Kiran Upadhyay

Groupon just announced that it has acquired Swarm Mobile, a startup that helps businesses connect with and track their customers while in stores. This continues Groupon’s pattern of expanding its offerings for local businesses beyond daily deals. Earlier this year, for example, it launched individual business pages and announced an iPad-based point-of-sale service. Meanwhile, Swarm (not to be confused with Foursquare’s similarly-named app) uses in-store WiFi, Bluetooth, and infrared technology to track user behavior and deliver targeted promotions on smartphones. I first wrote about the company in 2012, after it raised a $1 million seed round from rapper Nas, Honest Company co-founder Brian Lee, VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes, sneaker retailer FlightClub, and ad agency executives Saxon and Sebastian Eldridge. Swarm later raised a $3.5 million Series A led by Icon Ventures. In the acquisition blog post, Groupon exec Dan Roarty wrote: At Groupon, the Swarm team will put those ...

Remember the Gear VR, Samsung’s Oculus-inspired virtual reality headset? Rather than plugging the headset into a computer or console, you’d slip a phone (just the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, for now) into the headset and it’d act as the display, power source, and brains of the operation. Take the idea of Google Cardboard and make it an actual product, and bam — Gear VR. This morning, Samsung finally announced a rough shipping window earlier of sometime in “early December”. Now one more detail has trickled out: the price. The Gear VR “Innovator Edition” will come in two forms: one for $250 that comes with a mystery (as in, not yet pictured) Bluetooth controller, and one for $200 that is just the headset alone. Either offering seems pretty damned expensive, considering that you need to bring your own Galaxy Note 4 to the table. That’s a pretty specific device to require, and one that costs $750 off-contract. At the end of the day, a Galaxy Note 4, Gear VR headset, and a Bluetooth ...

Clearly, Facebook wants more users building and sharing videos on its service. Today, the company announced “Say Thanks,” a new tool that lets you quickly put together personalized video cards using a combination of pre-built themes and your own posts and photos. The end result is an easily shareable — if a bit cheesy — customized video you can post on yours and your friend’s Timelines. To create the video, users visit facebook.com/thanks (note: the service is rolling out throughout the day, so check back if the URL is broken for you). They then select a friend, choose a theme, and pick out posts and photos that “represent your friendship,” explains Facebook in a blog post announcing the new tool. The experience is somewhat reminiscent of using something like Flipagram, a mobile application that lets users put together short videos from their own photos and then share those creations to social networks. In fact, Flipagram hit the top of the Apple App Store over the 2013 holiday s...

Thank the kids in America for turning Yik Yak into the newest technology craze that’s a parental nightmare and an anonymous messaging juggernaut. Only a year after its launch, the app is now close to closing on roughly $75 million in new financing, according to several sources with knowledge of the company. With a focus on local and anonymous messaging for college students, Yik Yak has overtaken earlier entrants like Whisper and Secret to become one of the top ten social networking apps in the country, according to the analytics and tracking service App Annie. In fact, we’d originally heard that the round was going to be in the region of $25 million but that it crept up on the back of the app’s current popularity. Our sources are close-lipped on who’s leading the new investment, but previous investors include DCM Ventures, which led the seed and Series A round, and individual investors including Tim Draper and Kevin Colleran. Other institutions backing Yik Yak are Atlanta Vent...

Kindle has a new update rolling out to its Kindle e-reader device hardware, which includes new features for the latest Kindle, Kindle Voyage and Kindle Paperwhite devices. The update includes the new Word Wise feature that automatically shows definitions to difficult words above the within text on compatible titles, as well as Family Library, which lets you access not only your own books, but also those of a spouse, partner or family member, and Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a subscription service starting at $2.99 per month that provides curated access to special selections for kids and beginner readers. The most exciting part of this update for most is probably the Family Library function, which finally makes e-books from Amazon more like paperbacks in that they can be shared freely between family members. You’ll get the chance to link two accounts to a device, which can include a spouse or partner, rather than having to share a single account across devices. The two paired accounts...

This afternoon an industry source confirmed for me that Facebook is indeed piloting ‘Facebook at Work’ a product aimed at enterprise collaboration and the source told me such a product will be rolled out in a few months. Back in June, TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden reported that Facebook was working on a business collaboration product called ‘Facebook at  Work‘, and The Financial Times reported on a website with the same name this morning (registration required) and speculation began in earnest. Here’s what we know that’s new: While Facebook refused to comment officially, the source says the idea of a Facebook enterprise collaboration tool has been tested inside of Facebook for the last six months and is now being piloted by a small group of companies. They would not name the companies nor could they comment on what the final product will look like in terms of mobile or web-based tool, but there is no doubt Facebook is working to release such a tool in the near term. The sourc...

Nokia is getting back into hardware after selling its handset division to Microsoft, but its re-entry into the gadgets market doesn’t look like it’s going to be a phone. The Finnish company tweeted out a teaser for an announcement it’s making November 18, which included a photo of a device that looks quite a big like an Apple TV, or some kind of streaming set-top box. It could just as easily be a box with the Nokia logo on top that contains something else entirely within. Some on Twitter are also speculating that it could potentially be a Nokia set-top device running Android TV, akin to the Nexus Player just launched by Google to premiere the platform for consumers. The company has discussed its willingness to license the Nokia brand to new third-party hardware devices, and it also aims to begin building new and innovative hardware through a kind of rapid prototyping skunkworks it established post-Microsoft sale. Nokia can’t put its brand on smartphones until the end of 2016, how...