GoButler Takes Its SMS Personal Assistant Out Of Beta, Raises $8M

TechCrunch

GoButler has a straightforward premise — you should be able to send a text message and one of its “Heroes” will help you get whatever you need, whether you want to order dinner or make a flight reservation.

Today, the startup is announcing that it has moved out of beta testing and is available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It’s also announcing that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from Lakestar, Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital, Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and Cherry Ventures. General Catalyst’s Joel Cutler is now on the GoButler board.

We’ve described the service as a “Magic clone,” comparing it to that other SMS service that promises to bring you anything you want, on-demand. (Magic can’t deliver a tiger, though.)…

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Windows 10 Gets Its Own Shiny New Twitter App

TechCrunch

If you’re on a PC, you might be following the Windows 10 news closely. One of the items that popped up last night was that Twitter had a brand new app coming tailored specifically for the platform.

It’s here.

This app coincides with the Windows 10 launch, with the app sporting fast access to top tweets, photos and videos…without having to be logged in.

While Live Tiles are unique to the Windows 10 experience, the rest of this stuff is catchup with other platforms:

– Multiple photo Tweets — upload up to four photos per Tweet
– Animated GIFs
– Vine playback
– Tweets with photos, Vine videos and other select content now show a preview in your home timeline
– Share photos privately in Direct Messages

Desktop apps for Twitter have always been out of sync on different platforms, mostly because they’re all outsourced, we hear.

But…

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Big data companies in Sweden

Follow the Data

Edit in Feb 2015

A lot of people are still visiting this page. Bear in mind that it was written about four years ago, in 2011, and is unlikely to give a good overview of data-driven companies in Sweden today. Thank you for your cooperation. I may try to update it in some form at some point.

Alphabetically ordered list (see below for context & edit history)

AdAction – ad optimization – Stockholm

alaTest – product review comparisons – Stockholm

Augify – Real-time information capture, interpretation and visualization (or something like that) – Stockholm

Big Data AB – big data consultancy – Stockholm

Brummer – hedge fund – Stockholm

Burt – ad optimization – Gothenburg

Campanja – Online advertising – Stockholm

Experlytics – health analytics – Malmö

ExpertMaker – search, recommendation and discovery – Malmö

Gavagai – text analysis – Stockholm

Intellus – business intelligence – Stockholm

Keybroker – ad…

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The Internet Of Sound

TechCrunch

[tc_contributor_byline slug=”patrick-bergel”]

How do birds communicate? By singing. And now it’s the turn of the machines. A new crop of businesses are now creating what’s referred to as the Internet of Sound.

A Brief History

Let’s rewind. The history of sound-as-signal is deep. In the beginning, horns, drums and bells rang the alarm, roused the congregation and directed military troops and urban workers: city-sized ringtones guided our lives. These sounds were primarily communicative, musicality was a secondary concern.

Analog sonic codes can be found in unlikely places: composers from Mozart to Schumann hid private audio-numerological jokes in their music, underwater modems guided naval vessels, telephone networks babbled dial-tone enharmonics.

For many (including me), the first experience of the Internet was the grackle squawk of a modem, of PCM-encoded games on cassette — sound not as data per se but as a by-product of data transmission, designed neither for the air…

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Google Offers To Sell Patents To Startups In Its Push Against Patent Trolls

TechCrunch

Back in April, Google launched a pop-up, temporary marketplace for companies to sell patents, with Google being the sole buyer. Today, the search and mobile giant is expanding that marketplace in the other direction: Google has started a program for startups to buy up to two non-organic patent families off Google. It is tying the offer into a requirement to join the LOT Network, a cross-company licensing push (others in the group include Dropbox, SAP and Canon) aimed at driving down the number of patent trolling suits.

If you are interested, you should get in touch quickly. Initially, this will only be open to the first 50 eligible startups.

And what makes you eligible? There are a few caveats and requirements for startups to qualify to buy Google’s patents. First, a company’s 2014 revenues had to be between $50,000 and $200 million.

Then, Google will not let you pick what you would like to buy. The…

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Google Shutting Down Google+ Photos Next Month, Because Two Picture Storage Sites Is A Bit Much

Consumerist

(frankieleon)
Sometimes having the same thing twice is nice: that sweater you love or an extra toothbrush, you know, just in case. But having two similarly named photo synching and sharing applications – Google+ Photos and Google Photos – that pretty much do the same thing is a bit, well, redundant. And so, Google announced yesterday that it plans to send Google+ Photos to pasture with all the other outdated and seldom used apps and programs that came before it.

Google announced in a post on its social network site, Google+, that staring on Aug. 1 it will begin winding down Google+ Photos.

According to the tech company, the Android version of Google+ Photos will be the first to shutter, with the web and iOS versions going dark shortly after.

The company says the decision to shut down the platform was made in an effort to “ensure everyone…

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Online food delivery ordering is about to overtake phone ordering in the US