
gigaom.com
Flingo has raised $7 million in a Series A funding round led by August Capital. The San Francisco-based startup, which integrates streaming video and interactive advertising into smart TVs, has also added two new board members: August Capital’s David Marquart, as well as Howard Hartenbaum, founding investor in Skype. Flingo’s...
Hotel Tonight begins Euro invasion, goes live in London
gigaom.com
Hotel Tonight’s app is officially taking the giant leap across the pond. Starting Wednesday at noon local time, iOS and Android users can use the app for the first time to book a hotel room in London — just in time for next months’ Olympic Games. While the app is available...
Assurant Direct-Backed Protect Your Bubble Launches In The US, Wants To Insure Your Mobile Gadgets, Pets, And Trips
techcrunch.com
“Small things in our lives are important to us. Our pets are important. Travel is important. It’s the small thing that means everything.” That’s what Stephen Ebbett, President of Protect Your Bubble, told me in a phone interview last week. And I agree. The little things are important and worth...
Assurant Direct-Backed Protect Your Bubble Launches In The US, Wants To Insure Your Mobile Gadgets, Pets, And Trips
How Israeli cloud management startup NewVem is cutting its clients Amazon Web Service bills by 25%
venturebeat.com
There are very few tech startups these days that don’t rely, in whole or in part, on Amazon Web Services. The power of the elastic cloud means small startups with limited resources and employees can scale quickly to great size. Many startups that build on AWS, like Tumblr, continue to...
Georgia Tech Professor Tries to Transcend Social Media "Slacktivism"
allthingsd.com
Changing your Twitter pic is kind of like slapping a political bumper sticker on your car; it never started or finished a revolution. But Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing professor Eric Gilbert has come up with a clever way to add impact to what’s been labeled social media “slacktivism.”...
Canonical releases Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin
www.extremetech.com
No one can accuse Canonical of sitting around during the first quarter of 2012. With no less than six different release announcements since January, it seems that everything that Mark Shuttleworth’s company has been working on for the past few years is crystallizing all at once. With the release of...
Redpoint and BV Capital partner on VC firm for Brazil
gigaom.com
Redpoint and BV Capital’s eVentures have combined forces to go after some of the fast-growing entrepreneurial activity taking place in Brazil, together launching a new firm — Redpoint eVentures. The joint venture, to be based in Sao Paolo, will be led by founding partners Yann de Vries and Anderson Thees....
HP to certify Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for its Proliant servers
www.extremetech.com
Mark Shuttleworth has announced at the OpenStack conference that Canonical has received a ringing endorsement from HP in the form of certification for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on the ProLiant server systems. Responding to customer demand, HP has decided to officially support the popular flavor of Linux giving sysadmins another flexible...
Using open source & grassroots to map the world’s radiation data
gigaom.com
Mapping the world’s radiation and air pollution data, using one volunteer with one gadget at a time — that’s the goal of the Safecast project, which this week closed over $100,000 on Kickstarter to deliver a limited run of its open source geiger counters to interested buyers. “I don’t think...
Founder Swap: Like Wife Swap For Startup Execs
techcrunch.com
On June 1, Founder Swap aims to take six different startups and get them to exchange founders, in an effort to get a fresh set of eyes on whatever they’re working on and foster new ideas. The New York City-based project was dreamed up by ScrollKit founders Kate Ray and...
Grammy Awards partner with CBS for digital experience
gigaom.com
In these heady two-or-three-screen days, the Grammy Awards has been a classic case study in how social media engagement can pay off ratings-wise. Viewership of the on-air broadcast have increased dramatically since 2009 in younger demographics, with no small amount of credit due to the increasingly elaborate digital campaigns implemented...
Apple Beginning Independent Environmental Audits of Chinese Suppliers' Facilities
www.macrumors.com
While Apple's partnership with the Fair Labor Association to conduct independent audits of working conditions at factories in Apple's supply chain has been gaining headlines in recent weeks, USA Today reports that Apple is also gearing up for independent environmental audits of several suppliers. The news comes as Apple yesterday...
What The Hell Is Project Management, Anyway?
www.fastcompany.com
"Project management" can sound like everything and nothing all at once. We spoke with a project management pro to clarify what it really means to get people moving in the same direction.Project management seems like a classic chicken-and-egg career conundrum: How do you prove you’re adept at managing projects if...
Andreessen Horowitz Partners Pledge Half Their VC Income to Philanthropy
allthingsd.com
The six general partners of Andreessen Horowitz are taking on a modified version of Warren Buffett’s “Giving Pledge” for billionaires. Today, they’ve pledged to give at least half the income made from their venture capital careers to philanthropic causes, during their lifetimes. Andreessen Horowitz This is something top VCs John...
Venmo, now processing $10M a month, comes out of beta, offers me the world’s smallest bribe
venturebeat.com
Venmo just sent me a penny. I sent it back of course. VentureBeat is an ethical publication before all else. The New York based social payment service announced today that it was taking off the beta label after launching more than two years ago. Why putting on the big boy...
Five Questions for Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers
allthingsd.com
Today’s results from Cisco Systems came in almost exactly on target with the consensus of Wall Street analysts, which given how bad things were one and two years ago, amounts to progress. But after a major company-wide restructuring, and the divestiture of several non-core businesses, CEO John Chambers (pictured at...
Waze Unfazed By Apple's Move Into Crowdsourced Traffic
allthingsd.com
Even as most Apple enthusiasts sit back and cheer new features coming into the operating system, there are often a handful of third-party developers cringing as their products are being usurped. That was likely the case on Monday as Apple detailed the next version of iOS. Apple announced that its...
Peter Thiel Launches Mithril Capital, a New $402M Growth-Stage Investment Firm
allthingsd.com
Peter Thiel is reallocating some resources — both people and money — to create a new growth-stage venture capital firm called Mithril Capital Management. Ajay Royan, Mithril co-founder and managing general partner Mithril is aimed at fast-growing companies that “prefer to remain private as they mature.” Thiel is the largest...
Fanhattan hooks up with Facebook to make video discovery social
gigaom.com
Video discovery app maker Fanhattan is getting a lot more social, integrating with Facebook’s Open Graph to allow its users to share what they’re watching with friends. It’s also quietly rolling out a Facebook app that will let its users search for and find web-based videos from directly within the...
Apple to grab portion of Baidu ad sales in iPhone
9to5mac.com
Apple announced earlier this week at the Worldwide Developers Conference that Baidu will come to the iPhone in the iOS 6 software update, but it just came to light that the Cupertino, Calif.-based Company plans to seize a portion of the China-based search engine’s advertising sales as part of...
Loyalty startup CrowdTwist grows revenue 3200% with new blue chip clients like Sony and Pepsi
venturebeat.com
CrowdTwist CEO Irving Fain Some big growth news from CrowdTwist, one of the graduates from TechStars NY’s first class. CEO Irving Fain once complained to me that CrowdTwist didn’t get much screen time on the Bloomberg reality show, since there was little drama in a startup with a steady business....
ZeptoLab cuts deals with toymakers on Cut the Rope characters
venturebeat.com
ZeptoLab is cashing in on its Cut the Rope smartphone game — which has been downloaded more than 100 million times — by announcing several licensing deals today. The company is announcing licensing deals with Hasbro, Mattel, JAKKS Pacific and apparel company LF USA. The merchandising agreements are part of...
Cont3nt.com: connecting videographers and news agencies around the world
gigaom.com
News agencies that want to cover events happening in restricted parts of the world have had few options for licensing high-quality content. But with the rise of citizen journalism and the spread of viral video during the Arab Spring, a startup called Cont3nt.com is creating a way for publishers to...
News Licensing Outfit NewsRight Bags First Client
paidcontent.org
News companies have notched a victory in their long running push to charge digital aggregators for curating their content. On Wednesday, licensing service NewsRight announced a deal that could be the first step in creating a major new revenue stream for companies like the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) and...
Groupon Hires Ex-Amazon Exec Kal Raman for Adult Supervision
allthingsd.com
Groupon has hired Kal Raman to build out the company’s internal controls and processes, which have come under scrutiny after several recent gaffes. Raman, who has held executive roles at Amazon, eBay and Drugstore.com, will be the SVP of Americas, overseeing the company’s operations in the hemisphere. In a phone...
Steve Wozniak: Windows Phone is more beautiful and intuitive than Android, it's 'no contest'
www.theverge.com
Never one to mince words, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has this week expressed his thoughts on Windows Phone, and how it competes against the popular mobile platforms of our day: Android and iOS. In a phone interview with Gina Smith (coauthor of Woz's autobiography) and Dan Patterson, Wozniak is...
Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA
idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com
NEW YORK -- Kickstarter is having an amazing year, even by the standards of other white hot Web startup companies, and more is yet to come. One of the company's three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribue over $150 million dollars to its users' projects...
Kickstarter Expects to Provide More Funding Than the National Endowment for the Arts This Year
www.theatlantic.com
The crowdfunding platform is having a blockbuster year and may bring in as much as $150 million for the small projects on its site.Kickstarter is off to a running start this year. As Alexis Madrigal reported, the crowdfunding platform saw its first two million-dollar projects in one day, within...
The Future of Pandora: When Internet radio will be in everyone’s hands
thenextweb.com
When I asked Pandora’s founder and chief strategy officer Tim Westergren how much of a threat he thinks his company faces from other online music services like Spotify and Rhapsody, he did something I wasn’t prepared for. He yawned. More than once. While on a phone interview, he spoke broadly...
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