The San Diego TC Meetup Will Go Down In Exactly 10 Days, So Buy Tickets Now!

In exactly 10 days, TechCrunch will arrive in sunny San Diego, hungry for burritos and fresh talent. And today is the last day to apply for the pitch-off.The TechCrunch San Diego Meetup + Pitch-Off will go down on Thursday, August 22 from 6pm to 10pm at Block 16, complete with a few fireside chats, a 60-second pitch-off competition, and a whole...

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Salesforce Ties Together Different Platforms With New Performance Edition

Salesforce.com has pulled together several of its platforms to create what it calls the Performance Edition. The new service will combine the company’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Platform with Data.com, Work.com and its new identity service. Other services that are part of the package include its web-chat platform for connecting...

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Birdseye Turns Your Email Into Art

When I think of Birdseye I usually think of delicious frozen peas. Now, however, there’s Birdseye the mail app, a simpler and more streamlined system for handling your mail.Aimed at the email grazer rather than folks who get hundreds of messages a minute, Birdseye separates emails into folders where they are displayed in a graphically rich and...

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Disconnect, The Anti-Ad Tracking Startup, Now Has A Privacy App Specifically For Children (Built By An Ex-NSA Engineer

More than 1 million people are using apps and browser extensions each week from Disconnect, the anti-tracking, anti-ad targeting startup to block how third-party sites track your online movements and then serve ads based on those movements. Now it’s taking its campaign to the next generation. Today, the company is launching Disconnect Kids, a free...

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In The Future, Google Glass Makes Your Face A Trading Floor So You Can Never Escape Your Portfolio

More and more, wearable computing seems like a very bad idea that will only serve to make it impossible for any of us to disconnect for any amount of time at all. In case you need further proof, take a look at this concept video from Fidelity Labs, which is an early development partner for Google Glass. They’ve just launched Fidelity Market...

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Carrier-Backed Mobile Wallet Isis Ties Up With Chase, Amex, Ahead Of Nationwide Expansion

Carrier-backed mobile payments initiative Isis is gearing up support for its mobile wallet platform ahead of the nationwide launch later this year. Today, Isis is announcing Chase has signed on to be a part of the national rollout, following the pilot trials in Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City.Chase cards supported by Isis now include Chase Freedom,...

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After Retrenching In Europe, Fab Raises Another $5M From ITOCHU Corp. In Series D Expansion, Aims For Japan JV By 2014

The march into Asia continues for Fab, the online design retailer that raised $150 million in Series D funding in June. Today, the company announced a further $5 million extension to that round from ITOCHU Corp., a general trading company whose VC arm, ITOCHU Technology Ventures, also participated in the main Series D tranche. Jason Goldberg, Fab’s...

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YC-Backed Casetext Takes a New Angle on Value Added Legal Research With Wikipedia-Style User Annotations

Why do law firms spend, collectively, billions of dollars on commercial legal research databases, when what they are looking up is law — which is in the public domain? How are these databases able to erect these enormously profitable paywalls? The answer is that they provide more than just the raw text of the law. They provide search tools and...

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Path Opens Its API To 13 New Partners, Including PicStitch, Strava, WordPress, And Viddy

Path will now allow its users to share photos, videos, and more on its private social network, from a wide range of new API partners. Building on the success of its Nike+ partnership for sharing fitness data, Path is announcing 13 new apps that will hook into its network and get a “Share on Path” button.For Path, the hope is to provide more ways...

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TestFlight Celebrates 400K Apps Beta-Tested With Rewritten iOS SDK, Android SDK’s Wide Release

Mobile app beta testing service TestFlight is seeing steady growth, with considerable progress being made during the last 90 days in terms of new apps uploaded to its platform. TestFlight, which is now owned by Burstly, has now seen 400,000 apps in total added to its service, which represents nearly half of the active apps on the iTunes Store,...

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Google+ Adds SoundCloud Embeds As It Slowly Opens Up To More Third-Party Integrations

SoundCloud, the increasingly popular service for sharing all things audio, today announced that it is now deeply integrated into Google+. While its users could already easily share links to Google+ from SoundCloud, Google+ now features a built-in audio player that lets you play audio files directly on an artist’s Google+ page. This marks the first...

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Why Microsoft’s 3D Printing Partnership Makes Sense

Microsoft has to remain relevant to hardware hackers. While they are necessary – no one can dispute the strength of Windows in the business world – they have, for the past decade, fallen slowly in esteem in the eyes of designers, makers, and artists. That’s why their recent partnership with Makerbot makes perfect sense.Love them or hate them (and...

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Facebook Makes Mobile Pages More Functional With OpenTable Reservations Rovi TV Guide Info

Facebook’s on a mission to make mobile Pages more functional. Following a Yelp-ish redesign in April, iOS, Android, and mobile site updates coming today will add integrations with OpenTable to let you book reservations from 20,000 North American restaurants’ Facebook Pages, and Rovi to show you local TV airtimes for shows and movies. Facebook is...

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Weak Touch-Based Laptop Sales Harming Windows 8′s Shot At Being The Next Big Platform

Windows 8 is a bet on touch. Microsoft, in the pre-iPad era, made the call that touch was next and that its core platform would support it properly; touch in Windows 7 was abortive at best. However, according to IDC, Microsoft’s fortunes in the touch wars are unimpressive, and perhaps even slipping.IDC estimated that in 2013, between 17 percent...

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Firefox OS-Based ZTE Open Shipping Soon In The US And UK For $80 Unlocked, Orders Start Friday

How do you make a splash in the heavily entrenched U.S. and U.K. mobile markets, which are dominated by Android and iOS? Release a Firefox OS-based device for just $79.99 off-contract and unlocked, that’s how. Want to raise even more eyebrows? Offer it exclusively via eBay. That’s exactly what ZTE is doing with the Firefox mobile platform-powered...

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Komoot Launches Its Hiking And Cycling Guide App Across European Regions

We’ve had apps to explore your cities like GetYourGuide, we had apps to track your runs like RunKeeper. Now a startup, Komoot plans to address the great outdoors with guides for cycling and hiking based not just on crowds-sourced material but by also pulling partner APIs and running an algorithm over those data sets around trails, landscapes, elevation...

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BlackBerry Says It’s Looking For A Buyer (Or A Willing Partner), Forms Special Committee To ‘Explore Strategic Alternatives’

BlackBerry, the embattled Canada-based handset maker, today finally called a spade a spade. The company halted trading in its shares to announce what some might argue was inevitable: the company says it is now exploring strategic alternatives, including a possible sale or JV or other partnership. A committee chaired by Timothy Dattels and including...

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Wattpad Launches New Self-Publishing Crowdfunding, First Revenue Model For The Social Network

Wattpad, the Toronto-based social network based on writing and reading, has just announced a new crowdfunding platform called “Fan Funding” which offers authors on its network the chance to leverage their huge followings for raising capital towards creative works. It’s like a Wattpad-housed Kickstarter for creative projects, but there’s good reason...

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Apple’s Next iPad Will Indeed Inherit iPad Mini’s Thin And Light Good Looks, Reports WSJ

Apple’s next iPad will likely resemble the iPad mini, and lose some weight and possible some girth thanks to the same touch-panel tech that made the mini so… well, so mini. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple’s next iPad, which is currently in production with Apple’s supply partners, will use a film-based (vs. a glass-based) touch panel...

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Google Play Revenue Up 67% Over Past 6 Months, Fueled By Japan & S. Korea

Google’s Android app marketplace, Google Play, has seen significant revenue growth this year, fueled in large part by Japan and South Korea. In a new report released today by app store analytics firm Distimo, the company found that Google Play’s revenue grew by 67 percent over the past six months, while Apple’s App Store revenue grew by just 15...

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Apple’s September 10 Event Date For Next iPhone Gets A Strong, If Unofficial Confirmation

If you’re in the habit of scheduling time off for key Apple product unveilings, it’s pretty safe to book September 10. The date was floated this weekend by AllThingsD for a press event and official unveiling, and now The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple has confirmed that date. Dalrymple, apart from being the father to an amazing beard, is also maybe the single-best...

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New Kindle Fire HD vs. Nexus 7: Who will win the 2013 mini tablet war?

It’s now been almost a year since the Kindle Fire HD was released, and as surely as fall follows summer, Amazon is preparing to launch an updated line of tablets to compete against the rejuvenated Nexus 7 and the (assumed) iPad Mini with Retina display. According to “trusted sources,” Amazon will be releasing new versions of the 7- and 8.9-inch...

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HTC Hopes Robert Downey Jr. — And Some Internet-Friendly Humour — Can Drink Samsung’s Milkshake

Right now mobile maker HTC has a brand name that stands for ‘Has To Change’. So it’s hoping a circa $1 billion marketing campaign — starring actor Robert Downey Jr., of Ironman fame — plus an injection of Internet-friendly humour is the special sauce needed to lure consumers away from Android kingpin, Samsung.HTC has just released a teaser (above)...

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Xiaomi Beats Samsung To Top China’s Smartphone Charts

Xiaomi‘s flagship smartphone, the Mi 2S, is the most popular phone in China, according to Chinese benchmarking company, Antutu.According to Antutu’s data on “active device volumes”, the Mi 2S was the most popular phone bought by Chinese users in the first half of this year, followed by Samsung’s latest S4 device.The Mi 2S is the successor to Xiaomi’s...

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InsideView Raises $19M For Service That Adds Intelligence Into CRM Systems

Inside View has raised $19 million for its platform that aggregates information and then adds it into a customer’s CRM installation. The round was led by Split Rock Partners, with participation from the company’s existing investors, Emergence Capital, Foundation Capital, and Rembrandt Venture Partners. Overall, InsideView has raised a total of...

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One Hour Translation’s Patented Tech Enables Speedy And Accurate Real-Time Translation Of Online Content

Founded in 2008, One Hour Translation is one of the oldest and largest online translation companies, with more than 15,000 active translators in 100 countries who cover more than 75 languages. The Cyprus-based company processes 100,000 projects a month for customers ranging from large corporations (including Toyota and Shell) that need enterprise-grade...

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After Years Of Bootstrapping, MyFitnessPal Raises $18M Round From Kleiner Perkins And Accel

MyFitnessPal, a service that allows users to track their calories and share that information with friends, has raised $18 million in its first round of funding.This seems like one of those stories where a company goes years without raising any funding (MyFitnessPal launched in September 2005) before raising money from top-tier venture firms. The...

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ActiveNotifications Lets You Bring The Moto X’s Best Feature To Other Android Devices

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Moto X lately (full review coming shortly), and while the spec sheet isn’t to everyone’s liking, it packs some smart features that I’d love to see on other devices. Motorola’s motion-sensitive Active Display notifications is at the top of that transplant list, and thankfully a developer over on the XDA...

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