New Yorkers hoping to catch a ride with Lyft today are out of luck. The company said via email and on its blog that it’s putting off its NYC launch. Lyft had announced launch plans for Brooklyn and Queens earlier this week, and it said yesterday that it would move forward with those plans despite the fact that the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said the service did not… Read More
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Seven months after launching Instagram Direct, 45 million of Instagram’s 200 million users are actively sending or opening Direct messages, the company tells me. This 23% monthly usage rate indicates Direct is far from stillborn. While I haven’t seen or heard of many friends using the ephemeral private sharing channel, it may be quietly gaining steam with those who use Instagram… Read More
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A well-liked Tumblr extension called XKit, which adds more functionality to the social blogging service, has just made its way to mobile in the form of a paid iOS app. Though there have been some reports of flattening Tumblr traffic following its acquisition by Yahoo, the platform today hosts close to 200 million blogs, which are updated over 94 million times per day. Among these bloggers is… Read More
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Apple has faced a fair amount of state-sponsored criticism in China, a market where the prevailing powers have a stated goal of promoting more home-grown network and IT solutions. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple’s iOS 7 poses a threat to national security because of its ‘Frequent Locations’ feature, which identifies and provides users a map of their oft-visited… Read More
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Personal computers, long an ailing member of the larger technology market, had a strong second quarter. After consistent quarters of decline, the worldwide PC market was either up 0.1 percent, or down a modest 1.7 percent in the period, according to Gartner and IDC, respectively. In the United States, the PC market was up around 7 percent in the quarter, again according to the two firms. Read More
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A changing of keys and tempo, at PonoMusic, the venture founded on the premise of a high-fidelity digital music service and music-playing device. Neil Young, the iconic musician who founded Pono and saw it raise over $6.2 million on Kickstarter after aiming for only $800,000, is stepping in as its new CEO as John Hamm steps down. Hamm will remain an investor in the company, the company noted in… Read More
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The motto at Salesforce.com seems to be if you can’t beat them, buy them. This time the exact target of Salesforce.com’s $390 million desires is the scrappy startup RelateIQ, which uses searches of unstructured data from email, social networks, and calendars to automate large portions of the sales process. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company raised a significant $40 million… Read More
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Looks like Science Inc. is getting more serious about mobile development — the startup studio is announcing that it has acquired an eight-person company based in Yerevan, Armenia called Inlight. That company developed the iOS app of the same name, a social newsreading service targeting women. Science CEO Mike Jones and Chief Business Officer Peter Pham (pictured above at TechCrunch… Read More
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Mind Candy, led by star gaming property Moshi Monsters and founder Michael Acton-Smith, has been seen as one of the breakout successes of the UK startup and gaming world. But as many others in the space know all too well, game fads come and go, and so things are changing. Today Mind Candy is announcing that Acton-Smith is stepping down as the company’s CEO, while Divinia Knowles,… Read More
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ReservationHop and MonkeyParking, the two startups last week called emblems of exploitative #JerkTech, have both changed their ways. ReservationHop announced Tuesday a “soft pivot” away from its site that stole and resold dinner reservations without compensating restaurant owners. Meanwhile, MonkeyParking has complied with its cease-and-desist order from San Francisco by… Read More
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