[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "authors": "Drew Olanoff",
    "category": "Gadgets",
    "content": "OK, I’m old. You’re probably feeling old. Let’s get that out of the way. Done.\nThe NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) turns 30 today, as it was officially launched in North American on October 18th, 1985 to a limited portion of the US. I mean, where do we start on how amazing the NES was, and still is? I’ve got one in my closet complete with the Duck Hunt gun.\n\nThe most memorable game is Super Mario Bros. It changed everything. I used to have friends over and we’d play for hours trying to beat it. We weren’t competing, we were in it together. It wasn’t about the graphics or the people who made the game, it was all about the gameplay. It was as immersive an experience as I’ve ever had, even to this day. Forget VR, forget AR, the original Nintendo’s gameplay just…grabbed you:\n\nI can beat the first level with my eyes closed, that’s how many times I’ve played it. At this point, it’s embedded in my brain and I can pull it off like a well-choreographed ballet.\nI used to stand in line at my local Erol’s (which turned into Blockbuster) to rent Double Dragon. I’m not sure why we didn’t just buy it, because I rented it so much I could have gotten 10 copies instead. It didn’t matter, though. The excitement of grabbing it and literally running home to play it is a memory that I’ll never forget.\nAlso, when I think about the NES, the unique, but kinda the same, opening screens stuck with me. I can remember so many of them, but here’s one that might give you the feels:\n\nPlus, all of the quirks that came along with the aging system didn’t matter. I didn’t care how many times I had to slam the top of the NES, blow in the game cartridge or quick-flicker it on and off to actually work.\n\n\nThe NES was, and is, ours as a generation. Happy Birthday, NES…I can’t wait to show you off to my kids. Even Xbox superfan Major Nelson loves you dearly:\nI’m sure you have plenty of your own NES memories, so fire them at us on Twitter or Facebook.",
    "date": "10/18/2015",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2817906964_0a6c40d805_b.jpg?w=738",
    "section": "social/",
    "tags": "video-games,nintendo,nes,mario-bros",
    "title": "The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Turns 30",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/18/denim-denim-denim/"
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "authors": "Jonathan Shieber",
    "category": "Gadgets",
    "content": "Commercializing a new tool to bring the basic eye exam into the palm of a doctor’s hand could save the eyesight of nearly 1 billion people worldwide.\nThat’s the goal that Zhou Yaopeng and Marc Albanese, two former photonics researchers who met at Boston University nearly a decade ago, have set for themselves and for their two-year-old startup, Smart Vision Labs.\nThe company has just raised $6.1 million in its first major round of institutional funding from a group of investors led by Techstars Ventures. Other investors in the round included Heritage Group, Connectivity Capital, and Red Sea Ventures.\nSmart Vision’s device, the SVOne, is based on initial research that Zhou and Albanese conducted while at BU. It’s a piece of hardware that attaches to an iPhone to provide mobile vision exams. Traditional devices, which measure what’s called wavefront aberrometry, can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000. Smart Vision Labs’ co-founders say they’ve managed to drive the cost down to $3,950.\nBeyond the fact that Smart Vision is working to solve a problem that can improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world, the technology is impressive in that it opens up yet more avenues for mobile devices.\nEveryone talks about the phenomenal computing power available in mobile devices, but Smart Vision’s tech is one of the few that harnesses mobile computing in a novel way that make the device a new technology platform for healthcare.\n\nIt’s been two years since Albanese and Zhou first concocted the idea that would become Smart Vision Labs. The two former colleagues reconnected at NYU where Zhou was studying business at Albanese’s alma mater. The idea won NYU’s Entrepreneur Challenge , and would go on to receive a $1 million Powerful Answers Award, from Verizon (the new owner of Aol, which is the parent company of TechCrunch. Hi bosses!).\n“This is a product that is solving a lot of problems for everyone,” says Zhou. “That really had a lot of appeal to us.”\nIndeed, in the US alone less than half of the 200 million people who wear corrective eyewear visit the eye doctor as often as they should. Smart Vision Labs wants to make the process of the eye exam as easy as possible.\nNational Vision Inc., one of the largest eyecare chains in the country is a seed investor and a partner with the company, and Smart Vision is already generating revenue selling its devices.\n“The money is really going to be used to scale out our operating team and engineering team and getting ready to figure out how to really use this technology,” says Zhou.\nWhile applications in emerging markets are enormous, and the company has already tested the device in Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti, the initial focus for Smart Vision will be entirely on the US market.\nThe potential size of the market was enough for Techstars to lead the investment round in Smart Vision — a first for the firm’s latest $150 million early stage investment fund.\n“This is the first one where we are the sole lead,” says Ari Newman, a partner at Techstars Ventures and a director on the Smart Vision board. “We have a very strong conviction about this one.”\nFor Newman, the team, the tech, and the target market all aligned to make the deal persuasive. “ODs [doctors of optometry], and doctors get to put something in the palm of their hand that used to be a 40 pound machine,” says Newman. “Down the road, the number of applications for this technology is much bigger.”\n",
    "date": "6/22/2015",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads//2015/06/jillsm.jpg?w=738",
    "section": "startups/",
    "tags": "",
    "title": "Bringing Eye Exams To The Palm Of A Doctor’s Hand, Smart Vision Raises $6.1 Million",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/22/bringing-eye-exams-to-the-palm-of-a-doctors-hand-smart-vision-raises-6-1-million/"
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "authors": "Sarah Perez",
    "category": "Apps",
    "content": "WonderVoice, a Tel Aviv-based startup I first ran into at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley, is today launching its brand-new iOS application which allows you to listen to content from Facebook while on the go. Yes, it’s another audio-based virtual assistant of sorts, joining an ecosystem that’s been booming since the debut of Apple’s Siri. And like most of these voice-activated alternatives, WonderVoice is zeroing in on a particular niche – in its case, social networking.\nThe startup’s intelligent voice platform lets you interact with Facebook and more, offering to read your News Feed, your messages, and your Events calendar, as well as allowing you to update your status, see who’s online, who’s nearby, and more. Thanks to integration with 8Tracks and Spotify, you can also command the app to play your friends’ music from those services.\nThe use case for something like WonderVoice, like most virtual assistants, is limited – after all, when are you going to talk to Facebook via an app, except when driving? (Or jogging, I suppose). When I tested the app at home, for example, my husband shot me evil looks before finally pausing the DVR with an exasperated sigh. “Fine, I’ll just wait until you’re done there,” he said, getting up to leave the room.\nThat being said, the hands-free use case for drivers is a decent selling point – and one which other virtual assistant apps have already been taking advantage of, though generally on Android where deeper OS integration is permitted. And while it still feels a bit odd to talk to your phone, that’s mainly because the phone is still kind of bad at understanding your words and intentions. In time, that will change. And on this front, as well as on the “reading comprehension” side, WonderVoice has made progress.\nWonderVoice’s patent-pending technology leverages “big data” to overcome the problems that face other voice engines today, especially when working with real-world content. (Just listen to feeds read through apps like BuzzVoice and the like to see what I mean. For example, BuzzVoice even pronounces “Google” as “Goo-gall.” We’ve a long road ahead of us here.) With WonderVoice, however, the system has been trained to recognize acronyms and smiley face emoticons and even nearby venues, so it won’t stumble over slang like “ppl” (people) when reading through your News Feed.\nWhile there are other apps that will read to you from Facebook, WonderVoice’s founder Gal Melamed stresses that none enable this type of bi-directional communication, and all the competitors just read what’s on the page in front of them without much if any intelligence.\nAnd when WonderVoice listens, it doesn’t require that you craft your questions using particular keywords, either. “We are crunching a lot of data in order to create a voice interface which is optimized for a specific domain – and by domain I mean like Facebook, Foursquare, etc.,” explains Melamed. “By combining that information with personal information and location information, we’re trying to build you a new type of voice interface where you basically have uniqueness.”\nThe company, currently a bootstrapped team with just two full timers, is working on an Android version of the app, and plans to rapidly add support for more social networks and services to WonderVoice. “Our vision is to enable a true hands-free experience,” says Melamed. “We want to be the hub for all social networks and communication.” He specifically mentioned Twitter and Foursquare as being on the radar.\nThe app is available as a paid ($1.99) download in the iTunes App Store here, but monetization efforts in the future may allow the app itself to become free further down the road.",
    "date": "10/17/2012",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wondervoice-app-icon.png?w=400",
    "section": "social/",
    "tags": "virtual-assistant,wondervoice",
    "title": "Move Over Siri: WonderVoice’s New Virtual Assistant Lets You Speak To Interact With Facebook While On The Go",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/move-over-siri-wondervoices-new-virtual-assistant-lets-you-speak-to-interact-with-facebook-while-on-the-go/"
  },
  {
    "id": 4,
    "authors": "Josh Constine",
    "category": "Apps",
    "content": "Your friends may not be the best photographers, so Instagram today launched a second “People” Explore tab that highlights great Instagrammers and three of their recent pics. Instagram also now lets you edit old captions in case you had a typo or want to be more poetic.\nWhile photos from people you know are inherently the most interesting, YouTube, Vine, Snapchat, and other content platforms have developed vibrant communities of semi-professional creators that sustain loyal fan bases. By highting these creators and helping them build a following, Instagram could piggyback on people’s desire to come back again and again to see the latest shot from their favorite star photographer.\nInstagram tells me that the People tab “is personalized.” Accounts are selected to appear based on “a variety of factors, including who you follow, who you’re connected to, and what you like on Instagram. Also, some editorial suggestions.” Everyone won’t be seeing the same accounts, so specific users won’t suddenly rocket to stardom like in the early days of Twitter’s Suggested User List. Instead, Instagram is using algorithms to spread the suggestions around rather than playing favorites.\nOne issue with People discovery on Instagram is that since you only have one feed, snap-happy creators could drown out friends who only share occasionally. Still, there’s soo much Instagram could do with its Explore tab. If feels like the product is moving at frozen molasses speed. Two years ago I proposed a Nearby tab to show photos taken around you, but that’s still nowhere to be found.\n\nWhen you tap the Explore icon at the bottom of the screen, now a magnifying glass, you’ll get the same tab of popular photos you’re used to, but you can tap over to see the People tab instead. The caption editing interface is available from the three-dot More button beneath your photos.\nFor years, Facebook didn’t allow editing of posts because it feared people would bait-and-switch each other, putting up one set of text, then changing it to mean something different that could offend or embarass the people who Liked the old version. Eventually it realized this didn’t actually happen that often, and the community would properly shame anyone who did it, so in late 2013 it began offering post and comment editing. Now Instagram has been deemed mature enough to handle caption editing. What’s different is that you can edit in stealth because unlike Facebook, you can’t tap the “Edited” tag on Instagram to reveal the history of edits someone’s made.\nIf Instagram can pull off strong recommendations with the People tab, it could mint Instagram celebrities that keep users loyal to their app through a cult of personality. This not only makes the app stickier to existing Instagrammers, but could create instances of mass culture — photos or videos people publicly discuss — that content strictly from friends can’t. That could be the key to the next echelon of Instagram’s ascendance.",
    "date": "11/10/2014",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/screen-shot-2014-11-10-at-12-09-52-pm.png?w=738",
    "section": "social/",
    "tags": "creators",
    "title": "Instagram Launches A People Discovery Tab To Fill Your Feed With Fresh Creators",
    "topics": "facebook,instagram",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/10/instagram-discover-people/"
  },
  {
    "id": 5,
    "authors": "Scott Merrill",
    "category": "Enterprise",
    "content": "Marten Mickos is working on a joke. He has the opening line — “An app guy, an ops guy, and a VMware sales guy walk into a bar…” — but he hasn’t figured out what the punchline is, yet. Mickos is the former CEO of MySQL AB. Today he’s the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, developers of private infrastructure as a service solutions, and he thinks about “The Cloud” a lot.\nEucalyptus Systems is releasing version 3.1 of their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) product today, with a number of new features, improved installation options, and a renewed commitment to open source. According to Mickos, the cloud itself should be the product. It should be wholly integrated with existing technologies, and as easily upgraded as any other product. It is, in short, a whole new way of thinking about computing.\nThere is no shortage of IaaS solutions available today. Each of them is trying to do basically two things: 1) attract your attention, and 2) be fully compatible with Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus has a leg up on the competition for item 2 with Amazon’s recent blessing of their product as the IaaS to use when you want a private cloud.\nThis partnership has yielded two specific things for Eucalyptus, according to Mickos: Amazon reviews Eucalyptus’s work to ensure API compatibility (a benefit not available to any other IaaS product), and Amazon and Eucalyptus approach customers together to sell “The Cloud”. For those customers that need public and private cloud solutions, this tag team approach is a huge win. And for everyone else, it secures in their minds that Eucalyptus is the product to choose whenever they do decide to implement a private cloud.\n“At MySQL, we were the disruptors of the old. At Eucalyptus, we’re the innovators of the new,” Mickos told me. He pointed out a number of features of the new Eucalyptus release to underscore this point: service and platform level high availability, FastStart templates to speed proof of concept deployments, and a more holistic approach to documentation and user interface.\nWhereas many IaaS solutions are trying to be one-size-fits-all solutions for both public and private cloud configurations, Eucalyptus is focusing strictly on private cloud. They focus on API compatibility with Amazon, and, according to Mickos, have worked tirelessly to ensure that upgrades are effortless.  They conduct nearly half a million unit tests internally, and their euTester product allows their customers to build their own test cases.\n“We have a huge lead over others for hybrid cloud,” Mickos said. I’ve long been skeptical of the promise of hybrid clouds — the notion that you can easily move workloads from some private cloud to Amazon Web Services and back again — so I asked Mickos how many of their customers were actually using Eucalyptus for that feature. He admitted that currently it’s a very small number, but almost all of their customers demand the feature. According to Mickos, most customers aren’t ready to dabble with hybrid clouds just yet, but they want to know that they have a solution in place for that purpose when the time comes.\nI asked Mickos who he considered to be their primary competitors. He quickly rattled off VMware vCloud Director and Cloud Stack, but left out any mention of OpenStack. This caught my attention, since every Linux distribution is working to bundle OpenStack-powered cloud solutions into their product catalog. Mickos’s opinion is that OpenStack is shaping up to be a great public cloud platform, but he’s not seeing a lot of private cloud traction from it.\nLike OpenStack, though, Eucalyptus is free software. You can grab it from GitHub and use it today, without paying a dime to Eucalyptus Systems. Mickos is no stranger to open source business models, though; and Eucalyptus Systems has raised $55 million in funding.\nAs for his unfinished joke, Mickos says traditional “ops” people approach “The Cloud” the same way they do every problem: they identify a number of packages to combine into a menu to provide to their customers. Mickos suggests that this group is largely focused on the hardware they use, rather then benefits of “The Cloud”.\nThe VMware camp, says Mickos, looks to put “The Cloud” on top of their existing product portfolio. This is largely a marketing effort, rather than an engineering effort. Despite VMware’s recent dabblings with open source (see Cloud Foundry and Serengeti as examples), VMware’s primary interest is in selling VMware solutions.\nObviously, Eucalyptus is what Mickos considers the “app guy” in his joke. Hopefully Mickos can find a good punchline soon.",
    "date": "6/19/2012",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/eucalyptus_logo.jpg?w=300",
    "section": "enterprise/",
    "tags": "amazon,iaas,cloud,eucalyptus",
    "title": "Eucalyptus Systems Aims For Private Cloud Dominance",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/19/eucalyptus-systems-aims-for-private-cloud-dominance/"
  },
  {
    "id": 6,
    "authors": "Ingrid Lunden",
    "category": "eCommerce",
    "content": "Amid the rush of attention that online education is getting from the tech world, universities, students and investors, a startup that focuses on content for brick-and-mortar classrooms has picked up more funding. Flashnotes — a Boston-based marketplace for college pupils to buy and sell study notes and other online help for specific courses — has raised a Series A of $3.6 million. It will be using the funds to expand its service across the U.S. to some 300 institutions in the next year; as well as to increase penetration in the schools where Flashnotes is already active.\nThe round was led by Stage 1 Ventures, with participation also from new investor Runa Capital, and existing investors SoftBank Capital and Atlas Ventures. For now, this is mainly a strategic investment, Mike Matousek, founder and CEO, tells me: there are no immediate plans to roll out Flashnotes either to Japan or with any of SoftBank’s other properties, or in Russia for that matter.\nSome might scoff at how Flashnotes turns learning into a profiteering activity. Tapping into the fact that students are often looking for ways of making a little extra cash, Flashnotes promises users they can keep 70% of any purchase amounts (it keeps the other 30% for itself).\nTypical prices are around $9 for a 20-page study guide, with the range between $1.99 and $63. The latter was a bundle of notes from a course, a final study guide in effect, for a marketing class at Ohio State University.\nSince launching, the company has enabled WebRTC on its platform, which has opened Flashnotes up to including multimedia alongside notes, with video tutorials and more now also being added to the marketplace. And it has added integration to facilitate easier notes uploading — for example in an integration with Evernote. Matousek tells me that handwritten notes in PDF form remain the platform’s most popular kind of content.\nFlashnotes encourages a sense of competition among those contributing content to the platform by publishing a leaderboard. (Current leader: “Tony2050” from Florida State University, who has earned $11,953.72 on Flashnotes.)\nBut there is a higher aim here, too, Matousek tells me. While the promise of a lot of online learning is to use the internet to help bridge the digital divide — online classes and textbooks being more economical than the physical experience — a lot of that industry is far from being mass-market, he believes.\n“I’m a big fan of the concept of MOOCs, but we are talking about a wide shift being still decades away,” he says. “It’s amazing what they are doing to help immerse students, but I think it will ultimately be a hybrid approach between online and offline because students still need something tangible.”\nMeanwhile, in the world of brick-and-mortar higher education dropout rates are at around 40%, Matousek says. Flashnotes believes that by offering students a way of getting extra help for particular classes, it will keep those students engaged in the work and keep from falling too far behind and then leaving completely.\nFlashnotes has a limit to how it will let its platform be used, and also insists that it’s best used in combination with actually just turning up. “We have a zero tolerance for allowing exams to get posted, and for those who are simply buying notes and skipping class, you wouldn’t be getting much out of it anyway,” he explains. “This is a supplemental thing. That’s how we position it.”\nThere is, of course, competition for Flashnotes. Chegg, the online textbook rental company that went public in November 2013, has over the years gobbled up Cramster, another online platform designed for students to help each other with work, and P2P marketplace Student of Fortune. (Combined, the two now form Chegg Homework Help.) This seems to concentrate less on notes from specific classes and more on general expertise tutorials — possibly a more scalable concept but less directly relevant to specific classes.\nMatousek, believes that what Flashnotes is providing is something that is more core to the experience of taking a specific class. “It’s not just a feature in a bigger platform, but a standalone opportunity,” he says. “There is a real need to improve the core learning experience.”\nPhoto: Flickr",
    "date": "2/3/2014",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lecture-hall.jpg?w=738",
    "section": "startups/",
    "tags": "crowdsourcing,p2p,flashnotes",
    "title": "Flashnotes, A Peer-To-Peer Marketplace For College Study Materials, Picks Up Another $3.6M",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/03/flashnotes-a-peer-to-peer-marketplace-for-college-study-materials-picks-up-another-3-6m/"
  },
  {
    "id": 7,
    "authors": "Mike Butcher",
    "category": "Europe",
    "content": "It was only in March that one of Russia’s hottest startups — hotels booking service Ostrovok.ru – raised $25 million in a Series B round led by billionaire investor Yuri Milner. We said at the time that this market is very capital-intensive, especially in a market like Russia.\nBut today we learn just how difficult this might be in the mid-term. Today the company has announced on its blog that it is letting go of a third of its staff. Staff will be compensated with three months’ full salary and bonus, and their options will also vest. To Ostrovok’s credit they are making the news public so that their staff can find new positions: “If you need great people, write to Kate (katya@ostrovok.ru)”.\nThe reason, writes cofounder Serge Faguet in the blog post, is that they want to “take the company to break even” something they said they’d wanted to do last year. However, it’s clearly not happening as fast as they predicted, hence the layoffs.\nUnfortunately, the hotel booking space is a crowded one in Russia, and despite there being a rising middle class in Russia, the cost of travel can take out a hefty chunk from people’s expendable income.\nAnd while Ostrovok probably needed cash to scale up, the margins in travel booking are well known to be thin, requiring a lot of scale to make sense. It’s the age-old problem of burning cash to get to that scale – or cutting costs to make the numbers work better.\nFaguet, however is understandably trying to be upbeat about this move, noting that brand recognition is up “20%”, and he says they have hit 100,000 bookings and “are growing more than 50%” in the last quarter.\nFaguet told us via email: “The story is pretty simple… We’ve taken on too many people and projects simultaneously and, after raising our Series B, decided to pull back and work in a more focused way (and make ourselves more attractive for future fundraising). We still have over 130 people at the company.”\nHe goes on to say on the blog: “Our strategy remains exactly the same as before, and the quality of customer service will not change.”\nSo it seems it’s more of a case of a startup cutting lots of side projects and focusing on what it does best.",
    "date": "6/17/2013",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/focus1-margo-conner.jpg?w=400",
    "section": "europe/",
    "tags": "ostrovok",
    "title": "Post $25M Funding, Russian Startup Ostrovok Slashes Staff To Aim For Break-Even",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/post-25m-funding-russian-startup-ostrovok-slashes-staff-to-aim-for-break-even/"
  },
  {
    "id": 8,
    "authors": "Natasha Lomas",
    "category": "Apps",
    "content": "Holiday attractions booking startup, GetYourGuide, which raised a $14 million Series A at the start of this year from Spark Capital and Highland Capital Partners Europe to internationalise its content and zero in on mobile, has made good on the latter portion of its plan — with the launch of its first mobile apps (available on iOS now, and landing on Google Play for Android users tomorrow).\n“Our mobile traffic is growing at more than twice the rate than our web traffic is growing,” GYG CEO, Johannes Reck, tells TechCrunch. “We have the strong ambition to grow our mobile traffic to more than 50% of the total traffic in the next 12-18 months.”\nThe startup, which was founded back in 2009 as a student project, does not break out user numbers yet. But Reck confirms it’s continuing on a growth trajectory: “We are more than doubling revenue and traffic every year.”\nGYG’s new apps pull in info on more than 23,000 tours & activities — such as museum visits, sightseeing trips & historical tours, mixed in with some more practical tourist requirements like airport transfers — from 2,200 global destinations, presenting them initially as a stack of thumbnails that can easily be thumbed through (offering more info as users drill down).\nAs well as repurposing its content for speedy mobile delivery, there’s the added mobile bonus of being able to detect the user’s location to make relevant suggestions. Users can browse activities for the current day, the next day or the weekend; read reviews and make bookings. Tours can be filtered by price, deals, duration, languages and more. The app creates a mobile voucher (such as the one below, right) for bookings, so there’s no need to print tickets. Payment is by credit card, with the option to save card details to speed up future bookings.\n\nBack in January Reck told TechCrunch GetYourGuide was “going to bet the house on mobile”. Since then it has acquired deadpooled rival Gidsy — which had also been gearing up for a mobile push. GYG absorbed Gidsy’s team of 12, bolstering its apps push with relevant experience.\nAt the time of that acquisition, Edial Dekker, CEO and co-founder of Gidsy, told TechCrunch: “We’ve also been working a lot on mobile in the last months, but we did not launch it yet. We’ll have a huge opportunity to work on the same problems we tried solving in the first place: bringing people together around activities.”\nDiscussing the timing of its apps launch, Reck said previously, in the continental European markets where it is “particularly strong”, use of apps by travellers to get holiday suggestions has been retarded by factors such as mobile roaming charges. “With our increasing presence in the U.K. & U.S. and an exploding number of consumers taking the phone with them while traveling, now is the right time,” he tells TechCrunch.\n“The European Commission announced that roaming will be significantly regulated within the next two years,” he adds. “We are seeing better price plans every year and the telecom operators are very interested in striking deals with travel companies to provide better consumer service. Again, I think the time has come for mobile travel applications to become mainstream. It makes so much sense.”\nGetYourGuide’s app feels slick and relatively quick — with a cute bounding dog animation to keep you entertained while it harvests relevant tour data. However that content isn’t going to excite more discerning travellers, with a strong focus on more typical touristy fare.\nFor instance, when I queried the app for London attractions, it fired forth a barrage of tourist trap fodder, from Madame Tussauds to Hard Rock Cafe via a smorgasbord of Harry Potter tours. (And, bizarrely, several day trips to Stone Henge. Which isn’t exactly close to London — but is apparently a mainstream draw for U.K. visitors.)\nThis sort of content suggests GYG is gunning for the ‘road-well travelled’ tourist — which is, after all, likely the largest market. But that does mean it’s leaving room for alternative travel startups serving a more indie traveller category, such as U.S.-based AnyRoad.\n",
    "date": "10/9/2013",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/homepage_en_getyourguide.png?w=400",
    "section": "mobile/",
    "tags": "mobile-coupons,travel,apps,getyourguide",
    "title": "After Raising $14M In January, Travel Startup GetYourGuide Launches Its First Mobile Apps ",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/09/getyourguide-first-apps/"
  },
  {
    "id": 9,
    "authors": "Sarah Perez",
    "category": "Social",
    "content": "Google announced a suite of tools this morning for business owners, offering them a one-stop shop to update their business information, add photos, read reviews and, of course, use Google+. The service, called “Google My Business,” seems to be aimed at those who have yet to figure out how to “get on Google” so to speak; in fact, there’s a button that even uses that same expression.\nHowever, somewhat buried in today’s announcement is news that this is now going to be the default experience for others who were already using Google’s other business-focused services, including Places for Business and the prior version of the Google+ dashboard. These users will now be upgraded to Google My Business, the company notes.\nAfter signing up and filling in the requisite information, Google My Business will add the business information to Google Search, Google Maps and Google+, allowing customers to find the business no matter what device or service they happen to be using at the time. Companies are also invited to add photos and virtual tours, read and respond to their Google reviews, as well as add or correct business information like address, phone, store hours and more.\nIn addition, the service makes it easier for businesses to share on Google+, Google’s rival to the Facebook page. From the new service, owners can post news, events, photos and other updates they want shared with customers.\n\nThe service also pulls in custom insights and integrations with AdWords Express, which will help business owners better understand how people are finding their business on Google, what they’re clicking on, where they’re coming from when clicking on directions, and other trends over time. The insights, meanwhile, are designed to give businesses, as well as brands and other organizations, more information about their Google+ audience and content, including visibility, engagement metrics, and demographic data. (More on that here.)\nA Google My Business mobile application is being made available, too, the company says, which will let you do all of this on the go from either a phone or tablet. The Android app is out first (later today; UPDATE: live now on Google Play), with an iOS version to follow.\n",
    "date": "6/11/2014",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/devices.png?w=738",
    "section": "social/",
    "tags": "google,google-my-business",
    "title": "Google Introduces “Google My Business,” A New One-Stop Shop To Help Business Get Found Online",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/11/google-introduces-google-my-business-a-new-one-stop-shop-to-help-business-get-found-online/"
  },
  {
    "id": 10,
    "authors": "Rip Empson",
    "category": "Fundings & Exits",
    "content": "Tandem Capital, which claims to be Silicon Valley’s first startup accelerator to focus exclusively on early-stage mobile businesses, is announcing today that it has raised $32 million for its second fund, Tandem Fund II.\nThe capital comes from a host of executives, entrepreneurs, and organizations, including notable industry veterans (and LPs) like Verifone CEO Doug Bergeron, former Apple and Oracle general counsel Dan Cooperman, Google founding board member Ram Shriram, Playdom founder Rick Thompson, NetApp Board Chairman Dan Warmenhoven, and Amazon SVP of Consumer Business Jeff Wilke — to name a few.\nTandem Co-founder Doug Renert tells us that the fund’s investors were chosen not by the amount of money they were willing to invest, but as strategic investors that would be able to add direct value to its accelerator. “With Tandem II, we chose people that we knew would bring something to the table beyond money,” Renert said, “those who are in the game not just for the return, but to actually work with and help entrepreneurs, are looking to partner, and really become part of the equation.”\nThat may sound like spin, but Tandem is serious about taking a creative, hands-on approach to working with its mobile startups. Even though Tandem is a capital fund (that’s invested in and advised startups like Juice In The City, Playhaven, and ZumoDrive), a startup accelerator, and a team of advisors, the founders refuse to be labelled as such. “Tandem is not a VC firm or a group of angels or advisors who simply lob ideas or suggestions from afar,” their site proclaims.\nSo, startups, if you’re not comfortable with a hands-on approach, you might want to send your applications elsewhere. That being said, the capital fund/accelerator has a lot to offer. Literally. It will spend one-third of its new fund on providing its chosen startups with $200K in seed funding (with the remaining two-thirds reserved for follow-on rounds), free workspace, and daily meetings and hair-braiding (just kidding) with mentors and advisors in areas like business development, product design, marketing, user acquisition, etc.\nTandem is making a concerted effort to steer away from the large-scale approach pioneered by Y Combinator, designing an accelerator program that takes place twice a year, for a six-month duration, and generally includes six startups. Renert said that they’d tried 3-months but that was too short and a year, which saw companies relying too much on the accelerator for, well, everything. It’s all about finding a balance.\nA six-month program, relatively small class sizes, and the fact that there’s no demo day or set graduation date (teams can hang out at Tandem as long as they want) all work towards setting it apart from accelerators like YC and 500 Startups — well, that and the fact that it focuses exclusively on mobile companies.\nBut, so far, its alternative model has been working out. According to the Renert, the accelerator has seen a 90 percent success rate with its portfolio companies thus far, including ZumoDrive being acquired by Motorola in 2010 and YouSendIt’s acquisition of Attassa last year. Localyte and FlightCaster were also both acquired in 2010, with the remainder of Tandem’s nine investments having gone on to raise second rounds.\nThere also appear to be some success stories brewing in its current batch as well, like BitRhymes, for example, which makes social (and casino) games for a female audience. The startup’s flagship title, Bingo Bash, has nearly three million monthly active users, is one of the top 30 grossing apps on the App Store, and is the number one casino game on the iPad.\nEach of the four startups from its current batch have closed — or will soon close — follow-on rounds. This success, the co-founder says, has come from an improvement in how the Tandem team is identifying (or selecting) its startups. Today, he says, the team really hones in on good product teams that have proven they can build, even if they have zero market traction. If they can build a great product, we want to help bring them to market and raise capital, the co-founder said.\nThe deadline for the accelerator’s next program is on July 1st. Entrepreneurs interested in applying can go here. ",
    "date": "6/14/2012",
    "img_src": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tandem_logo_large.jpeg?w=400",
    "section": "startups/",
    "tags": "accelerator,startups,tandem-capital,tandem",
    "title": "Mobile Incubator Tandem Raises $32M Fund From Verifone CEO, Playdom Founder & More",
    "topics": "",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/14/tandem-raises-second-fund/"
  }
]