At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today, TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld took the stage to chat with Facebook’s Product Director for Ads at Facebook Gokul Rajaram about the social network’s advertising operations. For background, Rajaram was known as the “Godfather of Google Adsense,” and joined Facebook last year through the acquisition of his company Chai...
Predictive analytics provider Opera Solutions has raised $84 million from equity investors in its first-ever funding round, but that amount shouldn’t be surprising for anyone familiar with the company. When I profiled Opera in May, I called it the big data expert you’ve never heard of. It looks like that’s about to change. Opera’s...
Apple has been building support for the iMessage service into OS X Lion’s iChat application, reports Macrumors. The site says that a developer has shared two properties buried inside the framework for the Lion version of iChat that indicate that the cross-device messaging service will be making an appearance on the Mac as well as iOS...
We’re still interviewing on the floor at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Today, we caught up with Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, a concept where startups continuously pivot and innovate creating companies that can change their business model focus without drastic loss. Interestingly, near the end of the interview Ries say that...
As reported in a number of places, Walmart has acquired OneRiot: a startup that originally tried to do social search before pivoting to focus on social advertising. OneRiot joins a unit called Walmart Labs, which the giant retailer created earlier this year with the acquisition of a company called Kosmix. Why should media companies (or...
It doesn’t happen too often that a European web startup (or any foreign startup, for that matter) makes it in Japan, but Jimdo is one of the very few examples. After reading an article on the website building service from Germany on TechCrunch Japan a few years back, a team at Tokyo-based telecommunications giant...
Image: AP See Also: THE MICROSOFT INVESTOR: Microsoft Has A Lot Riding On Its Developer Conference / Analyst Day Next Week Twitter Has 100 Million Active Users — And 40% Are Just Watching Why Twitter Isn’t Worried About Google+ Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says that revenues are not a goal for Twitter, just a...
Image: AP See Also: How Windows Made Your Life Better And You Don’t Even Appreciate It Google Has Already Begun “One On Ones” With Zagat Employees, But Don’t Call Them Interviews How Google Got Gamed In Its Motorola Deal Good morning! Here’s the news: Microsoft revealed its next operating system Windows 8 — here’s...
Technology is helping cut transaction costs in many domains. Want to rent a movie? Forget the old days of driving 10 minutes to Blockbuster and spending 30 minutes arguing with your significant other about popcorn flick versus art house. Netflix will have a few hours entertainment downloaded in a matter of minutes and even...
One of the challenges for Indie movies is getting exposure to consumers. Studio films have massive marketing budgets, and are able to use these channels to get traffic. But movies created by independent producers don’t have a set way to gain buzz. Enter Prescreen, a new startup launching today to give filmmakers and distributors...