http://www.techcrunch.com Startup and Technology News Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:19:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en OffiSync, the Microsoft Office plugin that allows users to sync their documents easily with Google Docs, has launched a new release today that will make it even more appealing to businesses: support for Google Sites. Google Sites is the search giant's answer to Microsoft SharePoint, so this will give ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/offisync-google-sites/ If you want to sell something to TechCrunch, or anyone, the best way of going about it isn't to call people at their home number, accuse them of dishonesty, and then follow up with an email requesting a clearly unethical trading of services. All those things happened to me in ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/heres-some-pr-for-you-cdnetworks/ As a blackberry user, I generally feel a little left out of of the location-based apps world. FourSquare only provides a mobile site for BlackBerry users (but has an Android app). BrightKite has an innovative BlackBerry app, but it's not nearly as feature-rich as its sister iPhone app. Today, location-based ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/loopt-begins-fresh-mobile-assault-with-pulse-and-background-location-for-blackberry/ Some things in life are a certainty. Death. Taxes. Lawsuits. An example: If you steal from your customers for half a decade and then force them to sign a no-lawsuit agreement before you give them their money back, you're going to get sued. And that's exactly what happened to SnapNames. Last ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/snapnames-gets-hit-with-class-action-suit-over-shill-bidding/ Good news for Irish startups. The Irish government in partnership with Bank of Ireland and Limerick University have announced a new €26m fund for early stage companies. The Bank of Ireland Seed and Early Stage Equity Fund will make investments ranging from €100,000 to €500,000 and will target "export-oriented high potential ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/irish-startups-get-a-e26-million-seed-fund/ Google has just announced that it has acquired AdMob, the mobile ad platform that has been especially popular on the iPhone, for $750 million. This is a big win for the company's early investors, which include Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners (this is a huge day for Accel — they ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/google-acquires-admob/ Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn't work out. - Gizmo5's SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype's proprietary P2P back end. After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5's strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/exclusive-google-has-acquired-gizmo5/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/mojamix-a-web-service-that-lets-you-make-your-own-cereal-and-granola/ After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it's anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the deal as ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/not-playing-around-electronic-arts-buys-playfish-for-275-million/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/happy-5th-birthday-firefox/ Xignite, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of on-demand financial market data, today announced a couple of new customers that are working on interesting things, including micro-blogging information service StockTwits and iPhone app developer Turing Studios. Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite has a pretty interesting model, has attracted millions ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/realtime-money-flows-xignite-supplies-on-demand-financial-market-data/ I'd love to have witnessed the scene at eBay's house back in 2005 when the FedEx guy delivered their exciting new purchase... "Hey, guys! Skype's arrived!" "Awesome! Quick - open it..." "Wait, what the hell... this isn't what we ordered. It's just a big box full of users with the word 'Skype' written ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/last-week-on-techcrunch-the-skype-settlement-hitler-vs-obama-in-the-app-store-scamville-snapnames-and-more/ Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference is launching ShopCloud, a platform for building portable shopping carts and other e-commerce applications. ShopCloud's platform lets developers build a variety of applications around e-commerce, including distributed shopping carts, lead generation forms, polls and surveys, and ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/adgregate-markets-launches-shopping-cart-platform-shopcloud/ A couple of weeks ago, we put DotBlu (formerly known as BluBet) in the deadpool. The San Francisco startup, which ran an online betting play at launch which later morphed to some sort of social gaming service, discontinued its operations on October 16 despite the startup being backed by a ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/dotblu-resurfaces-from-the-deadpool-starts-third-life-as-townhog/ As we were all painfully aware, it took AT&T forever to bring MMS to the iPhone. A new app has just been released that hopes to one-up it. Knocking, made by Pointy Heads Software, is basically a photo-sharing app on steroids. With it, you can pretty much instantaneously share up to ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/forget-iphone-mms-share-100-pictures-in-an-instant-with-knocking/ A couple of days ago, I checked if there were any updates for the applications I have installed on my iPhone, and one that was identified as having published a more recent version in the App Store was TweetDeck, the popular Twitter client for desktop and mobile. Strangely, the update ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/popular-iphone-app-tweetdeck-gone-missing-from-the-app-store/ There are many sites that show trending links across the web including TweetMeme, Topsy, and Bit.ly. Recently launched splurb is now in the mix with its site that shows the most popular links that are trending on social media sites. splurb currently indexes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, TweetMeme, Yahoo Buzz ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/splurb-surfaces-the-most-popular-links-across-social-media-sites/ Last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that they would take steps to remove scammy advertising offers from their social games. There have been a couple of missteps since then, and Facebook responded by taking Zynga's newest game, FishVille, offline. Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/zynga-to-stop-all-in-game-offers/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/crunchgear-week-in-review-imported-treats-edition/ Zynga's most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for advertising violations. FishVille will remain suspended, Facebook tells us, "until Facebook is satisfied that Zynga demonstrates compliance with Facebook restrictions -- as well as Zynga's own restrictions -- on the ads it offers users." This is ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/zyngas-fishville-swims-with-the-fishes-for-ad-violations/ The TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, a demo event for web startups that took place this Friday, was a total blast. No less than 350 people came to the demo pit and meetup, which were co-organized by DESIGN IT!, LLC (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/techcrunch-japan-tokyocamp-29-asian-companies-show-their-wares/ Executives from Tudou—one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China—were in San Francisco earlier this week to meet with investors and do a little schmoozing. I met up with CEO Gary Wang and COO Sam Lai, who already raised some $85 million from Granite Global ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/tudou-a-push-towards-mobile-video-and-profits/ I'd probably feel slightly smug, if I didn't feel so sick. Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view. Unfortunately it's hard to feel ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/nsfw-after-fort-hood-another-example-of-how-citizen-journalists-cant-handle-the-truth/ Just five days ago Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said mobile subscriptions, among other scammy offers, would be removed from Zynga's popular Facebook and MySpace games. "We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value," he said. So we were surprised yesterday to see a ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/horrible-things-slink-back-into-zynga/ Yesterday I detailed my quest to find the throngs of Droid fans who had woken up at the crack of dawn to grab a place in line before Verizon unleashed the phone to the masses. Yet despite reports of lines elsewhere, I failed — the Verizon store in Palo Alto ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/think-the-droid-launch-was-a-let-down-not-so-fast/