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| Mar 16, 2021 | Cricut backs off plan to add subscription fee to millions of devices [Updated] | Enlarge / Cricut is neither the first nor last internet-connected device to alter the deal after the fact and tell you to pray it doesn't alter it further.
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| Jul 30, 2020 | The road to recurring revenue for hardware startups | Nils Mattisson Contributor
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Formerly at Apple, Nils Mattisson is now CEO and co-founder of smart home tech company Minut.
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The road to recurring revenue for hardware startups
If you look at the ... |
| May 21, 2020 | Wink Blinks: But Is Coronavirus Killing The Cloud? | A fortnight after Wink announced it would be terminating their free cloud platform in favour of a paid service, they’ve given users of their home automation products a last minute reprieve an extended the free platform for an indefinite per... |
| May 12, 2020 | 'Smart' Home Platform Wink Changes The Deal, Suddenly Imposes Subscription Fees | Time and time again we've highlighted how in the modern era you don't really own the hardware you buy. In the broadband connected era, firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony Pla... |
| May 12, 2020 | 'Smart' Home Platform Wink Changes The Deal, Suddenly Imposes Subscription Fees | Time and time again we’ve highlighted how in the modern era you don’t really own the hardware you buy. In the broadband connected era, firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony Pla... |
| May 7, 2020 | Wink smart hub users get one week’s notice to pay up or lose access | Enlarge / I, too, leave my electronics artfully placed in the middle of my stylish living room for the cat to knock over.
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| May 6, 2020 | Smart device maker Wink demands customers pay up or lose features | Smart home startup Wink today announced it will require customers to pay for a monthly service plan in order to access their devices from the Wink app, with voice control, or through the Wink API. Opting not to subscribe right away will dis... |
| May 6, 2020 | Smart device maker Wink demands customers pay up or lose features | Did you miss a session from GamesBeat Summit 2022? All sessions are available to stream now. Learn more.
Smart home startup Wink today announced it will require customers to pay for a monthly service plan in order to access their devices fr... |
| Aug 9, 2018 | Feature Flags Will Be the Great Enabler of the Connected World | The term “connected world” immediately sets some lofty expectations. If you’ve never heard it before, it sounds as ambitious as it does vague. But once you start down the rabbit hole of understanding, you’ll find yourself dealing with some ... |
| Sep 25, 2017 | Wink announces a wealth of new IoT products for its hub | The Internet of Things, commonly called the IoT, has become a hot topic these days for both the right and wrong reasons. It can be incredibly useful and time saving because of all the things that can be automated around the house, but there... |
| Jul 28, 2017 | Term Sheet — Friday, July 28 | CRYPTO WEEK CONTINUES
Happy Friday. It’s Jen Wieczner again, so keep the tips and feedback coming to [email protected] or on Twitter @jenwieczner. Erin is still on vacation, which means I can still fill your Term Sheet with, in her w... |
| Jul 27, 2017 | i.am+ buys Wink, the smart home hub formerly owned by Flex and Quirky | Wink — the smart home hub and platform originally incubated inside the failed connected object maker Quirky, and then acquired by Flextronics (now known as Flex) as part-payment for Quirky’s debts — has moved on to its third owner. i.am+, t... |
| Oct 28, 2016 | The best smart home hub of 2016 | There’s no place like home, especially if it’s a smart home.
It’s officially the future times — smart home devices are all the rage these days, offering total integration and control of the home from the palm of your hand. However, the most... |
| Sep 27, 2016 | New Wink Hub 2 Plays Nice With Alexa, Makes Smart Home Smarter - And Simpler | Alexandra Burlacu, Tech Times 27 September 2016, 06:09 pm
Wink has a powerful new smart home hub, introducing the Wink 2 with a number of cool features, including support for Amazon Alexa.
The new Wink 2 replaces the company's previous $69 ... |
| Feb 11, 2016 | Wink brings local control to your automated lights | Home automation, the connected home, the Internet of Things, it's all phrases used to describe the same thing -- a series of devices connected to the internet and used to power tasks around a house. Turn the lights on and off, lock doors, r... |
| Jan 30, 2016 | 'Alexa, turn on kitchen lights': Setting up Cree bulbs with Amazon Echo and Wink hub | "Alexa, turn on the lights". This is a phrase echoed, apparently, by more people than I thought. Amazon's Echo is taking hold and seems especially popular with those interested in the home automation side of technology. Voice cont... |
| Jan 18, 2016 | Neura, A Privacy-Focused Platform For The Internet Of Things, Raises $11M Series A | Neura, a platform that helps users personalize connected devices while guarding their data, will promote its new software development kit after raising a $11 million Series A. The round was led by AXA Strategic Partners and Pitango Venture ... |
| Jan 5, 2016 | Mark Zuckerberg Is About To Get A Smart-Home Headache | On Sunday night, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced his plans for 2016 on his Facebook page. The task: build an artificially intelligent smart home.
My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me w... |
| Sep 22, 2015 | Belly-Up in Bankruptcy, Quirky Trying to Sell All Assets Including Wink | Share Share on Facebook Share on Twitter LinkedIn Email Reprints
Ten months ago, Ben Kaufman energetically proclaimed the demise of the thermostat as he talked up a device being rolled out by his New York-based invention platform Quirky, wh... |
| Sep 22, 2015 | Quirky Files For Bankruptcy While Flextronics Puts Up A $15M Bid For Wink | Quirky, the long-suffering startup that was once held up as a model for bridging the maker movement and corporate world, has filed for bankruptcy.
The New York-based company has had plenty of issues lately, and we’d heard that Wink had been... |
| Aug 11, 2015 | Using Amazon Echo to control your lights with Wink and GE Link | Home automation has become the wave of the future, for better or worse. Not everyone trusts it, but many others embrace it. However it seems to be here to stay now, with websites and podcasts dedicated to it, as well as an ever growing numb... |
| Jul 17, 2015 | You won’t believe how honest this CEO is about blowing $185M | Quirky might seem like one of the more extreme examples of Silicon Valley excess in recent years, but its recent pivot — and the way its CEO handled it — is a rare example of honesty and transparency.
The startup’s premise was inspired, if ... |
| Jul 17, 2015 | You won’t believe how honest this CEO is about blowing $185M | We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Register today!
Quirky might seem like one of the more extreme ex... |
| Apr 7, 2015 | Quirky teams with Harman Audio to develop futuristic headphones | Quirky wants to usher in the next generation of headphones in its latest product development contest.
In collaboration with Harman, Quirky today announces a product challenge called Headphones of Tomorrow. The competition invites people fro... |
| Nov 13, 2014 | Quirky’s CEO Declares Death of the Thermostat—Even the Smart Ones | Share Share on Facebook Share on Twitter LinkedIn Email Reprints
Despite the hype, widespread adoption of technology for connected homes has thus far been little more than a dream.
New York startup Quirky and partner General Electric are on... |
| Nov 11, 2014 | Quirky releases a slew of new products, but its focus is still on the bulb | Quirky and General Electric are gearing up for the holidays with a new lineup of connected home products. Despite the wow factor of many of the new offerings, Quirky’s signature smart light bulb is still the star of the show.
Quirky’s home ... |
| Nov 11, 2014 | Quirky, GE Unveil Their Vision For The Connected Home | At their headquarters in Chelsea, crowdsourced invention engine Quirky and its manufacturing juggernaut of a partner General Electric threw back the curtains on their play for the connected home.
They re-launched their spinout, Wink, announ... |
| Jun 24, 2012 | Meet 21 Diverse Startups At Tonight’s Tech Week Startup Mixer in Chicago | We look forward to seeing everyone at our Tech Cocktail Startup Showcase & Mixer as part of TechWeek, where we will be hosting a fantastic mixer in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago to preview some of the LAUNCH startups – and quite a few... |
| Mar 3, 2011 | How popular are you online? PeekScores knows | Ever wonder how popular you are on the Web — and how you stack up to others?
People search company PeekYou has developed a program that lets you track how your online persona ranks relative to others’ on the Internet.
It released data this ... |
| Dec 27, 2009 | Privacy Theater: Why Social Networks Only Pretend To Protect You | Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Rohit Khare, the co-founder of Angstro. Building his latest project, social address book Knx.to, gives him a deep familiarity with the privacy policies of all the major social networks.... |
| Feb 24, 2009 | Reunion.com And Wink Morph Into MyLife.com | When Reunion.com and Wink announced their merger in early October 2008, the company indicated that it would be relaunching under a different brand name and with a completely overhauled website in early 2009. That day has finally come, and h... |
| Nov 3, 2008 | Old Friends Wink And Reunion.com Reconnect, Merge | People-search engine Wink has joined forces with Reunion.com, a hybrid people-search/social networking site, to create one giant hub for finding people you once knew but forgot to keep in touch with. The two companies have merged and will b... |
| Nov 3, 2008 | Reunion.com and Wink merge to form new people search site | Reunion.com, a social network of sorts that aggregates data about you, is merging with people-focused search engine Wink. The two companies will relaunch as a single, branded people search service early next year. They already made a strate... |
| Sep 25, 2008 | Wink's People Search Index Grows To 500 Million Profiles | Wink, the search engine that lets you search user profiles across many social networks, has announced that it has indexed a whopping 500 million profiles worldwide – double the number it had twelve months ago. Wink also predicts similar gro... |
| May 16, 2008 | Dirt-digging websites on the rise | Websites to help users find out if friends, family and co-workers have any secrets in the closet are proliferating in the US, WSJ.com reports.
And the material they can uncover goes way beyond the results you can get by tapping a name into ... |
| Mar 1, 2008 | Biographicon Wants To Be Wikipedia For The Non-Notable Masses | Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion – and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the g... |
| Feb 6, 2008 | 150 Invites To 123people.com For TechCrunch Readers | New comer to the people search game 123people.com is a Austrian based startup that is looking to provide a new take on the competitive people search market with a European focus.
There’s no shortage of wannabes in this space. Spock, Wink, Z... |
| Jan 7, 2008 | BigSight Aims to Become White Pages of Web, Pulls Data from Facebook | While we’ve covered the people search sector, and Facebook’s entrance into that sector, we have yet to profile a nascent site called BigSight that seeks to become the go-to web destination for people profiles.
BigSight differs from other pe... |
| Dec 12, 2007 | Mahalo delves into social search | updated
Mahalo, the controversial search engine that pays people to produce search results for top search terms, is now letting anyone submit links for inclusion.
Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis hails this new development as “social search” ... |
| Sep 15, 2007 | SquidWho - When A Product Becomes A Platform | I wrote a post a week ago talking about products that become platforms.
I started it off with a discussion about the Mahalo/Gnomedex thing. That was a mistake. It clouded the point I was trying to make. And that point is that the best produ... |
| Aug 31, 2007 | The rush to people search: Viadeo, ZoomInfo, Yahoo China, Spock…and PeekYou | For years, technology to search for people has been neglected, compared to most parts of the Web. Until now, that is.
A wave of new entrants are making it much easier to find out everything about a person, from their job, to their personali... |
| Jul 24, 2007 | The Web’s Top Takeover Targets | This past year has been a very eventful one in the M&A arena, with many of web 2.0’s biggest names being snapped up. A few stand-outs include the likes of YouTube, Photobucket, Feedburner, Last.fm, and StumbleUpon.
Yet, there still rema... |
| Jun 27, 2007 | A Look at Supernova 2007 Connected Innovators | At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with pundit... |
| May 9, 2007 | War Of The People Search | I moderated a fascinating panel tonight at Google headquarters that included execs from three “people search engines” – the CEO of Wink (Michael Tanne), the CEO of Spock (Jaideep Singh), and the COO of Zoominfo (Bryan Burdick).
The panel wa... |
| Mar 22, 2007 | Roundup: Apple TV a hit, YouTube killer, Google PPA, Wink & more | Updated
Apple TV is a hit — According to early accounts, at least.
YouTube killer? — [Update: This has been confirmed.] Rumors have existed for some time about collusion among the big-media players to challenge YouTube, the king of video sh... |
| Mar 19, 2007 | Wink Pulls Half An Odeo, Partially Liquidates | Search engine startup Wink has offered to buy back stock from investors with remaining cash at a rate of fifty cents on the dollar, according to sources involved with the company.
The company has raised two rounds of financing totaling $7 m... |
| Mar 15, 2007 | Streakr Search Makes Social Networks Bare All | Vivek, over at Startup Squad, recently discovered a new social network and social networking meta search engine, Streakr. The main URL still says the site is coming soon. The new engine lets you search the profiles on the major networks (My... |
| Dec 12, 2006 | Search 2.0 – What’s Next? | Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard
MacManus
You may feel relatively satisfied with the current search offerings of Google, Yahoo,
Ask and MSN. Search today is undoubtedly much better than what it was in the second half
of the 199... |
| Nov 10, 2006 | Wink, a place to flirt — and prowl | Wink, the social search engine that searches for Web pages that people have bookmarked, tagged or otherwise marked as interesting, has introduced a people search.
You click the people tab (see screenshot below), and you get results from thr... |
| Nov 10, 2006 | Wink Now Searches MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo | Social search site Wink released a new feature called People Search this weekend and I think it’s going to be a big move for the company. Wink People Search searches over the user profiles of MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo. It’s not a mashup of... |
| Oct 3, 2006 | TechCrunch 8: Party In New York | Our seventh TechCrunch party, held at August Capital two months ago, was a blast. Over 800 attendees sipped wine, checked out some new companies and watched a nearly naked man streak through the more fully dressed attendees.
We will be anno... |
| Sep 25, 2006 | Digg founders launch Revision3, a new video studio | Updated
Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, the co-founders of the news ranking site Digg, have started yet another company. Called Revision3, it is an Internet video production house that will exploit the trend toward TV viewing via mobile phone a... |
| Sep 6, 2006 | Wink 2.0 goes live | Social search company Wink just went live with their relaunched site, making better use of collaboratively built collections, offering a Firefox toolbar and other changes we detailed in an early preview. Wink is a smart, well funded company... |
| Aug 25, 2006 | Wink 2.0 to launch next week | Social search engine Wink will launch version 2.0 of its service early next week with changes designed to make make search more social than ever. I’ve described below the information I was able to get out of them prelaunch, but I hope there... |
| Aug 8, 2006 | Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary | A couple of weeks ago Michael Arrington got together with a number of startup CEOs and executives to video a discussion about Web 2.0. Participating in the discussion were Aaron Cohen (Bolt), Scott Milener and Steven Lurie (Browster), Keith... |
| Aug 2, 2006 | Update on TechCrunch Party at August Capital | The August 18 TechCrunch/August Capital party is just a couple of weeks away. We’ve made some changes to the wiki, changing it from our old provider to a Socialtext hosted site, here. More details will follow, but this is going to be a real... |
| Jul 19, 2006 | Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search | Written by Ebrahim Ezzy and edited by Richard
MacManus. Ebrahim is lead developer and co-founder of Qelix
Technologies, the company behind a search 2.0 contender called Qube. This 2-part series of posts is adapted from
Ebrahim’s research ma... |
| Jun 20, 2006 | Start-up Tagfetch lets you search tags | TagFetch, a new start-up in San Francisco, offers a simple search of popular sites that use tags.
We’re not sure whether we’ll ever need to use it, given the plethora of other search sites out there, but companies might use it to search and... |
| Apr 10, 2006 | Otavo To Launch in May | Ontario based Otavo is in the final couple of weeks of private beta testing and will be launching in May. I have been testing the service for a few days.
It is a new social bookmarking site with an interesting twist. Users can group tagged ... |
| Dec 22, 2005 | Wink Launches | The Wink user-enhanced search engine, in private beta for the last few months, launches Thursday morning to the world.
Wink has evolved substantially since my October 12, 2005 review.
Wink is, at its core, a combination of traditional searc... |
| Dec 22, 2005 | Wink, a search engine that bets on tags, launches | Wink has finally launched.
Wink first emerged back in August under the mysterious name of Machine Phase Systems, and then eBagle.
Wink is a search engine that lets you find sites that have already been “tagged” or otherwise selected by othe... |
| Dec 1, 2005 | Jookster v. Wink | Jookster‘s search engine launched yesterday. Like Wink, Jookster is aiming to provide more relevant search results by putting user-generated bookmarked links above normal results.
Unlike Wink, which allows users to add significant metadata ... |
| Nov 18, 2005 | Greylock raises tidy sum — and invests in shopping start-up, Cairo | Updated
Greylock Partners, the venture capital firm that has offices in San Mateo, has raised a tidy sum of $500 million for its latest fund. It is looking pretty green here in the heart of VC land — Menlo Park/Palo Alto/San Mateo — and not... |
| Oct 26, 2005 | Psst…Want in to the Wink Beta? | Wink is a very interesting new search site that combines traditional search results with del.icio.us and other user generated metadata.
We profiled Wink on October 12, 2005 and Michael Tanne, the CEO, gave a demo at our party last week. Win... |
| Oct 19, 2005 | Update: TechCrunch Party This Friday | We are proud to annouce the sponsors of the third TechCrunch party this weekend. Thank You: Edgeio, Flock, Goowy, Loomia, Pandora, Real Travel, Shasta Ventures, Simply Hired, Wink, Zazzle.
If you plan on attending, please sign up on the Wik... |
| Oct 12, 2005 | Wink – People Powered Search | Company: Wink
Launched: in Private Beta
Status: Funded by Greylock Partners
Location: Mountain View
Wink gave a brief demo at at Web2.0 last week and we were immediately hooked. Wink is still in private beta (you can request an account on t... |
| Oct 5, 2005 | The Companies of Web 2.0, Part 2 | Here’s the second set of companies that presented at the Web 2.0 conference Launchpad workshop. See Part 1 here. Zvents
My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutsh... |
| Green Deals: GE Link Wi-Fi-enabled 65W BR30 Smart Light Bulb $13 Prime shipped (Reg. $20+), more | Amazon offers the GE Link BR30 Wi-Fi-enabled 65W LED Light Bulb for $13.11 Prime shipped. That’s the best price by $6 and the lowest Amazon has ever sold it for. Aside from offering a LED design that will help cut down on energy costs, this... |
| The best smart home hub of 2016 | There’s no place like home, especially if it’s a smart home.
It’s officially the future times — smart home devices are all the rage these days, offering total integration and control of the home from the palm of your hand. However, the most... |
