TechCrunch

• Why Launch An Airbnb For Event Spaces? Venues Just The “Tip Of The Spear” Says Eventup CEO - LA-based, Science-backed startup Eventup launched this morning, providing people who want to rent or rent out spaces for events like parties and conferences with an easy-to-use platform from which to do so. In the same space as Venuetastic, but with a wider array of venue options that go beyond bars to offerings like homes and even a farm ranch, EventUp wants to eventually control the entire events funnel from catering to invitations. Well that's one way to corner a market, but what if Airbnb itself encroaches on your turf?
• With Funding In Tow, Uniiverse Launches A Platform For Collaborative Living - You have to love the accelerated development cycle that spins so fast in the tech industry's echo chamber. Just as most Americans are starting to get comfortable with this whole "social revolution," the tech industry has already exhausted every inch of "Social" (and social networking) to the degree that most are now tired of hearing about social. Case-in-point: A startup launching today, called Uniiverse, begins its pitch with this simple message, "Uniiverse is not a social network." I advised co-CEOs Craig Follett and Ben Raffi to put that bit in caplocks going forward. That's part of the reason Uniiverse is resistant to being lumped in with social networks, as the Canadian startup is building an online platform that focuses on bringing value to our offline lives.
• LinkedIn Picks Up Rapportive For Around $15 Million - So yes, LinkedIn has bought contact management startup Rapportive, according to multiple sources we've contacted, as was first reported by Liz Gannes at AllThingsD. The startup -- which aggregates and displays the social networking accounts of the people you contact though Gmail -- was backed for $1 million by seed investors Charles River Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, 500 Startups, Michael Zirngibl, Ashish Soni and David Cancel.
• From T-Pain To $6 Million In New Funding: Viddy Attempts To Become The “Instagram Of Video” - People really like Instagram. Founder Kevin Systrom recently appeared in a Best Buy Super Bowl ad paying tribute to mobile innovators, a testament to how far its come with a team of six. (Over 15 million users-far.) While Instagram is awesome (just ask Alexia) and offers a great tool for simple, hipster-elegant photo sharing, the startup hasn't extended its reach to include mobile video. Yet. After watching this formula bring Instagram more than a little attention, a number of startups have entered the mobile video sharing space, all clambering to become known as the real "Instagram of video."
• Olympus Brings Retro To Micro Four Thirds With The OM-D E-M5 - Olympus is building on its significant micro four-thirds IP (i.e. mirrorless cameras with the M4/3 sensor size) with a premium offering with a stylized, retro look. The OM-D EM-5, digital successor to the long-running OM series of film cameras, has a look straight out of the 70s but specs that should satisfy enthusiast photographers looking for a compact but powerful system. Their PEN series of M4/3 cameras is popular and well-reviewed, and the EM-5 builds on that tech. The difference is in some pro-like features Olympus has added in: a weather-resistant magnesium body, high-FPS EVF, and high-speed autofocus and shooting.
• Social Candy Monetizes Cupcakes And More With Social MarketingTools - Yes, it's another startup that wants to help businesses manage their presence on Facebook. Social Candy CEO Darin Kotalik admits that the'res no shortage of competition, but he's hoping to differentiate his company by combining ease-of-use and breadth of features. The company just announced that it's expanding those features with by allowing businesses to offer coupons through their Social Candy-created Facebook pages. That's an obvious way for Social Candy customers to drive traffic from Facebook into their stores — and to track exactly how effective those efforts are. Coupons can be set up in 15 minutes or less, and can automatically updated based on daily specials, Kotalik says.
• Snapjoy’s Flickraft Promised To “Rescue” Flickr Photos — Until It Was Blocked - Photo startup Snapjoy launched a clever promotional scheme this afternoon to lure users over from Flickr. And it succeeded — perhaps too well. The Y Combinator-backed company aims to be an online repository where users can store all their photos, while also sharing them on a limited basis. That already made Snapjoy a competitor, of sorts, to older photo sites like (Yahoo-owned) Flickr and (Google-owned) Picasa, but the startup decided to make the competition more direct with a service called Flickraft, which promised to "rescue" photos from the "sinking ship" of Flickr by creating an easy way to transfer photos from Flickr to Snapjoy.
• Pinterest Hits 10 Million U.S. Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever -comScore - It's beautiful, it's addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who's propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland. Maybe we should call it blow-dryer growth.
• UpWest Labs Closes The Missing Link Between New Israeli Startups And Silicon Valley - Silicon Valley investors have been going to Israel for decades to take advantage of its pool of hardcore tech entrepreneurs. But a new generation of consumer-focused companies has been emerging in the country over the last few years -- and they're facing a few challenges. One is that the local market is relatively small, which means that it can be harder for them to design and iterate products for mainstream users in large markets elsewhere. Another is that local venture funding has been skewing towards later-stage investments.  Finally given the distance, access to potential partners and Silicon Valley knowledge network can also be difficult.
• Rice University And OpenStax Announce First Open-Source Textbooks - When we think about the distribution industry being disrupted, we tend to think about music and movies, whose physical media and vast shipment infrastructure have been rendered mostly obsolete over the last decade. To a lesser extent, we hear about print, and the effect of e-readers and web consumption on books and magazines. No one is making the change particularly gracefully, and the same can be said of the textbook business, which does millions of dollars of business every year selling incredibly expensive items to students — who likely consider them anachronisms. Rice University, which has been pushing alternative distribution mechanisms for scholarly publications for years, has announced a new initiative, by which they hope to publish free, high-quality textbooks in core subjects like physics and biology via a non-profit publisher called OpenStax College. It's the polar opposite of Apple's iBooks textbooks, which, while they too help drag this dusty industry into the present, amount more to a new sales vector for the publishers than competition.