Ryan covers Silicon Valley startups for GigaOM, after spending more than five years on the digital media and telecom beats for a variety of publications in San Francisco and New York. Prior to joining GigaOM, Ryan followed online video and digital media trends for the United Business Media-owned blog Contentinople. Before that, he covered telecom infrastructure for Light Reading. Ryan is a frequent speaker at digital media events, including NAB, SXSW and Social Media Week.
Simulmedia announced that it has raised a $6 million Series C round from its existing group of investors, which include Avalon Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Time Warner Investments. That money will be put toward sales and support as it grabs more TV ad dollars. Read more »
Video chat startup Tango has raised another big round of funding, bringing in $40 million in Series C financing led by Qualcomm Ventures and Access Industries. That comes on the heels of impressive growth, with more than 45 million users signed up in just 18 months. Read more »
If this week’s NAB Show is any indication, by 2020 “broadcasting” is a term that will be foreign to anyone under 40. Based its programming, it seems that pretty soon no one will be concerned about how content is distributed — just whether or not it’s good. Read more »
James Cameron and Vince Pace have been working together on 3-D for years, but now the two are hoping to revolutionize the 3-D video market. I got a chance to sit down with them and talk about the future of 3-D in the home. Read more »
On Tuesday, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos took the stage at the NAB Show in Las Vegas to give a preview of the streaming service’s upcoming slate of original programming, including the return of Arrested Development and other projects. Read more »
3Crowd is rebranding itself XDN — which stands for eXchange Delivery Network — and finally coming out of beta. The startup founded by BitGravity’s former CTO plans to offer content delivery services to anyone at a steep discount when compared to providers like Akamai and Limelight. Read more »
Mid-rolls beat pre-rolls as the ads you’re most likely to sit through. Viewers stick around through mid-roll ads about 87 percent of the time, according to Adobe. That compares to a 67 percent completion rate for pre-rolls, and a 50 percent completion rate for post-rolls. Read more »
After a month of rumors surrounding a funding round being picked up by mobile social networking startup Path, the company has finally closed the deal and officially announced that it has raised more than $30 million in a Series B financing round led by Redpoint Ventures. Read more »
Urbantag allows you to curate and build lists of your favorite places, giving recommendations for where to go or where not to go. Users can then share those lists with friends online or in the app. It’s kind of like Pinterest, but for real-world places. Read more »
Uber has launched a new mobile website that at m.uber.com, aimed at allowing Blackberry and Windows Phone owners to use the service. That will help expand its potential user base, especially as it expands to more than 15 new cities worldwide this year. Read more »
WayIn is announcing TwitPolls, the creatively named platform for distributing polls on — you guessed it — Twitter. The service will let sports teams, brands, TV producers and ad agencies build Twitter polls and measure voting in real time, increasing engagement and building loyalty with fans. Read more »
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 rolling out a Facebook app for discovering web-based videos from directly within the social network. Read more »
The newest version of Sincerely’s Postagram app adds a QR code to all post cards sent out, which — when scanned by a QR reader that was just added to the app — lets recipients download a digital copy of the photo and share it on Twitter. Read more »
Everyme launched a new iPhone application which aims to allow private sharing among friends and family, by automatically creating circles of contacts. Users can then share all their pictures, thoughts and news with only the people that they want to see them. Read more »
Animoto has seen some major growth lately, with more than 4 million registered users — including 200,000 that joined in just the last month. It’s also made a huge addition to its board of directors, with Internet veteran Brad Garlinghouse jumping on board. Read more »
In just about 18 months, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups has made more than 250 investments. And it’s looking to expand even further, with the addition of two venture partners and the promotion of two of its existing team members. Read more »
Viewers who wanted to tune in to March Madness either had to pay a one-time fee or authenticate with their pay TV logins. That pay wall ended up causing fewer viewers to show up. But the decline wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Read more »
Travel booking startup Hipmunk is rolling out updated versions of its mobile apps, which will automatically take into account events that are already on your calendar when trying to book travel. It works through integration with calendars such as Microsoft’s Outlook, Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal. Read more »
TwitchTV is releasing an Android app, as well as the rollout of a new universal iOS app that will provide a more optimized iPad viewing experience. The new Android and iPad experiences come about six months after TwitchTV released its iPhone app. Read more »
From a single app, Fileboard lets users manage documents on a number of cloud services, including Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Dropbox, SharePoint and Salesforce. The newest partner to get added to the list is Box, which has also integrated some key Fileboard capabilities into its own app. Read more »
Most mobile apps take a lot of time and development hours — but what if someone came out with a WYSIWYG-type editor that would allow anyone to easily create customizable apps for the iPhone? That’s what New York City-based startup Yapp hopes to do. Read more »
Koding has come out of private beta with a cloud-based development platform that allows programmers to immediately start building and testing out code, without having to worry about different development frameworks or things like domain management. The release follows a $2 million Series A financing round. Read more »
Exec launched a few weeks ago with an ultra-easy-to-use system for booking exec assistants to do various odd jobs around San Francisco. Now it’s extending that service to include booking time with a few startup founders. Read more »
FoundersCard, which is like a members-only club for — you got it, founders! — has gone live with a spiffy new website and some new packaging for members that sign up. It’s also added a bunch of new deals to some popular retailers. Read more »
Cloud video production platform provider Aframe has raised a Series A round to expand internationally. The funding was led by Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures, with participation from existing investor Northstar Ventures, and will be used to open new offices in Boston, NYC and L.A. Read more »
Don’t want to judge a book by its cover? Date.fm has added video chat functionality into its mobile dating app, letting users get to know when another from directly within the app before getting to know one another on a first date. Read more »
Yahoo has open sourced Mojito, a JavaScript-based developer framework that will allow developers to leverage both client- and server-side technologies to get the best performance out of any device. The framework is now available on GitHub for anyone to play around with. Read more »
Netflix has tried really hard to destroy its DVD business over the last year, raising prices and making it hard to sign up. In its latest move, the company acquired DVD.com, meaning it now owns the eponymous domain for the technology that it wants to kill. Read more »
Comcast attempted to differentiate its Xbox VOD app from competitors, saying that its content on Xbox was “being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet.” Now the cableco is changing its tune and doing away with the whole public/private network argument altogether. Read more »
The HotelTonight iPad is now available, adding to the startup’s mobile repertoire. The startup, which specializes in last-minute hotel booking, is now coming out with a gorgeous app that takes advantage of the new tablet’s Retina display. Read more »
RentSocial will let apartment renters leave feedback about the places that they live, providing potential tenants with valuable new tools for learning about apartment buildings they’re looking into. It’ll also try to build community between current tenants that have connected with it. Read more »
The problem the Socialcam team has been trying to solve is, “How do you make the videos you shoot with your iPhone appealing enough to want to share with others?” Its answer? In the latest update, allowing users to add themes and soundtracks to their videos. Read more »
Fuze HD for iPad shoots and displays 1080p HD video, and also supports a number of collaboration tools. The app allows multiparty chat with up to 10 participants and interoperability with a number of high-end telepresence systems. It also lets users record and share iPad video. Read more »
Hundreds of press, investors and entrepreneurs converged on the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. on Tuesday to learn about the next new crop of startups to go through the most recent Y Combinator program. Here are ten of our favorites from the batch. Read more »
The next update to Microsoft’s XBox Live service will go live tomorrow, and will include long-awaited applications from some heavy-hitting partners. Sources have confirmed that the update will have brand-new apps that include Comcast’s video-on-demand service and HBO Go. Read more »
Parse is taking its “Heroku for app developers” backend-as-a-service out of beta and making it available as a freemium model. With its SDK, developers can quickly get up and running, allowing it to manage databases, user authentication, push notifications, and even file storage. Read more »
New York City-based Spinlister is looking to create a peer-to-peer marketplace for bikes, connecting those who have an excess supply with users who want to ride but aren’t quite ready to own or buy their own two-wheeled vehicles yet. It’s like RelayRides or Airbnb for bikes. Read more »
There are plenty of benefits from making data available to large repositories. But Trend Micro’s Dave Asprey said at Structure:Data one thing holding enterprises back from putting their data in the cloud is the lack of security of what they’re sharing. Read more »
When running databases, how do you get the speed you want while offering the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud? At Structure:Data, Wordnik co-founder Tony Tam described how his company was able to move its relational database from dedicated hardware to the cloud. Read more »
Data collected can be useful to retailers in many ways, but not necessarily in the ways that one might expect, as discussed at Structure:Data. For example, did you know that there’s a correlation between the music you listen to and the things you might buy? Read more »
