After months of rumors that speculated the company was the target of an acquisition by either Facebook or Google, social-mapping provider Waze is set to be snapped up by Google and added to the web giant’s map service. Read more »
Startup Whistle has designed an activity tracker that clips on to your dog’s collar, but its core offering is a cloud-based analytics service designed to quantify your pet’s health. Read more »
Many of today’s startups are obsessed with figuring out the best way to score investors. But for many companies bootstrapping it might result in a better product and a healthier business in the long run. Read more »
Connectify is going back to the drawing board — and back to Kickstarter — to develop a better version of broadband connection aggregation software. Read more »
Boland founded a wireless chipmaker in 2002 and sold it to Nvidia in 2011 for $367 million. Now he’s taking his expertise to white spaces startup Neul. Read more »
Quantance has gone back to its investors for a $12 million Series D, which it plans to use to bring its envelope tracking chip to market. The technology promises significant gains in LTE device battery life. Read more »
No matter how brilliant or beautiful your new gadget may be, it’s doomed if you can’t figure out how to make it efficiently, consistently and economically. An ex-Apple supply guy offers insights on how to make that happen. Read more »
Skype never dominated the mobile space the way it has dominated the PC, opening the door for numerous OTT communications rivals. TextMe believes it has combined the best features of Skype, WhatsApp and Pinger into a single mobile app. Read more »
Tempo AI is the latest startup to emerge from research institute SRI International, and like its virtual assistant predecessors Tempo aims to provide contextual understanding to a common app: the calendar. Read more »
Belly introduces the free sample to its local-business loyalty and rewards program. Through the Belly app, businesses can offer free goods and services to lure customers into their stores. Read more »
This is no Farmville. FarmLogs’ software-as-a-service tells you when the rows need tilling, when the fields need watering and when the crops are ready for harvest. Read more »
A graduate of Excelerate Labs in Chicago, SpotHero wants to act as a parking spot broker for the big lots as well as offer consumers the cheapest parking rates through its mobile apps. The company’s $2.5 million round was led by Battery Ventures. Read more »
Crowdsourcing may have liberated the restaurant review from the critics, but Steve and Jared Rivera think its also produced a lot of bad food recommendations. There answer was to create Chefs Feed, a food app where recommendations come solely from professional chefs. Read more »
Sometimes design is just another word for prettiness. But truly good design implies so much more. After launching a startup, Elle Luna, lead designer at Mailbox, believes design is “a way of thinking about everything” and offers three key insights. Read more »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more »
Google Ventures has invested in Desmos, a startup offering a free, browser-based graphing calculator. The funding follows previous investments from Kapor Capital, Learn Capital, Kindler Capital, and Elm Street Ventures and brings the startup’s total amount raised to more than $1 million. Read more »
Looks like the crusade for agility and programability os moving from computing and networking into the realm of storage, as startup Convergent.io gets $10 million in Series A funding. This follows yesterday’s $33M round for Nutanix, which makes similar software defined storage claims. Read more »
Karma not only encourages its 4G customers to share their connections with strangers, it rewards them with free bandwidth for doing so. The Dutch transplant’s social bandwidth vision now has a new convert. Venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson is participating its seed funding round. Read more »
Why check your phone for deals when you can check your car dashboard instead? Ford has integrated deal-broker Roximity’s location-based offers app with its Sync connected car platform, allowing drivers to verbally search for nearby bargains without slowing down. Read more »
Ginger.io, an up-and-coming Boston area health IT startup, is opening an office in San Francisco. The company, which grew out of MIT, will retain its Cambridge, Mass. headquarters but morph into a bi-coastal effort, according to CEO Anmal Madan. Read more »
Interested in trying your hand at worm composting or grant writing? Ever felt the desire to make your own sausage or kimchi? There’s a good chance someone on startup Dabble’s website is teaching just such a class this month, and for $20 you can sign up. Read more »
It’s only been a few weeks since Microsoft’s $1.2bn deal to buy Yammer was confirmed, but already the company’s influence seems to be spreading: productivity startup Teamly has scored investment from one of Yammer’s early team members and developed a deeper integration with the service. Read more »
Anyfi has developed a tunneling technology that allows ordinary access points and residential gateways to spawn virtual Wi-Fi networks anyone can log into. The Swedish startup is betting this is the answer operators are looking for to build huge ubiquitous Wi-Fi offload networks. Read more »
Note-taking service Springpad wants access to your Facebook profile. Why? It wants to scrape all of those random “likes” of movies, music, restaurants and TV shows scattered throughout your Timeline and organize them into notebooks, which you and your friends can search and share. Read more »
Cooks are increasingly using services like Evernote, Facebook and Pinterest to store their culinary ideas, storing recipes as notes, likes and pins for later viewing. The problem is none of the three is designed to be a culinary tool, but Say Mmm plans to change that. Read more »
Berlin startup Readmill’s iPad-based social reading app has got plenty of attention. Now it’s getting a significant update that will make it simpler and easier to use for everyone — including making it more useful for independent publishers to hook themselves in to. Read more »
Social dining network Grubwithus has raised $5 million in Series A financing, which the startup will use to expand its basic business premise: getting likeminded strangers together in a physical restaurant to share a meal. Read more »
Pizzerias love the mobile Web. Why? There’s a feature embedded in many of their sites called click-to-call that allows a hungry mobile surfer to initiate a phone order directly from the Webpage. An astonishing 35 percent of site visits result in a click-to-call order. Read more »
A GigaOM exclusive: A tiny company you have never heard is about to have an outsized impact on the global mobile industry. Global giant Vodafone is using a technology developed by a small Silicon Valley/Madrid startup called InToTally to supercharge its 3G networks. Read more »
Although the goal for most startup founders might be to build your company’s value, many companies are inadvertently taking steps to kill it. Marty Wolf, the founder of Martinwolf M&A advisors, explains the 5 things you need to avoid. Read more »
When Mobify CEO Igor Faletski participated in a Google event, he didn’t realize that the tech giant could teach him so much about running his startup more effectively. Here are the four lessons he learned and advice on how to put them into action. Read more »
Focus. Persevere. Hustle. Follow your gut. Put customers first. Don’t reinvent unnecessary wheels. This is just some of the smart, helpful and brief advice that iStartupLabs CEO Peter Corbett got from CEOs and founders over Twitter. Here, he shares the wisest words. Read more »
As a startup, you might think the A-list employees are beyond your grasp. But Scott Weiss, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explains why you should reach for the stars – and why they might jump at the opportunity. Read more »
The first round of 200 tickets to the Crunchies, the annual tech innovation awards, go on sale today at 10 a.m. The award show will be held January 31, 2012, at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Read more »
It’s easier than ever to build a web or mobile app and call yourself a startup. But with new funding opportunities and technology tools, entrepreneurs can easily — and cheaply — use technology to solve larger problems, rather than create another lifestyle app. Read more »
The latest version of Affectiva’s mood-sensing wristband combines its sensor with Bluetooth so the device can broadcast your emotions to a web site. Granted, the $2,000 sensor is used primarily in research and certain medical situations, but it doesn’t have to stop there. Read more »
Awe.sm has secured $4 million in Series A funding. Awe.sm is probably best known to most people for its URL shortening service, but the San Francisco-based startup says it’s actually rooted in a deeper software platform attached to those shortened links that provides analytics tools. Read more »
The world of home energy reports for utility customers just got heated. Opower has filed a complaint against Efficiency 2.0, claiming the company infringed on Opower’s copyrighted home energy reports. Efficiency 2.0 denies the claims. Read more »
Google chairman Eric Schmidt says his company is not quashing competition in the web industry — and has pointed to the fact that search startups like Hipmunk are still receiving millions in venture capital funding as proof. But does this really mean there’s a level playing field? Read more »
Gift cards are big business: The industry as a whole brings in $100 billion annually. But gift card companies are not exactly known for being on the cutting edge of technology. But San Francisco-based startup Giftly is bringing serious innovation to how gift cards work. Read more »
