It’s been a whirlwind few months for Vishal Sikka. It began when he suddenly left his job as executive and head of products at SAP at the beginning of May and it has continued as he prepares to take the helm at Infosys on August 1st. When I spoke to him at the end of May, just ahead of the SAP Sapphire Conference, he seemed at peace with his decision to leave SAP in spite of the… Read More
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Facebook’s earnings beat projections for the 8th quarter straight with $2.91B in revenue and $0.42EPS in Q2 2014. The service is growing about twice as fast on mobile compared to its services as a whole. Facebook now has 1.07 billion mobile monthly users, and 654 million daily mobile users. That helped it bring in 62% of its ad revenue from mobile. In total, Facebook now has 1.32… Read More
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When I first took a look at Sense, a smart sleep sensor launching today on Kickstarter, it reminded me of two things. Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium and Google’s old, discontinued Nexus Q product.
“Those are two of my favorite things,” said James Proud, a former Thiel fellow who went on to found a startup behind the device called Hello. “I wanted to create… Read More
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Getting a mobile app discovered, downloaded and then highly ranked is a challenging business – and one that’s now being dominated by larger players, it seems. One company benefiting from that trend is Mobile Action, a one-stop shop for mobile app user acquisition. Now on track for $2 million in revenue this year, the startup has also just raised $805,000 in seed funding from Felicis… Read More
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On Saturday NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden called developers to design products that protect users’ privacy and Constitutional rights, saying he plans to promote such technologies.But Vysk Communication’s CEO Victor Cocchia has been working on developing such technology since 2012, long before Snowden addressed the Hope X conference last weekend. Cocchia spoke to me about his… Read More
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After making the interesting decision to split its business and user experience in half, foursquare has today shown off the new version of foursquare proper for the first time. The new foursquare ditches the old logo and the old color scheme and the old way of using foursquare. This new app is centered around personalization and recommendations. That said, you won’t find much green in… Read More
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Samsung’s venture arm has contributed to a round of funding that adds $13 million to the total raised by BlueStacks, the virtualization startup that debuted its GamePop platform earlier this year to offer over-the-top mobile gaming for living room and TVs. Samsung’s investment backs the company’s vision of delivering GamePop as a white-label solution aimed at TV makers and… Read More
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Dropbox, now at 300 million users globally, says that there are 4 million businesses today using its cloud-based platform to store, distribute and share documents. But of those, only around 80,000 have opted so far to use Dropbox for Business, the company’s premium enterprise tier launched earlier this year. Today, the startup is making a move to sweeten the deal, unveiling a host of… Read More
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Virtual keyboard startup Fleksy has launched version 3.0 of its software today, which includes new monetization options via premium themes and content packs. The new themes complement the new design of the app, with alternate color options and a bonus theme available to Fleksy premium users free of charge, and there’s also support for over 700 new emoji for those of you who like to… Read More
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As payments platforms look for more ways to grow their margins and usage among businesses, they continue to push into a wider and deeper range of financial services. In one of the latest moves, eBay’s PayPal is expanding its Working Capital service to the UK. This is its first market for PayPal’s lending platform outside of the U.S., where it first launched the service in… Read More
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