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Music Hack Day Is Coming To San Francisco

What do you get when you combine music with frantic, all night hour coding sessions?  An event called Music Hack Day, where developers have 24 hours to hack together a new music-related app, which they then show off to their peers at event’s conclusion. Music Hack Day has previously been held in London, Berlin, [...]

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Fri, April 9 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Twitter Fills Its First Hole With An Official BlackBerry App

That didn’t take long. Two days ago, well known VC (and early Twitter investor) Fred Wilson wrote a post telling Twitter startups to stop filling holes in Twitter’s products and to instead look to launch killer apps that start entirely new businesses. That led some third party developers to question if Wilson was hinting that [...]

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Fri, April 9 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Venture Funding Doubled To $12.8 Billion In First Quarter

Venture capital is flowing once again to startups at a steady pace. During the first quarter of 2010, the total value of venture funding doubled to $12.8 billion from $6 billion a year before, when it was scraping the bottom of the barrel. However, the funding amount is down 16 percent from the [...]

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Tue, April 6 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Copy/Paste Innovation: Groupon Gets Cloned In Russia And China

Even a casual glance at new Russian site BigLion shows you that the creators not only copied Groupon’s business model, but they also just ripped the site design and navigation off completely, too. The sites look nearly identical, even down to the smallest details.
What’s more, the practice seems to be accepted in Russia, and the [...]

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Sun, April 4 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Top VCs Debate Rising Startup Valuations [Video]

The venture capital valuations for still-have-that-new-car-smell startups like Quora, FourSquare, Blippy are reaching unprecedented levels, and we wanted to find out why. Top VCs Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and David Hornik came by the TechCrunch offices to debate the issue.
Four month old Blippy is worth around $38 million. Quora, still in private beta, is valued [...]

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Sun, April 4 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

All The Cool Kids are Coming to Disrupt. Are You?

Do you want TV everywhere? And wonder what might happen after the Comcast-NBC merger is complete? Or want to know how technologists and financiers see the digital-content market evolving? So do we. That’s why we invited insiders like Avner Ronen and Quincy Smith to speak at Disrupt, our media and technology conference taking place May [...]

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Thu, April 1 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Tomorrow, SimpleGeo Launches Into Location Orbit With 5,000 Partners In Tow

If you’ll pardon the pun, SimpleGeo has positioned itself well.
With a frenzy of activity surrounding location-based services, more and more startups are launching ideas that rely heavily on location. But implementing location is still a relatively complicated process. And that’s where SimpleGeo comes in.
We’ve written about the service a number of times over the past [...]

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Tue, March 30 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Miso Gets Big Brand Love. Check-In To The Hot Tub Time Machine

For the past few years, being the “Twitter for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK” has been a popular trend among startups. Now, we’re starting to see a shift. Several new startups are launching as the “Foursquare for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK.” And big brands are actually starting to take notice.
Miso is an iPhone app that incorporates the “check-in” idea with watching movies [...]

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Sun, March 28 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Foursquare Goes Dark Too. Unintentionally.

Earlier we made fun of Bing for going “dark” today to save energy in a way that doesn’t at all save energy. But Foursquare has an actual way to do that: take down the entire service.
Yesterday, Foursquare had some downtime. That’s nothing new, startups have downtime all the time — see: Twitter, that was [...]

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Sun, March 28 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Mike Maples Goes Pro As A Venture Capitalist, Launches FLOODGATE

Mike Maples, one of the co-founders of Motive, has been investing “as a hobby” for the last five years under the banner of Maples Investments. Some hobby: his investments include Twitter, Digg, Chegg, Gowalla, ngmoco, Smule, Kwedit and a dozen or so other well known startups. And he’s already cashed in on a few of [...]

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Wed, March 24 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments