TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a group-edited blog that profiles the companies, products and events defining and transforming the new web.

  • Just-Eat Founder Launches Platform For Virtual Therapists And Life Coaches
    MentalineJesper Buch who co-founded Just-Eat, the European company that took fast food online, has launched his latest venture: Mentaline, a platform for therapists, life coaches and psychologists to deliver services to clients. Ambitiously, it's not a marketplace in which sessions eventually take place offline but instead the whole thing operates on the Web. Users browse the site by specialism to identify the right therapist and then book and pay for an online consultation which is delivered via webcam. In addition, the system scales so that sessions can be delivered to groups of people or couples, and a separate section of the site is tailored to 'Masterclasses' or life coaching-style lectures.

  • Soon, We’ll Have Downloaded More Apps From iTunes Than Songs (Chart)
    Asymco, a Helsinki-based app developer / industry analysis advisory firm, ironically founded and led by a longtime Nokia manager, just posted this telling chart on its blog: According to the firm's research, iTunes download rates for music and iOS apps are both still growing, but accelerating much faster for the latter. In fact, Asymco posits, based on data from the recently updated Music and App Store, that the total number of app downloads has already reached the same level as that of songs in less than half the time.

  • Kno Raises $46 Million More To Build “Most Powerful Tablet Anyone Has Ever Made”
    Marc Andreessen is normally enthusiastic about the startups he's invested in. Still, when I spoke to him last week about Kno, he surprised me by saying it will be "the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made." And he's backing up that claim with a new investment - Andreessen Horowitz has put even more capital into the company as part of a new $46 million debt and equity round. Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital also invested in the round. Kno has now raised over $55 million. The company is still planning on getting its first dual-screen tablet computer to market by the end of the year, says CEO Osman Rashid, although he won't get specific on the price. It will be less than $1,000, but that's as close as they'll get.

  • Alert The Enterprise: Seesmic Integrates With Salesforce Chatter
    How businesses and brands deal with social media has become one of the defining issues of the recent web era. Today a pretty big leap is taking place which may define the next phase. Two of the biggest players have come together to create certainly one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I've yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds. Seesmic is to integrate Salesforce's internal Twitter-like app, Chatter, into their platform. That makes Seesmic the first realtime social consumer app to go directly into the enterprise space. Seesmic will also suddenly have the potential to access to over 20,000 Salesforce customers who have used Chatter so far. The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce's Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once.

  • Salesforce Takes Chatter Mobile With iPhone, iPad, Android And BlackBerry Apps
    As Salesforce's foray into social collaboration, Salesforce Chatter, gains traction amongst enterprise users, it makes sense for the company to launch complimentary mobile apps to the platform. And as the enterprise increasingly relies upon mobile devices for connectivity; there is a strong demand for native mobile use of Chatter. Today, Salesforce is taking Chatter to mobile phones; unveiling Chatter Mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Google Android and BlackBerry devices. Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced last November, was launched into public beta in June after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform's firts three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 25,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce's client base using the platform. .