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  • Babelverse Is Out To Democratise Translation
    112478v6-max-250x250Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice end up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters. But it means anyone can be an interpreter. People practice to interpret and move up through the system, towards being more professional interpreters. Think of it as a sort of Demand Media platform for interpreting languages.

  • Sprint?s EVO 4G LTE Has Cleared U.S. Customs, Pre-Orders To Be Filled As Early As May 24
    evo7Sprint's launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we're hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected. According to Sprint, the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint's warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world on May 24.

  • Tagbrand Gives Fashionistas An App To Check-In Their Brands
    168039v8-max-250x250"All people wear clothes!" declared one of Tagbrand's founders on stage at Disrupt today. That's true, but let's review. DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accustomed to sharing their daily lives in a more quirky manner than mere video can afford. (Ok, OK, it's a bunch of teenagers sharing their zits, but work with me here, people). Now Tagbrand wants to apply that model to fashion, but with a tagging twist. The model is simple enough. Take and upload photos of what branded clothes you are wearing and tag them. Effectively, it's a photo check-in for brands, or 'Foursquare for fashion', if you will.

  • Stevie Turns Your Social Feeds Into TV Shows
    CelebTVScreenshotWe spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn't work work, but it's not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV. That's where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it's a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.

  • StyleSaint Wants To Turn Virtual Fashion Tear Sheets Into Custom Apparel
    Screen Shot 2012-05-21 at 3.45.40 PMAs we covered earlier today, the fashion vertical in tech has exploded, with myriad unique companies clamoring to take a bite out of Amazon's lunch, and a chunk out of the trillion dollar apparel industry. One of the most unique premises I've seen thus far is StyleSaint, a startup which at first glance seems like a Pinterest for fashion, but with a unique real-life twist. To use StyleSaint in its current form, log in with Facebook or Twitter and create an account, once logged on, you can chose from over 55K "tear sheet" images from which to create your own Stylebook, once you've got more than ten tear sheets loaded, you can hit the "Create Stylebooks" link in the top right and StyleSaint will automatically import, then publish, the last ten sheets you've torn. Alternatively you can drag-and-drop the tears to create a custom stylebook. Click on "Create" to publish to the site.

  • Led By Former Microsofties, GitHub Brings The Party To Enterprise With New Windows Client
    Screen shot 2012-05-21 at 12.43.04 PMGitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everything from jQuery and Ruby on Rails to node.js and Redis. At the outset, Github was just a side project, a tool to make developers' lives easier (its first slogan: "Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass.") Github is still a boot-strapped operation, but as both its user base and its own hacker collective (now at 73 strong) have grown, there has been an increasing demand for tools that fall outside Apple's domain. Today, about 50 percent of GitHub's traffic comes from Windows users, and, as a result, the startup has finally heeded demand and is now officially bringing the party to Windows, launching a desktop app to address the challenges of developing on Windows and to make it easy for Windows developers to collaborate in open-source and private repositories.

  • Punch! Launches A Platform For Building Interactive iPad Apps, Sans Developers
    punch logoIt's a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren't available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform. David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2. Vignette. TypePad. And yes, his startup Punch!, where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at Disrupt.

  • The Power Of Disrupt: gTar Raises $30,000 On Kickstarter In Two Hours
    IMG_8821Incident took the stage this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and debuted the gTar. It's safe to say that they are already a major contender for the Disrupt Cup. The startup wowed the crowd with their iPhone-powered teaching guitar. The judges loved it. The crowd loved. And most importantly, fans turned to the startup's Kickstarter campaign where funding took off like a rocket. Prior to hitting the stage, the gTar had raised just a touch above $10,000. Now, almost exactly two hours after their Disrupt debut, their Kickstarter funding (a.k.a. pre-orders) is north of $42,000 and rising fast.

  • Digital Video Consolidation: Avail-TVN Picks Up $100M From Carlyle, Buys UK?s On Demand Group For $27M
    OnDemand-logoA double-whammy in the digital video space today: Avail-TVN, a video services provider that works with companies like NBC, Univision, and brands like Mattel, has announced that it has picked up $100 million in financing led by the Carlyle Group, and it is using those funds to make an acquisition outside of the U.S., buying rival video service provider On Demand Group in the UK from its existing owner, SeaChange International, for $27 million. Avail-TVN says that the deal will make it the largest provider of digital video services in the world. The move is a sign of how the digital TV industry is already fairly large in its geographical reach, but in many cases is still only providing incremental revenue on top of more traditional TV revenue streams -- and so companies that work in this space, which can be capital intensive, are best suited to bulk up their scale to survive.

  • KurbKarma: A Social Network, And App, To Find Parking Where And When You Need It
    kurbkarma logoWe have all been there: you are in your car, you need to park, and you cannot, no matter how much you try, find a space. You see cars pulling away, but it's too far for you to get there before another car swoops in. You see people walking and you trail them, hoping they're heading to a vehicle. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but a new startup, KurbKarma, is launching today at TC Disrupt New York to try to solve it. ?Parking where and when you need it? is the basic idea here: you have people who have spaces they are about to leave; and you have people who need spaces. The app (available for iOS) works like an ad hoc social network to link these people up. Those who have a space can post their status on an app, those who need a space find one on the map. The app integrates with Google Maps to plot spaces near you, and lets you send messages -- several sendable with the touch of a button -- to let the space owners know how far away you are. Spaces are ?sold? with KarmaKredits: people who donate their spot pick up good Karma, in the form of KarmaKredits. People who need a space use their KarmaKredits to buy them. Each space "costs" two KarmaKredits.

  • Open Garden Lets You Crowdsource Your Mobile Connectivity
    opengarden_logoWhat if you couldn't just share your Internet connection with the few WiFi devices tethered to your phone or hotspot, but with pretty much everybody around you? Open Garden, which is launching at Disrupt today, lets you create a mesh network that ties together all the Open Garden-enabled devices around you into one large network that then automatically shares Internet access and bandwidth between all of these devices. Basically, Open Garden wants to become a crowd-sourcing platform for mobile bandwidth.

  • CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book
    callapp logoOne of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn't in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won't know until I pick up. CallApp, a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It's creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a "universal social contact book." It's drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users ? users can edit CallApp listings, and if they can want, they can add their contact book into the company's general database.

  • Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots
    imgres-1Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your front yard in a lawn chair, sipping lemonade while attempting to read the latest news on your WiFi-only iPad. You're just out of range of your WiFi signal. Your neighbor's signal is super strong, but that selfish hooligan didn't leave it wide open for you to leach onto. Wouldn't you love to be able to use a portion of his spectrum anyway while away from your own? Well, you still can't, however...

  • K3 Server Is Making Enterprise Application Integrations More Efficient, Reduces Work By Half
    broadpeakHow is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code...and frankly, a lot of manual labor. BroadPeak Partners has a better idea. The company is today introducing its application known as K3 Server, a system that aims to disrupt the traditional enterprise interface market by making it easier for I.T. to build, and for end users to tweak, the way code is handled, transformed, reconciled, mapped and enriched as it moves in between systems.

  • Major Steal: King.com Poaches Talent Behind EA?s Sims Social To Lead New London Studio
    catharina-malletKing.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA's Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end (with her departure first being noted by Business Insider last week). King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn't taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago, is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany's Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards. King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago.

  • UberConference Aims To Fix Crappy Conference Calls
    uber confWe all hate conference calls -- having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you've actually logged in, there's a whole lot of talking on top of one another, and a lot of re-introducing yourself so that everyone knows who's talking at any given time. UberConference, which was created by Firespotter Labs and is being launched as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, hopes to fix all that by providing a visual interface to all others on the call. Audio conferencing is not just a pain in the ass, but it's also a huge business -- a $3 billion business -- that's mostly controlled by big telco providers, such as AT&T and Verizon. By providing an easy-to-use alternative, UberConference hopes to disrupt the existing market.

  • At TechCrunch Disrupt, Startup Alley Is Where the Shootouts Happen
    Screen Shot 2012-05-21 at 15.46.52Well folks, while you may think all the action is on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the flip side of the coin is the enormous amount of buzz, energy and networking that happens in Startup Alley. Today there are 44 companies exhibiting in the Alley itself, not to mention the 20+ companies in the Israeli pavilion which makes its second appearance at Disrupt. We'll have another brand new 47 companies in Startup Alley tomorrow. You can check out all the companies today here. But none of this is just for show because attendees to Disrupt get to vote on their favourite companies, and those votes, plus the votes of TC staff, means one of them gets to pitch at the end of each day.

  • Incident Launches The gTar at Disrupt, An iPhone-Powered Electronic Teaching Guitar
    560036_392556664102555_217962081562015_1388052_90376671_nThe gTar by Incident is disruption defined. It takes the guitar, an instrument with a steep learning curve, and adds a bit of digital wizardry in the form of an embedded iPhone to make learning dramatically easier. The company brags that their modern take on the guitar allows for three levels of difficulty, rather than the traditional single really difficult one. But thanks to the iPhone and a clever app, this $450 electronic guitar essentially teaches users the ins and outs of the instrument. The startup recently turned to Kickstarter to raise $100,000. However today they gave the crowd at Disrupt a musical treat -- a demonstration at Startup Alley. And the device seemed to work as advertised.

  • Koemei Is Out To Transcribe All Video And Make It Searchable
    Screen Shot 2012-05-20 at 15.08.20Lord knows there is a lot of online video out there these days, but only a tiny proportion of it has been transcribed (less than 1% according to some estimates). Searching the mountains of video generated by businesses, governments and educational institutions for the valuable information within is almost impossible because the words hidden in the audio are invisible to search. Waiting for it is not just the world, but the many people who can't access that video because of their disabilities. Transcription unlocks the gold-dust buried in them there video hills. This would involve transcription on a vast scale, but this is exactly the problem Koemei aims to tackle. It's a SAAS platform for speech recognition in video. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt it announced it has completed an integration with YouTube's API in preparation for a potential launch. It also announced the successful completion of its first pilot with the University of Geneva and IMD Business School.

  • After Walking Away From Acquisition Talks With Facebook, Ark Opens Its People Search Engine
    ark-logosFollowing a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups...at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services to help you find out which of your high school classmates live in New York, see which friends are single, and connect with strangers who share your interests by layering up to 30 characteristic filters. The problem of too much social data and too little discoverability is so widespread that Facebook even discussed a possible acquisition of Ark. But instead its PhD founders decided to see how far they can ride their cute penguin logo. Soon it will launch native mobile apps with some of most useful push notifications I've seen. And as part of its limited launch today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, Ark is accepting new users at ark.com/tcd until the end of the conference on Wednesday.


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